Robert Redford Part 1

Robert Redford : the biography.

by Michael Feeney Callan.

Introduction.

America Is the Girl

Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid solid earth! the earth! the actual actual world! the world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? are we? where where are we? are we?Henry David Th.o.r.eau, The Maine Woods The Maine Woods It's Brigadoon, really, on a summer's day. You drive an hour south out of Salt Lake City on the I-15, turn east at the signposts for the Uinta National Park and catch the Provo Canyon Road as it wends along a river once famous for trout as populous as cobblestones. Then you head north again along the Alpine Loop road, and in a vee of aspens you find it: a modest trunk road to a circle of timber cabins, a ski lift or two beyond, and above, the breathtaking elegance of the glacial Mount Timpanogos, towering almost twelve thousand feet above sea level. Apart from the few small-signage properties, and the spidery frames of the lifts, it's as it was two centuries before, when the Ute Indians lived here. It is still the home of ground squirrels and four types of snakes. Golden eagles still overfly it. Mountain lions have been sighted. Deer numbered in the thousands until the particularly ferocious winter of 1990 wiped out 90 percent of them. Now the elk are back in numbers. It possesses, it seems, some powerful organic mechanism of renewal.

When you step out of your car (the only way to get here), the air has the minty intensity of the Alps. You breathe deeply, because at this elevation-more than six thousand feet-the air is thinner. Visitors get nosebleeds. It seems a place of enormousness. Huge sky. Huge mountains. Huge contradictions. Henry David Th.o.r.eau got lost on Mount Katahdin and in The Maine Woods The Maine Woods expressed both the beauty and the concurrent threat of nature. It's a place to take pause. expressed both the beauty and the concurrent threat of nature. It's a place to take pause.

Robert Redford discovered this canyon more than fifty years ago. Originally it was squatters' land, purchased from the government by a Scottish family in 1900 for $1.25 an acre under the terms of the 1877 Desert Land Act and granddaddied for sheep farming thereafter. By the 1950s the wool market was dead and the lands all but derelict. In 1961 Redford and his wife bought two acres and built a home. In 1968, flush with Hollywood success, he purchased several thousand adjoining acres and later called it Sundance in recognition of his movie breakthrough. In 1980 he set up an arts colony to promote young filmmakers. "I'd seen small movies like Heartland Heartland [directed by Richard Pearce], and saw pa.s.sion that was going nowhere. There was no infrastructure to support these films. Hollywood in the seventies was only interested in blockbusters." His remedy was an arts commune, based in part on the artists' colony Yaddo and on the theory of the a.s.sembly line that would address scriptwriting, script filming and, eventually, product selling. He asked friends like actor Karl Malden, writer Waldo Salt and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs to a.s.sist. They came to the canyon and set the wheels in motion. Seventeen new filmmakers were invited that first season, and the results were immediate. Enthusiasm was defined by the work ethic; people labored seventeen hours a day. Short movies were shot, edited, debated, reshot, finessed. Aspirant filmmakers who came with nothing more than an idea left with the bones of a professional screenplay. A few thousand dollars were spent that first summer. Within two years the sponsors were rolling in and millions were being directed toward what was essentially an alternative filmmaking industry. In popular perception, Robert Redford had invented independent cinema. [directed by Richard Pearce], and saw pa.s.sion that was going nowhere. There was no infrastructure to support these films. Hollywood in the seventies was only interested in blockbusters." His remedy was an arts commune, based in part on the artists' colony Yaddo and on the theory of the a.s.sembly line that would address scriptwriting, script filming and, eventually, product selling. He asked friends like actor Karl Malden, writer Waldo Salt and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs to a.s.sist. They came to the canyon and set the wheels in motion. Seventeen new filmmakers were invited that first season, and the results were immediate. Enthusiasm was defined by the work ethic; people labored seventeen hours a day. Short movies were shot, edited, debated, reshot, finessed. Aspirant filmmakers who came with nothing more than an idea left with the bones of a professional screenplay. A few thousand dollars were spent that first summer. Within two years the sponsors were rolling in and millions were being directed toward what was essentially an alternative filmmaking industry. In popular perception, Robert Redford had invented independent cinema.

