Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [10]
On a hot spring Sunday in 1928, fourteen-year-old George Menard, a transplanted Chicagoan, grew bored with morning services at the Fourth Street Christian Science Church in Santa Monica and sneaked out. He spotted a parked Model T on fire, grabbed a garden hose, lifted the hood and doused the engine. “A couple of minutes later,” remembered Menard, “church let out and this dark apparition sailed toward me, about thirteen or fourteen years old, with an older lady by her side. It was their automobile I’d rescued, and they were grateful and so began a great friendship.” The pretty girl that Menard admired was Martha Hart, and the woman was her mother, Sallie, just arrived from Texas. Martha had enrolled at University High School in West Los Angeles. Menard’s sister Poofie had enrolled at the same school and would shortly become Martha’s best school friend. George, operating in a different social circle, would coincidentally become best friends with a new arrival from the East Coast named Charlie Redford, who also attended Uni High. “But at that moment I wasn’t thinking what a great match she’d make for someone else,” said Menard. “I was thinking I’d like her for myself.”
In later years, Redford learned from his mother about her smooth transition into Californian life. “When Texas came to California, it was a big deal,” he says. “Sallie had renewed her health, and she was determined to reinvent herself as a social butterfly. My mother was naturally fun loving and extroverted, so they were on the right wavelength and in the right place.” Sallie contacted her cousins, the Wards and the Giesens—old San Marcos settler families—who were well-heeled regulars in the society columns. Sallie’s uncle Phil, a transplanted Chicagoan who had the Packard dealership in Beverly Hills, became a surrogate father to Martha. Phil’s wife, Marge, was the sister of up-and-coming Hollywood actor Robert Young.
Though Tot sent money and maintained a strangely passionate commitment to both mother and daughter, Sallie had met Nelson Bengston, a man who exuded an aura of calm and reserve, the apparent antithesis of Tot. Bengston had turned from defense work to real estate during the Depression, but he was, says Robert Redford, a frustrated artist who was also a recovering alcoholic. The couple met at the Christian Science church: a shared belief in the curative power of religion bonded them, and, says Redford, their harmonious relationship allowed Martha’s confidence to grow.
At Uni High, Martha thrived. She joined the glee club, the drama society, the writers’ club. Judging by her school reports and the memories of those who knew her, she didn’t so much rise to popularity as to reverence. She had the face and figure of a movie star and reminded people of Gene Tierney. She loved poetry and singing. She kept scrupulous scrapbooks, which reveal page after page of theatrical cartoons, jokey clippings about Will Rogers, lists of her many favorite popular songs (“Sweetheart Darling,” “Secondhand Store,” “Cabin in the Pines”), quotes from Keats and Shelley and her own poetry, bright as Pollyanna. Obviously she had with stood adversity well, surviving economic hardship, the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and relocation. She remained attached to her father, but the strength of her mother seemed her greatest advantage. She laughed her way, say friends, through the Depression.
After high school graduation, Martha enrolled at Santa Monica Junior College, a transitional education institution hugely popular with well-off Angelenos. Her diaries show her popularity: boys were attracted to her like flies. Her first teenage love had been Zachary Scott, a fellow Texan who’d headed to England as she left for Los Angeles and was now making headway in regional theater. There was no shortage of substitutes. George Menard recalled that “most boys chased Martha from the day she arrived in L.A.” But