Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  As a boy of ten Redford was oblivious to the big picture, but he witnessed the changes on Tennessee Street as the war ended. Overnight, congenial neighborliness was gone and identity clashes accelerated. Previously marginalized groups whose members fought in the war wanted their fair share back home. Local grievances became national debates. “But all I knew was I lost friends,” says Redford. “There was no longer the ease with my Mexican buddies. It was ‘us and them.’ ”

  A Hispanic gang, the Pachucks, began to terrorize the environs. Redford got punched around because he was small. “There was a kid called Felix who picked on me, probably because I went to a good school, I was good at track and popular with the girls, and he beat up on me. I toughened up fast, borrowing from Tot’s philosophy, which was, ‘Be ready to look out for yourself.’ ” At one point, Redford was bullied onto a rooftop and prompted to jump to prove his manhood. He did, and almost killed himself. “Facing down fears hit home early, and I attribute my survival to my mother and Tot. You have two choices, it seemed to me. You can be led by your fears, or you can overcome them. I chose Tot’s way.”

  The changes were everywhere, even in the landscape. Douglas aircraft manufacturing had boomed during the war, bringing copious employment and thousands of newcomers to West Los Angeles. Now the GI Bill launched a new building drive. Sallie’s new husband, the real estate agent Nelson Bengston, was suddenly busier than ever, working the markets of the new, vast acreages of cheap tract houses that spread out through the chaparral between Sepulveda Boulevard and the coast. Redford hated these changes. “When I’d drive with my parents in the forties through Orange County, it was just that: a country of citrus groves. That started to fade fast. Even on my route to school, it was different. Once, it had been fields of gold. Now it was gray tract housing. I lived through that moment when Los Angeles traded its rural soul to a smog-spewing industry machine, and it made me very sad.”

  It also exacerbated a growing resentment of “fitting in.” Standard Oil was expanding, and Charlie’s income improved. There was, marginally, more time for the social conventions, for the soirées and card games and Sunday brunches Sallie and Martha so loved. Redford balked. “Mom made every effort to turn me into a version of Dad,” he remembers. “He had the Irish trait of dressing up to cover his poverty, so an attempt was made to smarten me. Dad was always perfectly groomed, with neat hair, a polished face and the smell of Old Spice. Mom tried a kind of axle grease called Waveset in my hair to control the cowlicks, but still it stood up in fifty directions. She starched my shirts every week, put me in stiff collars. I rebelled. I’d get to the end of the street, and I would strip off my shirt, throw it on the ground and stomp the starch out of it.”

  The rebellion against parental control intensified. At every juncture, it seemed, Bobby clashed with his father. It began with an argument about music. Redford felt—still feels—that he had music in him. Uncle David’s stories of playing one night with Count Basie thrilled him. He loved to hear his parents sing along to Woody Herman and Bing Crosby on the radio. He, too, loved to sing. When a door-to-door guitar tutor offered cheap lessons, he jumped at it. Charlie, remembering his own father’s failure as a musician, would not hear of music studies. Redford was furious.

  They clashed about sports, too. Spurred by the athleticism of girls like Betty, Redford had made it up to a good American Legion junior team sponsored by Huntington, a sporting goods company. He also played tennis for his school and swam competitively at the Bantam Club on San Vincente. But problems arose when Bobby failed to meet Charlie’s expectations. “I hated it when my parents came to see me play because Dad was always critical,” says Redford. “I was never the best player, but I had stamina, I hung in. The trouble was, even when I was taking the medals for tennis and swimming, it was never good enough for him. It was an unfixable situation, because I discovered that it wasn’t me he was assessing, but himself. Bit by bit I learned that he had been a great ballplayer, but he never had the chance to develop it. That frustration burned a hole inside him.”

