Robert Redford Read online

  In 1911 Tiger married Cornish-born textile worker Lena Taylor, whose grandmother came from Kircubbin, County Down, in Ireland. She was six feet tall, a good eight inches more than Tiger, and had a loud Irish manner and a booming voice. But she was no match for Tiger’s stubbornness. The newlyweds settled into a rented wooden home in the Irish-Italian section of neighboring Westerly, across the Pawcatuck River. On November 19, 1914, a son, once again named Charles, was born, followed by David George on March 5, 1918. Now Tiger struggled to keep up. Big-time success evaded him, and he was an increasingly absent husband and father, chasing the expanding Keith circuit through the Midwest, eking out a few bucks in the pits while a jokey fiddle player named Ben Kubelsky—soon to be rechristened Jack Benny—burned up the center stage, earning $350 a week. When he was at home, his wife’s severe rheumatoid arthritis complicated matters. Travel took its toll, too. In his memoirs Jack Benny described the Keith treadmill as “constant getting on a train, getting off a train, carrying your bags to the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse, running to the theater, running, playing three, four, five shows a day, smiling when you faced the audience, taking your bow and fighting all the time for a better place on the bill.” Sometime in the mid-twenties, a couple of years before the end of vaudeville, Tiger retired to part-time violin teaching and occasional silent movie accompaniments at the Garde and Capitol theaters in New London, Connecticut. Five years later he unstrung his fiddles, carefully draped them with burial sheets and never touched them again.

  Under Lena’s influence Tiger assumed a Fenian sensibility, humming “Danny Boy” and sharing Lena’s oft-repeated tales of the heroic emergence of the Irish Free State. Much of his neighborhood, however, was immersed in Italian ways. Since the 1890s, floods of indigent Italians from Calabria and Sicily had populated ghettos that overspread the well-established Irish communities. Tiger was happy among the Italians, but he also sought out the Irish drinking community and was at home among the old guard. “Once he settled, all the family became Republican Irish,” says Redford. “I think it was a progression of his personal inbuilt rebelliousness.” Rebellion was certainly apparent in the next generation of Redfords. The young boys, Charlie and David, were good students, but they were intoxicated by the Jazz Age. They stayed out too late too often and were punished for it. David made adjustments, finally kowtowing to a disciplined school life. But Charlie stayed wild, reveling in his natural athleticism and a rapier wit like Tiger’s. In many ways the boys were unalike. David was tall and black haired like Lena; Charlie was smaller and sandy haired. David seemed to make peace with himself early on; Charlie remained irascible. Tiger foresaw trouble, and it wasn’t long in coming. At fourteen Charlie started a relationship with an Italian bargirl that caused controversy in the neighborhood and embarrassment for Lena, who was now wheelchair-bound. Tiger wrote in desperation to his sister in Los Angeles. The only option, he said, was to get Charlie out of town. Grace, now living and teaching at Morocco Junction, just five miles from Hollywood, agreed. Charlie Redford was going west.

  On a hot spring Sunday in 1928, fourteen-year-old George Menard, a transplanted Chicagoan, grew bored with morning services at the Fourth Street Christian Science Church in Santa Monica and sneaked out. He spotted a parked Model T on fire, grabbed a garden hose, lifted the hood and doused the engine. “A couple of minutes later,” remembered Menard, “church let out and this dark apparition sailed toward me, about thirteen or fourteen years old, with an older lady by her side. It was their automobile I’d rescued, and they were grateful and so began a great friendship.” The pretty girl that Menard admired was Martha Hart, and the woman was her mother, Sallie, just arrived from Texas. Martha had enrolled at University High School in West Los Angeles. Menard’s sister Poofie had enrolled at the same school and would shortly become Martha’s best school friend. George, operating in a different social circle, would coincidentally become best friends with a new arrival from the East Coast named Charlie Redford, who also attended Uni High. “But at that moment I wasn’t thinking what a great match she’d make for someone else,” said Menard. “I was thinking I’d like her for myself.”

