Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [22]
Redford, however, was. With increasing maturity came unlimited confidence; with an increasing sense of being boxed in came recklessness. He started spending time with a wilder group and organizing exploratory midnight rituals. “I’d get up in the small hours,” Redford recalls, “sneak out my bedroom window, follow the road past the Veterans Hospital and assemble the team, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Then we’d set out to investigate the darkest recesses of the neighborhood by night.” He climbed fences to swim in neighbors’ pools. He “borrowed” beer from friends’ unattended storerooms. Dodging the late-night police patrols electrified proceedings. Gradually the stakes grew higher: breaking and entering and annexing vacated properties for all-night drinking sessions became the main game.
Redford’s main coconspirator was Bill Coomber. To Dave Stein, a mutual acquaintance, Coomber was the force that released the sleeping tiger in Redford. “It was waiting to happen,” recalls Stein. “Bob was a very repressed individual. Bill gave vent to the anger in him. Bill wasn’t so much Bob’s passport to escape the stuffiness of the Brentwood set as his tutor in crime. Bill had the kind of privileges the Andrews girls had. The girls didn’t question their privileges. Bill did. He questioned by abusing them, by testing their limits: he kicked back. There was a real element of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bob and Bill. For a time they were criminals. Lovable, but criminals.”
For Redford, though, Coomber was a liberator. “My relationship with Bill was, literally, life sustaining,” says Redford. “He became like the brother I didn’t have.”
Coomber remembers their first meeting, at Emerson. They talked, and Redford invited Coomber to the UCLA sports field for an informal Saturday football game. “Bill was a mixer,” says Redford, “a very relaxed and loud personality with no inhibitions—and I wanted that for myself.”
Like Redford, Coomber had no siblings. The center of his life was his mother, Helen Brady Coomber, a three-time divorcée with independent wealth and a mansion on Denslow Avenue. Her fortune came from her father, the nationally syndicated medical columnist William Brady. As a young girl, Helen had started training as an actress at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where her family lived, and had moved successfully into theater and radio. Then, when her father’s asthma necessitated a move to the West Coast, she abandoned her acting dream and relocated, too. Upon her father’s death, the considerable inheritance facilitated “blazing adventures,” according to her sister, Lala. Helen married “impulsively” several times, her union to Frederick Van Coomber yielding her one son, Bill. “When Mr. Coomber moved on,” said Lala, “Helen treated Bill as the man of the house. She showered him with gifts, money, everything, and Bill was an adult at thirteen.”
Redford liked Helen. She was kind to a fault, had humor like his mother and was constantly reading, according to Lala—“everything from Erich Fromm to Proust.” Redford remembers that “she wasn’t a storyteller. She was gushing, but she had a drama about her, a kind of Norma Desmond quality. Just talking to her, you knew her life was diverse and big.”
In the Emerson school newspaper in the fall of 1949, Redford had been identified as “Krazy” and likened in personality to Milton Berle. It noted that he took to the stage in a playlet called Time Out for Ginger, a boy-meets-girl farce to which MGM sent talent scouts in hopes of finding a replacement for the aging Mickey Rooney. Redford doesn’t remember this—“which shows how much interest in acting I had.” But the next spring he was in the school play, Wilbur Faces Facts. Helen applauded him afterward, though Redford remembers more the enthusiasm of some schoolgirl friends. “That was a weird experience,” says Redford. “It wasn’t like sports or work. I wasn’t trying. I was up there goofing off and people were laughing. The girls came up. ‘You’re good,’ they said, and so