Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [33]
On a February night so cold that ice formed in the water jug on the nightstand, Redford says he began to crack up. “Staring in the mirror, I saw someone I didn’t recognize at all. I began to hallucinate. I couldn’t see flesh or bones, but I saw through the skin into some indescribable new entity.”
He broke down. Florence was the cathedral of highest art, the home of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Giotto, and he couldn’t make it there. “I was thinking all the time, If I can only hang on here, then maybe …? But I knew I was a goner. I started to laugh and then I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. It was the weirdest thing. My old self was gone. Dead. I was not the same person after that night in Florence.”
He now roamed the streets of Florence for days, panicked by the extent of his failure. He felt he had lived an inauthentic life until then, which qualified him for only one thing: role-playing. Tony Reeves saw he was indigent, took pity on him and organized a small gallery showing of his work that earned a couple of thousand lire and funded the passage north. He would meet Brendlinger in Munich as planned and head home.
When Brendlinger saw him again, he was concerned about his friend’s weight loss. “He looked very frail, with a beard and a general disheveled appearance,” says Brendlinger. “But it wasn’t much different from nights on the road. I had the impression he’d been sleeping in some ditch somewhere.” Redford felt himself “wasted and shaky but hanging in.”
They arrived back in the United States on March 14, 1957. Redford parted company with Brendlinger after an overnight stop at a Brooklyn hotel and embarked on a solo cross-country journey, exactly as Henry Miller did when he returned from postwar exile, notebook in hand, to reevaluate his homeland. On his first sight of New York, the returning Miller wrote: “Back in the rat trap. I try to hide away from my old friends; I don’t want to relive the past with them.” This was exactly Redford’s mind-set. Still upset by the Florence experience, he hitchhiked from New London (where he visited Tiger and borrowed $35 “for the Greyhound west”), through Illinois, Oklahoma and Tennessee, to Tot’s home on Lake Austin. He longed for some of Tot’s upbeat wisdom, but during the winter Tot had fallen off the roof and was a virtual invalid. Seeing him shuffle around in a steel back brace like an infirm old man was almost too much to bear: “He was only sixty-eight—a young sixty-eight—and seeing him so damaged and jaded destroyed me. I thought, All the good stuff is gone.”
After a few days, Redford called Charlie and asked him to pick him up at the bus depot. Charlie didn’t recognize his son. “I was waiting by the curb but he drove past,” recalls Redford, “then drove past again until I finally flagged him down. He couldn’t find words to express his shock at how I looked, and I certainly hadn’t the words to express what I’d gone through. We drove home in complete silence.”
Home was now Helen’s lavish house. Her son, Bill Coomber, was living there, having transferred to UCLA. Redford embraced him, but was impatient to be away from the situation. There were some who believed he was angry at Charlie and Coomber for the new closeness they’d developed. Redford denies it: “I didn’t feel resentment. In fact, I felt good for Bill, that the madness in him was gone, and he was at peace. For Dad, I think