Robert Redford, who personified “Hollywood handsome” for a few eons, dipped his toes deeply into the waters of Santa Barbara environmental politics before he died this week at age 89.
Redford was initially drawn to the area for all its obvious surfing attractions, not to mention backcountry hiking. His earliest activism here involved his support for Return to Freedom, a Lompoc-based nonprofit leading an effort to spare thousands of wild horses roaming on federal lands from being shot at from helicopters as a form of population control. Redford was initially drawn to the effort because to him the mustang embodied American freedom.
From there, he branched out to support an unsuccessful 2014 countywide ballot initiative — Measure P —that would have blocked further fracking and high-intensity oil drilling in Santa Barbara County. The oil industry vastly outspent the advocates of the proposal, and Redford lent his name to fundraising efforts to equalize that imbalance. In his letter, he incorrectly blamed Chevron — then a leading opponent of Measure P — for causing the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969.
“He was a star with a thoughtful side,” said Katie Davis, who led the charge for Measure P. “He was the America we should aspire to be.”
Return to Freedom founder Neda DeMayo said of Redford’s death, “We are heartbroken,” adding that Redford’s persona itself “was interwoven with the beauty and majesty of the West.”
Santa Barbara resident and literary agent David Obst, who represented Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with their two books on the Watergate Scandal, said Redford grabbed him and threw him up against the wall of the men’s room in the Kennedy Center during the premiere of the movie All the President’s Men. The second Watergate book — The Final Days — had just come out, and Redford, Obst said, was angry that its release coincided with the movie’s premiere.
“’You’ve ruined my movie!’” Obst quoted Redford as saying. “He pushed me up against the wall. And that was my last interaction with Bob.”
In 2014, Redford was honored by the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, whose executive director, Roger Durling, credited Redford for inspiring him to take a great leap into the unknown in his role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
