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By Root 823 0

the difficulties of his father’s position. David had had a stable home life, careful parenting, the good looks, the academic results, the musical skills, the athletic skills, the humor, now the uniform. Charlie had been abruptly uprooted in his teens and exiled to L.A. Poverty always shadowed him, even in his happy relationship with Martha. Time and circumstances seemed always against him. Even when he tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, he was rejected because of his bad back. “He was devastated,” said George Menard, who accompanied him to the recruitment center. “But in some ways, the bad back was a kindness. He was a patriot, whose hero was Nathan Hale, but he was also a pacifist. The idea of open conflict, of having to kill someone, would literally have destroyed Charlie. He was a very soft, gentle soul.” While David fought the war, Charlie graduated to a desk job at the El Segundo refinery offices of Standard Oil.

Redford saw his father bend under the pressures of survival. To his credit, his dedication was to improving his family’s lot, but the toll was high. “He was constantly on edge. He could cuss the house down when the mood took him. Standard Oil was the compromise, the moment he chose his course, and it was my belief that he took the wrong road. At the time, the great middle-class pressure was to become ‘the organization man’ and he settled for that. He missed his niche. From his junior college days he had a talent for sportswriting. The evidence was in his letters, till the end of his life. He was a terrific storyteller, with an acerbic wit that shone through. I felt resentment toward him for many years: that he’d discouraged me, suppressed my individualism. But that, I now feel, was my misunderstanding. My father made sacrifices for us.”

At Brentwood, meanwhile, Redford continued his hyperactive ways. Nothing calmed him, but one teacher’s passionate readings from Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie finally got him interested in books. “It was soothing,” says Redford. “Like a drug.” Charlie had started a midweek routine of taking the family to the Santa Monica Public Library, an alternative to movie nights. “Something strange happened to me,” Redford recalls. “I was magnetized to the mythology section. It was suddenly the be-all of my world. I couldn’t wait for Wednesdays, to go through the doors of that library. My parents would turn left for the adult section, and I’d make straight for Perseus, Zeus and The Odyssey. Even when I couldn’t really read, I’d pick out a word, ‘Perseus,’ and conjure the story from the illustrations. These monsters and myths became living realities. None of my friends were interested in ancient myth, and I often wondered why. I think my interest originated with the way information was handed down to me as a small boy. It came encoded. And the big themes of mythology decoded it and made sense of a lot I didn’t otherwise understand.” The literary precocity also made Redford open to whimsy: “Blame my dad. My mom was the games player in the living room, but Dad was the bedtime-story teller. Sometimes he’d read to me; more often he’d tell a tale out of thin air. One night he gave me the history of the Redford clan, tracing it back to Ireland and Scotland and demonstrating how I was related to Robin Hood.” Redford’s contribution to the next day’s show-and-tell was the announcement that he was Robin Hood’s cousin.

Betty Webb saw Bobby Redford as a loner. They attended the same Christian Science church in Beverly Hills. She was keen on him. “It was the attraction of the enigma, no doubt. There was also that crazy competitiveness. He just could not lose! Maybe his uncle David was influential—this great, distinguished winner!—but his dad pushed him very hard athletically. As a consequence, he was really good at track, and he became known as a very able softball player. Martha played some tennis, so he excelled at tennis, too. I tried to keep up with all this. We had a lot more in common than anyone else, so I was way out front in the dating stakes.” Redford and Betty’s first date