  Redford had other things to keep him busy—like sex. “I was impatient,” he says. “I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted it, as much as I could get.” Shopping with his mother in Westwood one day, he was surprised when a handsome, unshaven man in Bermuda shorts grabbed her in his arms. “She called out ‘Zach!’ with a great gush of passion. I had no idea this was Zachary Scott, the actor, nor that my mother and he had had a close friendship, or a love affair, back in Texas. I went home and blurted it to Dad: ‘Hey, Dad. Mom met up with Zach Scott!’ It bent him out of shape.” Scott, Redford learned, was married, with a daughter called Waverly who also attended Brentwood Grammar, in the class ahead of his. Over the next months, despite Charlie’s reservations, Martha befriended Zach’s wife, Elaine, and Waverly became the object of Bobby’s pubescent fantasies. “I loved the exotic world the Scotts lived in,” says Redford. “This was another frontier for me, this great, elegant house with a gilded spiral staircase in the Hollywood Hills. This was a mythical palace compared with Sawtelle. In our house you just had to open the front door to walk into your neighbors’ lives. The Scotts’ rooms were bigger than our house.”

  Zachary Scott became part of the school-day carpool, often driving Bobby and Waverly to Brentwood Grammar. Though Waverly was just a year older, Redford relished the idea of the “mature” girlfriend. “She was constantly teasing me, and we played all those mischievous hide-and-seek games in that big house with minimum chaperonage, testing each other’s boundaries.” And then one day, playing on the landing, the two kids heard strange noises downstairs. “We peered over the banister and saw what was going on. It was Elaine, her mom, making love with a stranger. I didn’t know who he was, but later on he became a player on the family scene. He started coming around a lot more. He started to carpool us. I didn’t realize I was witnessing the end of Zach—who we later learned was a closet homosexual—and the start of Elaine’s big relationship with John Steinbeck.”

  In the spring of 1946, Charlie’s labors paid off in the joint purchase with Nelson and Sallie of a substantial duplex on Homedale Avenue, across Sepulveda from Brentwood. It was a marginal but significant move upward. Today, the area has a Beverly Hills character, but in the forties, before the construction of the San Diego Freeway, Homedale sat in a vast, bland development, devoid of trees, partly designed by Nelson as cheap housing for returning GIs. Still, Charlie and Martha had salvaged Bobby from the ethnic battlefield of Sawtelle. “I didn’t want to leave,” says Redford. “The good feeling in the street was dead, but I still felt I belonged in that multicultural setting.” Facing total immersion in the snazzy Brentwood set, Redford was, he says, depressed: “I preferred that old world.”

  Late the following spring Redford woke one day with his eyelids encrusted and his limbs dead. He couldn’t move. No one told him for weeks, but he had polio. “The previous day was excruciatingly hot,” he says. “I had been down at the beach, in the ocean on a paddleboat with a friend. There was an allotted area to pedal in near Santa Monica Pier, but given my restlessness, I was way past confinement. I pedaled out too far and got dehydrated. I barely made it back to shore. I became ill, and then polio was diagnosed.”

  Redford remembers the worries about mortality and the guilt he felt at overdoing things. “I was in terrible discomfort, physically and mentally. When I woke every day, Mom sat by the bed with wet cloths and swabbed my eyes to open them. She kept me going. When I could sit up, I drew. I owe that mostly to my junior school art teacher, Miss Huff. She believed I had an artist inside me, and she had begun to encourage me. That was the branch I reached out for.” By August he could walk again. Soon afterward Martha, who had been pregnant with twins, lost the children shortly after birth. Now Martha clung closer to her only child. As a treat as they both recovered, she organized a two-day campout at Yosemite Valley. “It stands as a moment of real awakening in my life, and it seems magical now,” says Redford. “We’d been driving for
hours, leaving the tract houses and orange groves, and suddenly we were in the High Sierras inside a womblike tunnel, maybe a mile long, unlike anything I’d ever encountered. When we came out the other side, onto Glacier Point Road, there it lay before me: El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, Half Dome, wilderness. I’d seen a lot of America as a kid, but nothing on this scale of sheer majesty.”

  Redford has said that, despite the tedium of schooling, the loss of David, the loss of his siblings and his father’s demands, he loved his childhood. It was all due to Martha. “I owed everything to my mother for opening me up to the willingness to experience. When I went through that tunnel and first laid eyes on Half Dome and the view from Glacier Point, I remember thinking: I have to be part of this.”

