Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [13]
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 massive 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 shift. 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 relationship 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-class status,” says Marcella Scott. “He was dominant by nature. Unfortunately, she was also a very assertive 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