Robert Redford Read online

  Martha was her son’s role model, and her poise was distinctively romantic. “Broke or not,” says Vivian, “she affected Hollywood elegance. She wore well-tailored clothes beautifully because she was broad shouldered and very slim hipped.” She talked less about literature now; instead Hollywood comings and goings filled her diary. Early in 1937, six months after the birth of her son, Martha visited the MGM studios in Culver City to see Robert Young, who was playing the lead in a comedy called Married Before Breakfast. “She loved being on that set,” says Vivian, “and took every opportunity to connect with the movie world after that.” Movies were also about family bonding. Redford fondly remembers Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, most of all Disney. “Those Saturday matinees elevated everything. They gave us distraction and joyfulness. But they were also a shared interest, a glue that united us.”

  Life in Sawtelle for Redford was outdoorsy and sociable. Most of his friends living in the cookie-cutter, brick-and-timber houses of Tennessee Street were Mexican, some black. This was a Public Works Administration building site, and there was a sense of unified experience, of neighborly sharing. Martha, however, wanted to secure a better social status for her son. In 1942 she enrolled him at Brentwood Grammar, a swanky school “across the tracks” at the edge of Beverly Hills that Sallie strongly favored. Despite his age, Redford felt the change of tenor: “I suddenly had one foot in high society and one on the street.”

  From the start, Brentwood was a disaster. On his first day, Redford took an aversion to a teacher’s wig and her garish makeup, and decided to leave. He was found and returned to class. After several similar incidents two hall monitors were assigned to keep an eye on him. He ran away three times in all. Finally they had to call his father off his milk route.

  Redford hated school and its rigidly imposed discipline, but it didn’t bother him at all that some of his classmates came from the wealthiest homes, nor that he was poor by comparison. “I was impervious,” he recalls. “I was instinctively more interested in the individual than the dress. I was unimpressed by show. I was instead drawn by humor or originality of any kind.” His advantage, clearly, was that he had already been exposed to a wide range of people from varying social standing because of his parents’ backgrounds.

  Martha had taken her son to visit Tot in Texas for the first time the previous summer. She took the wheel of the ’36 family coupe and drove all the way, stopping briefly at Gallup, New Mexico, where Redford first caught sight of Navajos and Zunis on the reservation. By the time he arrived at Tot’s impressive pile on the shore of Lake Austin, he was living a storybook.

  Tot, to his delight, was as active and daring as any Roy Rogers. Under cathedral skies, in the dense forests around the lake, the precocious five-year-old was handed fishing rod and gun and initiated into the ways of the wilderness. The bizarre exposure of so small a child to guns and hunting seemed of little account to Martha or Tot, but Redford interprets this as a throwback to old southern values. Tot’s impact was profound, especially given Charlie’s absences: “He was the manifestation of everything I’d heard about frontiersmen-heroes multiplied a thousand times,” Redford recalls. “The house was spacious and magnificent, and he’d built it with his own hands. He knew the names of every bird, fish and snake and could hunt for his own dinner every day.” Tot adored his grandson, bounced him on his knee for cowboy sing-alongs, slung him on his back for the hunt and dumped him into the freezing waters of Barton Springs to learn to swim, exactly as he’d taught Martha when she was a baby. Redford loved Tot, and the gentle paternalism of Tot’s Mexican “man,” Gil Husauras, who shared Hispanic cusses with him, like the neighbors on Tennessee Street.

  Six months later Charlie introduced his son to the East Coast. The experience, by contrast, was funereal. New London, Connecticut, where Tiger had moved, was gray skied. “On Spring Street where my grandparents lived the driveway was choked with weeds,” says Redford. “There was my grandmother Lena, seated alone in the angled front window of a gray house, incapacitated by arthritis, propped in pillows, radiating an atmosphere of gloom.” Charlie was rigid with anxiety, returning from exile. Lena screamed when she saw him. There was no open affection, only propriety. Redford recalls sitting nervously in a stiff chair while Charlie took charge of reorganizing furniture and dumping trash before Tiger returned from his new day job as a maintenance fitter for General Dynamics Electric Boat. With hindsight, Redford came to recognize Charlie’s embarrassment at revealing the depth of the family poverty. Unlike Martha, who genuinely loved her parents, Charlie was awkward with and resentful of his. There was a willingness to heal scars, but laughter was in short supply. “New London was everything Texas wasn’t,” Redford recalls. “The rooms were small and claustrophobic. No one moved much. My grandfather hardly spoke. Lena terrified me. She had a spooky aura. All she did was listen to Arthur Godfrey on the radio and ramble on in a strange Irish accent, telling ominous tales of the old country. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

