Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [14]
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 swanky 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 class. After several similar incidents two hall monitors were assigned 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 classmates 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. I was unimpressed by show. I was instead drawn by humor or originality of any kind.” His advantage, clearly, was that he had already been exposed to a wide range of people from varying social standing because of his parents’ backgrounds.
Martha had taken her son to visit Tot in Texas for the first time the previous summer. She took the wheel of the ’36 family coupe and drove all the way, stopping briefly at Gallup, New Mexico, where Redford first caught sight of Navajos and Zunis on the reservation. By the time he arrived at Tot’s impressive pile on the shore of Lake Austin, he was living a storybook.
Tot, to his delight, was as active and daring as any Roy Rogers. Under cathedral skies, in the dense forests around the lake, the precocious five-year-old was handed fishing rod and gun and initiated into the ways of the wilderness. The bizarre exposure of so small a child to guns and hunting seemed of little account to Martha or Tot, but Redford interprets this as a throwback to old southern values. Tot’s impact was profound, especially given Charlie’s absences: “He was the manifestation of everything I’d heard about frontiersmen-heroes multiplied a thousand times,” Redford recalls. “The house was spacious and magnificent, and he’d built it with his own hands. He knew the names of every bird, fish and snake and could hunt for his own dinner every day.” Tot adored his grandson, bounced him on his knee for cowboy sing-alongs, slung him on his back for the hunt and dumped him into the freezing waters of Barton Springs to learn to swim, exactly as he’d taught Martha when she was a baby. Redford loved Tot, and the gentle paternalism of Tot’s Mexican “man,” Gil Husauras, who shared Hispanic cusses with him, like the neighbors on Tennessee Street.
Six months later Charlie introduced his son to the East Coast. The experience, by contrast, was funereal. New London, Connecticut, where Tiger had moved, was gray skied. “On Spring Street where my grandparents lived the driveway was choked with weeds,” says Redford. “There was my grandmother Lena, seated alone in the angled front window of a gray house, incapacitated by arthritis, propped in pillows, radiating an atmosphere of gloom.” Charlie was rigid with anxiety, returning from exile. Lena screamed when she saw him. There was no open affection, only propriety. Redford recalls sitting nervously in