In Robert Redford's environment

By:Cynthia Robins

When arts and politics intersect, interesting things happen. Like, when actor-producer-director Robert Redford strode into the New Main Library's Wallace Stegner Environmental Center on Tuesday evening, probably 40 minutes late, the temperature went up. Not only was this a committed activist, come to introduce a program of four environmental debates next year to be paid for by the Fred Gellert Family Foundation (to the tune of $34,000), but a movie star. They don't get much bigger or brighter than Redford. Redford brings it all with him - Jay Gatsby, the Sundance Kid, the grifter from "The Sting," Isak Dinesen's lover from "Out of Africa." He's every teenage girl's fantasy man rolled up in a slender, 5-foot 9-inch package. And I've got to admit, the charisma that sparkles from the big screen translates to up close and personal. As Redford walked by, loosening his longish blond hair from under a stagey navy beret, he looked me straight in the face with the same eyes that captivated Barbra Streisand and Mia Farrow, that tried to seduce Demi Moore, and asked: "Is it all right?" Yeah, you might say, damn well perfect. An hour later, as guests who had paid $1,000 apiece filed into the teensy private dining room at Stars and awaited Redford, Summer Tompkins, co-chair of the cocktail party with Greenpeace's Francesca Vietor, commented, "He knows he's hot. I like that controlled arrogance. It's awfully sexy. . . . What's that film where he offers somebody $1 million to sleep with him, "Indecent Proposal?' I'd do it for 50 cents. No, make that a penny." Sipping a vodka on ice, Annette Gellert said she had talked the family foundation into starting "the environmental arm about five or six years ago. I wanted to make it powerful enough to counteract the stranglehold that special interests like oil, timber and mining have on our natural resources. We the people have to say, enough." Tree huggers, a k a dedicated environmentalists like Gellert, who came by her wilderness bent by spending summers at Tahoe, hiking and sharing the pristine beauty with her children, by and large are very serious people. Think Ralph Nader. Think the Monkey Wrench Gang. And then there is Redford, who is one of maybe two or three major stars (Paul Newman comes to mind) who have put their money where their causes are. Often it amounts to tilting at windmills, especially when facing down huge corporations that have wanted to deface the Utah and Colorado plateau wilderness so dear to Redford's heart. Redford does not, however, accept the role of an environmental Don Quixote. He is very used to getting his own way. "I learned the art of lobbying from Joan Claybrook, now head of Public Citizen, a consumer group, who had worked for Ralph Nader for years back in the '70s," he said, munching on a piece of vegetarian pizza. "I quickly became depressed and despondent and asked her, "How do you do it when the most intelligent reasons are thrown aside?' And she said, "You don't always lose.' What drives you is conviction and passion." The difficult part, he said, is to come up against the "uninformed and the downright bigoted, the paranoid, mean-spirited people who see the environment as a threat to business. That is where tilting at windmills comes in. I hate to see the attitude of some people who treat the environment as an enemy." In his years at Stanford and as a writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, the late Wallace Stegner was a champion of the real West and the environment, particularly the plateau region of southern Utah. The area has just been made into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument with the aid, comfort, funds and lobbying effort of one movie star, Robert Redford. When Redford, who in his travels had met Stegner, was approached by video documentarian Stephen Jay Fisher to narrate "Wallace Stegner: A Writer's Life," he agreed. He also agreed to come and meet with the press, introduce the film and schmooze a little at a select few fund-raisers (attended by such local lovelies as Maryon Davies Lewis; Jo Schuman Silver; Jeanette Etheredge; Susie Tompkins, Summer's newlywed mother; and the wondrous Marjorie Stern, without whose vigilance the New Main would probably still be on the drawing boards). The screening itself at Herbst Theater sold out, paying off about $50,000 of the remaining $70,000 debt owed by the Stegner Environmental Center. Designed as an in-library research center as well as an instrument for environmental outreach, the Stegner Center, located on the fifth floor of the New Main, is decorated in part with an etched glass partition on which is written part of Stegner's famous "Wilderness Letter." "Americans are a different species because of our wilderness," he once wrote. "It gave us our optimism and freedom. We're a lesser or diminished people if we let that go."