  Perhaps, as director Alan Pakula believed, it was Redford’s early cross-country travels and the sharp contrasts of culture he experienced that seeded his restlessness. At Brentwood, conformity was grudging, his motion constant. “He wasn’t an exceptional-looking kid,” says his classmate Tissie Keissig, “but he was a natural class leader because he had a go-go-go that grabbed your attention.” While his grades lapsed, he became a fanatical athletic competitor. “I was the undisputed track champion,” says Betty Webb, another classmate, “and then suddenly I noticed this cute, redheaded, freckle-face kid who came out of nowhere fixed on the idea of beating me at everything. The next couple of years were a tussle between Bobby and me, trying to outdo each other at track.” Betty liked him “because he was a little arrogant, and ferocious in pursuit of whatever interested him. Kids like that kind of confidence.”

  The arrogance was a swaggering emulation of the new heroes in his life, of Tot and especially Charlie’s brother, David, who was in the army, stationed at Fort Leavenworth, and visiting often. Three and a half years younger than Charlie, David excelled at sports in high school, receiving an offer to play baseball in the St. Louis Browns organization. He enrolled at Brown instead, where his aptitude for languages won him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. David enlisted in the military when the war began. Studying accountancy part-time at the University of Southern California and exhausted by his day job, Charlie had become bookish and subdued. David, by contrast, retained the smiling, generous flamboyance that made him instantly likable to all who met him. Bobby regarded him as a god.

  David taught Bobby the rules of baseball and elaborated the parlor games Martha devised. He often agitated Charlie with his swagger, but he was also a bonding force within the family. “It was really only David who got Dad out of his shell,” says Redford. “The uniform, for example, naturally inspired all sorts of war games. In my mind I can see David and Dad like kids, rolling over the furniture, competing with each other to entertain me with my favorite shooting games. I loved to do the big dying thing, and when I was ‘killed,’ it was the highest drama. I took an hour to lie down. Those rare moments of Dad’s relaxation, when he would let his hair down long enough to have a laugh, are the ones that stick.”

  Sometimes, though, David pushed Charlie over the edge. Redford remembers David accompanying his parents to a live radio broadcast in the early forties. Bobby sat at home with Sallie, listening in awe as David answered a quiz question to win the top prize of a not-insubstantial $50. There were whoops of delight in the house as young Bobby awaited his hero’s return. An hour later, as Bobby lay in bed, doors were suddenly slamming and anger swept the house. Charlie, it seemed, had thrown David out. David was in the garage, from where Bobby could hear him playing a trombone. David had insisted on buying the trombone on the spot with the $50. “Dad called that outrageous squandering,” says Redford. “Everyone was short of money—and then this extravagance!”

  Redford’s bond with Da
vid was in some ways divisive. Looking back, Redford recognizes the difficulties of his father’s position. David had had a stable home life, careful parenting, the good looks, the academic results, the musical skills, the athletic skills, the humor, now the uniform. Charlie had been abruptly uprooted in his teens and exiled to L.A. Poverty always shadowed him, even in his happy relationship with Martha. Time and circumstances seemed always against him. Even when he tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, he was rejected because of his bad back. “He was devastated,” said George Menard, who accompanied him to the recruitment center. “But in some ways, the bad back was a kindness. He was a patriot, whose hero was Nathan Hale, but he was also a pacifist. The idea of open conflict, of having to kill someone, would literally have destroyed Charlie. He was a very soft, gentle soul.” While David fought the war, Charlie graduated to a desk job at the El Segundo refinery offices of Standard Oil.

