Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [26]
Charlie continued to believe his son’s redemption lay in sports. In his first fall at Van Nuys High, Redford made the football team. But he quit. He still loved the Red Sox, and had fantasies about being the next Ted Williams—“the only public figure I ever idolized”—but now he avoided baseball as well.
Redford tried marijuana and hashish, spent weekends “rumbling” hot rods on dirt tracks in the Simi Hills and romanced Pat’s friends when he could get away with it. Coomber was absent, but Redford didn’t need the prompting of his friend’s wildness. En route to a drag trial in Santa Barbara, he lost control of a souped-up coupe and crashed at ninety miles an hour. Lucky to be alive, he was ferried home, dazed. Charlie was outraged. Redford says, “All I remember was the look of absolute hopelessness on his face, looking at me and saying, ‘Who are you?’ ”
In the spring of 1954 Redford graduated from Van Nuys High. “If you’d asked me on that day of graduation, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ my answer would have been, ‘Get as far away from Van Nuys High as I can, period.’ ” As the names of graduates were read out, Redford sat at the back of the assembly hall, reading Mad magazine.
Given his grades, his college options were restricted. The University of Colorado at Boulder, though, offered the possibility of an eventual sports scholarship. Faded though its allure was, Redford thought he might resume his baseball. “So it was a no-brainer. Colorado was baseball. And, more important, the mountains. Escape.”
Redford started out brooding and isolated. He focused on the arts at Boulder, and baseball was quickly abandoned. Jack Brendlinger, a senior, four years older, took him under his wing. They first met during fraternity rush week by the moat in front of the Kappa Sigma house. Brendlinger was drawn to Redford, he says, because he looked so out of place: “Our frat house was 90 percent well-heeled, well-tailored students from Chicago’s North Shore, and here was a depressed-looking bum in an Irish tweed jacket with his hair styled in a ducktail. I sat beside him and the first thing he said was, ‘Man, this just isn’t for me.’ ” Brendlinger invited Redford to join him for a round of golf. After Redford shot a blistering nine, Brendlinger decided he belonged in Kappa Sigma. “Bob was unfazed during the hazing. For him, it was masochistic competition,” says Brendlinger. “He was a strange guy.”
Redford’s insularity swung to extroversion. He befriended Dave Barr from Glendale and a Minnesotan called Hugh Hall, and moved off campus to share an apartment with them. He resumed his drawing and started what would be a lifetime habit of diary keeping, filling notebooks with spontaneous observations. The Kappa Sigma Chicagoans, in particular, became the templates of the North Shore folk whom he would essay twenty-five years later in Ordinary People. “You shouldn’t generalize, I know, but my observation was of advantaged Americans besotted, as my father was, with the vision of the organization man,” says Redford. “These were Eisenhower’s people. Everything came secondary to the ultimate career, and education was limited to the streamlined agenda that served that career. It was a narrow, elitist view, and, like Brentwood, it had no introspective, self-analytical tendency nor much interest in human communication.” In compensation, Redford gravitated toward a group of Jewish students whom he called “this reverse cabal,” because of their humor and their constant questioning of the status quo.
Within months Redford had become beloved in the drinking circles but was regarded as a loose cannon. He was the most relaxed with Hugh Hall, the son of evangelistic Baptist parents, because he was spontaneous. They enjoyed the same literature (Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis) and the same music (George Shearing, Chet Baker), and equally enjoyed attacking