Years ago, Cliff Robertson, pilot and Academy Award and Emmy Award winner, read “Time Must Have a Stop,” by Aldous Huxley. He remembers wondering about the title.
“I didn’t know what he meant, but I’m beginning to realize it now,” he said. “We need more time!”
If he had more time, Robertson would spend it doing what he has always dearly enjoyed: making memories with daughters Stephanie and Heather, communing with his “aviation buddies” and flying his airplanes.
A pilot with several thousand hours in the cockpit, Robertson spends as much time as possible in his Grob Twin Astir, a German two-place glider he keeps at High Country Soaring in Minden, Nev., 38 miles south of Reno on the eastern side of the High Sierras. He glides in and out of other places, but says that High Country, run by Tom and Janice Stowers and Bill Stowers, is the world’s best place to soar.
“They’re good people; they’re like family to me,” Robertson said. “When I go up there, they put me in the back room. I spend two to four days. That’s my Walden’s Pond.”
He adds that glider pilots from around the world come to High Country Soaring, because the conditions there are so unique. Robertson’s been gliding for more than 16 years and has his diamond altitude, for over 26,000 feet. A few years back, he and a friend set a Nevada state record for distance in a two-place glider—240 miles, from Tonopah to Parowan.
He shares that passion for gliding with friends like Barron Hilton, whose Flying M Ranch is about 35 miles from High Country. But gliding is only a part of Robertson’s aviation “obsession.”
“I have a big hole in my head and a stable of planes,” says the man who holds single-engine land and sea, multiengine, instrument and commercial licenses, as well as balloon, gliding and seaplane ratings.
His planes include a Beech Baron 58, Messerschmitt Me 108 and Stampe SV4, a French, fully aerobatic, open-cockpit biplane. He previously owned three Tiger Moths, as well as a Spitfire Mk.IX.
Once upon a time in La Jolla
Clifford Parker Robertson III was born on Sept. 9, 1925. His grandmother and an uncle raised him after his mother died when he was 2. He recalls becoming aware of aviation when he was 5, while living in La Jolla, Calif.
“I saw a little yellow airplane doing aerobatics over our house,” he said. “My uncle and another man were standing there watching the aerobatics, wagging their heads sagely. One said, ‘You’ll never get me up in one of those little airplanes.’ Then the little airplane turned southward and started to hum its way home. We got into the Ford alongside the curb, and it wouldn’t start. In my little mind, I was thinking, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ I think I began to become a partisan for aviation at an early age. I was defending it then, and I still do now.”
The summer Robertson was 14, he rode his bicycle six days a week to a “little, sleepy airport.”
“Speer Airport had one little, sandy runway,” he said. “I would work eight hours a day there, cleaning airplanes and engine parts. I was never paid a nickel, but every third or fourth day, the chief pilot would say, ‘Cliff, go get your cushion.’ I was short for my age, so I had a special cushion. I’d take it out to a little red Piper Cub. He’d take me up for 15 minutes and let me at the controls once we took off. I thought I was the ace of aces. It was a magic time.”
From off-off Broadway to Hollywood
Robertson abandoned aviation for a period while sorting out what to do with his life. As a teenager, he joined the military. He served with the Navy for three and a half years and was active in the Maritime Services. He rose to lieutenant junior grade.
Then he attended Antioch College and entered a work program, writing for the Springfield Daily News. While working for the paper, he was told he should write for the theater “instead of a deadline,” because his talent was more suited for that rather than general newspaper assignments.
“I said, ‘I don’t know; we’ll see,’” Robertson said.
When he arrived in New York, he knew nothing about the theater.
“I was told, ‘If you’re going to write for it, you have to go out and do the “husking”’—go out into the regions and the provinces and learn about the theater,” he said. “I learned to drive a truck and build flats, but I didn’t take it very seriously. Ultimately, I fell in with bad companions and did off-off Broadway and Broadway. I was this ‘callow kid.’ It irritated my fellow actors, who took everything, including themselves, very seriously.”
Robertson said he acted because everybody around him did.
“I had the audacity, in spite of myself, to get good reviews; that really ticked them off,” he said. “I was hanging in there in New York. I did a lot of things, but eventually I was making a living in the theater, then in early television and finally Hollywood.”
After two years with a touring company, Robertson landed a few, small, uncredited roles in films in the late 1940s. He appeared in television installments of “Kraft Television Theatre” in 1947, “Robert Montgomery Presents” in 1950 and “Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers” in 1953 and 1954. His first credited film role came in 1955, when he appeared in “Picnic,” after starring in the Broadway production in 1952. Also in 1955, he played Joan Crawford’s schizophrenic boyfriend in “Autumn Leaves.”
