were whispering about who was a Jew and who wasn’t. One
day, Lois Levinson—she was a pal, really smart—stands up in
class and says, ‘My name is Lois Levinson. I am a Jew, and I’m
very proud of it.’ The class gasped.”
That night at dinner, Redford told his father about Lois
and asked: “What am I? If she’s a Jew, what am I?”
“You’re a Jew—and be proud of it,” Redford Sr. said.
The boy ran to his room, bawling. “I thought, ‘I’m
screwed,’” Redford laughs. “I heard my mom say, ‘Charlie,
go explain.’ My dad came in and gave me a lecture about how
what happened was unfair. He said, ‘ We’re all alike.’”
It was an early turning point. “Any time I saw people
treated unfairly because of race, creed, whatever—it struck
a nerve,” Redford says. A natural athlete, he often cap-
tained his school football and baseball squads. “The look on
the face of the kid who was uncoordinated broke my heart,”
he says. “I would choose him.” He was empathetic but also
driven, sometimes to a fault. “Then I’d get angry when he
couldn’t perform,” he ruefully admits.
Redford was guided as much by frustration as compas-
sion. “I was never a good student,” he says. “I had to be
dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to
somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience
and adventure, and I didn’t know how to express that.”
He finished high school but flirt-
ed with trouble. “Messing around
with friends, pushing the envelope,
stealing Cadillac hubcaps for $16,
was a release,” Redford says. “I was seen in earlier years
by family members and people of authority as somebody
wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions
of conformity. It made me edgy.”
Redford won a baseball scholarship to the University
of Colorado but soon lost it, reportedly due to drinking.
“There was a lot of that,” he concedes. After a year the
school asked him not to return. About the same time,
Redford’s mother, Martha, died at age 40. “She had a hem-
orrhage tied to a blood disorder she got after losing twin
girls at birth 10 years after I was born,” he says quietly. His
own birth was difficult, and doctors had advised his mother
to stop having children. “She wanted a family so badly she
got pregnant again,” Redford says. Her death was a shock.
“It seemed so unfair. But, in an odd way, it freed me to go off
on my own, which I’d wanted to do for a long time.”
By then Redford’s father had landed a job in the account-
ing department at the Standard Oil refinery in El Segundo.
Redford went to work there in the shipping yard, driving
a forklift and cleaning tanks. The experience planted the
seeds for his environmental activism years later. “I saw
the oil seeping into the sand dunes. Now all that [oil] sits
underneath the big buildings they’ve built there.”
When he had saved enough money, Redford hitch-
THE INIMITABLE
ROBERT REDFORD
ON THE BIG SCREEN
Clockwise, from top left: His film
career took off in 1969 with his
portrayal of Paul Newman’s bank-
robbing sidekick in Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid. Redford went on
to deliver nuanced performances of
flawed American characters, includ-
ing Hubbell Gardiner, opposite Barbra
Streisand, in The Way We Were (1973);
the real-life Bob Woodward, with
Dustin Hoffman, in All the President’s
Men (1976); and baseball player
Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984).
