Robert Redford’s good looks haven’t always worked in his favor, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. His natural popularity with girls from an early age caused a vicious backlash among the boys at his Los Angeles school. “Pretty soon it became a regular thing where guys would pass me when I was with a girl and say, ‘ARF! ARF! ARF!’” The actor was appalled to discover that ARF stood for the Anti-Redford Federation. “I was so hurt and shocked,” he says. “From that point in my life, I retreated into a more loner place. I was then forever shy of going out and expressing myself, and I would do it in my art.” When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turned Redford into a household name and sex symbol, he told himself, “This is great. I think I’ll roll with this for a while.’’ But some “out of whack” fan experiences made him withdraw again. “It got harder and harder,” he says, “and then it got exhausting.” That’s why the 77-year-old is actually happy to be aging. “The nice thing about getting older is that you don’t have that quite so much anymore.”
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