Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [99]
“There we had to draw the line,” says Redford. “I called up my lawyers and we hit Lorillard with a lawsuit. They fought back, but it cost them half a million dollars in the end.” Redford was pleased, then amused when Martin Garbus, the civil rights lawyer who presented the case on his behalf, gave him a token gift of one of Lorillard’s promotional packs, with his pseudoface beaming out. Redford took the packet home and placed it in a glass display case. A week later, he came home to find his kids had breached the case and smoked the cigarettes.
Redford took pride in his business sense. He took pride in the fact that he built his A-frame for $14,000 and spent just $20,000 for the first-phase development of the Sundance acreage (the money was borrowed against his Willie Boy contract). But almost immediately the partnership founded by Frankfurt started to disintegrate. “None of us had real money to begin with,” says Stan Collins, who was responsible for the financial management of this new, amorphous business. “We were all to pitch in $20,000. Bob did his bit. But I didn’t have $20,000, so I gave my services in lieu. Mike Frankfurt provided his legal services. Which meant that, apart from Bob, only Gottschalk and Hans Estin put hard cash up.” Gary Hendler, a tax management expert, had structured the deal with the less experienced Frankfurt, but Redford took the bulk of the risk, and it was Redford who first spotted the defects in the partnership. The 98 percent mortgage was signed in his name, with repayments amounting to $360,000 a year. “At first, I didn’t notice it. Everything moved so fast, and all I cared about was securing the canyon. To do that I had to keep working, to keep solvent, and I was working so intently I wasn’t taking care,” says Redford.
There was progress, though. Redford assigned Wayne, Lola’s brother, to build a new guesthouse, the Mouse House, beside the A-frame. On the resort side, a second chairlift was installed at a cost of $200,000. The new lift system spanned over a mile to an elevation of fifty-two hundred feet above the base camp, complementing the existing Poma lifts, which took novice skiers to an elevation twenty-six hundred feet above camp. The objective of all this, says Frankfurt, was to compete with Alta, Utah’s only major ski resort, just thirty miles away.
Despite the progress, Redford was nervous: “It became pretty evident that the promises made were not going to be kept,” he recalls. “There was no money. And I began to worry that no one was sincerely committed.” Hendler, who was slowly taking over from Frankfurt, was ostensibly following the boss’s orders, but Redford was concerned about him, too. Hendler had been skeptical about the purchase of the canyon lands to begin with, but had come around to Frankfurt’s idea of developing the resort as a nationally advertised vacation spot. Redford saw the conundrum: Hendler’s appetite was for building, but his, essentially, was for preservation.
Hendler was Brooklyn born and Harvard educated. Despite being short, he had become a star varsity basketball player, an achievement, Redford opines, that reflected his determined stubbornness. While others preferred to take weekends off, he worked nonstop. Hesitant at first, he had seen the opportunities afforded by the property boom of 1970 and surrendered to Sundance. “Prior to Gary,” says Frankfurt, “our setup in New York was hand-to-mouth. With EYR, we were always begging for the loan of office space. We found Bob a hole in the wall on East Fifty-fifth Street and that was our business base in its entirety. Gary wasn’t interested in any of this small-time panhandling. He saw the big picture. The economy was booming and the property market was on the up. People had disposable income. It was a good time for vacation properties. Gary came to see the light and he wanted Bob to benefit.”
Hendler moved fast. First, a number of half-acre plots were sold at $10,000 each to a pool of friends assembled