Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  There were shared football games, sleepovers, campouts and horseback-riding sessions in Will Rogers State Park, where Redford’s love of riding began. “It was never open competition,” says Coomber, “but we were always pushing each other. When we were riding, I was the experienced one. But Bob had to ride faster. There was never any admission of weakness from Bob—ever. It was always take it to the limit.”

  When the boys were just fifteen, they decided to tackle serious mountaineering outside Palm Springs. “Bob wanted to do it,” says Coomber, “because it took him back to the wilderness. As soon as we could get our hands on an automobile—illegally, of course, since we were underage—we were off to Palm Springs.”

  Climbing the ten-thousand-foot Mount San Jacinto, Coomber and Redford overreached. “It was dumb and it was my fault,” says Redford. “We started out with a party of friends on a bitter cold weekend. We camped, climbed, camped again. No one was stupid enough to want to try for the summit, except me. We knew the temperatures fell by forty degrees at night. Bill said, ‘Okay, we’ll give it a shot.’ We had no sleeping bags, no more rations, just some cheap street gloves that started to shred. Suddenly it was so dark we couldn’t distinguish the black ice. We were up very high, disoriented, lost.”

  The friends lit a fire from tinder in a snowbound cave. Exhausted, they took turns sleeping, constantly stoking the fire to stave off freezing to death. Coomber felt they wouldn’t make it down alive. At first light they found a way down. They gorged at the Mountain Diner, then slept in a sand trap at the local golf course. They had been gone for days, but when Redford returned home, no questions were asked. “It had got to the point where my parents were sick of asking questions,” says Redford.

  At home, Redford was expressing himself more and daring to argue openly—“usually about nothing at all”—with Charlie. The family had acquired its first television set, an eleven-inch Philco, and, led by Bobby’s dinnertime talk, embraced the wider world—the fall of Joe Louis, the rise of Milton Berle, Truman’s policies, the collapse of the American Communist Party. Redford was drawn to politics but frustrated by Charlie’s arcane communication. “He was highly intelligent but so polluted by his family’s failure to stand up and be counted, so most of it was buried in dismissive wit. It was a pity, because when he let his feelings and opinions air, his insights were amazing.”

  In 1950, as Congressman Richard Nixon prepared for a Senate run in California, Charlie’s reticence was breached. Kenny Chotiner, a classmate of Bob’s at Emerson, was the son of Murray Chotiner, a key Nixon aide. From carpooling, Martha was friendly with Chotiner’s wife, Phyllis. Charlie tolerated the friendship until Nixon developed his campaign as a character assassination, lambasting his Democrat opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a pinko. The Chotiners became the subject of screaming dinnertime debate. Charlie railed against the Nixon camp’s ethics; Martha emotionally supported her friend. When Nixon won his seat, Charlie never forgave him. “Here was another instance, the character of leadership, like the persistent issue of racism, that my father was sharp to, but much too muted about,” says Redford. “Those Chotiner arguments stuck in my mind because of these great instincts my father had. He resented bullshit. And he predicted before anyone I knew that Nixon meant trouble.”

  Increasingly intrigued as he was by social politics, the fate of Carol Rossen, whose family life was upended by the HUAC campaign against her father, stimulated Redford. “It drove me nuts when her family was effectively exiled from the area,” says Redford. “I wasn’t aware of the finer points of HUAC, that Trumbo and Maltz had gone to jail, and big-profile people like Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Walt Disney were trying to weed out these pinkos.”

  Given his rebellious nature, a life of insouciance would not last.

  4

  East of Eden

  Redford’s last year at junior high coincided with a career shift for Charlie. Standard Oil had opened a district office at Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley, and Charlie was to be a divisional accountant based there. For Redford, the Valley represented an inland desert, a wasteland. But he objected in vain.

  Before the move, the family made another cross-country journey to see Tiger and Lena back east. It was a mistake: the antagonism between father and son had become corrosive. On the way home, driving through Colorado, Redford jumped ship. He took a summer job tending horses in the stables at Estes Park, sixty-five miles northwest of Denver, a declaration of independence that seems significant in hindsight: already he was opting for fresh country air in preference to the tense, oppressive claustrophobia of Los Angeles.