Over the next years, he switched back and forth between TV and motion pictures and received accolades for his performance as an alcoholic in the 1958 Playhouse 90’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” He appeared in “Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” episodes and as the original Big Kahuna in “Gidget.”
In 1961, Robertson accepted a role in “The Two Worlds of Charly Gordon,” an hour-long Theater Guild television adaptation of Daniel Keye’s short story, “Flowers for Algernon.” His character, Charly Gordon, was a mentally challenged bakery worker who became a genius after undergoing experimental brain surgery.
“It got such recognition that I secured the film rights,” he said. “Up to that time, I was always a bridesmaid and never a bride.”
Film rights were something Robertson hadn’t been able to acquire with “Days of Wine and Roses.” Jack Lemmon had bought the rights and cast himself in the film’s starring role.
“I can’t blame him,” said Robertson. “If I’d had his money, I probably would’ve done the same thing.”
Seven years would go by before “Charly” would be released as a motion picture. In the meantime, while working on a movie at Paramount, Robertson received a call from a White House representative. The caller requested he go to Warner Brothers the following day to do a test for “PT 109,” a film that told the story of Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy’s fight to keep his crew alive when their boat sank in the South Pacific.
“I said, ‘You’re kidding me,’” Robertson said. “He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m working on this picture.’ Then he said the key words: ‘It’s been arranged.’ When I heard that, I knew somebody big had arranged it.”
When he found out that a book written about his World War II South Pacific experiences was to be made into a movie, President Kennedy made three requests.
“One request was that it would be historically accurate, because Hollywood is not known for its accuracy; it has a tendency to exaggerate,” Robertson said. “The second request was that any monies that he might receive from the film would instead go to the PT 109 survivors or their families. His third request was that he be allowed to pick the actor.”
Robertson said that a lot of talk was going on about who would play the young Kennedy.
“I remember Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda were rumored, ” he said.
Robertson did the test. Three days later, he learned he had the part when he received a call from a friend in New York who had seen his picture alongside Kennedy’s in the New York Times.
While doing “Sunday in New York” with Jane Fonda, Robertson received a call from the president.
“He asked me if I’d like to come down and visit,” he said. “It turned out he’d seen things that I’d done.”
“PT 109” and “Sunday in New York” were both released in 1963.
Something you never forget
When one of Robertson’s roles took him to England, he found the opportunity to become “seriously” involved in aviation. He joined the Fairoaks Flying Club in Chobham, Surrey, as well as other aero clubs.
“Being involved in aviation is like meeting a beautiful woman; you never forget,” he said.
After successfully soloing in a Tiger Moth, a de Havilland biplane used by the English in the late 1930s to train RAF pilots, he decided that if he could land a biplane in a crosswind, he could land anything. Robertson bought his first Tiger Moth and flew it across the Channel to Normandy, France, to film “Up from the Beach,” a 1965 war drama.
“I had it over there during filming, and then I shipped it home,” he said. “I worried about finding parts, so I looked around and found another Tiger Moth at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. It was for sale for virtually nothing. I bought it, thinking I could cannibalize it when I needed parts. When it arrived in San Pedro, and we cracked open the case, we found it was in better shape than the first one. I ended up getting a third for the same reason. For a number of years, I was the proud owner of three Tiger Moths.”
While in England filming “633 Squadron” for United Artists, Robertson became interested in the de Havilland Mosquito bomber.
“In the film, we had five of probably the very last Mosquito bombers left,” he said. “I tried to buy one, but I was subverted by someone who will remain nameless; that person screwed things up, so nobody got one.”
Robertson said one Mosquito bomber was destroyed during filming. A scene called for an airplane to hit a truck.
“To make it look genuine, they had to make this bomber explode on the ground,” he said. “Nobody was in the cockpit, of course. A special-effects guy ran long wires behind it and triggered it off when it hit this truck. It exploded, and we watched it burn. That broke my heart. It was called the ‘wooden bomber,’ because a lot of it was made out of wood, which made it very light and fast. That central spar was made of very highly compressed wood. I watched it burn for more than three hours, and that spar was still intact. It was amazing how strong it was.”
Although he wasn’t able to acquire a Mosquito, Robertson learned that the Belgium Air Force owned three Spitfires, another aircraft that attracted his interest.
“In World War II, they used them to tow targets for jets,” he said. “That was the fastest thing they could get, since they weren’t using jets to tow the targets.”
When he returned to America, he looked into buying one of the few remaining Spitfires. He found one with Belgian registration OO-ARF and bought it.
