George Lucas: A Biography

2 Modesto

If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place that’s furthest from it.

Luke Skywalker, on Tatooine, his home planet, in Star Wars

There is no easy way into Modesto – nor, for that matter, any easy way out.

Most people approach from the south, up Interstate 5, toughing out the flat emptiness of the San Joaquin, the ‘long valley’ John Steinbeck made famous in his stories of rural life in the twenties and thirties. Then, as now, this was fruit and vegetable country, the kitchen garden of California. Orchards, geometric patches of dense, dark foliage, interlock with fields of low, anonymous greenery which only a farmer would recognize as hiding potatoes, beets, beans. Occasionally, some town raises a banner against mediocrity – ‘Castroville, Artichoke Capital of the World!’ – but the norm is self-effacement, reticence, reserve.

Zigzagging among the fields, a great irrigation canal, wide as a highway, delivers water from lakes set back in the hills. No boats move on its surface, no kids fish from the concrete banks, no families picnic on its gravelled margins. This water, fenced off from the fields and the highway behind chain link, isn’t for leisure but, like everything else here, for use.

Modesto sits on almost the same parallel of latitude as San Francisco, but there any similarity ends. Californian or not, this is a Kansas town set down twelve hundred miles west. Even more than for most places in California, the people here are relative newcomers, migrants from the midwest and the south who fled the dust storms of the twenties and the farm foreclosures that followed.

Laid out flat as a rug on a landscape without a hill to its name, Modesto’s sprawl of ranch-style homes and flat-roofed single-story business buildings is divided as geometrically as Kansas City by a grid of streets, in turn cut arbitrarily by railway tracks. Splintered wooden trestles spanning gullies choked with weeds and the rusted hulks of Chevies and Buicks indicate the high tide of rail in the forties, but traffic still idles patiently at level crossings while hundred-car freight trains clank by.

A garage or a used-car lot seems to occupy every second corner – in farm country, anyone without a car might as well be naked – but one sees almost none of the Cadillacs, Porsches, even Volkswagens common in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pick-ups, trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles predominate, many of them old but mostly well-tended. Cars here aren’t playthings or success symbols, but farm machinery.

In so flat a landscape, anything resembling a skyscraper looks like insane audacity. The town’s one modern hotel, the Red Lion, twenty stories tall and stark as a wheat silo, respects scale as little as a chair-leg planted in a model-train layout. Building the Red Lion broke Allen Grant, the overambitious Modesto businessman who financed it. Defaulting on his loans, he sold out to a chain. Locals recount this cautionary tale with implicit disapproval of his recklessness. In Modesto, it’s the horizontal man who’s respected, not the vertical one. If he wanted to erect something, why not a mall? When Grant used to race sports cars, his mechanic and co-driver was George Lucas.

Appropriately, Modesto’s monument to its most successful son barely lifts its head higher than George Lucas’s five feet six inches. At Five Points, where the narrow downtown streets coalesce into McHenry, a ribbon development of shopping malls and parking lots, a small wooded park next to an apartment block shelters two bronze figures. They loiter against the forequarter of a ’57 Chevy, they and the car both cast from metal with the color and buttery sheen of fudge sauce. Toffee-colored Jane perches on the fender, ankles crossed, absorbed in mahogany Dick who, earnestly turning towards her, describes his latest triumph on track or field – it’s implicit that nothing which happened in class could remotely interest this couple. What they most resemble is an image from the Star Wars trilogy: Han Solo, frozen in carbonite to provide a bas relief for the palace of Jabba the Hutt.

A slab of green marble set into the sidewalk and incised in gold footnotes the figures:

GEORGE LUCAS PLAZA

The movie remembrance of Modesto’s past, ‘American Graffiti,’ was created by the noted film-maker, George Lucas, a Modesto native and a member of the Thomas Downey High School Class of 1962. This bronze sculpture, created by Betty Salette, also entitled ‘American Graffiti,’ celebrates the genius of George Lucas and the youthful innocence and dreams of the 50s and 60s.

The ritual that inspired American Graffiti no longer takes place: large signs specifically indicate ‘No Cruising.’ In Lucas’s time, drivers circulated on Tenth and Eleventh Streets downtown, exploiting a one-way traffic system introduced by shopkeepers to facilitate business parking. Later, the Saturday-night paseo moved to McHenry, but it wasn’t the same. McDonald’s didn’t provide either telephones or public toilets, so cruisers congregated in the parking lots of shopping malls, fields of naked asphalt lit by towering lamp standards.

