Nichols

Robert Redford looked like he walked out of the sea to become a Hollywood god. He was physically flawless. Pacific blue eyes, salt-bleached hair, a friendly surfer-boy squint. Born in Santa Monica to a milkman and a housewife, his first memory was of sliding off his mother’s lap at the Aero Theatre as a toddler and running toward the light, causing such a ruckus that the projectionist had to stop the film.

He definitely grew up to grab the movies’ attention. He wasn’t just telegenic but talented, although that wasn’t a requirement for stardom when he emerged in the late ’50s when the industry was scooping up hunks like him by the bucket for television and B-movies. All a male ingenue needed to do was smile and kiss the girl. It would have been so easy to do that a couple times and wind up doing it forever. You can understand why so many forgotten actors made that deal, without realizing that forever can lead to a fast retirement.

But if Redford had sensed at 2 years old that he was meant to be onscreen, by his 20s, he insisted he’d only do it on his own terms. At 27, with nearly zero name recognition, he horrified his then-agent by turning down a $10,000-a-week TV gig as a strait-laced psychiatrist to do a Mike Nichols theater production for just $110. His rejection of the easy money was an unusual choice, particularly for a cash-strapped father of two.

To appreciate Redford fully, we have to applaud not only the work he did but the simple, feel-good roles he rejected. He could have become a celebrity without breaking a sweat as the war hero, the jock, the husband, the cowboy, the American ideal made incarnate. Yet, he had the rare ability to sidestep what audiences thought we wanted from him to instead give us something we didn’t know we needed: selfish victors (“Downhill Racer”), self-destructive veterans (“The Great Waldo Pepper”) and tragic men who did everything right and still failed (2013’s “All Is Lost”).

In spirit, Redford never strayed far from the teen rebel he’d been — a truant who’d skipped school, stole booze and crashed race cars — and the radical artist he hurled himself into becoming by quitting everything traditional (the football team, his fraternity, college altogether) to move to Paris where he took up oil painting and marched against the Soviets. He might have excelled at the sleazy roles that made Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino famous. On the outside, he knew they didn’t fit, either.

Sometimes Redford said no even when I wish he’d have said yes. Imagine if he’d agreed to face off against Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Instead, he told Nichols he’d rather tangle with Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate,” only to be rejected as too handsome for the role. “Can you honestly imagine a guy like you having difficulty seducing a woman?” Nichols told him.

Instead, Redford used his all-American good looks to make us question our flattering image of ourselves. In the 1974 adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he was the first person you’d think of to play the title role because he fully understood the point of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book — how it felt to represent our country’s whole image of success while knowing it’s a phony put-on. I imagine him making a devil’s bargain with his face, vowing that he won’t hide behind goofy accents and stunt wigs the way other too-handsome oddballs do, if he’s allowed to use his appeal like a Trojan horse.

If there’s one thing that unites his roles, from 1966’s “The Chase” to “Lions for Lambs,” it’s his willingness to give the screen his full charisma — to let audiences stare at him for the whole running time of a movie — as long as we’ll agree to ask what’s lurking in his underbelly. Most often, we’ll find frustrated idealism just at the moment it starts to sour.

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The films of the 1960s and ’70s that made Redford an icon mostly cleave into two categories: scamps and truth-seekers. (The latter can overlap with suckers and stooges.) His antihero crooks in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting” captured something in our national id, our not-so-secret belief that it’s OK to break a few rules to get ahead — that we can forgive a sin if we like the sinner. I like how those movies give you a guilty little tingle about rooting for Redford even when it means scratching off a couple of the Ten Commandments. (Thou shalt not steal unless you’re Robert Redford, who got away with it all the way through 2018’s “The Old Man and the Gun.”)

Lately, the Redford roles I’ve been thinking about are the ones where his all-American appeal makes us examine all of America, good and bad. The two that instantly jump to mind are his pair of political thrillers: “Three Days of the Condor,” in which he plays a CIA agent on the run from his own co-workers, and “All the President’s Men,” in which he doggedly uncovers the Watergate scandal. Both films believe in the power of getting the truth out to the press; neither is so naive as to think the truth alone will save the day.

But let’s not overlook “The Candidate,” a movie that has Redford as underqualified political scion Bill McKay, pressed to run for governor of California. “He’s not going to get his ass kicked — he’s cute,” his father (Melvyn Douglas) says. Meanwhile, his own campaign team cares more about the length of his sideburns than ideas in his head. Released in 1972, five years into former actor Ronald Reagan’s own governorship, the movie hammers home that superficiality might be democracy’s downfall — and the stakes are bigger than who is Hollywood‘s latest heartthrob.

Vice President Dan Quayle once said “The Candidate” inspired him, triggering its screenwriter Jeremy Larner to dash this off in an op-ed: “Mr. Quayle, this was not a how-to movie, it was a watch-out movie. And you are what we should be watching out for!”

In his later years, Redford became a filmmaker himself and I can picture him pulling Brad Pitt aside on the set of “A River Runs Through It” to whisper: You don’t have to stay in that pretty–boy box. Feel free to get weird. As an actor and director, Redford continued to create characters who uncovered our our hidden rot, whether in our purported national pastime, baseball (“The Natural”), or in our actual one, watching television (“Quiz Show”). His turn in “Indecent Proposal” as the wealthy man who offers to rent his employee’s wife lives on as shorthand for tycoons who assume they can buy whatever, and whoever, they want. When he eventually signed on for a superhero film, it was, fittingly, alongside Captain America, that upright paragon of virtue — and Redford played the villain.