  Back home the adventuring with Coomber that had been excusable as tomfoolery became delinquency. Redford had transferred to University High, Coomber’s new school, which proved a mistake. “The problems got out of hand at Uni High,” says Coomber. Both became members of the legendary boys’ club, the Barons. “We were a street gang,” says Coomber, “there’s no other name for it. The Barons became our camouflage for all kinds of petty theft.” During the previous fall, Redford had been detained for breaking into a local girls’ school after dark. Now Coomber was arrested and charged with grand theft for purloining the five-foot brass propeller at the naval memorial in Ocean Park. Shortly after, Redford was arrested for borrowing an automobile that had stolen jewelry in its trunk. Helen and Charlie interceded, and charges were dropped against Coomber and Redford. Redford was abruptly removed from Uni High and temporarily ensconced in the Catholic Notre Dame High School.

  “You could say Bob was a spoiled brat reacting to his toys being taken from him,” says Steve Bernhardt. “In Westwood, he had a good love life, a stable family, wealthy friends. All this was being displaced with this family move to the desert.”

  In November the Redfords moved to the Valley, to a barnlike bungalow at 5637 Buffalo Avenue, a mile from Van Nuys High School, into which Redford transferred. Sallie and Nelson were left behind, as were so many friends. He was distraught: “It was worse than I imagined. We had moved into an oven. There was no culture, no air, no sea, just badly tended orange groves and some awful movie star dude ranches. It was a very western place, but primitive. Our house was a cracker box with a barbecue in the small yard. It was a Twilight Zone version of suburbia.”

  Redford stopped attending school. He hitched instead to Hermosa Beach, the surfers’ hangout, where Coomber and friends from Emerson hung out. They drank, waxed surfboards, listened to the jocks of radio station KMPC. At four every afternoon, he would hitch back across the hills to Buffalo Avenue and pretend he’d been to class.

  The deception lasted a month. When Charlie learned the truth from a truant officer, he exploded. Redford promised to mend his ways, returning to school and taking an evening job at a local pharmacy. Within a week he and his new friend Dave Brockman were supplying stolen Cadillac hubcaps to a fence who managed the liquor store down the street.

  Kitty knew Redford was slipping away from her. She visited him in the Valley and saw the changes. Barred from seeing Coomber and the Emerson friends, he was building a new life and forming new friendships. Hot-rodding was his new pastime, shared mostly with Brockman, the son of a judge. “I didn’t think Bobby had become delinquent,” says Kitty, “but he was struggling to keep life in perspective. We were kids, but we’d had a special, very mature bond, and that bond was slipping, partly because of the geographical separation, partly because of the changes in both of us.”

  The relationship with Kitty ended that year when her family moved east, but Redford had already romantically moved on, acquiring a new girlfriend named Pat Lyons. Redford was not yet seventeen; Pat was twenty. “I sought out an older girl,” says Redford, “because I was hungry for experience. Less and less I wanted what my parents had.” Lyons introduced him to smoky L.A. jazz clubs like the Haig, the Oasis and Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse, to the world of cool jazz, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. This was about as far as he could get from the pleasantries of Santa Monica’s big-band ballrooms, and he w
as thrilled. “I loved the profanity, the booze, the blue-lit, hazy rooms. Most of all I went for this terrific discordancy in the music. It wasn’t polite. The world I was stuck in was all polite. But this was expressive and completely free.”

  One weekend his parents took off for a four-day trip to San Diego, leaving the family Chevy at home. Redford drove it to San Francisco, in search of more jazz. He had no permit, so was obliged to dodge the highway police, taking the scenic Route 101 past Malibu toward Big Sur. The sense of liberation evoked by wild, untamed nature once again kicked in. “On that journey I realized I hated L.A. for its compromises,” says Redford. “I decided that somehow I must get out of it permanently.”