  In later years, Redford learned from his mother about her smooth transition into Californian life. “When Texas came to California, it was a big deal,” he says. “Sallie had renewed her health, and she was determined to reinvent herself as a social butterfly. My mother was naturally fun loving and extroverted, so they were on the right wavelength and in the right place.” Sallie contacted her cousins, the Wards and the Giesens—old San Marcos settler families—who were well-heeled regulars in the society columns. Sallie’s uncle Phil, a transplanted Chicagoan who had the Packard dealership in Beverly Hills, became a surrogate father to Martha. Phil’s wife, Marge, was the sister of up-and-coming Hollywood actor Robert Young.

  Though Tot sent money and maintained a strangely passionate commitment to both mother and daughter, Sallie had met Nelson Bengston, a man who exuded an aura of calm and reserve, the apparent antithesis of Tot. Bengston had turned from defense work to real estate during the Depression, but he was, says Robert Redford, a frustrated artist who was also a recovering alcoholic. The couple met at the Christian Science church: a shared belief in the curative power of religion bonded them, and, says Redford, their harmonious relationship allowed Martha’s confidence to grow.

  At Uni High, Martha thrived. She joined the glee club, the drama society, the writers’ club. Judging by her school reports and the memories of those who knew her, she didn’t so much rise to popularity as to reverence. She had the face and figure of a movie star and reminded people of Gene Tierney. She loved poetry and singing. She kept scrupulous scrapbooks, which reveal page after page of theatrical cartoons, jokey clippings about Will Rogers, lists of her many favorite popular songs (“Sweetheart Darling,” “Secondhand Store,” “Cabin in the Pines”), quotes from Keats and Shelley and her own poetry, bright as Pollyanna. Obviously she had with stood adversity well, surviving economic hardship, the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and relocation. She remained attached to her father, but the strength of her mother seemed her greatest advantage. She laughed her way, say friends, through the Depression.

  After high school graduation, Martha enrolled at Santa Monica Junior College, a transitional education institution hugely popular with well-off Angelenos. Her diaries show her popularity: boys were attracted to her like flies. Her first teenage love had been Zachary Scott, a fellow Texan who’d headed to England as she left for Los Angeles and was now making headway in regional theater. There was no shortage of substitutes. George Menard recalled that “most boys chased Martha from the day she arrived in L.A.” But her eye was on Charlie Redford, who had also transferred to Santa Monica Junior College. According to Menard, Charlie, too, was a magnet for suitors. “They were really both spectacular creatures,” said Menard, “but they were temperamentally totally unalike. Charlie stuttered. She was cheeky. He adored sports but she preferred to read Carl Sandburg. And of course he was a Yankee and she a Confederate.”

  “Still, from the moment they met, they were close, like twins,” says another close college friend, Marcella Scott. “Charlie was living at the corner house on Bundy and Wilshire with his aunt Grace, who taught at Uni High, but he was restless. He was going through big changes. You detected this terrible insecurity in his stutter and also in his anger a lot of the time. Maybe it was embarrassment about the failures of his family and the poverty back east, which contrasted with the comforts of Los Angeles.” Menard remembered the comforts of Grace’s home, her intelligence, her warmth and her “historic” Boston bean soup. Most of all he remembers the wall-to-wall bookcases. “When Charlie and I weren’t playing football or baseball, we were reading. The atmosphere in Grace’s home was perfect for it, and for Charlie it became a mission of self-improvement.” Menard was almost jealous of his friend’s nimble progress. Charlie was chosen for the prestigious student body commission, then became the leading sportswriter on the colleg
e quarterly, The Samojac. The literary spurt, says Scott, was more Martha’s influence than Grace’s. It was Martha the A student who drove him. “Let’s give credit where it’s due: he owed a lot to Martha,” says Scott.

  In the winter of 1934, as Martha angled for a career by starting secretarial studies at Westwood’s Sawyer Business School, Charlie’s choices seemed few. Grace worked hard to support him, but she had just a schoolteacher’s pay and a rented home. “It was still the Depression,” said Menard, “and we were, metaphorically, on a very limited playing field.” The options were low-paid work with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or the military. Through the winter, said Menard, Charlie was “bothered” about his future. At the same time, he was buoyant in his growing romance with Martha. At Christmas he sent her a card depicting old-timers on a pony cart with a funny caption suggestive of their close relationship: “We can’t go on like this, Martha. We’re just playing with fire!” Martha laughingly showed the card to her friends, then stuck it in her scrapbook beside the playbill for Romeo and Juliet, which they had seen that summer.