Redford's initiative came on the heels of a stream of eco-activism and Indian rights pursuits. Its principle, says Redford, was conciliatory. He recognized the importance of business in Hollywood as much as he recognized the frustration of the independents. But a sense of exclusion, he felt, repressed emerging talent. Apropos of his environmental activism, he wrote in the Harvard Business Review Harvard Business Review that "people need the chance to see how much agreement is possible." Fostering independents, he felt, could only enhance Hollywood. But there were inherent contradictions. He disliked the overintrusion of Hollywood and only reluctantly allowed a studio presence in the Sundance boardroom. He wanted a clear demarcation zone. The bullishness raised hackles. Journalists visited and observed his brand of altruism as suspect. There was about it, one wrote, indulgence. The rebellious seventies had made him a star and a wealthy man: "This rustic Xanadu and the ideals behind [it] are his way of keeping that decade alive in all its skepticism and sincerity." Some accused him of "granola" filmmaking. But Redford stood his ground with ferocity, even against the advice of his lawyers when they told him he couldn't afford the mortgages and overheads that amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year. that "people need the chance to see how much agreement is possible." Fostering independents, he felt, could only enhance Hollywood. But there were inherent contradictions. He disliked the overintrusion of Hollywood and only reluctantly allowed a studio presence in the Sundance boardroom. He wanted a clear demarcation zone. The bullishness raised hackles. Journalists visited and observed his brand of altruism as suspect. There was about it, one wrote, indulgence. The rebellious seventies had made him a star and a wealthy man: "This rustic Xanadu and the ideals behind [it] are his way of keeping that decade alive in all its skepticism and sincerity." Some accused him of "granola" filmmaking. But Redford stood his ground with ferocity, even against the advice of his lawyers when they told him he couldn't afford the mortgages and overheads that amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year.

Redford maneuvered to keep his vision alive. He had in place already a mom-and-pop ski resort that comprised a ski lift and a basic restaurant. In 1985 he commercialized the operation, endorsing an expansion plan for accommodations around the estate that included two multiunit condominiums and a hundred houses, all of which, in keeping with his pa.s.sion for maximum conservation, were built below the tree line. In 1989 he introduced a trading catalog, selling western apparel. Combined, these enterprises effectively underwrote the arts labs. But the labs, he felt, needed an evolutionary nudge. Filmmakers were being trained and projects honed, but there was nowhere for these projects to be seen. The showcasing required a festival forum, and he had it on his doorstep with the Salt Lake Citybased United States Film and Video Festival. In 1985, he annexed it and relocated it in Park City, thirty miles up the road. Henceforth, the Sundance lab projects were one step closer to Hollywood.

In 1989, the film festival liberated Sundance. One movie-Steven Soderbergh's s.e.x, lies, and videotape s.e.x, lies, and videotape-broke out and won a huge Hollywood distribution deal. Its global recognition shone a light on the first principle of the Sundance Inst.i.tute, which was to allow new artists the unconditional chance to express themselves. Sundance now had a cultivating laboratory and a marketplace. Redford had realized his vision in stubbornness. He had not gone to Hollywood. Hollywood had come to him. What followed was a decade of growth, before entropy set in and the business flanks of Sundance, designed to commercially b.u.t.tress the arts inst.i.tute, gave way. Sundance wobbled, but it didn't fall. Redford was forced to step back from much of his business, but not his dream. As the business wars raged, attendance at the film festivals grew exponentially. The summer labs-the place it all began-continued to thrive, with yearly script submissions now numbering in the thousands.

Redford's achievement has always been shadowed by skepticism. "Opportunism" was the most commonly offered obloquy, though it was hard to see precisely what self-service beyond the enhancement of a winter vacation resort might be at play. Certainly, by the time he initiated the Sundance Inst.i.tute, Redford was a made man. His stardom, which began in the sixties, was rock solid, and successes like Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and and The Sting The Sting had lifted him to iconic status. And it was impossible to accuse him of stagnation in 1980. The year he planned the Sundance labs was also the year he set out as a director, winning an Academy Award for had lifted him to iconic status. And it was impossible to accuse him of stagnation in 1980. The year he planned the Sundance labs was also the year he set out as a director, winning an Academy Award for Ordinary People Ordinary People and establis.h.i.+ng a determined second strand to his cinema career. What, then, were his deepest motives? And why was the voice of independence so important to him that it prompted what might accurately be described as empire building in the remotest and unlikeliest of places, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah? and establis.h.i.+ng a determined second strand to his cinema career. What, then, were his deepest motives? And why was the voice of independence so important to him that it prompted what might accurately be described as empire building in the remotest and unlikeliest of places, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah?

Understanding the obsession that created Sundance necessitates understanding Robert Redford and his journey. Out of such an impulse-to better understand the making of this resilient new arts generator in the heartland of America-this book began.

