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so we talked the same language,” says Redford. “He was also gripped by a raging frustration, lost in the backwater of Boulder, and consequently anarchic, which felt familiar. I was confident in my style because I had been sketching for so long. I was ready to experiment. Other students were stuck in theory, and that drove Dudley nuts. One girl labored over a very detailed Florentine nude, which inflamed him because he wanted all of us to let the tiger out. He approached her, took her inkwell and upended it over the drawing. Then he grabbed her hand and scrawled through the ink, smearing it everywhere. ‘Let it go! Let it go!’ I found that stimulating.” Nonetheless, Redford’s grades were awful.

In May 1955, Martha died of complications arising from the recurrent septicemia she had been suffering from since her difficult pregnancy. Charlie called his son, who caught the next plane from Denver. “I’ll never forget his meeting me at the airport,” says Redford. “I’d never seen him as a vulnerable man, and the balance of power had always been one-sided. I’d raised hell, but he was always boss. At the airport it was completely different. He fell to pieces. I told him to get out of the driver’s seat and I took the wheel. Everything changed when my mother died. His world fell down. Mine seemed to also.”

5

Behind the Mirror

Photographs of Redford taken soon after his mother’s death are revealing. He looks like a punch-drunk boxer, shoulders hunched, collar upturned, tie askew. In Los Angeles, family friend Vivian Knudson found him “disoriented and angry.” Coomber observed him “torn apart. He was devastated by her loss, and it pushed him far inside himself at exactly the time he had the chance to grow outward.”

For the next eighteen months he consoled himself with girls and books. All direction disappeared. He was submissive. When Charlie insisted on summer field work, loading boxcars and cleaning oil drums at the El Segundo refinery, he acceded. George Menard insisted that while Charlie recovered from Martha’s passing, “Bobby was seriously screwed up. He mumbled about vague career plans in art or design, but Charlie said it was all nonsense, that his future must be something more substantial.”

More convulsions followed. In November, Lena died in New London. At the same time Hugh Hall, his friend from CU, signed for two years in the military. Redford searched for comfort in literature, devouring Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann. Each struck chords that would resurface explicitly and implicitly in his later work: Wolfe the egotist, filled with spiritual wonder, the hunger for self-realization and chronic alienation in equal parts; Lewis, dissecting American smugness and philistinism in Main Street and Babbitt; Mann, probing Western civilization. All engrossed Redford; all left a sense of want.

Finally, in Henry Miller, Redford found what he was searching for. A fellow student loaned him the slim, European-published Nights of Love and Laughter. This was Miller at his most raucous and profane. Redford loved it. “No one I’d found was so frank about tackling the hypocrisies of society. Yes, he talked about hunger and anger and sexual voracity. But it was all in the spirit of saying, ‘Let’s just lay it out here. Let’s be honest about human beings.’ It was frank, direct human communication, and that was a rare commodity in my life.”

Late in the spring of 1956 he decided abruptly to go to Europe. Dudley, as much as Miller, was behind the decision. “It was also what John Hubley had said: get experience.” The University of Colorado had made it clear that he wasn’t welcome back. His home life also suddenly became unbearably complicated. True to form, there had been no analytical discussion of Martha’s passing, just silence. Now Charlie announced in a letter that he was planning to marry Helen Coomber. Even today both sides of the family express bewilderment at this overnight romance. According to Lala Brady, the family friendship had deepened significantly in the weeks preceding Martha’s death, but neither she nor anyone