  In San Francisco, Redford and his friends stumbled on a party at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s newly opened City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. The hosts were the forward guard of the Beats: Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael Mclure. The poets took turns reading their work. Jack Kerouac collected donations in a hat. “This was years before [Ginsberg’s] Howl,” says Redford, “but there was a sense of manifesto. I had never experienced what you might call an alternative communal vision, but this was it. These guys were obviously doped. But they had a track on something honest that made absolute sense to me. It was a mind-blowing evening.”

  The previous summer, the summer of 1952, a Life magazine survey listed the national teen idols as Roy Rogers, Joe DiMaggio, Vera-Ellen, Louisa May Alcott, General Douglas MacArthur and Doris Day, none of whom, with the exception of DiMaggio, Redford connected with. Instead, his natural affiliations were with the rebels, with Kerouac, then wrestling with On the Road, with Miles Davis’s improvisational jazz, with Alan Watts and radio station KPFA prompting the Bay Area toward Eastern thinking. Coomber had prophesied to friends that Redford was facing some major, life-altering change. “I told them either he’ll break through in some important career or he’ll end up in the gutter like a bum. There’d be no middle way,” says Coomber. Redford experienced a new focus with the Beats. “The music I was listening to and those guys in North Beach opened my eyes,” he says. “One perfect example was a night with Pat at the Haig, watching Gerry Mulligan play to the room, and everyone, except one smooching couple, was enraptured. So Mulligan went over to their table and leaned in with his sax and blew them into orbit. That was an education for me: That jazz wasn’t just entertainment. That it was a weapon, an onslaught on convention. That art, or however you phrase it, had the power to change things fundamentally.”

  Charlie continued to believe his son’s redemption lay in sports. In his first fall at Van Nuys High, Redford made the football team. But he quit. He still loved the Red Sox, and had fantasies about being the next Ted Williams—“the only public figure I ever idolized”—but now he avoided baseball as well.

  Redford tried marijuana and hashish, spent weekends “rumbling” hot rods on dirt tracks in the Simi Hills and romanced Pat’s friends when he could get away with it. Coomber was absent, but Redford didn’t need the prompting of his friend’s wildness. En route to a drag trial in Santa Barbara, he lost control of a souped-up coupe and crashed at ninety miles an hour. Lucky to be alive, he was ferried home, dazed. Charlie was outraged. Redford says, “All I remember was the look of absolute hopelessness on his face, looking at me and saying, ‘Who are you?’ ”

  In the spring of 1954 Redford graduated from Van Nuys High. “If you’d asked me on that day of graduation, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ my answer would have been, ‘Get as far away from Van Nuys High as I can, period.’ ” As the names of graduates were read out, Redford sat at the back of the assembly hall, reading Mad magazine.

  Given his grades, his college options were restricted. The University of Colorado at Boulder, though, offered the possibility of an eventual sports scholarship. Faded though its allure was, Redford thought he might resume his baseball. “So it was a no-brainer. Colorado was baseball. And, more important, the mountains. Escape.”

  Redford started out brooding and isolated. He focused on the arts at Boulder, and baseball was quickly abandoned. Jack Brendlinger, a senior, four years older, took him under his wing. They first met during fraternity rush week by the moat in front of the Kappa Sigma house. Brendlinger was drawn to Redford, he says, because he looked so out of place: “Our frat house was 90 percent well-heeled, well-tailored students from Chicago’s North Shore, and here was a depressed-looking bum in an Irish tweed jacket with his hair styled in a ducktail. I sat beside him and the first thing he said was, ‘Man, this just isn’t for me.’ ” Brendlinger invited Redford to join him for a round of golf. After Redford shot a blistering nine, Brendlinger decided he belonged in Kappa Sigma. “Bob was unfazed during the hazing. For him, it was masochistic competition,” says Brendlinger. “He was a strange guy.”