  Redford saw his father bend under the pressures of survival. To his credit, his dedication was to improving his family’s lot, but the toll was high. “He was constantly on edge. He could cuss the house down when the mood took him. Standard Oil was the compromise, the moment he chose his course, and it was my belief that he took the wrong road. At the time, the great middle-class pressure was to become ‘the organization man’ and he settled for that. He missed his niche. From his junior college days he had a talent for sportswriting. The evidence was in his letters, till the end of his life. He was a terrific storyteller, with an acerbic wit that shone through. I felt resentment toward him for many years: that he’d discouraged me, suppressed my individualism. But that, I now feel, was my misunderstanding. My father made sacrifices for us.”

  At Brentwood, meanwhile, Redford continued his hyperactive ways. Nothing calmed him, but one teacher’s passionate readings from Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie finally got him interested in books. “It was soothing,” says Redford. “Like a drug.” Charlie had started a midweek routine of taking the family to the Santa Monica Public Library, an alternative to movie nights. “Something strange happened to me,” Redford recalls. “I was magnetized to the mythology section. It was suddenly the be-all of my world. I couldn’t wait for Wednesdays, to go through the doors of that library. My parents would turn left for the adult section, and I’d make straight for Perseus, Zeus and The Odyssey. Even when I couldn’t really read, I’d pick out a word, ‘Perseus,’ and conjure the story from the illustrations. These monsters and myths became living realities. None of my friends were interested in ancient myth, and I often wondered why. I think my interest originated with the way information was handed down to me as a small boy. It came encoded. And the big themes of mythology decoded it and made sense of a lot I didn’t otherwise understand.” The literary precocity also made Redford open to whimsy: “Blame my dad. My mom was the games player in the living room, but Dad was the bedtime-story teller. Sometimes he’d read to me; more often he’d tell a tale out of thin air. One night he gave me the history of the Redford clan, tracing it back to Ireland and Scotland and demonstrating how I was related to Robin Hood.” Redford’s contribution to the next day’s show-and-tell was the announcement that he was Robin Hood’s cousin.

  Betty Webb saw Bobby Redford as a loner. They attended the same Christian Science church in Beverly Hills. She was keen on him. “It was the attraction of the enigma, no doubt. There was also that crazy competitiveness. He just could not lose! Maybe his uncle David was influential—this great, distinguished winner!—but his dad pushed him very hard athletically. As a consequence, he was really good at track, and he became known as a very able softball player. Martha played some tennis, so he excelled at tennis, too. I tried to keep up with all this. We had a lot more in common than anyone else, so I was way out front in the dating stakes.” Redford and Betty’s first date was a chaperoned doubles match at the public tennis courts, followed by a drive to the Santa Monica Pier. “He didn’t talk much,” says Betty. “I remember his silence.”

  Redford didn’t talk, he says, because he was lost in the world, confused by the wide divisions he perceived in his family. “It was really a response to noncommunication—that I now see. My father’s way was silence.” Redford got to like observing from afar. He started surreptitiously drawing, studying faces, expressions and gestures. He loved to go under the kitchen table, from where, hidden by the tablecloth, he would draw the feet and legs of those gathered for supper or a card game. “I drew the world as I saw it at floor level. It was fascinating, watching the shoes people wore, their posture, the relaxation of their feet, or the tap-tapping nervous feet.” Redford progressed to drawing arms, hands and faces. Avoiding homework, he would entertain himself copying faces from Life magazine. Marcella Scott, still close with Martha, had become a sought-after artist, and Martha posed for her. On these occasions, says Scott, Redford sat close by, studying her.

  “But I never broke through with Bobby,” says Betty Webb, “no matter how much we talked. I felt he was absorbed in this inner dialogue. There was some escapism that worked for him, and he stayed inside that magic circle.”

  The magic circle encompassed the ongoing weekly visits to the library and the movies. He saw Bambi twenty-three times, loved Fantasia, Pinocchio, the Three Stooges. But he found Charlie Chaplin cold and somehow compassionless. “I suppose I found greater comfort in animals, cartoon and otherwise,” says Redford. “It was a yearning for uncomplicated friends that left a mark and has lingered through my adult life.” A devotion to dogs—which would be lifelong—started when he fostered a series of strays. “Mom was always compliant, but Dad would fume.” He nurtured his first find, a scraggy mongrel, day and night for months. It was hit by a truck on Tennessee Street and killed: “My first collision with mortality. Pow! I loved that mutt like my best friend. Its death wiped me out.”

