Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [35]
In July, Redford persuaded Lola to spend “a honeymoon weekend” with him in Monterey. One of the Provo roommates didn’t approve, and word reached Lola’s parents of their daughter’s dalliance with a Beat bum. The parents immediately sent cousins to L.A. to investigate. By then, says Redford, he and Lola had crossed the river. “We were in love. We thought, We have too much in common to let it go. Neither of us was conformist. We liked challenges. So we ignored them and started making plans.”
In fact, Redford had been exploring new options since his return. During his time in New York he had picked up a prospectus for the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the highly regarded art and design school cartoonist John Hubley had attended. He had also, spontaneously, collected literature about the various drama and actor-training groups in Manhattan. Though Helen Coomber had trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he focused on that institution simply because its advertisement in Variety was the biggest and most distinguished-looking. On May 3, he had written off for AADA application forms. “There was no great intuition at play,” says Redford, “it was simply a Plan B for escape. I was primarily thinking about animation and possibly stage design, and thinking I should go back to New York, find gainful employment, study a little and make it back to Europe to paint. Lola’s arrival, of course, skewed that plan a little.”
Redford and Brendlinger were evicted from Varwood at the end of July. Redford had saved some money for New York while working at El Segundo, and was optimistic. On August 1, he persuaded Helen to write a letter on his behalf to support his application to AADA. “Kindly look with favor upon my stepson, Robert Redford,” Helen wrote. “Because I once graduated from the academy I feel able to say that he can benefit from Academy training.”
On September 1 he mailed the requested check for $160 to AADA, as a deposit. In mid-September he packed a bag and flew to New York. He soon learned he was wrong about the entry process, that he would have to audition before any decision about acceptance was made. “I suddenly had to perfect a couple of pieces,” Redford remembers. He chose a lament by Branwell Brontë and a monologue from Philip Barry’s play The Youngest, which he would present in front of a selection committee. Frances Fuller, protégée of the great acting teacher Charles Jehlinger and the academy’s current director, personally oversaw the interview. Redford was infuriated by the inattention of the main interviewer: “It was, I later learned, just the standard audition,” says Redford. “But I had a chip on my shoulder, and I resented the fact that it was a cattle call. I was facing a table at which these interviewers sat, with Frances Fuller to one side and this man in the middle. His body language, his dismissiveness, offended me, and I started shouting. The Philip Barry piece was supposed to be an angry tirade, so I personally directed it at him.” Redford wondered there and then whether he’d blown his chances, but Fuller curtly told him to return the next day. That was a gesture of bureaucracy. Within the academy, she was already telling the staff they had made a remarkable find.
PART TWO
Bonfaccio
In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities
6
At the Academy
The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was as bad a choice as Redford could have made for theater studies. Given his nonconformist attitude, the cutting-edge options might have been better for him: the Neighborhood Playhouse, the American Theatre Wing, the Actors Studio. The academy was, literally, old-school.
Situated in a fin de siècle three-story building on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, recently relocated from Carnegie Hall, it creaked like a galleon under the weight of a fifty-year-old syllabus honed by Charles “Jelly” Jehlinger, the Edwardian dean of American theater theory. The graduate course was a two-year program, with qualifying exams after the first year.