Robert Redford Was the Last Simple Beauty

Did you feel a pang? Not that I ever found him interesting. But there he was, on the obit screen, dead at 89, at some moment between Barefoot in the Park and Bob Woodward at the Post. I sighed, “Hi, gorgeous,” not just for him but for the whole culture in which some people looked not simply good, but sort of noble or virtuous. They looked like honest intact icons. And that white lie was going even as Robert Redford reigned.