Without the sense of community it enjoyed downtown, cruising became a magnet for the area’s rowdies, especially on the second Saturday in June – high school graduation night. In 1988, Modesto’s city council belatedly caught up with its own bandwagon and formalized the June weekend bash as an American Graffiti festival. As many as 100,000 people converged on Modesto to line McHenry and watch the parade of ’32 Deuce Coupes and ’57 Chevies. Deejay Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, was master of ceremonies, an honor he enjoyed six more times, the last when he was Cruise Parade Marshal for the 1994 Graffiti USA Car Show and Street Festival. By then, night-time cruising had been banned after repeated problems with drinking and violence. The 1994 parade took place in mid-afternoon. Jack didn’t approve: ‘My favorite thing was the cruising and me being on the radio, and we don’t do that anymore,’ he said nostalgically. ‘Now they do it in the heat of the day with everyone roasting in their convertibles.’ He longed for the days ‘when the carbon monoxide was so thick you could hardly breathe.’

Meanwhile, Reno and Las Vegas, to the irritation of some Modestoans, launched what they called Hot August Nights, encouraging local owners of classic cars to cruise; and Roseburg, Oregon, launched an annual Graffiti Week. In Los Angeles, Wednesday night was Club Night on Van Nuys Boulevard, in the dormitory suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. After he made American Graffiti, Lucas enjoyed hanging out there. ‘It was just bumper to bumper. There must have been 100,000 kids down there,’ he said. ‘It was insane. I really loved it. I sat on my car hood all night and watched. The cars are all different now. Vans are the big thing. Everybody’s got a van, and you see all these weird decorated cars. Cruising is still a main thread in American culture.’ But by the late eighties, the Van Nuys ritual too had disappeared.

One isn’t surprised at Modesto banning the Cruise. Cruisers did not plant, nor cultivate, nor harvest. They were a plague, like locusts, and all the more loathed for being locally hatched. Most people in Modesto, if they were honest, would admit they were glad the gleaming cars, the horny guys and giggling girls, the throbbing exhausts and squealing tyres had moved on, taking their creator with them.

Future friends of Lucas like Steven Spielberg who, Angelenos to the heels of their fitted cowboy boots, joked about ‘Lucasland,’ which they visualized as a place of hot tubs, meditation, and marijuana, couldn’t imagine how little his birthplace resembled the satellite communities of San Francisco which furnished this fantasy. ‘Southern California ends at Carmel,’ any San Franciscan will tell you. ‘Once you get to Monterey, you’re in Northern California.’ And Modesto? ‘It’s neither. It’s the Valley.’ Their contempt is obvious, and Lucas shared it. When anyone in Los Angeles asked him where he came from, he said evasively, ‘Northern California.’

Nevertheless, the San Joaquin Valley put its stamp firmly on both Lucas and his films. Without the white upper-middle-class Methodist values he absorbed during his upbringing in this most complacent and righteous of regions, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones series, even the more eccentric THX1138, let alone American Graffiti, would have been very different. Indeed, they might not have existed at all, since Lucas, unlike the directors who joined him in building the New Hollywood in the sixties and seventies, is anything but a natural film-maker. Nothing in his character fits him to make films. The process irritates and bores him, even makes him physically ill.

Actors lament his failure to give them any guidance towards character. Harrison Ford, recalling the making of American Graffiti in Modesto, remembers staring for hours out of the windscreen of his car at the camera car towing it. ‘The cameraman, the sound man and the director could all sit in the trunk, and every time I looked at George, he was asleep.’ Cindy Williams, one of the film’s stars, was flattered when Lucas called her performance ‘Great! Terrific!’, until she found he said exactly the same thing to everyone.

It is easy to forget that Lucas, for all his fame and influence, has only directed four feature films in almost thirty years. Repeatedly he’s handed the job to others, supervising from the solitude of his home, controlling the shooting by proxy, as Hollywood studio producers of the forties did. As critic David Thomson remarks, ‘Lucas testifies to the principle that American films are produced, not directed.’

Martin Scorsese agrees that Lucas differs radically from both himself and others in New Hollywood, especially Spielberg. ‘Lucas became so powerful that he didn’t have to direct,’ he told Time magazine. ‘But directing is what Steven has to do.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I love the work the way Patton loved the stink of battle.’

Lucas has less in common with Scorsese and Spielberg than with a producer like Sam Goldwyn, who fed the public taste for escapist fantasy and noble sentiment forty years before him, with films like Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a young critic, the British director Lindsay Anderson met Goldwyn, and was impressed by his conviction that nobody knew better what his public wanted and needed. ‘Blessed with that divine confidence in the rightness (moral, aesthetic, commercial) of his own intuition,’ Goldwyn was, Anderson decided, one of the ‘lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears that it likes to weep.’ Today, the grandchildren of Goldwyn’s audience laugh at Chewbacca the wookiee, cry at the love of Princess Leia for Han Solo, feel their hearts throb in tune to John Williams’s brassy score for Star Wars.