  At twelve, Redford transferred to Emerson Junior High School in Westwood. There he came to fancy Kathleen “Kitty” Andrews, the dark-blond daughter of a well-to-do furniture manufacturer whose home on Bundy Drive was the hub of Emerson social life. They had briefly known each other at Brentwood. Now Kitty stood tall among the Trim, Neat and Terrifics, the girl buddy group whose sweaters, with the yellow logo TNT, became premium Emerson status symbols.

  Redford quickly stormed the TNTs. He had worked hard to become a great dancer—“waltz, foxtrot, samba, Charleston, the lot”—at the local hot spot, the Cotillion on Santa Monica Pier, and, says Betty Webb, who continued to be his official “date,” seemed suddenly widely sought after by the girls. “He was the funniest person alive,” says Kitty, “not in joke telling, but in his mannerisms. He was the kind of kid who’d walk down the street and make a major drama of it, dodging behind trees, vanishing, reappearing, doing a flip like Buster Keaton. The key to his attractiveness was his athleticism. He moved like a dancer.” Janna and Sheila, Kitty’s sisters, were equally attracted to him.

  Redford’s success with the girls elicited jealousy from his male peers, but that scarcely discouraged him. Steve Bernhardt, the son of a movie director, saw Redford as strategically inventive: “He chose his allegiances carefully. For example, he courted Jill Schary, who was the daughter of the MGM chief, Dore Schary. He also hung out with Bill Chertok, whose father coproduced The Lone Ranger for ABC. These guys had great properties. Schary had a mansion in Beverly Glen, and the Chertoks a terrific weekend retreat at Shelter Cove, in Lake Arrowhead, with a Chris-Craft, butlers and maids.” Redford agrees he was strategic, but so was everyone else, says Jan Holman, another of the TNT blondes who shared summer outings to Lake Arrowhead with Redford: “He was a gentleman. I understood why the guys were jealous of him, because he was naturally adept. He had a physicality that was unusual, even among healthy, outdoorsy boys. Stripped to the waist, he was a beautiful specimen, like some Scandinavian god, with a fine blond down across his body.”

  Redford concentrated on the new blooming romance with Kitty that displaced Betty. “He was very generous as a boyfriend, always attentive,” says Kitty, who still has the rolled gold charm bracelet he gave her that first Christmas. “I felt I saw things in Bobby that other people missed. His writing, when he wrote to me, was advanced beyond his years. His artwork was also exceptional. I think the boys were envious of him with good cause.”

  Redford adored Kitty but was also attracted to Sheila, with whom he formed a close and open friendship. “You can oversubscribe to childhood angst, but Bobby was in a real turmoil,” says Sheila. “Much of it had to do with heritage. He was a first-generation Angeleno, remember, and he was unsure of his place in the world. There was poverty in his background, and a kind of taunting wealth. He really didn’t understand his background at all, and he was like a kid pressing his nose against the windowpane of other people’s lives, wondering, What’s going on in there?”

  Redford also developed a good friendship with Carol Rossen. Her father, Robert Rossen, was a Warner Bros. screenwriter turned director. The previous year, HUAC had forced Rossen to renounce his Communist Party membership, and though he continued to work, he also continued to host political parties with blacklisted writers like Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz. Carol fancied Bobby Redford, too: “In my case, we had in common a curiosity about the real world, though we found it hard to talk openly about it because we were brought up in silence. Neither Communism nor Jewishness was openly discussed in my home, and it bothered me. I was Jewish, but my only understanding of Judaism came in the casual observance of Passover and Hanukkah we shared with my grandmother. That seemed like a terrible waste of heritage, and some part of me was in rebellion to this imposition. Bobby and I were joined, because we were on a private quest to get out of this phony world and into the sunlight.”

  Carol hid her Jewishness. She fit in with the Bundy set, she says, because she was redheaded, desirable and smart, with creativity and money in her background. “The scene was very racist, very WASPy and extremely politically right-wing,” says Carol. “But I wasn’t about to rock the boat.”

  Redford, however, was. With increasing maturity came unlimited confidence; with an increasing sense of being boxed in came recklessness. He started spending time with a wilder group and organizing exploratory midnight rituals. “I’d get up in the small hours,” Redford recalls, “sneak out my bedroom window, follow the road past the Veterans Hospital and assemble the team, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Then we’d set out to investigate the darkest recesses of the neighborhood by night.” He climbed fences to swim in neighbors’ pools. He “borrowed” beer from friends’ unattended storerooms. Dodging the late-night police patrols electrified proceedings. Gradually the stakes grew higher: breaking and entering and annexing vacated properties for all-night drinking sessions became the main game.