  Charlie and Menard decided to join the CCC, digging on the Roosevelt (later Pacific Coast) Highway for $30 a month. After a few weeks Charlie converted his junior college academic results—straight A’s in business—into a part-time clerical job at the stock exchange, working for E. F. Hutton of Beverly Hills. In the tight privacy of their relationship, says Marcella Scott, Martha and Charlie never seemed happier. Then, in February, Martha fell ill with a blood disorder. A critical complication was that she was several weeks pregnant. Christian Science, formerly a tower of strength, became a liability. Under the restrictions of her religion, blood transfusions were not allowed. Martha’s condition worsened. She showed signs of escalating pernicious anemia and it was feared she was dying of blood poisoning.

  Beyond Charlie and the doctors, no one knew of Martha’s pregnancy. “There was a sudden change of atmosphere,” says Scott, who was then Martha’s closest friend. “One moment Martha was the footloose fun lover who was everywhere, then she had vanished like a ghost. We had no idea of the severity of this crisis. Looking back, in the context of her health and the judgmental ways of that era, the predicament must have been sheer hell for both of them.”

  When Sallie found out, she was torn between her religious convictions and her daughter’s life. The best blood specialist was consulted. Martha entered Santa Monica Hospital, and an obstetrician was called in to supervise the baby’s expected delivery in September. The crisis lasted months, but gradually Martha’s anemia was brought under control. The pregnancy, however, remained in doubt. In July, Lena sent Martha a warmly reassuring card, signed “from Charles’ mother, father and brother.” Martha was keen on marriage, says Scott, but Charlie initially hesitated. He was genuinely in love, Scott insists, “but had a complete lack of confidence, based on his family’s experience, of his ability to create a stable, prosperous home.” In August, six weeks before her due date, Martha, who had been released from the hospital and was at home muddling through a heat wave while keeping up with the Berlin Olympics on the radio, was rushed back to start a long, difficult labor.

  On the evening of August 18 in her third-floor room, Martha delivered a seven-pound, thirteen-ounce boy. Charles Robert Redford Jr., the name Martha had already decided on, was a blue baby, rushed immediately to intensive care. “My mother said it was touch-and-go,” Redford recalls. “There was a serious lack of oxygen in her blood often associated with congenital heart defects. None of this was ever properly diagnosed, because of the background religious conditioning and the restrictions of treatment and medication. It didn’t look like I’d make it. With the medical care available then, very few blue babies survived. She was in the grip of a terrible distress.” After three days the baby stabilized. Martha, ever the resilient fighter, quickly regained her strength and pride. There was no longer any point in covering up. To the Redford and Hart families, she sent out frilled blue cards announcing: “A welcome guest has come to stay. We thought you’d like to know the name, the weight, the day.” The cards were signed “Mr. & Mrs. Charles Redford.” When Martha was released from the hospital, Sallie and Nelson took the baby while the couple drove south to Nogales, Arizona. On November 20, unknown to their closest friends, they tied the knot at a pueblo chapel. Soon after, they were living in suburbia, a pair of happy young marrieds with a bungalow and a baby.

  2

  Two Americas

  At the time of Robert Redford’s birth, the work programs of the New Deal had reactivated the economy. President Roosevelt had created six million new jobs and improved national income by 20 percent in three years. But, in the words of FDR’s second inaugural speech in January 1937, there was still a considerable proportion of the population “denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot.” There was work to be done, but there was measurable national unity and a prevalent sense of hope.