I first met Redford at a taping for the Bravo television series Inside the Actors Studio Inside the Actors Studio at the New School in Manhattan in March 1995. I knew I had my work cut out. I admired him and thought much of his work was undervalued and that key thematic connections in his directorial films were unexplored. I also knew he disliked no-holds-barred interviews and that while he cherished the past in a curatorial sense as reflected in his movies like at the New School in Manhattan in March 1995. I knew I had my work cut out. I admired him and thought much of his work was undervalued and that key thematic connections in his directorial films were unexplored. I also knew he disliked no-holds-barred interviews and that while he cherished the past in a curatorial sense as reflected in his movies like A River Runs Through It A River Runs Through It and and Quiz Show, Quiz Show, the personal past left him cold. But I asked for his cooperation, and I got it. the personal past left him cold. But I asked for his cooperation, and I got it.

Once we agreed upon a biographical collaboration, the project immediately stalled. He was legendary for being late ("Call the book The Late Robert Redford, The Late Robert Redford," Paul Newman advised me), and I immediately felt the full brunt of it. I flew halfway across the world for meetings that never happened or were largely unproductive because of distractions. I thought of Sartre on Alexandre Dumas's Kean, Kean, the story of an actor: "He is his own victim, never knowing who he really is, whether he's acting or not." Was this Redford's core character-a professional self-investigator, as good actors are, dulled by his skill for circ.u.mvention? Was he, like Jay Gatsby, whom he told me he so admired, lost? the story of an actor: "He is his own victim, never knowing who he really is, whether he's acting or not." Was this Redford's core character-a professional self-investigator, as good actors are, dulled by his skill for circ.u.mvention? Was he, like Jay Gatsby, whom he told me he so admired, lost?

Very quickly I learned that contradictions and paradoxes defined him. Throughout his movies, whether he is tackling politics, family or "the system," there is always the prevalent dominance of one man and his actions. Even at the height of his romantic idol career in the seventies, when women were mailing him their underwear, sagacious journalists were weeding out some underlying contradictory truth. He was, for one, "a subtle blend of Owen Wister's Trampas, a man who knows that words are deadly and final, and Sartre's Orestes, who knows that actions are the only true description of a man."

I labored on. I called him on his disregard for punctuality, which Sydney Pollack, his lifelong friend, had told me was anything but amusing. George Roy Hill, in the last days of his life, fumed about Redford's lateness during the filming of Butch Ca.s.sidy; Butch Ca.s.sidy; Barry Levinson told me the habit cost almost $100,000 in the making of Barry Levinson told me the habit cost almost $100,000 in the making of The Natural. The Natural. Redford waved it away. And yet elsewhere there was generous accountability: for neglect of his marriage, incompetence in friends.h.i.+p, failed partners.h.i.+ps, failed businesses. Redford waved it away. And yet elsewhere there was generous accountability: for neglect of his marriage, incompetence in friends.h.i.+p, failed partners.h.i.+ps, failed businesses.

The paradoxical nature of his relations.h.i.+p with the past resurfaced after the events of 9/11. He was always active in the political shadows with the League of Conservation Voters, and his direct comments about the attacks on New York were few, but pointed. The crisis, he opined, was the result of America's failure to fully understand the world it shared. He stated that America, being a young country, was just spoiled enough not to have to think about the big picture. "We're sort of shallow.... We don't look to the past for any clues about our future; we don't look to history. If you look at the Bush administration's way of operating and thinking, you'd be led to believe they've no use for history. It's probably one of the reasons they've bungled everything so badly. What they've set in motion really has a horrible future."

By the time of 9/11 I had been working on the project for more than five years, pursuing Carl Jung's dictum that the truth is only available from the concert of many voices; I attempted to interview all and anyone who knew him. I was close to Redford, regularly lunching and supping with him in Ireland and America, but I felt his spirit was still evasive, and I still had uncertainties about the core philosophy of Sundance.

Reading his reflections on American foreign policy, I remembered a conversation I'd had with his daughter Shauna. Everything of value that she learned about her father, she told me, came in transit: in cars, while skiing, trail riding, on long walks. That reminded me of a key moment in The Horse Whisperer. The Horse Whisperer. He is courting Kristin Scott Thomas, the East Coast interloper, and she cannot come to grips with him. She is verbally dexterous; he is silent in the Native American way. He leads her on horseback to a high precipice above Big Sky Montana and shows her the land. The moment nudged me, because I'd shared that view precisely in my first experience of Redford out west. The location was different. It was Sundance, Utah, not Montana. But all else was the same: he was expressing himself in a view of America. He is courting Kristin Scott Thomas, the East Coast interloper, and she cannot come to grips with him. She is verbally dexterous; he is silent in the Native American way. He leads her on horseback to a high precipice above Big Sky Montana and shows her the land. The moment nudged me, because I'd shared that view precisely in my first experience of Redford out west. The location was different. It was Sundance, Utah, not Montana. But all else was the same: he was expressing himself in a view of America.

