Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [41]
Opening night saw Redford performing before the first large audience of his career, at Finch College. It also marked the first time Lola saw her husband perform onstage. The fact that it was a success, that the audience approved and the fellow cast members congratulated him for his originality of interpretation, was disorienting. More confusing was what Redford calls “the bizarre sexual attention” focused on him in the after-show party. He was aware of the advantage of his looks and his charm with women, but was surprised by the intensity of the new attention. “I didn’t discuss it with Lola. I think I only see it now, with the perspective of time. I’d taken a risk and broken down some invisible barrier. Women were looking at me in a very interesting new way. I thought it odd but invigorating at the same time, but after a drink or two I just wanted to be out of there.” Before he left, Francis Lettin cornered him. “He said, ‘Every now and then you see an actor who you think could really play Hamlet. I’ve been in this business thirty years and I’ve seen actors come and go. But you are the first I’ve seen who could really do it. It’s entirely up to you now.’ ”
Antigone followed a month later. Redford played Creon in a classicist style light-years from the Chekhov. Once again, the effect of independent thinking, risk and experiment produced the tumultuous audience response. Redford exulted in the intoxicant of applause. “After The Seagull, every opening night, every stage play, was something new. Till that point, I’d been dealing with AADA formula. With The Seagull, everything altered.”
7
Graduation
Several of the AADA tutors continued to question a behavioral smugness, but Redford puts it down to stubborn personal confusion. The writer David Rayfiel, who would come to know Redford through his collaborations with mutual friend Sydney Pollack, explained it well. “When we appreciate Cézanne’s apples, we see first of all the simplicity. But that’s not what knocks you over. It is, as Willa Cather said, the anxiety of the apples—and that comes from an existential unease, from something suppressed. I always felt that about Bob. He was outwardly supremely confident, but underneath there was always the doubt.”
On the walls inside AADA were photos of the esteemed alumni who had gone to the top—among them Grace Kelly and Kirk Douglas—but Redford insists he had no “instinct” for them. “I recognized how iconography worked, how John Wayne became representative of the frontier heartland, but I hated the caricature that came with repetitiveness. The actors who appealed to me were the characters who were usually lost down the playbill. People like Franklin Pangborn, Billy De Wolfe, Van Heflin. No one had much to say about their technique, but I learned more from them than I did from Kirk Douglas.”
With graduation looming, Redford was itchy to break out. The Actors Studio suddenly seemed like a good idea, “because that’s where they broke the rules.” It was at the radical Group Theatre of the thirties that Konstantin Stanislavski’s “Method” was first taught in America. Stella Adler adapted it, and Lee Strasberg refined the technique for the Actors Studio. It attracted Paul Newman, James Dean, Eli Wallach and Geraldine Page and gained notoriety as the new and insightful way to act, though its techniques only dented the dominant melodramas of the fifties. “Whether we were AADA proponents or radicals,” says Harry Mastrogeorge, “we all thought people like Strasberg were onto something psychologically valuable in terms of freeing up the actor.” Redford and classmate Ellen Siccama decided to study with Strasberg after they graduated from AADA. They rehearsed a few scenes from William Saroyan’s The Time of Your