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often driving Bobby and Waverly to Brentwood Grammar. Though Waverly was just a year older, Redford relished the idea of the “mature” girlfriend. “She was constantly teasing me, and we played all those mischievous hide-and-seek games in that big house with minimum chaperonage, testing each other’s boundaries.” And then one day, playing on the landing, the two kids heard strange noises downstairs. “We peered over the banister and saw what was going on. It was Elaine, her mom, making love with a stranger. I didn’t know who he was, but later on he became a player on the family scene. He started coming around a lot more. He started to carpool us. I didn’t realize I was witnessing the end of Zach—who we later learned was a closet homosexual—and the start of Elaine’s big relationship with John Steinbeck.”

In the spring of 1946, Charlie’s labors paid off in the joint purchase with Nelson and Sallie of a substantial duplex on Homedale Avenue, across Sepulveda from Brentwood. It was a marginal but significant move upward. Today, the area has a Beverly Hills character, but in the forties, before the construction of the San Diego Freeway, Homedale sat in a vast, bland development, devoid of trees, partly designed by Nelson as cheap housing for returning GIs. Still, Charlie and Martha had salvaged Bobby from the ethnic battlefield of Sawtelle. “I didn’t want to leave,” says Redford. “The good feeling in the street was dead, but I still felt I belonged in that multicultural setting.” Facing total immersion in the snazzy Brentwood set, Redford was, he says, depressed: “I preferred that old world.”

Late the following spring Redford woke one day with his eyelids encrusted and his limbs dead. He couldn’t move. No one told him for weeks, but he had polio. “The previous day was excruciatingly hot,” he says. “I had been down at the beach, in the ocean on a paddleboat with a friend. There was an allotted area to pedal in near Santa Monica Pier, but given my restlessness, I was way past confinement. I pedaled out too far and got dehydrated. I barely made it back to shore. I became ill, and then polio was diagnosed.”

Redford remembers the worries about mortality and the guilt he felt at overdoing things. “I was in terrible discomfort, physically and mentally. When I woke every day, Mom sat by the bed with wet cloths and swabbed my eyes to open them. She kept me going. When I could sit up, I drew. I owe that mostly to my junior school art teacher, Miss Huff. She believed I had an artist inside me, and she had begun to encourage me. That was the branch I reached out for.” By August he could walk again. Soon afterward Martha, who had been pregnant with twins, lost the children shortly after birth. Now Martha clung closer to her only child. As a treat as they both recovered, she organized a two-day campout at Yosemite Valley. “It stands as a moment of real awakening in my life, and it seems magical now,” says Redford. “We’d been driving for hours, leaving the tract houses and orange groves, and suddenly we were in the High Sierras inside a womblike tunnel, maybe a mile long, unlike anything I’d ever encountered. When we came out the other side, onto Glacier Point Road, there it lay before me: El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, Half Dome, wilderness. I’d seen a lot of America as a kid, but nothing on this scale of sheer majesty.”

Redford has said that, despite the tedium of schooling, the loss of David, the loss of his siblings and his father’s demands, he loved his childhood. It was all due to Martha. “I owed everything to my mother for opening me up to the willingness to experience. When I went through that tunnel and first laid eyes on Half Dome and the view from Glacier Point, I remember thinking: I have to be part of this.”

At twelve, Redford transferred to Emerson Junior High School in Westwood. There he came to fancy Kathleen “Kitty” Andrews, the dark-blond daughter of a well-to-do furniture manufacturer whose home on Bundy Drive was the hub of Emerson social life. They had briefly known each other at Brentwood. Now Kitty stood tall among the