Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [39]
Redford called from a pay phone at the corner of the park. “Ginny nudged, but I was heading that way,” he says. “I just said, ‘Come on, let’s do it.’ ” Lola hesitated. “Her academic life at BYU was taking shape and I was asking her to abandon all that. She was highly intelligent and knew the risk. More than anything, she was going against her parents’ wishes.” Redford wanted them to elope, avoiding a Mormon wedding. Lola offered a compromise: she would secure her parents’ approval and agree to a double ceremony, one informal, one Mormon.
Summer was coming, and Redford contacted Charlie, requesting more work at the El Segundo refinery to fund his imminent marriage. Charlie’s response was compliance—and anger. Martha’s old friend Marcella Scott encountered Charlie driving down Sepulveda in a white-faced rage. “We pulled over and talked. All he wanted to do was vent steam about Bobby and the mess he was making of his life: ‘Now he wants to get married, damn him!’ was all he was saying, ranting.”
On August 9, a few days before his twenty-second birthday, Redford married nineteen-year-old Lola in a five-minute service at the Heather on the Hill, a walk-in chapel on the Strip in Vegas. They had eloped. Bill Coomber was his best man. They returned to Monterey for the honeymoon. Five weeks later the formal Mormon ceremony took place at Lola’s grandmother’s home. Charlie and Helen attended—the sole representatives of the Redford family—along with fifty Van Wagenens. “I stopped short of the Mormon baptism that was expected of me,” says Redford. In time, all but one of the children of the marriage would be baptized into the faith, though none would retain it.
Thanks to the work Charlie grudgingly got him at El Segundo, Redford and Lola had amassed $300 in savings over the summer. Much of it went on the marriage services. Within forty-eight hours of the Provo ceremony, they exchanged their gold rings for $150 and paid their fare back to New York.
Lola was every bit as edgy as Redford in New York. She entered the fall of 1958 with trepidation, she said, “facing what [Bob and I] knew would be a winter of hardship.” Redford says, “I knew nothing at all, and I carried a terrible sense of guilt. I was asking someone to believe in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Yes, I wanted to change the world. But so did every Joe in the street. The bottom line was, I didn’t have a dime to my name. And that’s all that matters when you are a couple starting out.”
For his second year of theater studies, thanks to good exam results, Redford had the assistance of an AADA scholarship. Financially, though, things remained tight. In the fall Lola found work as a bank teller for $55 a week, and Redford enrolled at the Pratt Institute, taking night courses in set design, “because I still thought I’d probably end up painting scenery.” Redford says Pratt “just wasn’t right for me. It had a famous architectural department, but it seemed too concentrated on technical drawing, which always left me cold. It wasn’t the school’s fault. It was mine.” He also found part-time work as a clerk at a store on Seventh Avenue and served nights as a janitor at the ANTA Theatre for a combined personal income of $93 a week. “It was exhausting to the point of stupor,” says Redford. “But there was an advantage beyond funding a marriage. Spending more time at the Anta meant I could watch more plays and understand more about the profession of acting.”
Among the new friends at the Mormon Manhattan ward functions Lola and Redford attended was Provo-born Stan Collins, who was two years older than Redford and studying business at