We all like to count among our friends principled people who are serious about their chosen profession and dedicated to working towards the greater good. But do we want to read about them? That’s the uphill battle fought by Michael Feeney Callan in his meticulous, tiptoeingly respectful Robert Redford: The Biography, which covers in detail Mr Redford’s four-decade acting career, his emergence as a director and his dedication to environmental causes. Mr Redford is also, of course, the founder of the Sundance Institute, established in 1981 to help independent filmmakers polish their skills and bring their work to a wider audience; in 1985 he expanded the Sundance empire by taking over the United States Film and Video Festival, thereafter known as the Sundance Film Festival.
But how does any list of accomplishments stack up against that face? What we love about actors has less to do with the people they really are and everything to do with them as dream-people, projections of our own fantasies and longings. No matter how any of us may feel about Mr Redford’s skill as an actor – he was sometimes terrific, sometimes terrifically bland – he was one of the great fantasy figures of American movies in the ’70s: he seemed to glow gold.
That kind of glow is never weightless, and neither is this slog of a book. The curse of any serious actor who has the luck, the charm and the stamina to become a big movie star is that he then has to prove he’s not just a pretty nitwit. Mr Redford, as Mr Callan shows here, has stretched that imperative to the far reaches of dullness. Barely a page goes by without some pompous, heavy-duty quotation from the actor about the deeper meaning of a movie he directed or starred in. Sneakers is a warning about “the whole issue of privacy in this information age,” Mr Redford says. The Legend of Bagger Vance is a “morality fable,” Mr Callan writes, far more significant than any love story it might contain. Mr Redford: “ Bagger Vance was about remembering who we are and this shared spiritual journey we’re on.”
The Way We Were, directed by Mr Redford’s longtime friend and associate Sydney Pollack, is a rumination on the injustice of the Hollywood blacklist: “The questionable nature of true free speech was a provocative notion, and I attached to that.” That’s the setting — but that’s not why audiences flocked to see it. (The dual charisma and crackle of Mr Redford and his co-star, Barbra Streisand, probably had something to do with that.) Mr Redford isn’t always wrong to look for deeper meaning in his work. But as Mr Callan lays it out for us, Mr Redford’s lifetime of proving himself to himself (and to everyone else) is almost as exhausting to read about as it must be to live.
Maybe it didn’t have to be that way. Written with Mr Redford’s cooperation, this biography reveals certain details that the actor, a private and somewhat reclusive person, hasn’t spilled elsewhere. The chapters on Mr Redford’s youth and escalating career are the best; here, Mr Callan humanises him as no one has before. We learn that Mr Redford wasn’t always the straight-arrow, serious-minded beard-stroker he’s come to be (particularly in his latest incarnation as the director of civic-minded movies like Lions for Lambs and The Conspirator). Mr Redford was born in 1936 in Santa Monica. His parents weren’t married at the time of his birth, but they tied the knot shortly thereafter. Mr Redford had polio as a child. He drifted aimlessly in high school, for a time becoming part of a street gang. He was arrested for “borrowing an automobile that had stolen jewellry in its trunk,” Mr Callan writes, and at his high school graduation he sat in the back of the auditorium, reading Mad magazine.
Mr Redford studied art at the University of Colorado at Boulder and showed an interest in animation before finding his way to acting in the late ’50s, building his résumé with work onstage and on television. In 1959, just as his career was beginning to take shape, he and his first wife, Lola, lost their first child to crib death. The couple went on to have three more children, but Mr Redford’s unvarnished account of their early loss, as told to Mr Callan, makes their suffering vivid and concrete. (They went on to divorce in 1985, and Mr Redford was married a second time, to the artist Sibylle Szaggars, in 2009.)
Over all, Mr Callan – who has also written biographies of Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery – paints Mr Redford as a thoughtful and reserved but likable guy, and he explains in intricate, if generally eye-glazing, detail Mr Redford’s laudable environmental-preservation efforts. But he has a tendency to highlight Mr Redford’s pretentiousness rather than deflate it. For instance, he stands by mutely as Mr Redford explains his initial reluctance to appear in The Way We Were opposite Streisand: “What I was really worried about was the whole concept of basing a movie on Barbra as a serious actress. . . . She had never been tested.” Mr Callan might have pointed out that Streisand had already been “tested” in pictures like The Owl and the Pussycat and especially Funny Girl, and that perhaps what Mr Redford was actually expressing was misguided disdain for comedy — or maybe just plain old snobbishness.
Mr Callan’s book is methodical, principled and fair. It’s also joyless. But the blame doesn’t rest wholly with him. We may read a biography like this one to find out what Mr Redford is like, but in the end the things we love most about him are the qualities we see reflected in his movie roles: a cowboy god squinting in the sun in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; a sexually magnetic charmer in The Way We Were who nonetheless projects a mysterious and affecting air of melancholy.
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Robert Redford: The Biography leaves no doubt that Mr Redford is an intelligent, conscientious guy. It also leaves no doubt about how hard he works at being that guy. Like most mere mortals, you may at one time have envied Mr Redford his good looks and great success, but you probably don’t want to be him — and you certainly don’t need to read about him. To watch him is the thing, and that’s as it should be.
The New York Times
ROBERT REDFORD
The Biography
Michael Feeney Callan
Alfred A Knopf
468 pages; $28.95