Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [5]
Robert Redford was a first-generation Californian, born in Los Angeles as the citrus era ebbed and Hollywood hit flood tide. In the mid-1930s realities clashed as the Dust Bowl casualties came west, only to be stopped at the gates of the city by local police patrols while Angelenos hosted Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper. The Redfords were within the city limits, but poor; neighborhood friends hanged themselves in the Depression. Still, proximity to dream weaving, and the perfect climate, provided powerful distraction. Across the country, movie theaters saw their best business during the Depression years: such was the potency of the dream. For Redford, as for many of his childhood friends, the division between reality and fantasy was blurred. It wasn’t unusual, if you were born within five miles of Sunset Boulevard, to see Charlie Chaplin or Betty Grable on your street, or at a store, or driving by. When Redford was a baby, the first person to hold him was the actor Robert Young, a cousin of his mother’s; Cesar Romero carpooled him to school; John Steinbeck courted his future wife Elaine before his eyes in a neighbor’s home; Redford played on the lawns of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives.
Redford remembers that for a child of five, with a stressed father working fourteen-hour shifts as a milkman, Los Angeles was a place of magic, fragrant with night-scented jasmine. “There was this ritual,” he recalls. “At dusk I would cycle to the very edge of the sidewalk and roll the lead wheel onto the curbstone, balancing it, as if I were poised on a chasm; I was told I couldn’t go into the street so I was pushing it as far as I could. From there I’d wait for the sunset—and the air was so clear in L.A. at that time that those sunsets were amazing. I’d watch the dark come up from the east. And then, bit by bit, the stars appeared. It was mesmerizing just to contemplate it. The hugeness of this sky. The beauty. What could it mean? Where did it begin?” Redford loves this first childhood recollection: it represents for him the incessant curiosity that has ensured him a life of movement.
Los Angeles was a doddle from his birth until Pearl Harbor, but it was populated, he decided, with faces and personalities that didn’t belong in the idyll of the endless summer. There was Grandma Sallie Hart, a faded southern belle with the troubles of the world etched in her beauty. And vaguely behind her was Grandpa Hart, a prairie pirate who lived “down south.” Back east there was Grandpa Redford, a ghost whom Redford’s father alternately grumbled and laughed about. And then the mysterious Grandmother Redford, who wrote to her son almost daily, with a tone of foreboding. Who were these people? Like Uncle David, his dad’s bright-eyed, military-uniformed brother who blew in and blew out, none of them belonged to Los Angeles. In 1944, Redford started asking questions about his family origins; at Grandpa Redford’s deathbed in 1964 he was still asking. “I never got answers,” says Redford. “We were all just horse dealers, dope addicts and dropouts. None of my grandparents wanted questions and answers. But they were all storytellers. Who was my dad’s dad? Just some failed musician, I was told. Who was my mom’s dad? When I visited, he was more interested in teaching