Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [21]
Redford quickly stormed the TNTs. He had worked hard to become a great dancer—“waltz, foxtrot, samba, Charleston, the lot”—at the local hot spot, the Cotillion on Santa Monica Pier, and, says Betty Webb, who continued to be his official “date,” seemed suddenly widely sought after by the girls. “He was the funniest person alive,” says Kitty, “not in joke telling, but in his mannerisms. He was the kind of kid who’d walk down the street and make a major drama of it, dodging behind trees, vanishing, reappearing, doing a flip like Buster Keaton. The key to his attractiveness was his athleticism. He moved like a dancer.” Janna and Sheila, Kitty’s sisters, were equally attracted to him.
Redford’s success with the girls elicited jealousy from his male peers, but that scarcely discouraged him. Steve Bernhardt, the son of a movie director, saw Redford as strategically inventive: “He chose his allegiances carefully. For example, he courted Jill Schary, who was the daughter of the MGM chief, Dore Schary. He also hung out with Bill Chertok, whose father coproduced The Lone Ranger for ABC. These guys had great properties. Schary had a mansion in Beverly Glen, and the Chertoks a terrific weekend retreat at Shelter Cove, in Lake Arrowhead, with a Chris-Craft, butlers and maids.” Redford agrees he was strategic, but so was everyone else, says Jan Holman, another of the TNT blondes who shared summer outings to Lake Arrowhead with Redford: “He was a gentleman. I understood why the guys were jealous of him, because he was naturally adept. He had a physicality that was unusual, even among healthy, outdoorsy boys. Stripped to the waist, he was a beautiful specimen, like some Scandinavian god, with a fine blond down across his body.”
Redford concentrated on the new blooming romance with Kitty that displaced Betty. “He was very generous as a boyfriend, always attentive,” says Kitty, who still has the rolled gold charm bracelet he gave her that first Christmas. “I felt I saw things in Bobby that other people missed. His writing, when he wrote to me, was advanced beyond his years. His artwork was also exceptional. I think the boys were envious of him with good cause.”
Redford adored Kitty but was also attracted to Sheila, with whom he formed a close and open friendship. “You can oversubscribe to childhood angst, but Bobby was in a real turmoil,” says Sheila. “Much of it had to do with heritage. He was a first-generation Angeleno, remember, and he was unsure of his place in the world. There was poverty in his background, and a kind of taunting wealth. He really didn’t understand his background at all, and he was like a kid pressing his nose against the windowpane of other people’s lives, wondering, What’s going on in there?”
Redford also developed a good friendship with Carol Rossen. Her father, Robert Rossen, was a Warner Bros. screenwriter turned director. The previous year, HUAC had forced Rossen to renounce his Communist Party membership, and though he continued to work, he also continued to host political parties with blacklisted writers like Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz. Carol fancied Bobby Redford, too: “In my case, we had in common a curiosity about the real world, though we found it hard to talk openly about it because we were brought up in silence. Neither Communism nor Jewishness was openly discussed in my home, and it bothered me. I was Jewish, but my only understanding of Judaism came in the casual observance of Passover and Hanukkah we shared with my grandmother. That seemed like a terrible waste of heritage, and some part of me was in rebellion to this imposition. Bobby and I were joined, because we were on a private quest to get out of this phony world and into the sunlight.”
Carol hid her Jewishness. She fit in with the Bundy set, she says, because she was redheaded, desirable and smart, with creativity and money in her background. “The scene was very racist, very WASPy and extremely politically right-wing,