TV Shows. Inspirational Stories. Advertise with us. Contact us. About us. Celebrity April 28, Share Share this pen.
I had a mad crush. As exciting as it was for Redford to become a celebrity, at home, things were only marginally better. The uncertainty around his health persisted for months, as doctors were unsure if the baby would manage to overcome multiple illnesses.
It seems in his early years he was struck with a different sort of luck, having come down with what was considered only a mild case of polio at the time.
As a child, it should have been obvious that Redford was made for acting, as he was always putting on a show to get out of his classes.
Having to go to the bathroom, having a stomachache, forgetting to call home — I used them all. As Redford approached his university years, he was as aimless as many young people still find themselves when it comes time to deciding their career trajectories. By the time he started university, Redford would take another hit that just ramped up his bad behavior. As Redford reflected back on losing his mother when he was so young, he realized he had one major regret.
Though he would come to realize perhaps he married a bit too young, he credits Lola for saving his life. With that, he lost his scholarship. As she healed from such a shocking event, Redford stepped in as her rock, but even so, he found the experience still shook him to the core. Despite the troubles, Redford always had one friend he could rely on: Paul Newman. He sent his buddy a beat-up Porsche with no engine all tied with a bow as a funny birthday gift.
In return, Newman had the car crushed, and sent back to Redford. So we never mentioned that Porsche. The durability and length of this friendship has created a pretty deep root. Obviously I don't want to denigrate the person I married, there were a lot of good reasons But when you ask me a question, like why? That's what it felt like at the time. It's a fact of life, like contradictions are. Redford tends to talk in mythic terms - black and white, good and bad. Still, he says quite openly that sadness and contradiction form a major part of his early life.
He was born in Los Angeles in "In that transition between the Great Depression and the second world war - from one dark time to the next. LA tends to be a place that people migrate to. And this gave him an edge, he says, a way of seeing. It just never was for me. His parents were poor, living in the Spanish part of Santa Monica - he was one of the few blond boys on the block. By his account, his father was a strange amalgam -"very conservative, tough, old-fashioned", but politically a liberal.
When Goldman, a Russian Jew by origin, was arrested in and later deported from the States for protesting against first world war conscription, J Edgar Hoover personally oversaw her deportation. Redford's great-aunt was hounded out of her community. She went to Berkeley to teach.
There wasn't enough money to raise two sons. That's how bad it was. The brother, a Rhodes scholar, was later killed in Patton's third army at the Battle of the Bulge. All his life, Redford says, "My father had a doom's eye view of taking chances. And I came out the opposite. For a long time he was certain I was headed for the trash heap. Taken from Norman Maclean's novel, it is a story of two brothers, Norman and Paul, and their relationship with their preacher father.
Norman is the studious boy, the good son, and Paul, played by Brad Pitt, the renegade. Paul finally dies in a street brawl, part sacrificial victim - he can't cope with life's realities - part self-induced; he has a violent and self-destructive instinct.
He will sometimes eulogise the Los Angeles of his youth - "I could ride my bike all over" - and lament the desecration that began in the s.
Concrete, he says, replaced grass. Pollution substituted for the fragrance of the air. He'd head off for the beach or the sierras. Awarded an athletics scholarship to the University of Colorado - "We could never have afforded it" - he then had it taken away through his drunkenness.
He says now that he felt he was losing it, "I was headed for the edge. I have no horror of LA, but there's a sadness when I'm there. It was home. Somewhere around , he left for Europe.
Except, as he says, he had no talent. He spent 18 months, in Florence and Paris, living in penury - he was used to that - painting on pavements. Europe, he says, politicised him, saved him in a way. Don't forget I grew up in a state that had Nixon for senator. When he returned to the States in , he didn't go back to California but instead became an acting student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
I came from the west and I wanted my family to have an option, to have their summers in the open, in the west. I'd looked to the future and I could see what was happening. The west was open for its final chapters, its manifest destiny. Everything was going to be taken. Arizona had already gone, even then. It was remote enough from civilisation to feel you were part of nature, part of the way it was. Part of that pioneering spirit that established this state.
At the time, he wasn't famous - he was just one year into an acting career that wouldn't take off for another decade. Yet everything is in place. The secrecy or the desire to be alone. The love for the west.
The belief in or the nostalgia for the core pioneer values - struggle in adversity, heroism in defeat. He built his family a cabin. He was Robert Redford long before he became "Robert Redford". Through the s, Redford continued to buy land in Utah, including the Timp Haven ski resort from the original settler family - the place that is now both resort and home to his Sundance Institute.
It is an awe-inspiringly beautiful place - a mammoth terrain lit by the stark sun of the west. If you take the lift some 2, feet up, you look across the deep gorge to the receding mauve Wasatch mountains. The air is crystalline. On the day I visited, it was mostly empty except for a few kids sunbathing on the lifts and families having lunch in the cabins below.
I asked one of the guides if it was usually so quiet. He said yes.
0コメント