That Redford Magic

The 2004 book People We Know, Horses They Love featured Robert Redford on the cover aboard his beloved palomino and an essay inside by Redford himself. What follows is an inside look at how that essay came to be, along with Redford’s own moving account of his love for horses, the land, and the West.

We were on deadline, and our “Bob” story was not complete. I just needed another 300 of his own words, to expand on the exclusive sit-down interview that then Today Show correspondent and award-winning animal advocate Jill Rappaport had done at Sundance. I had set up a call through his assistant, Donna Kail, but was on a long hold and starting to get antsy. “Wendy, you’re pulling back too tight on RR’s reins,” Kail told me definitively. “You need to loosen up and not pull back!” Twenty minutes later, he got on the phone — “Hi, Wendy, it’s Bob.” After a lively 15-minute conversation, I got all that I needed to finish our cover story.

But let me take a step back. Jill, photographer Linda Solomon, and I had already started doing interviews for the book but still did had not gotten a final yes from Redford to grave our cover. I remember the day we landed him (in large part thanks to Kail). We finally had the cover for our book, and since we’d secured Paul Newman and Katharine Ross earlier, the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gang was back together again.

My young daughter was quite sick the day of the Redford photo shoot in Sundance, Utah. So, my partners went without me for the day.

“When Redford arrived for the shoot, he was on the back of a Kawasaki dirt bike wearing a backwards baseball cap and dressed in a classic pearl snap Wrangler denim shirt and jeans,” Linda remembers. “It was such a natural look, especially that indigo blue Western shirt and beautifully tooled leather belt. Photographing him at Sundance was one of the most special experiences of my photojournalist career.”

Sundance was the place he loved the most. “Shooting him there, I felt I captured him in the truest sense,” Linda says. “When he mounted Charm, that exquisite palomino horse with a flaxen mane and tail, they both radiated a beautiful blondness and were the perfect pair!”

Linda was photographing Redford with film, and he was so pleased that she was not shooting with a digital camera. “He wanted the texture and quality of film and was so generous with his time. When I told him how much I loved The Way We Were, he stopped, still on Charm, and said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, but I have never seen it. I was filming The Great Gatsby and couldn’t attend the premiere.’”

When Linda started to photograph Redford, she was so in the moment that she completely forgot to have him sign the photo release, which was a requirement from our publisher. After the shoot, Jill and Linda met Redford in the famous Tree Room at Sundance, and for almost an hour and a half, he gave Jill what she has always referred to since as “one of the greatest interviews I have ever been a part of.”

When they concluded, Jill produced the release for Redford to sign for the use of the interview. Sipping his wine, he just signed it without reading it. “I probably should’ve read that before signing,” Redford told Jill, who quickly responded: “No problem, Bob! In six months, I will be Mrs. Robert Redford, and I now own half of Sundance!”

Jill had known Redford before our book photo shoot from interviewing him several times for the Today Show in support of such films as The Legend of Bagger Vance and Spy Games and had been passionately set on securing him for the cover. But it was that shoot that really lodged in lovely detail in her memory. “Sure, I’d gotten to interview him in different settings, but I had never seen him like this,” Jill says.

“When Redford and his golden palomino came trotting down the field toward me, it was a sight that literally took my breath away!” she recalls. “As he came up right next to me with Charm's nose nuzzling my shoulder, he said, ‘Be careful, Jill. You know there are snakes in that grass where you’re standing!’ I gazed up at that perfect smile and said “Well, Bob, if I die looking up at you, it’s OK!’ Redford started to crack up, and Linda captured the moment. That image became the cover of People We Know, Horses They Love.”

A lifelong animal advocate as well as a veteran celebrity and animal-welfare correspondent, Jill has interviewed hundreds of celebrities. But Redford, she says, stood out as the most memorable of all. “He was always more interested in what I had to say, as opposed to talking about himself. He always wanted to know about my job and my love for animals. He wanted to know about Linda and me and never wanted to focus on himself.”

Robert Redford. Movie star, producer, director, wild-horse advocate, environmentalist, visionary, humanitarian, founder of the Sundance Film Institute.

He was self-proclaimed “of the West,” a prince among men, and the heart and soul of People We Know, Horses They Love. He will be sorely missed, and we will be forever grateful.

— Love, Jill, Wendy, and Linda

Excerpt: Of The West

By Robert Redford

There were no horses in the poor Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up, except on the movie screen. My first time on a real horse was when I was 5 or 6. I admit it was just a guy dragging me around the ring at a pony ride, but it was instant love. I asked if I could take the reins, but the guy told me it was against the rules, that he had to lead me. After several times around the ring, I once again asked to take the reins. He reluctantly agreed but insisted on walking with me. Several more times around and I pleaded to go around by myself. Worn down, he let me, and I walked around the ring twice. Spotting an opening and seeing freedom on the other side, the pony and I took our chance and rode out. Of course the guy freaked out and brought me back inside. I might have given him a bad day, but it was a first taste of freedom on horseback, and it stayed with me.

