Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [19]
It also exacerbated a growing resentment of “fitting in.” Standard Oil was expanding, and Charlie’s income improved. There was, marginally, more time for the social conventions, for the soirées and card games and Sunday brunches Sallie and Martha so loved. Redford balked. “Mom made every effort to turn me into a version of Dad,” he remembers. “He had the Irish trait of dressing up to cover his poverty, so an attempt was made to smarten me. Dad was always perfectly groomed, with neat hair, a polished face and the smell of Old Spice. Mom tried a kind of axle grease called Waveset in my hair to control the cowlicks, but still it stood up in fifty directions. She starched my shirts every week, put me in stiff collars. I rebelled. I’d get to the end of the street, and I would strip off my shirt, throw it on the ground and stomp the starch out of it.”
The rebellion against parental control intensified. At every juncture, it seemed, Bobby clashed with his father. It began with an argument about music. Redford felt—still feels—that he had music in him. Uncle David’s stories of playing one night with Count Basie thrilled him. He loved to hear his parents sing along to Woody Herman and Bing Crosby on the radio. He, too, loved to sing. When a door-to-door guitar tutor offered cheap lessons, he jumped at it. Charlie, remembering his own father’s failure as a musician, would not hear of music studies. Redford was furious.
They clashed about sports, too. Spurred by the athleticism of girls like Betty, Redford had made it up to a good American Legion junior team sponsored by Huntington, a sporting goods company. He also played tennis for his school and swam competitively at the Bantam Club on San Vincente. But problems arose when Bobby failed to meet Charlie’s expectations. “I hated it when my parents came to see me play because Dad was always critical,” says Redford. “I was never the best player, but I had stamina, I hung in. The trouble was, even when I was taking the medals for tennis and swimming, it was never good enough for him. It was an unfixable situation, because I discovered that it wasn’t me he was assessing, but himself. Bit by bit I learned that he had been a great ballplayer, but he never had the chance to develop it. That frustration burned a hole inside him.”
Redford had other things to keep him busy—like sex. “I was impatient,” he says. “I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted it, as much as I could get.” Shopping with his mother in Westwood one day, he was surprised when a handsome, unshaven man in Bermuda shorts grabbed her in his arms. “She called out ‘Zach!’ with a great gush of passion. I had no idea this was Zachary Scott, the actor, nor that my mother and he had had a close friendship, or a love affair, back in Texas. I went home and blurted it to Dad: ‘Hey, Dad. Mom met up with Zach Scott!’ It bent him out of shape.” Scott, Redford learned, was married, with a daughter called Waverly who also attended Brentwood Grammar, in the class ahead of his. Over the next months, despite Charlie’s reservations, Martha befriended Zach’s wife, Elaine, and Waverly became the object of Bobby’s pubescent fantasies. “I loved the exotic world the Scotts lived in,” says Redford. “This was another frontier for me, this great, elegant house with a gilded spiral staircase in the Hollywood Hills. This was a mythical palace compared with Sawtelle. In our house you just had to open the front door to walk into your neighbors’ lives. The Scotts’ rooms were bigger than our house.”
Zachary Scott became part of the school-day carpool,