Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [36]
Redford started in October 1957. Frances Fuller, diminutive, clearheaded and married to the television impresario Worthington Miner, told Redford later that his audition rant had reminded her of AADA alumnus Spencer Tracy, who also spat through his teeth. “What they got was anger, not acting,” says Redford. “I was repelled by the atmosphere. It was condescending, like we were the rabble and this was the 1600s. The situation was complicated by the fact that I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be Modigliani. I wanted to study theater because someone somewhere said, ‘You can go out in summer stock and paint backdrops.’ So I could be an artist, at last!”
His work commitment, however, was real because he and Lola—who was back at her studies in Utah—had made a firm decision to build toward a life together in New York as soon as possible. But it was a struggle to keep disciplined. After weeks of apartment-hopping, he settled finally in a third-floor room on Columbus Avenue that was a cramped ten feet square. His next decision was to widen his theatrical social circle, by drinking at watering holes like Charlie’s Bar on West Fifty-second Street, which many AADA students frequented. Almost immediately he befriended Ginny Burns, a New Yorker whose mother ran a children’s theater group in Barrington, Rhode Island. Ginny noticed him as “someone apart,” though, she says, it was hard not to. The first week, at a vocal assessment class tutored by June Burgess, the new students were asked to bring along a favored song to show off their vocal capacities. “Everyone did,” says Ginny. “Bob didn’t. When it came to his turn, he stood up with immense intensity, as if he was preparing to jump out the window. Then, in a smoldering voice, he dove into Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ which he claimed appropriate because it was lyrical. He didn’t merely recite it. He hollered it like an opera, jumping from one window ledge to the next, caroming around the room, stunning Burgess. I thought it was the single most amazing piece of theater I’d ever seen. I adored him, just for this soul baring.”
“Firstly, I loved Poe,” says Redford, explaining his choice. “And, secondly, there’s a supreme musicality in all his poems. But then there was the theme of madness, and that felt apt to where I was at. I’d been insane. I was still loopy.”
At AADA, Ginny and Redford grew close. Ginny remembers that they “played tennis in Central Park and hung out at the Park Avenue apartment of Nikki Lubitsch, the movie director’s daughter, who was also an AADA student. We drank a lot of Nikki’s scotch and listened to Sinatra, which Bob liked to sing along to. What we also had in common was a gradually developing interest in acting. Let’s face it: we were not actors, and certainly Bob didn’t have much inclination to be one when we commenced.”
If Redford had any modicum of actorly leaning, it was toward theater. But the great flowering of serious American theater that came with the social changes of the Depression and yielded Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams was past. More representative of fifties theater were musicals like Flower Drum Song and My Fair Lady. Innovative work was still in progress at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, but Redford was not inquisitive at that point. “I was fairly indifferent to contemporary theater,” he says now. “In film I’d seen