Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [23]
Coomber saw no support for the whimsical side of Redford at Homedale. “I thought Charlie was really rough on his son,” he says, “always getting him to do endless thankless chores, like mowing the lawn week after week, whether it needed mowing or not.” Redford grew more and more angry about Charlie’s rules. “All I ever heard was, ‘You gotta improve those high school grades. You gotta make it to Dartmouth or Stanford.’ I realize now that those colleges represented the Gates to Heaven for him, because everyone he knew who succeeded in business had the right degrees. He wanted that kind of stability for me, but I didn’t want it at all the older I got and the more of the world I experienced.”
Redford’s interest was absorbed by Coomber’s obsessions: magic and general derring-do. “It was,” says Coomber, “like a secret life. I had ‘normality,’ school and home, and then I had all these sidelines.” Occasionally he performed magic shows—for tips—at a Westwood club. More often he was driving without a permit, boozing beyond reason and shoplifting petty items. He also loved climbing the high-rise buildings around Westwood Village after dark, and Redford joined him, scaling the sheer tower of the imposing Fox Village Theater.
There were shared football games, sleepovers, campouts and horseback-riding sessions in Will Rogers State Park, where Redford’s love of riding began. “It was never open competition,” says Coomber, “but we were always pushing each other. When we were riding, I was the experienced one. But Bob had to ride faster. There was never any admission of weakness from Bob—ever. It was always take it to the limit.”
When the boys were just fifteen, they decided to tackle serious mountaineering outside Palm Springs. “Bob wanted to do it,” says Coomber, “because it took him back to the wilderness. As soon as we could get our hands on an automobile—illegally, of course, since we were underage—we were off to Palm Springs.”
Climbing the ten-thousand-foot Mount San Jacinto, Coomber and Redford overreached. “It was dumb and it was my fault,” says Redford. “We started out with a party of friends on a bitter cold weekend. We camped, climbed, camped again. No one was stupid enough to want to try for the summit, except me. We knew the temperatures fell by forty degrees at night. Bill said, ‘Okay, we’ll give it a shot.’ We had no sleeping bags, no more rations, just some cheap street gloves that started to shred. Suddenly it was so dark we couldn’t distinguish the black ice. We were up very high, disoriented, lost.”
The friends lit a fire from tinder in a snowbound cave. Exhausted, they took turns sleeping, constantly stoking the fire to stave off freezing to death. Coomber felt they wouldn’t make it down alive. At first light they found a way down. They gorged at the Mountain Diner, then slept in a sand trap at the local golf course. They had been gone for days, but when Redford returned home, no questions were asked. “It had got to the point where my parents were sick of asking questions,” says Redford.
At home, Redford was expressing himself more and daring to argue openly—“usually about nothing at all”—with Charlie. The family had acquired its first television set, an eleven-inch Philco, and, led by Bobby’s dinnertime talk, embraced the wider world—the fall of Joe Louis, the rise of Milton Berle, Truman’s policies, the collapse of the American Communist Party. Redford was drawn to politics but frustrated by Charlie’s arcane communication. “He was highly intelligent but so polluted by his family’s failure to stand up and be counted, so most of it was buried in dismissive wit. It was a pity, because when he let his feelings and opinions air, his insights were amazing.”
In 1950, as Congressman Richard Nixon prepared for a Senate run in California, Charlie’s reticence was breached. Kenny Chotiner, a classmate of Bob’s at Emerson, was the son of Murray Chotiner, a key Nixon aide. From carpooling, Martha was friendly with Chotiner’s wife, Phyllis. Charlie tolerated the friendship until Nixon developed his