  The first months of Redford’s childhood were spent in sunny Santa Monica, the coastal adjunct of western Los Angeles that was like a fiefdom apart. The pleasure piers, stretching from Venice in the south to the Roosevelt Highway at its northern border, featured the unparalleled Zip roller coaster, any number of beach clubs, an Orpheum-circuit vaudeville hall and the La Monica Ballroom, a Byzantine-domed colossus, then the largest ballroom in the world. Offshore gambling, illegal elsewhere, was available in the floating casino off Catalina Island, frequented by the denizens of Hollywood. Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Jean Paul Getty and William Randolph Hearst all had properties in and around Santa Monica, pushing beachfront prices past $20,000 a foot, the highest real estate values in the United States.

  But for Charlie, Martha and the baby, economic security was knife-edge. Sallie’s resources were diminished to the point where she was often dependent on Tot, whose finances waxed and waned. Grace’s schooldays support was a thing of the past and the onus fell squarely on Charlie, whose worsening stutter lost him his job at the stock exchange. The rental bungalow was suddenly unaffordable. Woody Knudson, the husband of a friend of Martha’s, was manager of Edgemar Dairies, the biggest business outside of recreation in Santa Monica. With Martha’s intercession, Woody offered Charlie work as a milkman on the wholesale route of West Los Angeles, yielding commissions that averaged $50 a month. Once in regular employment, Charlie allowed Martha a dollar a day for housekeeping.

  Charlie was determined to improve their lot and applied himself with a dedication that Vivian, Woody’s wife, admired. “The milkmen worked six days a week, lugging massive urns. If someone was sick, they worked seven days. They got up at 2:00 a.m. to begin their working day, then came home at six in the evening. They’d fall asleep during dinner from sheer exhaustion. Charlie and Woody had to catch four hours’ sleep to get ready for the next shift. It was like a chain gang.”

  Though single-minded, Martha embraced Santa Monica’s publicized commitment to the Moral Rearmament Organization, which saw a woman’s place as solely in the home. She was domestically dutiful but spent much of her free time with her girlfriends and their children at nearby Crystal Beach. Redford clearly remembers those beach idylls: “It was just women, women. And the sand, the surf, and the vast expanses of horizon.” Martha fussed endlessly over the baby (who was also called Charlie in his early life), Vivian Knudson recalls, while Charlie seemed indifferent. In fairness, the remorseless Edgemar schedules, exacerbated by the back pain Charlie suffered as a result of an injury on his first day, brewed frustration and bad temper. Redford remembers only his father’s absence: “When I conjure those beginnings, I see my mother. He was just not there.”

  Many friends found it remarkable that Charlie and Martha’s relationship survived the first year after Robert Redford’s birth. “Charlie was never an easy man, probably because he was the underdog who had to rise to Martha’s middle-class status,” says Marcella Scott. “He was dominant by nature. Unfortunately, she was also
a very assertive individual. So it was ripe for strife. But they got over it because they shared a goal of re-creating the good life their grandparents once had.”

  By 1939, Charlie could afford a $3,000 mortgage. As war broke out in Europe, the Redfords bought a brick bungalow on Tennessee Street in Sawtelle, a low-income area two miles south of Santa Monica. This was clearly a step down. Tennessee Street was bordered by the crowded Hispanic developments along Pico Boulevard. Having grown up with farmhand Hispanics, Martha was very comfortable in Sawtelle, a comfort she conveyed to her son. The austerity didn’t matter at all to Charlie. He had found the first place he felt truly at home.

  Marcella Scott insists Robert Redford quickly developed into “the most verbal two-year-old you could ever imagine.” Vivian Knudson believes he was “an introvert—you could never get through to him.” Redford himself only remembers the movies. His first vague memory is of sitting in the Aero Theater at Fifth and Santa Monica Boulevard, switching between his father’s and mother’s laps: “I slid off her knee in the dark and made for the light. I made it as far as the projection stage, and the management stopped the movie to sort the commotion.”

  Vivian was “vaguely scandalized” by the family’s devotion to movies, the national palliative against economic privations. In the Redfords’ case, though, it was something more. What began as a casual interest, says Vivian, became Martha’s social staple, gradually drawing in Charlie. “She never stopped talking movies, and I saw the effect on Bobby from infancy.” Vivian remembers coffee mornings at Tennessee with baby Bobby obsessively doodling “cowboys, cowboys, cowboys, almost before he could walk.”