Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [15]
Perhaps, as director Alan Pakula believed, it was Redford’s early cross-country travels and the sharp contrasts of culture he experienced that seeded his restlessness. At Brentwood, conformity was grudging, his motion constant. “He wasn’t an exceptional-looking kid,” says his classmate Tissie Keissig, “but he was a natural class leader because he had a go-go-go that grabbed your attention.” While his grades lapsed, he became a fanatical athletic competitor. “I was the undisputed track champion,” says Betty Webb, another classmate, “and then suddenly I noticed this cute, redheaded, freckle-face kid who came out of nowhere fixed on the idea of beating me at everything. The next couple of years were a tussle between Bobby and me, trying to outdo each other at track.” Betty liked him “because he was a little arrogant, and ferocious in pursuit of whatever interested him. Kids like that kind of confidence.”
The arrogance was a swaggering emulation of the new heroes in his life, of Tot and especially Charlie’s brother, David, who was in the army, stationed at Fort Leavenworth, and visiting often. Three and a half years younger than Charlie, David excelled at sports in high school, receiving an offer to play baseball in the St. Louis Browns organization. He enrolled at Brown instead, where his aptitude for languages won him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. David enlisted in the military when the war began. Studying accountancy part-time at the University of Southern California and exhausted by his day job, Charlie had become bookish and subdued. David, by contrast, retained the smiling, generous flamboyance that made him instantly likable to all who met him. Bobby regarded him as a god.
David taught Bobby the rules of baseball and elaborated the parlor games Martha devised. He often agitated Charlie with his swagger, but he was also a bonding force within the family. “It was really only David who got Dad out of his shell,” says Redford. “The uniform, for example, naturally inspired all sorts of war games. In my mind I can see David and Dad like kids, rolling over the furniture, competing with each other to entertain me with my favorite shooting games. I loved to do the big dying thing, and when I was ‘killed,’ it was the highest drama. I took an hour to lie down. Those rare moments of Dad’s relaxation, when he would let his hair down long enough to have a laugh, are the ones that stick.”
Sometimes, though, David pushed Charlie over the edge. Redford remembers David accompanying his parents to a live radio broadcast in the early forties. Bobby sat at home with Sallie, listening in awe as David answered a quiz question to win the top prize of a not-insubstantial $50. There were whoops of delight in the house as young Bobby awaited his hero’s return. An hour later, as Bobby lay in bed, doors were suddenly slamming and anger swept the house. Charlie, it seemed, had thrown David out. David was in the garage, from where Bobby could hear him playing a trombone. David had insisted on buying the trombone on the spot with the $50. “Dad called that outrageous squandering,” says Redford. “Everyone was short of money—and then this extravagance!”
Redford’s bond with David was in some ways divisive. Looking back, Redford recognizes