Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [59]
Redford had resolved his priorities. It wasn’t money he wanted, it was roots.
9
Big Pictures
The two acres Redford had purchased for $500, a onetime chicken-coop plot at the north fork draw at Timp Haven on the flank of the hill facing Mount Timpanogos, would become the physical nucleus of Sundance. Incrementally, over the next five years, he would purchase six hundred more acres of wild lands from Justin Stewart to broaden his base. Redford insists “there was no long-term strategy.” But a significant pattern was forming. With every peak of achievement came an act of withdrawal.
Lola and the children were housed in an apartment in town while Redford took to camping on-site, intent on constructing his house with only local builder Garn Phillips and his son to help. In 1961, Redford had seen Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, built in Arizona, in Sunset magazine. “That started my love affair with organic architecture, and also the organic notion of building.” The highlight of Taliesin West for Redford was a unique stone-in-cement chimney. Redford wanted his A-frame built around this design, but both Phillips and Lee Knell, the Provo architect consulted in the planning, were stymied. Finally Redford found stonemason Jay Bown, a half-Cherokee Mormon based in Cash Valley on the Iowa border. “I drove 130 miles north to find this apparently hostile guy who met my plan with indifference. He was standing on his sixty-foot flatbed truck and wasn’t impressed by the fact that I was this actor who wanted to do the impossible. Finally I said to him, ‘Okay, I’m going to try it anyway. I just don’t want to screw it up,’ and he came around.” The timber used was local; the granite shipped from nearby Deer Creek and Strawberry was so ancient it was studded with dinosaur-era fossils. They labored through the summer and fall. The house became an obsession for Redford. As it came together, it comprised fourteen timber A-frames, thirty-eight-foot-wide windows looking out to Timpanogos, an encircling pine deck, three bedrooms and a cathedral living space. “We had moose and deer, a mountain lion, bald eagles, every sort of wilderness creature—but no running water,” he remembers. “When the winter snows came, we boiled water to cook and bathe with. When the snows were heaviest in January, the house was half buried, and we used sleds to trek from the canyon entrance. When the family came to stay, it took an hour to transport them, and the supplies, from the entrance to the house. It was nineteenth-century living.”
As Redford labored in bliss, his future was being shaped by yet new advisers. Arthur Park had been replaced, by mutual agreement, by Meta Rosenberg of Rosenberg and Coryel, who had a plan to pay off the Sanderses from the proceeds of a possible movie deal with Columbia. Rosenberg already had that deal in hand, with producer Irving Allen, who wanted Redford for his Viking movie, The Long Ships. Ostensibly this was what Redford sought: good casting, alongside a major star—Richard Widmark—in a movie to be directed by the respected Jack Cardiff. But Redford dithered. Hesseltine was calling at the same time, telling him of Mike Nichols’s interest in casting him in Nobody Loves Me, the follow-up to Simon’s Tony-winning Come Blow Your Horn. “I was very flattered,” says Redford, “because I obviously knew Neil’s and Mike’s reputations. And, of course, I’d always said I wanted good theater. But I was so at peace in Provo that I didn’t want to get back in the race.” After weeks of phone exchanges, Redford finally offered an equivocal agreement. Sticking to his word and choosing East Coast over West, he told Nichols he would accept the play, but strictly on the condition of his finding comfort in the project. “I was emphatic,” says Redford. “I told