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contrast between him and my mother. The ‘Redford trait’ was a kind of darkness. Life was all trials and troubles. Mom was the opposite. She was positive. She would tell it like it is, but she was also the one who kept the tooth fairy and Santa alive. Every Christmas she’d get cotton wool and lay it along the windowsills to make Californian snow. Then she’d stand outside my bedroom door shaking sleigh bells, whispering, ‘Here he comes!’ But on Christmas morning Dad would say, ‘Santa? There’s no darn Santa. Have you any idea how much sweat it takes to earn those toys?’ He blew it for me with the cold facts. But when it came to the death of David, when I was old enough to understand, there was this terrible conspiracy of silence. It was as if it didn’t happen. My grandmother Sallie just said, ‘He’s passed,’ without the slightest elaboration. I said, ‘Passed? What the hell does that mean?’ But I got no answers. And Dad drew up the bridge, refused to talk at all. So here was this gap: honest, tenacious people with a gaping hole where the real truth was. But I wanted the full picture.”

In the face of David’s mysterious death, the contradictions of religion and spirituality irritated Redford. There was no value at all, he felt, in vague, otherwordly promises. “I was precocious in that regard. Something broke in me. Sallie would give me the lectures about the peace to come and my guarantee of salvation, and my mom would give me some, a little less convincingly. But I didn’t buy into it. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God or Spirit, but Christian Science seemed an excuse for Republicans to get together, and my father’s inclination toward Catholicism didn’t do it for me, either. When Uncle David died, I started questioning institutional thinking. I couldn’t have expressed that then, obviously. I was a kid, but a process started that has never stopped.”

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Krazy in Brentwood

Robert Redford’s parents were apolitical in the tradition of their upbringing, but they fully understood the changes the war wrought. Charlie particularly was wary of national paranoia, reflected in the public tolerance for witch hunts against Japanese and Jews, and the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 as an anti-Nazi program. In his storytelling Charlie attempted to convey to his son that the kind of American homogeneity that was being extolled was as unsavory as Aryanism. It flew in the face of decency and betrayed the pluralist foundations on which American greatness was built.

As a boy of ten Redford was oblivious to the big picture, but he witnessed the changes on Tennessee Street as the war ended. Overnight, congenial neighborliness was gone and identity clashes accelerated. Previously marginalized groups whose members fought in the war wanted their fair share back home. Local grievances became national debates. “But all I knew was I lost friends,” says Redford. “There was no longer the ease with my Mexican buddies. It was ‘us and them.’ ”

A Hispanic gang, the Pachucks, began to terrorize the environs. Redford got punched around because he was small. “There was a kid called Felix who picked on me, probably because I went to a good school, I was good at track and popular with the girls, and he beat up on me. I toughened up fast, borrowing from Tot’s philosophy, which was, ‘Be ready to look out for yourself.’ ” At one point, Redford was bullied onto a rooftop and prompted to jump to prove his manhood. He did, and almost killed himself. “Facing down fears hit home early, and I attribute my survival to my mother and Tot. You have two choices, it seemed to me. You can be led by your fears, or you can overcome them. I chose Tot’s way.”

The changes were everywhere, even in the landscape. Douglas aircraft manufacturing had boomed during the war, bringing copious employment and thousands of newcomers to West Los Angeles. Now the GI Bill launched a new building drive. Sallie’s new husband, the real estate agent Nelson Bengston, was suddenly busier than ever, working the markets of the new, vast acreages of