“My friend Neil Williams, who had been Britain’s top aerobatic pilot and a Royal Air Force test pilot, went over to get it,” he said. “He begged me to let him fly it. Every pilot—particularly every English pilot—would give his right arm to fly a Spitfire, because there weren’t that many left.”
After the flight, Williams wrote him a lengthy, emotional letter, telling what it meant to fly that airplane. People have often asked Robertson what it was like to fly a Spitfire.
“I tell them, ‘I’ll give you the same answer I gave my insurance adjustor: “Of course I didn’t fly it!”’ he said with a grin. “That’s my answer, and I’m sticking to it!”
Robertson had the Spitfire for about 20 years.
“When you get an airplane like that, it takes a lot of upkeep,” he said. “It’s a queen, and you have to treat it like a queen. Later on, I let Tom Poberezny keep it at EAA. I also had it up at the Air Zoo in Michigan.”
Robertson eventually sold the Spitfire to telecommunications pioneer Craig McCaw.
“He respects the airplane as much as I do,” Robertson said. “He realizes it’s more than a fighter plane. That airplane saved Western civilization, as we know it today. World War II would have ended entirely different had it not been for that one man, Mr. Mitchell, who designed the Spitfire. The Hurricane was a fine airplane, but no matter how those pilots flew, they wouldn’t have tipped the balance against the Germans. Historians agree that without the Spitfire, England would have lost the Battle of Britain, which turned the tide of the war. If the Germans had won that battle, Germany would have been able to focus its forces against Russia and would have won the war.”
Robertson had the same desire for the public to be able to see his Messerschmitt Me 108, another valuable part of aviation history. It’s on display in the Parker-O’Malley Air Museum in Ghent, N.Y. He made similar provisions for the Messerschmitt as he had with the Spitfire.
“If I requested it, I was allowed to take the Messerschmitt out and fly it,” he said. “We had that provision with both Oshkosh and the Air Zoo.”
Giving to others
Robertson has accumulated various aviation awards. In 1983, he received the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Laurence P. Sharples Award, given for “the year’s greatest, selfless commitment to general aviation by a private citizen.” The award recognized Robertson for flying humanitarian relief into Nigeria during the Biafra Civil War. He was also presented the Heritage of Freedom Award and in 1987, the Freedom of Flight Award, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s highest honor, for his role in the organization’s “In Pursuit of Dreams” presentation.
Robertson’s affiliation with EAA began a long time ago.
“I pull a long bow, back over 30 years,” he said. “It was back in the days when EAA was at Hale’s Corners (Wisconsin). I had heard about this remarkable guy named Paul Poberezny, his lovely wife and their young son, Tom. So I went back there. It was snowing. All we had was an indoor showroom, and she made us chili. It was a very simple operation. Now, you get almost a million people.”
Years after becoming involved with EAA, Robertson decided to give others the opportunity he had as a youth in La Jolla. Within EAA, he founded the Cliff Robertson Work Experience, in 1993.
“We have a contest where young people over 16 submit their desires to come to Oshkosh and work in hangars for 12 weeks, doing all the dirty work that we used to do as kids,” he said. “In exchange, they not only get their room and board and a little allowance—they also get flying lessons. The work ethic is not dead yet; we’ve had wonderful success with it. Some of our ‘graduates’ have gone on to West Point and the Air Force Academy, and some have gone on to fly with airlines. It’s been very productive.”
Robertson also helped launch EAA’s Young Eagles program, organized in 1992, and served as its first national honorary chairman until 1995.
At EAA AirVenture 2002, he was presented with the inaugural Key to the City Award, created by EAA and the city of Oshkosh, to honor distinguished personalities for significant contributions to the promotion and support of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh and the aviation community.
Nothing’s purer
Robertson said that to name one type of flying as his favorite would be like trying to name your favorite child. However, he does say nothing’s “purer than pure glider flight.”
“You’re environmentally sensitive for a moment, because you’re not burning fossil fuels, and you’re not bruising or abusing the environment,” he said. “You’re working with nature, so purity is there. There’s also a sense of pride, because once you’re up there, you’re on your own. You don’t have an automatic pilot. And if you go as I did, for 6 hours and 20 minutes on that attempt for the state distance record, you have a sense of, ‘I did something special.’”
Robertson glides as often as he can. It’s not unusual for the resident of Water Mill, Long Island, N.Y., and La Jolla, to fly across the country. When he’s in a hurry, he takes one of the “big aluminum tubes.” But when he has the time, he prefers flying his twin-engine Baron, which he’s had for more than 20 years, so he can stop at “little pokey airports” to reacquaint himself with his country. He happened to be flying the Baron on Sept. 11, 2001.