Very shortly afterward, I opened another bundle of files sent by Sundance. These included reams of his own notes and sketches over the years, together with his copious correspondence with luminaries in the arts and politics. One letter that got my attention came from the humorist Mort Sahl. Having enjoyed Havana, Havana, a movie in which many who knew Redford saw encoded autobiographical references, Sahl felt compelled to express his admiration. After a lifetime of bewilderment about the real Robert Redford, wrote Sahl, "I finally get it. America is the Girl." a movie in which many who knew Redford saw encoded autobiographical references, Sahl felt compelled to express his admiration. After a lifetime of bewilderment about the real Robert Redford, wrote Sahl, "I finally get it. America is the Girl."

To all who know the quotidian Robert Redford, there's no surprise in his fixation with the land. He fell in love with America, he says, when he first encountered Yosemite as a teenager in the company of his mother. The "sacredness" of the pristine environment overwhelmed him, and in the years that followed, with successive epiphanies in Texas and on Navajo reservations, he committed himself to some type of stewards.h.i.+p. When he found Provo Canyon in the fifties, he felt a call to set down permanent roots. Once he settled there, he bought up as much of the surrounding land as he could to block development and used it as a base for his activism against what he saw as the mismanagement of the national park system and such legislative loopholes as the 1872 mining act that effectively allowed the devastation of lands bordering the parks.

Recognizing this unconditional determination to protect land became the first key to a fruitful understanding of Redford. Then came the arts labs. One project from the very first Sundance lab, Gregory Nava's El Norte, El Norte, made it to the big screen. In made it to the big screen. In El Norte, El Norte, a Mayan brother and sister, Enrique and Rosa, are tormented in their homeland of Guatemala and flee to Mexico, then to the United States. They are looking for "home." This central focus-"the pursuit of a sense of place," Redford calls it-permeated all the projects of that first Sundance lab and has woven in and out of everything Sundance has done since. Its importance cannot be overstated. Over the years, Redford has strived to encapsulate Sundance in a phrase: It's a place of experiment. A place of risk. Of diversity. This welter of branding somehow obfuscates the point. As flagged by a Mayan brother and sister, Enrique and Rosa, are tormented in their homeland of Guatemala and flee to Mexico, then to the United States. They are looking for "home." This central focus-"the pursuit of a sense of place," Redford calls it-permeated all the projects of that first Sundance lab and has woven in and out of everything Sundance has done since. Its importance cannot be overstated. Over the years, Redford has strived to encapsulate Sundance in a phrase: It's a place of experiment. A place of risk. Of diversity. This welter of branding somehow obfuscates the point. As flagged by El Norte El Norte and repeated ceaselessly since, the Sundance arts aspiration is toward an inclusive statement of Americanism. and repeated ceaselessly since, the Sundance arts aspiration is toward an inclusive statement of Americanism.

Like Sundance, Robert Redford bestrides two worlds. He is the product of two very different and disparate families, one part New England settler, one part western. His life has been peripatetic. He has engaged careers on the East Coast and West. It may not be a coincidence that his arts laboratory-his "great experiment"-is not too many miles from Promontory Summit, where, in 1869, the golden spike was hammered that joined the East Coast and West on the transcontinental railroad. It may be that Redford's fugacious nature is not so mysterious, that it is studded in the artwork of the labs and the very stones of Sundance. It may be that Redford's journey is the same as Enrique and Rosa's: toward the integration of personal understanding and the harmony of home.

MICHAEL FEENEY CALLAN.

Dublin January 2011

PART ONE.

California Role

For our country here at the west of things For our country here at the west of things Is pregnant of dreams; and west of the west I have lived.

Robinson Jeffers, "Epilogue"

1.

West.

America bloomed on a dream, consolidated in the pages of the Democratic Review Democratic Review in 1845 when journalist John O'Sullivan wrote that it was "our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Prior to then, "America" existed in a huddle of spa.r.s.ely populated states that were outgrowths of the East Coast Dutch and British settlements. Across the Appalachian divide was limbo, and the travelers who first set out on the Oregon Trail wrote wistfully of "going home to America." Within two centuries, the wilderness was taken from the Native Americans, but its settlement was mythologized in blithe imaginings wrought by the stories of Owen Wister and the paintings of Frederic Remington. In truth, there were few cowboys, fewer than ten thousand at their peak, and the pioneers who trekked west traveled not in Conestoga wagons, but on draylike prairie schooners hauled by oxen. Fantasies are inherent in human nature, and much of the American landscape, unchanged for millennia until the great drive west in the nineteenth century, provoked heaven and h.e.l.l. in 1845 when journalist John O'Sullivan wrote that it was "our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Prior to then, "America" existed in a huddle of spa.r.s.ely populated states that were outgrowths of the East Coast Dutch and British settlements. Across the Appalachian divide was limbo, and the travelers who first set out on the Oregon Trail wrote wistfully of "going home to America." Within two centuries, the wilderness was taken from the Native Americans, but its settlement was mythologized in blithe imaginings wrought by the stories of Owen Wister and the paintings of Frederic Remington. In truth, there were few cowboys, fewer than ten thousand at their peak, and the pioneers who trekked west traveled not in Conestoga wagons, but on draylike prairie schooners hauled by oxen. Fantasies are inherent in human nature, and much of the American landscape, unchanged for millennia until the great drive west in the nineteenth century, provoked heaven and h.e.l.l.