  Redford’s insularity swung to extroversion. He befriended Dave Barr from Glendale and a Minnesotan called Hugh Hall, and moved off campus to share an apartment with them. He resumed his drawing and started what would be a lifetime habit of diary keeping, filling notebooks with spontaneous observations. The Kappa Sigma Chicagoans, in particular, became the templates of the North Shore folk whom he would essay twenty-five years later in Ordinary People. “You shouldn’t generalize, I know, but my observation was of advantaged Americans besotted, as my father was, with the vision of the organization man,” says Redford. “These were Eisenhower’s people. Everything came secondary to the ultimate career, and education was limited to the streamlined agenda that served that career. It was a narrow, elitist view, and, like Brentwood, it had no introspective, self-analytical tendency nor much interest in human communication.” In compensation, Redford gravitated toward a group of Jewish students whom he called “this reverse cabal,” because of their humor and their constant questioning of the status quo.

  Within months Redford had become beloved in the drinking circles but was regarded as a loose cannon. He was the most relaxed with Hugh Hall, the son of evangelistic Baptist parents, because he was spontaneous. They enjoyed the same literature (Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis) and the same music (George Shearing, Chet Baker), and equally enjoyed attacking convention. Hall was a part-time disc jockey at the local radio station, KBOL, who delighted in mocking his audience with filthy, erudite innuendo. “He was so smart,” says Redford, “he could fund himself writing overnight term papers for students. He could also recite the Kama Sutra on the radio without anyone knowing what he was talking about.” Together they subverted game shows to win Redford prizes and staged outrageous doublespeak phone-ins. Once, Redford burst into the studio while Hall was broadcasting and pretended it was an armed holdup. It almost cost Hall his job, but he went on to a career in regional broadcasting, changing his name to Sam Hall.

  Redford’s new romantic fixation was Wanda Shannon, an old Westwood flame who had gone to Vegas to become a dancer in one of the big hotel floor shows. During spring break in April 1955, Redford and five friends decided they’d visit Wanda. When they arrived, they learned that Elvis was in town. “I’d already discovered black music with Big Jay McNeely at the Blue Sax in North Hollywood and made the blues-jazz connections, so I wanted to experience this Elvis thing,” says Redford. The Elvis show was a support act to Freddy Martin at the Frontier, a fancy supper club that Redford’s group couldn’t afford. “So I persuaded the guys to pool cash and we came up with $10, then charmed a waitress to let us dine on rolls while we watched the show.” From the moment Presley started with “Hound Dog,” Redford was a convert. “It was electrifying, a validation, to see these stuffed-shirt socialites who’d come to see Freddy Martin clamp up in reverence. I thought, Hey, a kid with nothing, from nowheresville, can do this!”

  Sinatra was at the Sands. His theatricality riveted Redford: “We sat at the back in darkness. Then, from the shadows, emerged this liquid, velvet voice: ‘You see a pair of laughing eyes.…’ I realized he was a storyteller. He was introducing a new version of himself with ‘Wee Small Hours in the Morn
ing.’ Later on I learned how he perfected his phrasing by emulating Tommy Dorsey’s breath control with the trombone. The combined effect was huge artistry.

  “I went to Vegas expecting razzmatazz and status quo. Instead, I found artists at work. It was a different kind of artistry than the Beat scene, but it was no less radical. I expected to be cynical. I wasn’t. Vegas encouraged me to be more eclectic in my tastes, to move away from the knee-jerk rebellious response—to grow up, maybe.”

  He’d bought an old car and now started traveling, establishing a peripatetic pattern that would last all his life. Aside from the regular drives between Colorado and home, he motored to New Mexico, Utah, Nebraska and Wyoming.

  “The love of movement reflected the fact that, apart from art history, the only classes at CU that interested me were geomorphology and anthropology,” he says. “Geomorphology fed this curiosity about landscape. I relished those drives home to L.A. and started alternating routes. In winter, I’d drive the southern route via Gallup and Albuquerque; in summer, the northern route via Vegas and Salt Lake City. I got fired up on sedimentology to the point where I was reading books about it voluntarily. I’d bore everyone at home with detailed descriptions of schisms and alluvial fans. The Rockies and the desert became vital for me: they were the fossilized history of the world. And then anthropology kicked in. The human culture element breathed life into it all. The man who opened this up for me was one of the best teachers at CU, Omer Stewart.”