  Redford’s main coconspirator was Bill Coomber. To Dave Stein, a mutual acquaintance, Coomber was the force that released the sleeping tiger in Redford. “It was waiting to happen,” recalls Stein. “Bob was a very repressed individual. Bill gave vent to the anger in him. Bill wasn’t so much Bob’s passport to escape the stuffiness of the Brentwood set as his tutor in crime. Bill had the kind of privileges the Andrews girls had. The girls didn’t question their privileges. Bill did. He questioned by abusing them, by testing their limits: he kicked back. There was a real element of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bob and Bill. For a time they were criminals. Lovable, but criminals.”

  For Redford, though, Coomber was a liberator. “My relationship with Bill was, literally, life sustaining,” says Redford. “He became like the brother I didn’t have.”

  Coomber remembers their first meeting, at Emerson. They talked, and Redford invited Coomber to the UCLA sports field for an informal Saturday football game. “Bill was a mixer,” says Redford, “a very relaxed and loud personality with no inhibitions—and I wanted that for myself.”

  Like Redford, Coomber had no siblings. The center of his life was his mother, Helen Brady Coomber, a three-time divorcée with independent wealth and a mansion on Denslow Avenue. Her fortune came from her father, the nationally syndicated medical columnist William Brady. As a young girl, Helen had started training as an actress at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where her family lived, and had moved successfully into theater and radio. Then, when her father’s asthma necessitated a move to the West Coast, she abandoned her acting dream and relocated, too. Upon her father’s death, the considerable inheritance facilitated “blazing adventures,” according to her sister, Lala. Helen married “impulsively” several times, her union to Frederick Van Coomber yielding her one son, Bill. “When Mr. Coomber moved on,” said Lala, “Helen treated Bill as the man of the house. She showered him with gifts, money, everything, and Bill was an adult at thirteen.”

  Redford liked Helen. She was kind to a fault, had humor like his mother and was constantly reading, according to Lala—“everything from Erich Fromm to Proust.” Redford remembers that “she wasn’t a storyteller. She was gushing, but she had a drama about her, a kind of Norma Desmond quality. Just talking to her, you knew her life was diverse and big.”

  In the
Emerson school newspaper in the fall of 1949, Redford had been identified as “Krazy” and likened in personality to Milton Berle. It noted that he took to the stage in a playlet called Time Out for Ginger, a boy-meets-girl farce to which MGM sent talent scouts in hopes of finding a replacement for the aging Mickey Rooney. Redford doesn’t remember this—“which shows how much interest in acting I had.” But the next spring he was in the school play, Wilbur Faces Facts. Helen applauded him afterward, though Redford remembers more the enthusiasm of some schoolgirl friends. “That was a weird experience,” says Redford. “It wasn’t like sports or work. I wasn’t trying. I was up there goofing off and people were laughing. The girls came up. ‘You’re good,’ they said, and so I thought twice about it.”

  Coomber saw no support for the whimsical side of Redford at Homedale. “I thought Charlie was really rough on his son,” he says, “always getting him to do endless thankless chores, like mowing the lawn week after week, whether it needed mowing or not.” Redford grew more and more angry about Charlie’s rules. “All I ever heard was, ‘You gotta improve those high school grades. You gotta make it to Dartmouth or Stanford.’ I realize now that those colleges represented the Gates to Heaven for him, because everyone he knew who succeeded in business had the right degrees. He wanted that kind of stability for me, but I didn’t want it at all the older I got and the more of the world I experienced.”

  Redford’s interest was absorbed by Coomber’s obsessions: magic and general derring-do. “It was,” says Coomber, “like a secret life. I had ‘normality,’ school and home, and then I had all these sidelines.” Occasionally he performed magic shows—for tips—at a Westwood club. More often he was driving without a permit, boozing beyond reason and shoplifting petty items. He also loved climbing the high-rise buildings around Westwood Village after dark, and Redford joined him, scaling the sheer tower of the imposing Fox Village Theater.