Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [30]
For Redford a long-distance exile became a necessity: “Domestically it was too much to deal with. The job prospects at home were terrible. Plus, I really wanted art in my life, that much I now knew. Expressionism was the big scene in the United States, but I preferred the Europeans like Utrillo, Modigliani, and especially Gauguin, and the postimpressionists, who were immensely exciting for me.” In Europe, Redford reasoned, he would be closer to the wellsprings and might escape the American cultural inertia that Miller disdained.
Brendlinger and Redford had drifted apart over the last year, but Redford approached his old supporter. “I was contemplating the summer ahead and the obligations I had for the Naval Reserve,” says Brendlinger, “when Bob comes up and blurts, ‘I’ve decided to go to Europe.’ ” It was agreed they would join up for a while over there in search of adventure. In France, Brendlinger could take language courses at the Sorbonne and maybe be a ski bum in Switzerland, while Redford, with an introductory letter from Dudley, would enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Charlie thought of his son’s new plan as a lark, but was met with the usual bullish stubbornness. “I knew what my father wanted me to be,” says Redford. “The problem was, he didn’t know who I was. If I didn’t get out of there then, I believe I’d have continued a serious downward slide.”
Early in September, Redford hitched to Denver, from where he and Brendlinger drove a Lincoln Continental to New York, providing a vehicle-delivery service for a rental agency. In Manhattan, they bought round-trip tourist-class tickets to France aboard the USS United States for $300 apiece, almost half their money. Then Redford splurged on a farewell gift to himself—a Broadway ticket to see Jason Robards in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It brought him to tears with the eloquence of its language and the echoes of grandfather Tiger’s New London.
At the time of Redford’s arrival in France in 1956, the cold war was raging. Earlier in the year Polish riots against Soviet occupation had filled American headlines. In November, Hungary would launch its five-day rebellion. Redford arrived in the gap between the two. “I was open for political conversion,” he says. “I’d had the full American education, which amounted to conservatism, social torpor and an absolute lack of understanding of other cultures. France, to me, was Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Of course, in some circles there was a better perspective, but the popular understanding was negligible. I arrived in Europe an innocent, but with a metaphorical, and literal, notebook in my hand.”
Charlie had reluctantly agreed to send $100 a month. “Bob would spend his month’s money in a week,” says Brendlinger, “and then live off mine. I think he was almost in debt from the time we arrived.” They had made no arrangements for accommodation in Paris, and since it was auto show week, no hotel rooms could be found. At the last minute a clerk at American Express found an old lady with rooms on the Right Bank. One week’s board ate up a month’s budget. “We were off to a very bad start,” recalls Brendlinger.
Redford, however, was uncowed. This was the world he wanted: edgy, overstretched, extreme. He hung out in the university district and sought to meet some French women. It was no easy chore. “They just didn’t like Americans,” says Redford, “and coming from my uninformed place, it was hard for me to judge how much of their rudeness was personal.” Redford started a crash course in recent French history, learning about de Gaulle, the war in Indochina, the warring factions in Algeria. “My exposure to pre-Gaullist France,” says Redford, “was the start of coherent political awareness because I had to apply myself to understand why it was hard for us to fit in there. It was valuable for making me reevaluate America, too. I started reading Walter Lippmann and Art Buchwald for the better perspective. And I understood for the first time the colossal role America was playing