“As far as I know, I was the only guy flying right over that holocaust when it all happened,” he said. “I was flying alone, on the way to the West Coast. I got right over the World Trade Center, climbing at 7,000 feet. I looked down and suddenly saw this great big column of smoke puff up. I didn’t see the plane, because by that time it was inside the building. I just thought it was an explosion of some kind.”
Robertson said that after he had climbed to 8,500 feet and leveled off, the other plane hit.
“Again, I didn’t see what caused it, but the air traffic controller came on, and I gave my call number,” he said. “He said, ‘We have a national emergency. Land at the nearest available airport.’ I’d never heard that in all the years I’d been flying. I was hermetically sealed for three and a half days in beautiful downtown Allentown (Penn.). I couldn’t take my plane out. I finally got out on a commercial flight. Later, my buddy Craig McCaw had one of his pilots, who was out on the East Coast, fly the airplane back to me. I was up giving a talk at an aviation conference in Oregon.”
The ups and downs of Hollywood
Robertson laughingly says he still recalls the plays in elementary school, where children donned costumes for stints as fruit and vegetables—something he wasn’t inclined to do. He also remembers his third-grade teacher telling him that acting was “a dodge.”
“I still think it’s a dodge,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t put his heart into the roles he lands. He received an Emmy for Best Actor, for a guest appearance in “The Game,” a Bob Hope Chrysler Theater production. Three years later, with ABC Pictures, he co-produced “Charly,” at the modest cost of $1 million. His intense performance put Robertson in the running for the 1968 Oscar for Best Actor with Alan Arkin for “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Alan Bates for “The Fixer,” Ron Moody for “Oliver!” and Peter O’Toole for “The Lion in Winter.”
Robertson didn’t think he had a chance of winning and was more than 7,000 miles away when the Academy announced the Oscar winner. While he was in his trailer in the Philippine jungle, working on “Too Late the Hero,” Michael Caine and several other actors were hovering over a short-wave radio outside. Caine burst into the trailer, exclaiming, “You won the damn award!”
Robertson thought he was joking. Later, he was photographed—wearing military garb and a Scottish tam—being thrown up in the air in celebration. That photo was sent around the world.
Even after winning an Oscar for “Charly,” Robertson says he’s never been fully satisfied with his Hollywood career—or with any of his other achievements, for that matter. He looks at his accomplishments with “a degree of dissatisfaction.” When it comes to his movies, he says he’s “less dissatisfied with some.”
“You always feel like you could do better if you could do it over,” he said. “Once you cross the Rubicon of a certain age, you don’t get satisfied, but you get a little more mature. You say, ‘I guess I did the best I could, given what I was given’—and given the time limitations and some of the questionable scripts you’re working with.”
Robertson said he was partial to “J.W. Coop,” released in 1971, which he co-wrote, directed and starred in, because he was able to write about something familiar.
“It was about man’s confrontation with change, which is the antagonist in everybody’s life,” he said.
Besides flying one of his Tiger Moths in the film, he also did some bull riding. He says his experience in that arena was “genetic.”
“Going way back on my father’s side, there were lots of horse people,” he said. “When you have a genetic predisposition, it gives you kind of an ill-deserved confidence.”
Robertson had an uncle who owned a 55,000-acre ranch about 25 miles from Walsenburg, Colo., in a little town called Red Wing.
“It was unbelievable,” he said. “It was beautiful, like a little Switzerland. I was married at the time, and I’d take my wife (actress Dina Merrill) and my two daughters out there in the summertime.”
Robertson flew a DC-8 in “The Pilot,” which he also directed, and again took to the air in “633 Squadron.” His film credits in the 1970s included “Three Days of the Condor,” released in 1975, and “Midway,” released in 1976. In “Midway,” Robertson appeared as a pilot in a bar scene he had written.
The following year, his Hollywood career came to a temporary halt when he blew the whistle on David Begelman, Alan Hirschfield’s right-hand man at Columbia Pictures, in an embezzlement scam that became known as “Hollywoodgate.” Columbia’s accounting department had sent Robertson a 1099, which said he owed taxes on money he never received.
“I hadn’t even worked for Columbia,” he said. “This old Scot’s not going to pay taxes on money he didn’t earn.”
After Robertson and his secretary began investigating the statement of earnings, a supervisor at Columbia looked up the Robertson file and found an endorsed check made out to him. However, the signature on the back wasn’t Robertson’s.
“In spite of a lot of sage advice and people warning me, I went ahead and gave it to the FBI,” said Robertson.