California, especially, inspired heaven. It was huge, its very geography offering a mult.i.tude of opportunities for exploitation. Gold had been sprinkled there by the G.o.ds. Starting in 1849, the influx began, filling the twin ramshackle metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles with their various dreamers. In 1800 the California population measured a few thousand. By 1853, after the gold rush was finished, the population was a quarter of a million. The entrepreneurial energies of great financiers, including Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, made San Francisco the Paris of the West. Los Angeles, in compet.i.tion, boomed by nurturing its reputation for blue skies and perfect, balmy breezes. The mission Spaniards, set on sanctifying paradise, persevered with Spanish orange and Portuguese lemon crops, which took hold when the early cattle kings dispersed. These Californian delicacies caught on back east and gave the environs of Los Angeles a bedrock export economy.

Still, California was no easy sell. To the recent immigrants settled on the East Coast-Scots-Irish folk like Redford's maternal great-grandfather, John Hart-the industrial options of the more established towns were more desirable. As the gold rush subsided and the Civil War ran its course, the fledgling Los Angeles chamber of commerce commissioned books like Charles Nordhoff's California, California, which sold the southern part of the state-to-be as a sanitarium. "California college girls are larger by most every dimension than are the college girls of Ma.s.sachusetts," wrote naturalist David Starr Jordan in an act of shameless boosterism. But it was William Mulholland's extraordinary irrigation scheme at the start of the twentieth century that finally put Los Angeles on the map. Greenery suddenly spread out to envelop the San Fernando Valley, and the city was repackaged as a year-round tourist destination. The succeeding tourist boom fueled helter-skelter residential growth from Santa Monica to Van Nuys and, ultimately, nourished the invention of a dream factory called Hollywood. which sold the southern part of the state-to-be as a sanitarium. "California college girls are larger by most every dimension than are the college girls of Ma.s.sachusetts," wrote naturalist David Starr Jordan in an act of shameless boosterism. But it was William Mulholland's extraordinary irrigation scheme at the start of the twentieth century that finally put Los Angeles on the map. Greenery suddenly spread out to envelop the San Fernando Valley, and the city was repackaged as a year-round tourist destination. The succeeding tourist boom fueled helter-skelter residential growth from Santa Monica to Van Nuys and, ultimately, nourished the invention of a dream factory called Hollywood.

Robert Redford was a first-generation Californian, born in Los Angeles as the citrus era ebbed and Hollywood hit flood tide. In the mid-1930s realities clashed as the Dust Bowl casualties came west, only to be stopped at the gates of the city by local police patrols while Angelenos hosted Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper. The Redfords were within the city limits, but poor; neighborhood friends hanged themselves in the Depression. Still, proximity to dream weaving, and the perfect climate, provided powerful distraction. Across the country, movie theaters saw their best business during the Depression years: such was the potency of the dream. For Redford, as for many of his childhood friends, the division between reality and fantasy was blurred. It wasn't unusual, if you were born within five miles of Sunset Boulevard, to see Charlie Chaplin or Betty Grable on your street, or at a store, or driving by. When Redford was a baby, the first person to hold him was the actor Robert Young, a cousin of his mother's; Cesar Romero carpooled him to school; John Steinbeck courted his future wife Elaine before his eyes in a neighbor's home; Redford played on the lawns of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives.

Redford remembers that for a child of five, with a stressed father working fourteen-hour s.h.i.+fts as a milkman, Los Angeles was a place of magic, fragrant with night-scented jasmine. "There was this ritual," he recalls. "At dusk I would cycle to the very edge of the sidewalk and roll the lead wheel onto the curbstone, balancing it, as if I were poised on a chasm; I was told I couldn't go into the street so I was pus.h.i.+ng it as far as I could. From there I'd wait for the sunset-and the air was so clear in L.A. at that time that those sunsets were amazing. I'd watch the dark come up from the east. And then, bit by bit, the stars appeared. It was mesmerizing just to contemplate it. The hugeness of this sky. The beauty. What could it mean? Where did it begin?" Redford loves this first childhood recollection: it represents for him the incessant curiosity that has ensured him a life of movement.

