Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [66]
The family traveled to Can Pastilla in an attempt to reawaken what he describes in his diary as “the richest experience I have ever had.” But the marble villa he once lived in was neglected and overgrown, with a Coca-Cola billboard blocking its sea view. The Redfords moved west and found a blue-and-white villa perched on the cliffs at Port d’Alcudia. In the shade of Mediterranean pines, surrounded by bougainvillea (his favorite shrub), Redford walked the cliffs and mocked himself for his yearnings for “a Beatnik-type freedom.”
Within days, he wrote in the diary, Lola had observed a major change in him. For the first time since they’d met, he was relaxing, happy to sit and idle by the fire. He was reading Saroyan; she, Aldous Huxley. On January 4, T. S. Eliot died, and the newspaper articles about his passing, as well as the contemporaneous reports of Allen Ginsberg’s street protest for the legalization of marijuana in New York, roused him. In his journal he wrote at length about American cultural values and his desire for a better understanding of what it is to be an American. T. S. Eliot represented “dignity and restraint” that had survived half a century—“He seems to have found the rare area between detachment and involvement”—while Ginsberg encapsulated everything that was wrong with the youth, “soaking his body in the Ganges, stalking the Far East” while becoming “confused, confusing and ridiculous.” Redford says his viewpoint has changed: “I could not then hook into Ginsberg’s work because, like him, it was too loudly desperate. It was about me, me, me. I preferred Gary Snyder or Robert Creeley. Ginsberg’s was not the voice I was open to at that time.”
Ginsberg’s, though, was a critical new American voice at a time of ferment. Every American newspaper Redford got his hands on reported the convulsions at Berkeley, the Joan Baez rallies at Sproul Plaza, the helicopters teargassing students. It was, says Redford, a bewildering tapestry to unravel. On one hand, there was the clear progress of Johnson’s Great Society with the landmark bills for civil rights and wilderness protection. On the other was military escalation in Vietnam and the Merry Pranksters. “I alternately felt that the place was in trouble or undergoing a terrific change. More than anything, the confused signals I was getting reflected the confusion inside myself. I had sympathy with the reformists, but I was involved with starting a career and raising a family, so I was, literally, elsewhere. On the other hand, this terrible ferment was a place of some attraction to me.”
The day he read of T. S. Eliot’s death, Redford also received a telegram from Meta Rosenberg summoning him home. In his diary, Redford recorded the “feeling of sickness in my stomach.” Lola was eager to get back to New York so the kids could start school; he was not. In his diary he wrote hopefully of meetings in Paris with François Truffaut and Tony Richardson, both of whom had expressed interest in working with him. “But when I got down to it, I knew my fate was with Rosenberg and the Warners soundstage. I was the one who asked for that. I was the one who set those wheels in motion.”
10
Child’s Play
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. But don’t worry. May we meet in the castle of lost souls, in the land of the black swan, otherwise known as the Prince of Darkness. Welcome, little captive, to the waterfall of sweet dreams.”
In the elegant faux-Grecian splendor of a Brentwood mansion, Redford has finished speaking