Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [25]
The deception lasted a month. When Charlie learned the truth from a truant officer, he exploded. Redford promised to mend his ways, returning to school and taking an evening job at a local pharmacy. Within a week he and his new friend Dave Brockman were supplying stolen Cadillac hubcaps to a fence who managed the liquor store down the street.
Kitty knew Redford was slipping away from her. She visited him in the Valley and saw the changes. Barred from seeing Coomber and the Emerson friends, he was building a new life and forming new friendships. Hot-rodding was his new pastime, shared mostly with Brockman, the son of a judge. “I didn’t think Bobby had become delinquent,” says Kitty, “but he was struggling to keep life in perspective. We were kids, but we’d had a special, very mature bond, and that bond was slipping, partly because of the geographical separation, partly because of the changes in both of us.”
The relationship with Kitty ended that year when her family moved east, but Redford had already romantically moved on, acquiring a new girlfriend named Pat Lyons. Redford was not yet seventeen; Pat was twenty. “I sought out an older girl,” says Redford, “because I was hungry for experience. Less and less I wanted what my parents had.” Lyons introduced him to smoky L.A. jazz clubs like the Haig, the Oasis and Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse, to the world of cool jazz, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. This was about as far as he could get from the pleasantries of Santa Monica’s big-band ballrooms, and he was thrilled. “I loved the profanity, the booze, the blue-lit, hazy rooms. Most of all I went for this terrific discordancy in the music. It wasn’t polite. The world I was stuck in was all polite. But this was expressive and completely free.”
One weekend his parents took off for a four-day trip to San Diego, leaving the family Chevy at home. Redford drove it to San Francisco, in search of more jazz. He had no permit, so was obliged to dodge the highway police, taking the scenic Route 101 past Malibu toward Big Sur. The sense of liberation evoked by wild, untamed nature once again kicked in. “On that journey I realized I hated L.A. for its compromises,” says Redford. “I decided that somehow I must get out of it permanently.”
In San Francisco, Redford and his friends stumbled on a party at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s newly opened City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. The hosts were the forward guard of the Beats: Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael Mclure. The poets took turns reading their work. Jack Kerouac collected donations in a hat. “This was years before [Ginsberg’s] Howl,” says Redford, “but there was a sense of manifesto. I had never experienced what you might call an alternative communal vision, but this was it. These guys were obviously doped. But they had a track on something honest that made absolute sense to me. It was a mind-blowing evening.”
The previous summer, the summer of 1952, a Life magazine survey listed the national teen idols as Roy Rogers, Joe DiMaggio, Vera-Ellen, Louisa May Alcott, General Douglas MacArthur and Doris Day, none of whom, with the exception of DiMaggio, Redford connected with. Instead, his natural affiliations were with the rebels, with Kerouac, then wrestling with On the Road, with Miles Davis’s improvisational jazz, with Alan Watts and radio station KPFA prompting the Bay Area toward Eastern thinking. Coomber had prophesied to friends that Redford was facing some major, life-altering change. “I told them either he’ll break through in some important career or he’ll end up in the gutter like a bum. There’d be no middle way,” says Coomber. Redford experienced a new focus with the Beats. “The music I was listening to and those guys in North Beach opened my eyes,” he says. “One perfect example was a night with Pat at the Haig, watching Gerry Mulligan play to the room, and everyone, except one smooching couple, was enraptured. So Mulligan went over to their table and leaned in with his sax and blew them into orbit.