Los Angeles was a doddle from his birth until Pearl Harbor, but it was populated, he decided, with faces and personalities that didn't belong in the idyll of the endless summer. There was Grandma Sallie Hart, a faded southern belle with the troubles of the world etched in her beauty. And vaguely behind her was Grandpa Hart, a prairie pirate who lived "down south." Back east there was Grandpa Redford, a ghost whom Redford's father alternately grumbled and laughed about. And then the mysterious Grandmother Redford, who wrote to her son almost daily, with a tone of foreboding. Who were these people? Like Uncle David, his dad's bright-eyed, military-uniformed brother who blew in and blew out, none of them belonged to Los Angeles. In 1944, Redford started asking questions about his family origins; at Grandpa Redford's deathbed in 1964 he was still asking. "I never got answers," says Redford. "We were all just horse dealers, dope addicts and dropouts. None of my grandparents wanted questions and answers. But they were all storytellers. Who was my dad's dad? Just some failed musician, I was told. Who was my mom's dad? When I visited, he was more interested in teaching me to hunt than in talking about the past. To me, he was just a frontiersman. Only later did I make the connections to a big, rich story of several different cultures blending into one life in L.A."

The story that fed both branches of the family, the Redfords and the Harts, was one of rebels and outcasts. The factions arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and clung to the East Coast and the ideals of pluralism and liberal democracy that had been established there. Freedom was the quest of both families. By the late fourteenth century the Redfords, Saxon in origin, had split into branches centered in Berks.h.i.+re and Manchester. Prominent in the Berks.h.i.+re branch was Henry Redford, a merchant who became Speaker of the House of Commons. He was to be the last celebrated Redford for six hundred years. The other branch, predominantly Catholics, fared less well in Manchester, striving to establish themselves as farmers just as the Church of England Tudors laid siege on Catholic power. Through the 1600s the Catholic Redfords lost their lands, intermarried with the Scots and became reformist Presbyterians at war with the Crown. In 1849, Presbyterian Elisha Redford married Irish Catholic Mary-Ann McCreery in Manchester Cathedral and signed his occupation as "unemployed spinner," meaning a garment industry worker. Other Redfords had already made the journey to Ma.s.sachusetts under the Puritan flag, and apparently seeking to improve their lot, Elisha and his bride sailed for New York in the summer of 1849. Elisha and Mary-Ann immediately settled in the seaport trading town of Stonington, Connecticut, on the point of land that juts into Little Narragansett Bay. Elisha was a "jickey," the name ascribed to the many Englishmen who came every year to labor at the loom, and he worked hard in constant employment, striving to improve his family in a house shared with two other families. In 1851 the first of the American Redfords arrived when Mary-Ann gave birth to Charles, Redford's great-grandfather. Charles was educated to grade school level, and in adolescence opted to work as a barber in the heart of Pawcatuck, a census-designated section of Stonington then known for its poverty. As a teenager, Charles quickly showed a flair for entertainment and formed a singing quartet to entertain customers. He took up the mandolin, the musical rage of the time, and was suddenly in demand for local recitals. By the 1870s, his virtuosity had seduced a Scots Episcopalian girl from Aberdeen, Jane Archie, ten years his junior, who became his wife. They settled not far from his parents, who, though no more than modestly secure, financially helped Charles to leave Pawcatuck and invest in a barbershop partners.h.i.+p, Hepworth and Redford, across the river in upmarket Westerly.

Charles and Jane's first child, Charles Elijah, born in December 1880, would become Robert Redford's grandfather. Twin sisters, Grace and Claribel, followed. The family was close-knit and restive. The girls were intelligent, and Charles Elijah, even before his teens, evinced a musical skill that surpa.s.sed his father's. He mastered cello, ba.s.s and piano, but his instrument of choice was the violin, on which, at twelve, he excelled.

By century's end, Elisha was not much better off. He was still in a clapboard house in Stonington, still laboring as a spinner. If he dreamed of a better life for his children, there must have been fulfillment in his son Charles's joy with his barbershop and his music. Charles's children, too, seemed intent on moving up. Like his father, Charles Elijah longed for a career in music. And the sisters Grace and Claribel had brains to burn. The only shadow on Elisha's vision of their future was the apparent rebelliousness his grandchildren displayed. Charles Elijah wanted faraway sh.o.r.es, and though the girls planned on solid careers in education, they, too, were restless and difficult. In Claribel he found an obstinate, politically minded reactionary, and in Grace a freethinker who embraced communism.