By the time I was a teenager, 12 or 13 years old, a bunch of guys and I would frequent Will Rogers State Park and ride, even though we had no clue what we were doing. Pretending that we knew how to ride, we would race and spin and push each other around, me with my reins dragging on the ground and holding onto the horn. Someone asked me, “What the hell are you doing with the horn?” My best trick at the time was to make the horse go wild and take tight turns at a gallop, so my phony little excuse using the horn was that it makes the horse go faster.”

My next memory of horses involves a cross-country trip with my family traveling to New England to see my grandparents when I was 15 and a half. We were packed in the car, and I was halfcrazed with boredom. On the way home we stayed in Estes Park, Colorado, at a place that had stables; my family continued back to California, but my independent streak was deeply rooted at that point and I decided to stay in Colorado. I did any odd jobs that I could find, including grooming and caring for the horses. It was a different experience than my wild riding in Will Rogers Park, since I didn’t really get to ride until the end of the day when everyone else was finished. Then I would take one of the horses and go out on my own for an hour or so. This was the start of a new relationship with horses for me. I was no longer acting like a yahoo cowboy without a clue. I developed a connection with horses, an appreciation that went beyond the satisfaction of riding horseback.

Early on, my career kept me mainly in an urban environment, but I still loved to climb mountains and surf and do physical things out in nature. I was living in New York, raising a family, but I knew that I had to live at least part of my life in the West because I was of the West. So I tried to balance things by buying two acres here in Utah for just $500 and deciding to create another dimension to my life. Back in those days, Utah was off the map — there was nothing here. I built my own cabin and learned the land by riding horseback with the sheepherders. To me, sheepherders were the fathers and engineers of this country because they did their job by instinct, by experience. So I bought my first horse and rode along with them. The deeper we went into the country, the more I appreciated that a horse is the best way, other than on your own two feet, to explore your environment.

Naturally, then, I wanted to do my own riding when I landed leading roles in my first westerns, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I was always very critical as a kid watching movies when the actor was obviously not doing his own stunts, so it was important for me to do my own. This meant that I had to spend more and more time with horses and get really good on their backs. It’s one thing to ride casually, but to do some of the stunts that are required and to come across on camera as being in control, you have to be more than comfortable in the saddle. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve worked with some wonderful animals.

For example, I did all my own riding in The Electric Horseman, too. In that movie there was this scene where I had to ride along a culvert that dropped off from either side, with cop cars and even a helicopter in pursuit. I was on this incredible horse called Rising Star, who was so fast and fired up. I got on him and we both hooked in. With the helicopter pulling away, I had to go so fast that my nose and the horse’s nose were almost equal. Through that experience with Rising Star I learned what it feels like to push yourself to the max, and to get the max out of the animal you’re on. After the filming was over, I bought Rising Star and kept him for 18 years on my property until he died, and he is buried here.

Horses have taught me a kind of meditation that’s possible when you’re acting as one and communicating instinctively without words. It’s all about mutual respect and discipline. That’s what I find so special about the movie The Horse Whisperer. For me it was a chance to demonstrate my own particular affinity for horses, but the film is also about a way of life out West whose disappearance is sad but inevitable. Things come and go, and one of the things becoming obsolete is the ranching industry the way it used to be, and I wanted to document that. Still, at the heart of the story is a man whose sensitivity toward a horse, Pilgrim, could not only heal him but also heal the people around him.

Each of these experiences has led me into a deeper and deeper understanding of horses until they became an integral part of my life. I have six horses now at Sundance, and I’m partial to palominos. If you’ve ever gotten to know a horse, then you know that color isn’t a consideration in their temperament, and yet as a kid I used to love to watch Roy Rogers ride his palomino, Trigger, off into the sunset, and I dreamed of having a horse just like that. When I was making Ordinary People we filmed a scene in Apple Valley, California, where Roy and Dale Evans retired. It was such a thrill when Roy invited me out to his amazing ranch, which was full of artifacts of his and Dale’s cowboy life.

Coming to Utah so many years ago has made me appreciate this vastness. One particularly rewarding horse-riding adventure was a monthlong journey I made from Montana down to southern Utah on the old Outlaw Trail that Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole-in-the- Wall Gang rode in the late 1880s. A National Geographic photographer accompanied us, and I documented the ride in a 30-page cover story for the magazine, which I later extended into a book called The Outlaw Trail. What I learned then, and what I continue to marvel at, is how wild and free this land was and still can seem on the back of a horse.

Reprinted from People We Know, Horses They Love, by Jill Rappaport and Wendy Wilkinson (2004, Rodale Press); photographs by Linda Solomon. Used by permission.

Read more of our February/March 2026 cover story: "Robert Redford: Golden Boy" or "Robert Redford: Beyond Sundance"

From our February/March 2026 issue.

PHOTOGRAPHY: (all images) Linda Solomon