Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [57]
That fall there continued to be plenty of heated talk about his potential, but no clear breakthrough. He wanted more movie auditions, but he was suddenly advised by the Sanderses’ company that he was committed to them exclusively for at least another film. “My mistake, but it was terrible because I really didn’t like what they were offering,” says Redford. In response to his rejections, the Sanders brothers were threatening to sue. At this point Carol Rossen reentered his life. That spring, by chance, he had found her photograph among Hesseltine’s files. Surprised she was working as an actress around New York, he told Hesseltine to send her warm greetings. Now Hesseltine surprised the Redfords during a beach barbecue by bringing Carol along. Redford was delighted. “I’d cut off that part of my life, and in doing so I lost some good people. Carol was one of the good ones. Reconnecting with her was good, because it brought the past into perspective and allowed me to assess the distance I’d traveled.”
But Carol observed that her old friend was on the edge: “He’d changed in one way: what had always been a fiery temperament had become a very short fuse. I was in admiration for all he was achieving, and I loved Lola and the kids. But he felt he was in the wrong place, not just in the entertainment industry, but in life. It exuded from his pores. Everything of worth was happening in Europe, he said, not here. In movies they had the nouvelle vague, and the British had the New Wave. We had Doris Day and Pat Boone. This was also the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the feeling that Kennedy’s sociable foreign policy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We were supposed to be living in Camelot, but you had youth revolts and that feeling of the powder keg. America hadn’t got over McCarthy, and Bob was desperate to find a way not to be part of the status quo.”
Carol was more accurate in her judgment of Redford on the edge than she knew. Shortly after, having disrupted family life with petty arguments that masked his true inner turmoil, he suddenly decided to take to the road again by himself. “I drove two hundred miles,” he says, “through Big Sur to Morro Bay, and parked the car. I just knew, for everyone’s sake, that I had to put a distance between me and the world. Big Sur was always a fabulous mystery to me, something that sat on the edge of my imagination, beckoning. It was a mystery I wanted to solve by being in it. So I decided to walk it.” That November there were subzero temperatures and the coast road was closed because of landslides. Redford didn’t care. He had a sleeping bag, writing materials, a sketchbook and a flashlight. “I was Kerouac walking back to face the demons at the cove in Big Sur. Of course, I was processing as I went, all the time questioning myself. Did I want to continue in the rat race? Was I letting Lola and the kids down?”
Over several days Redford walked ninety miles toward Monterey, finally stopping at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, where he made a new friend in the Norwegian proprietor, a fanciful image of his darkest self. “Here was a man who’d come full circle in the journey of life. He’d come to America to build a better life. Somewhere he flipped and murdered a man. In consequence, he went to Alcatraz. From there he was out on a convict chain gang, digging the coastal highway during the Depression.