‘He came from a very practical era,’ the supervisor of Stanislaus County said of George Lucas Sr when he died in 1991. ‘There was never a day that I didn’t see George hailing me over. He’d be gesturing with his hands and pointing, and everyone knew that George was on the warpath with the government.’

The Lucases arrived in central California from Arkansas in 1890, after having left Virginia a century before. Before that, the family history is shadowy. ‘Nobody knows where we originally came from,’ George Jr said later. ‘Obviously some criminal, or somebody who got thrown out of England or France.’ The remark wasn’t made out of embarrassment. In a sort of reverse snobbery, his father had taught him that it was better to trace your roots to Billy the Kid than to the Mayflower.

In 1889, Washington and Montana achieved statehood, and California, with its orchards blossoming, its fishing industry thriving and oil being pumped along its central coast, looked like the place to be. Just before World War I, Walton Lucas, an oilfield worker, settled in Laton, a grim little town south of Fresno, where his son George Walton Lucas was born in 1913. George Walton Sr, the film-maker’s father, never lost the wiry look of a frontiersman, nor the sense, reinforced by Methodism, that life and work were two sides of the same coin. ‘He was one of those people who, at the dinner table, always had little talks about those kind of things,’ his daughter Kate recalled. ‘He quoted a lot of Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true.” He said a lot of things like that.’

In 1928, when George Sr was fifteen, his father died of diabetes, a disease whose gene would skip a generation and pass to his grandson. His widow Maud moved into Fresno, shuffling her son from school to school while she looked for work, a commodity in short supply as America’s economy imploded in the worldwide slump. In 1929 they relocated sixty miles from Fresno, to Modesto, and George enrolled in Modesto High School with the idea of studying law. Already convinced by events that the Lord only helped those who helped themselves, he was a serious student, becoming class president in his senior year. His vice president, who also co-starred with him in the senior-class play, was pretty, dark but frail Dorothy Bomberger, daughter of Paul S. Bomberger, a wealthy local businessman who’d built his father’s property interests into a large corporation that also included a seed company and a car dealership. They married in 1933, the year Lucas graduated. He was twenty, Dorothy eighteen.

With a wife to support, Lucas abandoned any thought of a law degree and found work in an old established Modesto stationery store, Lee Brothers. Shortly afterwards, one of the biggest stationery stores in the state, H.S. Crocker in Fresno, offered him a job at $75 a week. The couple moved, but Dorothy missed her family, so they returned to Modesto. With Dorothy’s father in real estate and her uncle Amos in loans, there was no problem finding a place to live. Lucas and Dorothy moved into an apartment repossessed from a defaulting borrower.

Lucas went to work for LeRoy Morris, who owned the town’s oldest stationery supplier, the L.M. Morris Co. Morris had been in business since 1904, and his shop showed it: school supplies and office materials shared space with books, gifts, and toys. With no children of his own, Morris was on the lookout for someone to whom he could hand on the thriving business. Lucas Sr wasn’t backward in making it clear he was a candidate.

‘This is the next-to-last move I plan to make,’ he told his boss. ‘By the time I’m twenty-five, I hope to have my own store.’

‘That’s a very ambitious goal,’ Morris said mildly.

But the young man’s directness had impressed Morris. Two years later he sought out Lucas in the basement where he was shifting boxes, and asked, ‘Are you satisfied with me?’

When Lucas looked blank, Morris continued, ‘If you are, I’m satisfied with you. Do you think we could live together for the rest of our lives? You know, a partnership is like getting married – maybe harder in some ways.’

‘But I have no money,’ Lucas said.

Morris shrugged this off. ‘You’ll sign a note you owe me so much. This business is no good if it won’t pay it out.’

Lucas switched from earning wages to owning 10 per cent of L.M. Morris. His employer’s generosity reinforced his belief in patriarchy. When he had a son, he would put him into the family business too, and help him run it until he was ready to take over.

In 1934 the Lucases had their first child, Ann, and two years later Katherine, always called Kate. The pregnancies sapped Dorothy’s strength, triggering the ill-health that was to haunt the rest of her life, and looking after her two daughters placed a further strain on her frail constitution. Nevertheless, she encouraged her husband, accepting his decision to spend six days a week at the store, and helping with the book-keeping on Sundays. She even got pregnant again, though two miscarriages had convinced her doctors she should not have any more children. Confident of prosperity, Lucas bought a $500 lot on Ramona Avenue, a wide street on what was then the edge of town. With $5000 borrowed from Paul and Amos Bomberger, he built a single-story house at number 530. It was here that his only son, five-pound nine-ounce George Walton Jr, was brought home after his birth on 14 May 1944 – Mother’s Day.