Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [27]
Redford’s new romantic fixation was Wanda Shannon, an old Westwood flame who had gone to Vegas to become a dancer in one of the big hotel floor shows. During spring break in April 1955, Redford and five friends decided they’d visit Wanda. When they arrived, they learned that Elvis was in town. “I’d already discovered black music with Big Jay McNeely at the Blue Sax in North Hollywood and made the blues-jazz connections, so I wanted to experience this Elvis thing,” says Redford. The Elvis show was a support act to Freddy Martin at the Frontier, a fancy supper club that Redford’s group couldn’t afford. “So I persuaded the guys to pool cash and we came up with $10, then charmed a waitress to let us dine on rolls while we watched the show.” From the moment Presley started with “Hound Dog,” Redford was a convert. “It was electrifying, a validation, to see these stuffed-shirt socialites who’d come to see Freddy Martin clamp up in reverence. I thought, Hey, a kid with nothing, from nowheresville, can do this!”
Sinatra was at the Sands. His theatricality riveted Redford: “We sat at the back in darkness. Then, from the shadows, emerged this liquid, velvet voice: ‘You see a pair of laughing eyes.…’ I realized he was a storyteller. He was introducing a new version of himself with ‘Wee Small Hours in the Morning.’ Later on I learned how he perfected his phrasing by emulating Tommy Dorsey’s breath control with the trombone. The combined effect was huge artistry.
“I went to Vegas expecting razzmatazz and status quo. Instead, I found artists at work. It was a different kind of artistry than the Beat scene, but it was no less radical. I expected to be cynical. I wasn’t. Vegas encouraged me to be more eclectic in my tastes, to move away from the knee-jerk rebellious response—to grow up, maybe.”
He’d bought an old car and now started traveling, establishing a peripatetic pattern that would last all his life. Aside from the regular drives between Colorado and home, he motored to New Mexico, Utah, Nebraska and Wyoming.
“The love of movement reflected the fact that, apart from art history, the only classes at CU that interested me were geomorphology and anthropology,” he says. “Geomorphology fed this curiosity about landscape. I relished those drives home to L.A. and started alternating routes. In winter, I’d drive the southern route via Gallup and Albuquerque; in summer, the northern route via Vegas and Salt Lake City. I got fired up on sedimentology to the point where I was reading books about it voluntarily. I’d bore everyone at home with detailed descriptions of schisms and alluvial fans. The Rockies and the desert became vital for me: they were the fossilized history of the world. And then anthropology kicked in. The human culture element breathed life into it all. The man who opened this up for me was one of the best teachers at CU, Omer Stewart.”
Driving toward Salt Lake City once to pick up the two-lane Highway 91 home, Redford diverted at Ogden, turned for Heber City and stopped at a riverside diner called the Chalet. He had lunch and then surveyed the area: “The river, the snow on the mountains, the cladding of screw pines and aspens, it all had what I’d now call a European character. I found a little side road called the Alpine Loop and drove up the hill, which was the north fork draw of Provo Canyon, until the road ran out. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t pull myself