Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [37]
Through his teens, movies had lost their fascination for him. “I’d always had a problem with authenticity,” says Redford. “When I was very small, my dad would project 8 mm films of Tom Mix on a sheet in the living room. I bought into all of it. But when I got older, it bothered me that Gene Autry couldn’t walk right and John Wayne couldn’t ride right. The worst letdown was Disney’s Song of the South, because it was phony, because you could see the wires. I couldn’t abide this. If you’re giving me a fantasy, give me Scaramouche, Captain Blood—the kind of full-on stuff Rafael Sabatini created, not the half-baked version.”
But, during AADA, classic movies he rediscovered from the forties stimulated his interest. In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine the legendary showdown between the Earps and the Clantons of Tombstone is presented in the imagery of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, where Henry Fonda’s Wyatt oversees the consecration of the town’s new chapel against evil opposition. In John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart is the adventurer succumbing to the terrible elemental forces of the desert and his own greed. It was the texture as much as the content of these films that galvanized Redford. “They had a resonant truth like those myths I loved as a child.” In them he saw the appeal of movies as an art form, and, incrementally, felt challenged.
But in the eyes of AADA not all was running smoothly. Francis Lettin, the senior rehearsal instructor who had recently staged a Broadway reworking of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Montgomery Clift, remarked in his early notes that Redford was “standoffish.” Sandor Nagy, who taught fencing, judged Redford “awkward.” Harry Mastrogeorge, the radio actor turned tutor who would become a leading supporter, wrote that Redford “seems to have some desire [to act], but as a person I don’t think he has found himself yet. He is possibly a little unstable as a human being.”
Redford continued to work hard, at last focusing on the modern American stage classics, including Bus Stop and A Streetcar Named Desire, and, for the first time in his life, making studious notes with enthusiasm. In a Tennessee Williams workshop conducted by Broadway director and academy senior Ezra Stone, Redford was asked to read the role of Stanley in Streetcar. Stone was stunned by the result. “He’s a master at cold reading,” Stone told Mastrogeorge. “I tried to stump him again and again, but it was undoable. He has no nerves. He’s made for the stage.” Redford liked the Stanley role because “it was tough, in your face, and its starkness I could connect with.” He learned he preferred modern pieces with an edge. Only later did he apply himself to the value of the speech and movement. “At the start I rejected technique,” he says. “I just didn’t want to ponce around.”
Though Lola and Redford remained in frequent touch by mail and phone, he discovered her absence intensified his feelings for her. He was sociable and finding enjoyment in his studies, but there existed, he says, “a hole” in his being. His feelings were muddled, says Redford, but he was reaching for some sort of spiritual elevation that would calm him and make sense of his fragmented life. Ginny Burns and another close friend, Bob Curtis, who would become a priest, saw the fireside conversation at yet another new apartment on Seventy-third Street turn toward faith. Ginny and Curtis attended church service daily; Redford avoided church. But Redford was clearly processing a new discovery brought to him by Lola: Mormonism. “He was suddenly committed to great changes in his life,” says Ginny, “and they involved spiritual choices.”
Lola guided Redford to a study of Mormonism. He began reading obsessively, devouring the Book of Mormon and the history of Joseph Smith’s American vision. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was