Law enforcement agencies initiated further investigations. More improprieties became known, and Begelman “resigned.” For Hirschfield, the Columbia crisis ultimately came to a head at a July 1978 board of directors’ meeting, when the board voted not to renew his contract. But Begelman and Hirschfield weren’t out of work for long. That wasn’t the case for Robertson.
“After Hollywoodgate, I was blackballed and didn’t work for three and a half years,” Robertson said. “They were trying to send a message to other would-be Don Quixotes. The FBI told me that for 75 years, the unwritten covenant in Hollywood had been, ‘Thou shalt never confront a major mogul on corruption, or thou shalt not work.’”
Robertson said he’s proud of what he did.
“They wrote me up in the Congressional Record,” he said. “I was given a lot of citations. All the writers and the creative people were delighted.”
Within two years, several other actors began confronting corporate corruption and “creative bookkeeping.”
The curse on Robertson was finally broken when a “courageous director” named Doug Trumbull cast him in “Brainstorm,” Natalie Wood’s final film.
“He said he wouldn’t listen to those bastards,” Robertson explained. “He said, ‘He’s right for this role, and I’m going to hire him.’ As soon as he did, it broke the cycle.”
Over the last two decades, Robertson has appeared in several films, including “Dead Reckoning” (1990), “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” (1991), “Escape From L.A.” (1996), “Family Tree” (1999) and “Falcon Down” (2000). More recently, he played Uncle Ben Parker in “Spider-Man” (2002), and although his character met a sad demise, he returned in “Spider-Man 2.” Steven King’s “Riding the Bullet” is his 72nd feature film.
“I have many friends in Hollywood, but I don’t live in LaLa Land, and I don’t embrace some of the lifestyle or network, so I don’t get some of the things I’d like to,” he said. “I prefer living in the country, away from some of the glitz. I’m happy to run out here say the words, pick up the check and run back to my cat (Halsey) and make apologies.”
He adds that he’s never found it necessary to “throw away money on press agents.”
“My former wife had them on both coasts,” he said. “She used to say, ‘You’re nuts. You’re an Emmy Award winner, Oscar winner and stage winner; you should have a press agent.’ I said, ‘Nope. Work begets work, and I’m not going to pay a lot of hard-earned money to get my name in a column. I’d rather give it to charity.’”
Playing hooky
Robertson says he’s always been obsessed with working. When he was 10, he added a year to his age to get a job selling magazines.
“And I had a newspaper route,” he said. “I also had a little skiff. I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning and go out to get my lobsters.”
One reason for his work obsession is that his father was “to the manner born.”
“He never worked a day in his life,” he said. “He did a lot of things, but he never worked.”
Robertson attributes his “work-instilled ethic”—as well as his charitable giving—to “Calvinist guilt.”
“I was brought up Presbyterian,” he said. “A lot of the old verities still hang in. When you’re a very young dude, you wander away and think you have it all figured out. You flirt with being agnostic, atheist or whatever. Then, when you’ve been around the pike a few times, certain things begin to stack up, and you think that maybe some people had it right.”
Having a Calvinist conscience, says Robertson, also gets in the way of taking himself too seriously. To be Calvinist, he explains, isn’t as simple as only believing in predestination.
“That’s just part of it,” he says. “The perverse aspect is, ‘If the medicine tastes good, it can’t be good for you. If it tastes bad, it has to be good!’ It’s a perpetual ‘hair shirt,’ but it does give you a work ethic and a good ethos.”
Although a hard worker, Robertson takes the time to “play hooky,” which could mean an annual visit to EAA AirVenture or traveling with pal Hilton to Alaska to fish. He and Carroll Shelby are some of Hilton’s regular fishing buddies.
“Barron flies us up in his Citation,” Robertson said. “We go up there regularly in the summer and sometimes in late spring. We all go fishing on his boat.”
Besides his other commitments, Robertson speaks at events across the country, through his affiliation with the Aviation Speakers Bureau. He has plenty of aviation stories to tell, but he also draws from his Hollywood experiences.
“When you’ve done well over 200 productions for films and television, you have a lot of stories,” he said. “I have stories about movies, my own exploits, other famous actors—and not famous actors. There’s a wide matrix of subject matter.”
In November 2003, American Veteran Awards named Cliff Robertson Veteran of the Year. The award is given to a prominent veteran based upon career achievements, personal accomplishments, philanthropic pursuits and outstanding character.
In 2006, he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. In 2007, he received the Wesley L. McDonald 2007 Elder Statesman of Aviation Award from the National Aeronautic Association. Robertson returned to the screen in “Spider-Man 3” in 2007.