  There was not much time for moping. Throughout 1942 and 1943 Japanese bombing scares kept the foghorn atop Santa Monica City Hall busy. Blimps from Airship Squadron 32 dotted the skies. Blackouts began, and the colorful electric trolleys, recently displaced by dull but too-well-lit municipal buses, came back into service. Redford loved the excitement. Uncle David’s visits became irregular, but more highly charged. He was now always in uniform, and the drama of war hung about him. They often went to the movies together. “The one that stands out was The Fallen Sparrow with John Garfield,” Redford recalls. “It was dark and spooky for a kid, totally beyond my years. But that was Uncle David. He was all for taking it to the edge. I loved him for that, and I’ve loved every John Garfield movie since.”

  Redford understood little about the war in Europe. “For a kid, it just meant rationing, wastepaper drives and FDR’s fireside talks. I certainly didn’t connect any risk for Uncle David with the seriousness of this conflict that everyone was talking about.” David was a sergeant in the Third Army. In early 1944 he sailed from New York on the Ile de France. He followed the first wave of the Normandy invasion and landed on Utah Beach with Forward Echelon Group X, an elite scouting party designed to penetrate the retreating enemy lines. An interpreter, he was ordered to go to the front to assist with the interrogation of prisoners. On January 1, 1945, as part of a small team on a top secret mission involving the Saarlautern bridgehead in Germany, he was killed by sniper fire.

  It took a week for the news to filter home. When the telegram arrived, eight-year-old Bobby was fetched from school. An army major arrived with the details. “It upended everything,” says Redford, “because it brought me face-to-face not only with the issue of human mortality, but with the issue of truth. Dad was a profoundly, hurtfully honest man. This was the primary contrast between him and my mother. The ‘Redford trait’ was a kind of darkness. Life was all trials and troubles. Mom was the opposite. She was positive. She would tell it like it is, but she was also the one who kept the tooth fairy and Santa alive. Every Christmas she’d get cotton wool and lay it along the windowsills to make Californian snow. Then she’d stand outside my bedroom door shaking sleigh bells, w
hispering, ‘Here he comes!’ But on Christmas morning Dad would say, ‘Santa? There’s no darn Santa. Have you any idea how much sweat it takes to earn those toys?’ He blew it for me with the cold facts. But when it came to the death of David, when I was old enough to understand, there was this terrible conspiracy of silence. It was as if it didn’t happen. My grandmother Sallie just said, ‘He’s passed,’ without the slightest elaboration. I said, ‘Passed? What the hell does that mean?’ But I got no answers. And Dad drew up the bridge, refused to talk at all. So here was this gap: honest, tenacious people with a gaping hole where the real truth was. But I wanted the full picture.”

  In the face of David’s mysterious death, the contradictions of religion and spirituality irritated Redford. There was no value at all, he felt, in vague, otherwordly promises. “I was precocious in that regard. Something broke in me. Sallie would give me the lectures about the peace to come and my guarantee of salvation, and my mom would give me some, a little less convincingly. But I didn’t buy into it. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God or Spirit, but Christian Science seemed an excuse for Republicans to get together, and my father’s inclination toward Catholicism didn’t do it for me, either. When Uncle David died, I started questioning institutional thinking. I couldn’t have expressed that then, obviously. I was a kid, but a process started that has never stopped.”

  3

  Krazy in Brentwood

  Robert Redford’s parents were apolitical in the tradition of their upbringing, but they fully understood the changes the war wrought. Charlie particularly was wary of national paranoia, reflected in the public tolerance for witch hunts against Japanese and Jews, and the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 as an anti-Nazi program. In his storytelling Charlie attempted to convey to his son that the kind of American homogeneity that was being extolled was as unsavory as Aryanism. It flew in the face of decency and betrayed the pluralist foundations on which American greatness was built.