Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [80]
During the early discussions about Blue, Redford experienced a clear understanding of the limitations of defining himself solely, or even principally, in movie terms. “Movie stardom was never going to do it for me. Neither was Hoover’s retail store, or diet pills,” he says. “Many of my Mormon friends, like Stan, saw my struggle as a religious crisis. And then the pressures for conversion came on, very kindly, very committed, very determined. I was courted, I was given Mormon literature, and though they tried, I was not blessed. The more they pushed me to commit to the Church, the more I pulled away.”
After Christmas, Stan Collins and his wife, Mary Alice, invited the Redfords on a driving trip to Lake Powell, one of the country’s biggest man-made reservoirs, in southern Utah. The couples stopped at Gallup, New Mexico, and Redford rambled around on the Navajo reservation. It was five years since his Pacific-bound train had stopped for water at Gallup and the face at the window incited a healing Zen moment. “This time around I took my time. I explored and really lost myself in the culture,” he says. “It blew me away. I felt at peace and at home, with the faces, the postures, everything.” Redford talked to the traders, sat in the dirt to play with face-painted kids. “Some drunken Navajo called me Bonfaccio, and it stuck. From then on, to myself, I was Bonfaccio, the white interloper. Bonfaccio became a moniker and it was the name I wrote on the clapper slate when I first signed myself as director of Ordinary People.”
Since his preteens he’d been reaching for a bridge of understanding between the two contrasting Americas of his parental origins: the frontier Texas of Tot and the urban East Coast world of Tiger. During The Chase, the activism of Brando, Penn and CORE had teased his awareness of Native American and minority issues, and in November, as he finished Barefoot, the eruption of youth politics in the Sunset Strip riots, where a coalition of liberals protested the overdevelopment of L.A., further focused him. At Lake Powell, contemplating Blue, he believed he had achieved some liberating clarity.
Purchasing Timp, he reflected, was about reconciliation. It seemed fated, even, for it was close by in 1869 that the golden spike was driven into the ground at Promontory Summit, to mark the joining of railroads from east and west. He was attracted to Indian culture, he decided, because it was the root of all Americas. Redford calls this the moment of awareness that presaged his sense of stewardship about the canyon and also his commitment to explore the diversity of American culture, which would later be foundational in his creation of the Sundance Institute. “There’s always a key moment,” he says. “That was mine.”
Soon afterward, a silversmith Hopi called Fred Kapote made Redford the ring he still wears today. It depicts a turtle, representing patience and endurance—two staples that would be well tested in the days ahead. In the spring, he was ready to face Bob Evans and the fight for a role beyond stardom.
11
Toward Concord
Barefoot in the Park opened at Radio City Music Hall in the summer of 1967. It earned $9 million, five times its budget, in the first six weeks, a resounding success. But Redford had an appetite for change, and change was in the air. America was agitated. Disillusioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, anxious because of the missile crisis, the death of Kennedy and the war in Vietnam, Americans everywhere were reappraising core values. This was the year Brian Wilson retired the Beach Boys’ California