Robert Redford's early life was dominated by women. They were not the women of New England, but women of the West. His mother, Martha Hart Redford, was, he says, the center of his universe. She taught him to drive when he was eight, taught him to draw, to role-play in games. She connected him with the past, introducing him to Native Americans on Navajo reservations in Arizona and to Yosemite. These conjunctions came naturally to her, because she was the stuff of the West, descended from Texans who were, in spirit, the polar opposite of the Redfords. A century before, the Harts and Greens of the maternal family line lived a frontier life along the Mississippi Valley, religiously random, indulgent, drifting. The Harts were Galway-Irish, the Greens Scots-Irish, and both families came to America through the southern colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. The Harts followed the frontier to Missouri; the Greens followed the money to Boston. While the Harts drifted, the Greens built one of the first large-scale printing presses in Boston in 1790. When a similarly ambitious undertaking in Arkansas failed, George Green set out with his family by wagon train in the late 1700s to settle lands near Austin, Texas. Along with three partners, he founded a new town called San Marcos. In no time George, a slave owner, had established mining interests and a loan company. His son, Edwin Jeremiah, known to all as Ed, was twelve when they set up in Texas. By the age of twenty he had expanded the family's businesses into every variety of service provision for miners across the region. He also built Green's Anglican Church next door to the family bank. During his service in the Confederate army, young Ed's wife died and he married her sister, Eliza Jane, who bore him six children, including Eugene, Robert Redford's maternal great-grandfather. As San Marcos's fortunes grew during Reconstruction, Ed became a legendary figure, a t.i.tan of the local business world. Among his social circle was another celebrated exConfederate officer, Zachariah P. Bugg, the sheriff of a Tennessee towns.h.i.+p. Zach's daughter Mattie married Eugene in 1891. Out of this union came Sallie Pate Green, Robert Redford's grandmother.

Sallie Pate's childhood was one of privilege and tragedy. Eugene Green followed his father into mining and banking, but died suddenly at twenty, when his daughter was just months old. Shortly after, his teenage widow, Mattie, died of typhoid. Ed became de facto father to Sallie and rechristened her Mattie, in memory of her mother. She was the apple of his eye. In 1896, when Sallie was three, Ed's wife pa.s.sed away. Shortly afterward he married Alice Young Bohan, a recently widowed sister of his former wives. Alice was affectionate but not maternal, and Ed was sixty-five; it was Sallie's good fortune that the black wet nurse, Nicey, a Green household fixture since her own childhood, became an affectionate subst.i.tute mother.

In 1909, as Sallie turned sixteen, America's fascination with the new automotive culture, started ten years before by Henry Ford, was peaking. That fall, Sallie attended a county fair advertising a race for custom roadsters, one of dozens held across the country. The race was won by the Bluebird, the handiwork of a shoe salesman turned inventor/mechanic, recently arrived from El Paso, named Tot Hart. Having won the attention of Sallie and the rest of the Green family, he was invited by them to dinner.

Archibald "Tot" Hart was, like the Greens, of a western cut. His father, John Gabriel, was a traveling salesman from Spotsylvania, Virginia, who married an Ohioan, Ida Woodruff, in Missouri in 1885. In 1897, when Tot was eight, his father succ.u.mbed to cirrhosis, dying at the side of the road, and two years later his mother lay on her deathbed, urging her sons to pledges of temperance. Foster homes were found for Tot and his brother. Tot was small, but he had the energy of a terrier and liked the notion of risk. As with his father before him, the frontier beckoned. He headed south with nothing but the clothes he walked in, he later told Redford.

In the years that followed, Tot learned the survival skills he would ultimately pa.s.s on to Robert Redford. "He was a modern mountain man," Redford recalls. "He was a child when he hit the road, but it was do or die. He took work wherever he could find it, and learned to live off the land, hunting small game and harvesting berries. He loved the outdoors, but he also possessed a great gift with mechanical devices. Because he had to, he learned to build. He could build anything: furniture, boats, guns, even automobiles from scratch. He followed fifty trades, whatever paid for a crust of bread."

Tot fell for Sallie. It was the unlikeliest of marriages. Tot was dwarfish beside the mannequin figure of Sallie. His coloring was mousy and weather-beaten; hers, a pampered tan. He had no education; she had good schooling behind her. He was quiet; she was talkative, vain, sociable. But their common bond was ambition. Surviving on the edge, Tot had become foxy and tenacious. Years of traveling and scheming had honed his ambition: to build houses and cities on the edge of the frontier. The Greens and their connections afforded him a supreme opportunity. Sallie understood this. Rooted in Texas after their 1913 marriage, Tot began to build. With Ed's help, Tot constructed a Prairie-style home on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Austin at Travis Heights that became the blueprint for a community of homes by the lake built over the next ten years.

