Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [28]
Martha’s health, meanwhile, had begun to decline. At the time of the loss of her twins in 1947, Redford remembered hearing through a closed door someone saying, “It’s either her or the twins.” The fact that she had a weak heart and a chronic congenital blood disorder was skipped over, partly, Redford believes, because of religious preconditioning. She’d recovered, but not totally. “She was so full of optimism, she had such a bright, loving smile, that I thought she was immortal,” says Redford. And then he noticed her wane. “I’d come back home in the middle of the day, and she’d be wearing her dressing gown, which seemed so unlike her. When I’d question it, she’d just say, ‘Oh, I was tired.’ ” Martha put on weight and her skin took on a blue hue. Redford knew she was in pain, and observed that she could only find relief getting in the car and going for drives out to the desert. Redford was happy to take her driving. “After all, she taught me, when I was about eight. In those days, when Dad was working in El Segundo, we’d drive out on the back roads to collect him late at night. Mom used to put me on her lap and work the pedals while I steered. Now she sat in silence while we drove in circles.”
At CU, Redford distracted himself with his art. “I looked around Boulder to try to find the arts community, but there was none,” he recalls. Richard Dudley, the fine arts professor, advised him the community would be of his own making. Dudley was a wild man, a transplanted New Yorker. “Art is about you and your vision,” Dudley told him. At Van Nuys, Redford had won a Scholastic Gold Key for drawing and, as part of the prize, had been offered summer work as an apprentice, cleaning cels for the lead animators at Disney Studios in Burbank. He’d visited but disliked the assembly line labor. Instead, on the advice of a kind technician, he walked up the block to UPA, the tiny independent studio run by Faith and John Hubley, which made the Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts that launched Mr. Magoo. “I didn’t have any sort of plan then,” says Redford. “I just loved those cartoons and thought my own sketches were kind of similar.” The Hubleys, operating from a shack behind a restaurant, welcomed the young Redford into their workshop and showed him their designs. “They were just amenable folk excited by what they were doing and patiently making ten-year projections of each character’s development. It was great down-home enthusiasm, and I loved the fact that they cherished the individual artist.” Redford asked for a job and was told to “go find experience—anywhere—and come back to us.”
Redford first saw Dudley’s CU program as a prep course for a possible career in animation but soon found his horizons expanding. A committed modernist, Dudley promoted the deconstructive principles of expressionism and denigrated the stubborn teaching formula that centered on Hellenic form. His idol was Paul Klee, the Blaue Reiter transcendentalist whose famous contribution to abstract art was the narrative use of symbols and numbers within mosaics. Klee searched for spirituality in his art, and Dudley tried to convey some of the attraction of intellectual surrender to his mostly female class. Redford jumped at the invitation to free expression but found himself “a stroke behind all this; I needed a few years to catch up with the emotional release of expressionism.” But the bond with Dudley was inspirational. “He wasn’t an admirer of the fauves, and I was anticolor at the start,