What Quayle missed about “The Candidate” is that when it comes to a Robert Redford movie, truth is never as plain as what your eyes can see. There’s always a deeper level and there’s no guarantee that justice would win. In fact, I’d argue in Redford’s films, it rarely does.

TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa’s new mayor on Sunday proposed a $100 million private trust as part of a reparations plan to give descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre scholarships and housing help in a city-backed bid to make amends for one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history.

The plan by Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Oklahoma’s second-largest city, would not provide direct cash payments to descendants or the last two centenarian survivors of the attack that killed as many as 300 Black people. He made the announcement at the Greenwood Cultural Center, located in the once-thriving district of North Tulsa that was destroyed by a white mob.

Nichols said he does not use the term reparations, which he calls politically charged, characterizing his sweeping plan instead as a “road to repair.”

“For 104 years, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been a stain on our city’s history,” Nichols said Sunday after receiving a standing ovation from several hundred people. “The massacre was hidden from history books, only to be followed by the intentional acts of redlining, a highway built to choke off economic vitality and the perpetual underinvestment of local, state and federal governments.

“Now it’s time to take the next big steps to restore.”

Nichols said the proposal wouldn’t require city council approval, although the council would need to authorize the transfer of any city property to the trust, something he said was highly likely.

The private charitable trust would be created with a goal to secure $105 million in assets, with most of the funding either secured or committed by June 1, 2026. Although details would be developed over the next year by an executive director and a board of managers, the plan calls for the bulk of the funding, $60 million, to go toward improving buildings and revitalizing the city’s north side.

“The Greenwood District at its height was a center of commerce,” Nichols said in a telephone interview. “So what was lost was not just something from North Tulsa or the Black community. It actually robbed Tulsa of an economic future that would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.”

Nichols’ proposal follows an executive order he signed earlier this year recognizing June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day, an official city holiday. Events Sunday in the Greenwood District included a picnic for families, worship services and an evening candlelight vigil.

Nichols also realizes the current national political climate, particularly President Trump’s sweeping assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, poses challenging political crosswinds.

“The fact that this lines up with a broader national conversation is a tough environment,” Nichols admitted, “but it doesn’t change the work we have to do.”

Jacqueline Weary, is a granddaughter of massacre survivor John R. Emerson, Sr., who owned a hotel and cab company in Greenwood that were destroyed. She acknowledged the political difficulty of giving cash payments to descendants. But at the same time, she wondered how much of her family’s wealth was lost in the violence.

“If Greenwood was still there, my grandfather would still have his hotel,” said Weary, 65. “It rightfully was our inheritance, and it was literally taken away.”

Tulsa is not the first U.S. city to explore reparations. The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, was the first U.S. city to make reparations available to its Black residents for past discrimination, offering qualifying households $25,000 for home repairs, down payments on property, and interest or late penalties on property in the city. The funding for the program came from taxes on the sale of recreational marijuana.

Other communities and organizations that have considered providing reparations range from the state of California to cities including Amherst, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Asheville, North Carolina; and Iowa City, Iowa; religious denominations like the Episcopal Church; and prominent colleges like Georgetown University in Washington.

In Tulsa, there are only two living survivors of the Race Massacre, both of whom are 110 years old: Leslie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher. The women, both of whom were in attendance on Sunday, received direct financial compensation from both a Tulsa-based nonprofit and a New York-based philanthropic organization, but have not received any recompense from the city or state.

Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the survivors and the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation, said earlier this year that any reparations plan should include direct payments to Randle and Fletcher and a victims’ compensation fund for outstanding claims.

A lawsuit filed by Solomon-Simmons on behalf of the survivors was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court last year, dampening racial justice advocates’ hopes that the city would ever make financial amends.

Murphy writes for the Associated Press.

Roger Nichols, the songwriter who penned “We’ve Only Just Begun” and other hits for folk-rock duo the Carpenters, has died. He was 84.

Nichols’ death on May 17 was confirmed in a social media post from Nichols’ longtime songwriting partner, Paul Williams. He did not list a cause of death.

“The first song Roger Nichols and I wrote was called ‘It’s hard to say goodbye …’ Sadly, we hit the nail on the head. Roger Nichols passed away peacefully four days ago, at home with his beautiful family,” Williams wrote. “His wife Terry and the daughters he was so proud of, Claire and Caitlin at his side.

“He was as disciplined as he was talented,” Williams continued. “The words were born of the beauty in his completed melodies. I wrote what I heard, note for note …word for word. The lyrics waiting in the emotion already in his music. He made it easy.”

Nichols, a Montana native, released his first solo LP, “Roger Nichols & the Small Circle of Friends,” on A&M Records in 1968. It’s now regarded as a cult classic in the California pop-rock canon, with guest credits from Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and Lenny Waronker. However, he earned his big break as a songwriter after he penned an unexpectedly poignant jingle for a Crocker-Citizens National Bank commercial.

Richard Carpenter, who formed the popular duo with his sister Karen, heard the tune on television and asked if Nichols and Williams had a full version of the song. They quickly extended it into a tune that became the duo’s 1970 smash “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The single was nominated for song of the year at the following Grammys.

With Williams (and other lyricists), Nichols co-wrote many of the Carpenters’ most beloved songs, including “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” “Let Me Be the One” and “I Kept on Loving You.” Beyond his hits for the Carpenters, Nichols co-wrote songs that were recorded by the Monkees, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Petula Clark and Art Garfunkel, among many others.

In a comment on Williams’ post, Nichols’ daughter Claire wrote, “My mom, Terri, and my sisters, Caroline and Caitlin, are all so proud of the man he was, and are in awe of the legacy he leaves.”