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By Root 600 0

for half of 1965 the family was in Utah or New York while he was stuck in Los Angeles. There were long separations, stubborn, widening gossip about an affair with Natalie Wood and too many awkward, apologetic late-night phone calls. The talk of romance with Wood put the greatest pressure on his marriage. “It struck me that I was starting to ‘go Hollywood’ without noticing,” says Redford. “I’d bought a flashy Lincoln Continental and started driving around like a head of state. It was ridiculous. After a couple of weeks I took it back to the dealer and told him to take it off my hands. I suppose I was succumbing to the temptations like everyone before me. It was stress, and compensation. I drank too much, spent too much; everything was as phony as the statues in Ray Stark’s garden. I knew if I went on like that, my marriage, or I, would be dead inside a year.”

On January 1, with no immediate movie commitment, the Redfords boarded an Italian liner bound for Gibraltar.

Paramount’s start date for Barefoot in the Park was months away, so Redford had time to reorder his thoughts. Days before he left, he recorded in his diary the first stirrings to paint again, “watching Shauna, who is all the colors of the fall, a living Renoir.” Europe, he wrote, was the place to do it, specifically Spain. This, his third European excursion, was different in every way from the previous adventures. Stan Collins, now managing investments at the Provo branch of stockbrokers Goodbody and Company, waved him goodbye “as if he were royalty. It wasn’t like before. The first time, he had a suitcase. Now the family packed trunks.” There were also influential theatrical and movie friends to bid them adieu. Richard Schickel, the critic for Look and Show magazines, came to the dock for the send-off. Schickel, who had been introduced to Redford by Carol Rossen, observed “a very courageous, or foolhardy, move, depending how you looked at it: here was a guy, the better part of ten years looking for a career, abandoning it as soon as it got moving. I thought he was nuts.”

The family took up residence in Mijas, an hour from Gibraltar, in January 1966. Redford took to sitting on an iron chair in the garden of the rented villa, just staring. For almost a month he hardly talked. Lola and the kids, familiar with this isolation, concentrated on fashioning a new home for themselves. “I had no practical plan,” says Redford. “I wanted to paint and read, that’s all.”

The Andalusian coast Redford opted for was hardly a primitive Eden. Mijas was part of the fast-developing Costa del Sol, haven for the privileged likes of Aristotle Onassis and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had hideaway haciendas there. What had been, in the fifties, farmland dotted with fishermen’s cottages and Arab forts was now prime real estate. The previous year, Life magazine’s William Sansom extolled the best of what remained in a feature titled “The Great Game of Getting Away from It All”: “Dress is heterodox. Anything goes, from a Hawaiian shirt to a black sombrero. Students, of course, look like students, and beats like beats”—and all of this against a fading backdrop of “an Arcadian agricultural scene where oxen pull the plow between groves of olives and almonds, and limes and lemons loom as large as boxing gloves.”

Mijas was an olive growers’ community the size of Greenwich Village, where the writer Robert Storey and Prince Bernadotte of Sweden lived. The Redfords’ villa, outside the town, was sparse, white and capacious, with an empty swimming pool in the yard and the hills of Churriana beyond. The unique square bullring was a ten-minute walk along the switchback two-lane road that led to the coast. Redford took to walking this steep road daily, winding down among the olive terraces to the seaside village of Fuengirola for wine and provisions. Jamie’s first clear memories of his father are of these days of decompression. “I was vaguely aware of my dad as a life force, but, for us, the home revolved around Mom,” Jamie says. “Looking back, I realize he was fighting his demons. But he