Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [32]
At the start of December, Redford and Brendlinger rejoined and hit the road. Redford wanted to go to Italy. He had decided he would draw and paint on the streets and earn his way. They hitched, following a youth hostel map that took them first to Capri and then to Rome for Christmas. “It was excruciating,” says Brendlinger. “We always seemed to miss a hostel bed and end up sleeping in the dirt. It was also an intensely cold winter, colder than Colorado.” In an often published account of the trip, Redford is reported to have copied a trick from a Jack London story and buried himself in cow dung for warmth. “It’s true,” says Redford, “ridiculous, but true.” By the time they reached Rome in mid-December, both were almost out of cash and subsisting on cheese and water. They hurried through the Roman sights—the Piazza Venezia, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum—then hitched to Naples and cadged a ferry ride to spend Christmas in Anacapri. Back in Rome on New Year’s Eve they gate-crashed Bricktops, the haunt of the glitterati, where Redford joined a jostling pack of revelers stealing kisses at midnight from Ava Gardner.
When they reached Florence, Redford made a decision. “No disrespect to Jack, but I wanted this solitary trip. It was partly masochistic. I wanted to be alone with the grief I had and the difficulty I had with my personal identity. More than anything, I wanted to go on a journey with my art. Was it any good? How far would it take me? Could I survive with it, and it alone?” Brendlinger departed for the ski resort of Zürs, and the friends agreed to meet again in Munich in March.
Redford began a rapid slide. It was as if the true trough of his depression revealed itself once constant companionship was removed. The photographs Brendlinger took throughout the Europe trip speak for themselves: at the start Redford looks chubby and comfortable; by the time he’s in Florence, he is gaunt and stripped of expression. “I lost forty-two pounds,” says Redford. “Nervous tension and the constant movement burned the weight off me. What was I nervous about? Failing, and having to go back to resume a Los Angeles life. It was bad in Paris. It became unbearable in Florence.” Speaking no Italian, bereft of friends, he took a room with a family called the Barbieris and enrolled for classes at a dingy, private scuola supervised by tutors from the Accademia di Belle Arti. The Orphean descent began. “Because the Barbieris spoke no English, there was almost no communication, just like at home,” says Redford. “I hardly saw them because I lived by night and slept half the day. It was the dead of winter, fifteen Celsius below, and I slept in my gray wool overcoat for the heat. Staying warm became the big deal. And staying sane. And working. Just these three things: warmth, sanity, work. I smoked cut in half Alfa cigarettes to stay warm.”
Each afternoon, when not attending classes, Redford lived a military routine: “It was always very late when I’d rise. I’d eat a small plate of penne or ravioli and take a coffee at the railway station, then go walk the Ponte Vecchio. I walked and walked and walked, looking and sketching. I had a large sketchbook in which on the left facing page I wrote my thoughts and on the right I drew.” One of the scuola tutors, Tony Reeves, a Canadian from the American arts program at the academy, offered encouragement. Very much in mind of Picasso’s contention that abstract art is worthless unless its concept is rooted in recognizable reality, Redford studied himself. “I started examining my own face in the solitary three-quarter-length mirror on the washstand in the corner of my room. Just sitting on a