On April 12, 1914, Sallie gave birth to their only child, Martha, and their fortunes seemed secure. But almost immediately, through bad partners.h.i.+ps and failing health, Ed Green's empire began to slide. The properties Tot labored over failed to sell. Sallie began to drink. By the 1920s she was all but incapacitated as an alcoholic, and Tot was seeking comfort in the company of other women. Ed Green's death in 1924 devastated Sallie, but it was nothing compared with the humiliation of Tot's relations.h.i.+p with Mary P. Robinson, a well-heeled neighbor who flaunted their affair.

In the midst of her alcoholic despair Sallie experienced a religious conversion. "The doctor said, 'That's it, there's nothing anyone can do for her,'" Redford recalls his mother telling him. "Then, at the last minute, someone recommended this Christian Science woman doctor down the street who could work miracles. This woman was summoned, and gave Sallie the literature that changed her world. It was like a light switch. Sallie got out of bed, stopped drinking and swore never to touch liquor again, and she never did."

After six months' separation, Tot and Sallie were divorced in June 1928. In search of a new beginning, Sallie daringly decided on the faraway pastures of California, where some cousins lived. Armed with telephone numbers and a few hundred dollars from the settlement, Sallie and thirteen-year-old Martha headed west.

The Redfords, meanwhile, had also begun the move west. Ten years before, Elisha's granddaughter Grace, disenchanted with the increasingly anarchist movement headed by her hero Emma Goldman, landed a teaching post in Los Angeles, leaving her sister teaching in the dull confines of a ramshackle school in the heart of the most impoverished area. Elisha was dead by then, but the fabric of security he had sought to weave was rapidly coming undone. Charles had become a deadbeat, preferring his music, or a day at the bar, to barbering. Eventually he would become an insurance salesman. Charles Elijah had drifted into vaudeville. Redford remembers Charles Elijah as "Tiger," a wry moniker derived from his sandy complexion and grumbling persona. They grew close late in Tiger's life, and Redford viewed the old man as a stubborn introvert whose emotions never surfaced. For Tiger, Redford believes, vaudeville was not an indulgence, but an escape to a rosier life. Business and industry had variables, but given its scope, vaudeville seemed a sure thing. All across the East, theaters were flouris.h.i.+ng. Composers, lyricists and music publishers were rolling in dough. Tin Pan Alley was a boomtown, and the talent-packaging houses of William Morris, Klaw and Erlanger and Keith-Albee could hardly keep pace with audience demand. Tiger's violin skills were such that a wealthy Westerly patron had offered him sponsors.h.i.+p for the Conservatoire in Vienna, but vaudeville seemed to him like the better bet. "I have a picture in my head," says Redford, "of the terrible drabness of life for immigrants from Europe, the financial struggles, the political and religious tensions. And then vaudeville comes to town in the painted tent. Suddenly there are people with greasepaint faces and funny hats. Suddenly there is laughter! I have an image of Tiger on his knees, lifting the edge of some circus tarpaulin, peeping into a happier world. No more struggle. No more stress. Freedom!" Tiger easily found a place in the orchestral pits of the B. F. Keith circuit, where he earned $7.50 a week in 1910, the year the Marx Brothers, then billed as the Marks Brothers, set forth on the same circuit.

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 a.s.sumed 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 relations.h.i.+p with an Italian bargirl that caused controversy in the neighborhood and embarra.s.sment 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 friends.h.i.+p." 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 b.u.t.terfly. 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 dealers.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionate commitment to both mother and daughter, Sallie had met Nelson Bengston, a man who exuded an aura of calm and reserve, the apparent ant.i.thesis 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 sc.r.a.pbooks, 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 Sh.e.l.ley and her own poetry, bright as Pollyanna. Obviously she had with stood adversity well, surviving economic hards.h.i.+p, 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 inst.i.tution 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 subst.i.tutes. 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 Wils.h.i.+re 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 embarra.s.sment 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 college quarterly, The Samojac. 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. 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 relations.h.i.+p: "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 sc.r.a.pbook beside the playbill for Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, which they had seen that summer. 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 h.e.l.l 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 rea.s.suring 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 a.s.sociated 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. Offsh.o.r.e 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+ft. 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 relations.h.i.+p 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-cla.s.s status," says Marcella Scott. "He was dominant by nature. Unfortunately, she was also a very a.s.sertive 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."

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. 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 Ca.s.sidy, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, most of all Disney. "Those Sat.u.r.day matinees elevated everything. They gave us distraction and joyfulness. But they were also a shared interest, a glue that united us." "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 Ca.s.sidy, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, most of all Disney. "Those Sat.u.r.day 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 sw.a.n.ky 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 cla.s.s. After several similar incidents two two hall monitors were a.s.signed to keep an eye on him. He ran away three times in all. Finally they had to call his father off his milk route. hall monitors were a.s.signed 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 cla.s.smates 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.