Steven Spielberg

2 The Boy Who Swallowed a Transistor

We belong to the last generation that could relate to adults.

Joan Didion

HE WAS short and thin. His ears stuck out, and his narrow face seemed to elongate towards the chin, making his mouth V-shaped, and pulling the lower lip out and down, so that his mouth would never seem quite closed. He looked like an inquisitive bird, with a beaky nose he found so embarrassing in childhood that he stuck tape to the tip of it and to his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. The beak was matched by a bird’s gaze, motionless, eerily unblinking. If he disliked something, as adult or child, he just stared it out of existence. A bird’s voice, too, high, fast, uninflected. And he moved in an avian way, darting and stopping, darting and stopping, his actions apparently unmediated by intellect. When teams were chosen for any game, he would always be the last one picked. Nobody wanted jerky little Steven. Adolescence would bring not muscles but acne, freckles and even greater gawkiness. His thin arms so embarrassed him that it wasn’t until the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1976 that he dared take off his shirt in public.

Spielberg’s birth almost coincided with the first sightings of UFOs over the United States. On 24 June 1947, Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold, flying his two-seater plane over the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington state, reported nine shallow dish-like objects heading towards the Cascade Range. They looked to him like skipping stones, but he estimated their speed at 1200 m.p.h. Over the next two weeks ‘flying saucers’ were seen in thirty states, after which sightings settled down to fifty a month.

For many years it was believed that Spielberg was born a few months after this, at the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. In fact, his mother Leah Posner Spielberg gave birth to him a year earlier, on 18 December 1946, a date Spielberg systematically obscured during his early adulthood. He was followed within the next few years by three sisters, Anne, Sue and Nancy. Spielberg would complain that he spent his childhood in a house with three screaming younger sisters and a mother who played concert piano with seven other women. Elliott’s little sister Gertie in E.T., inclined to sudden squeals and conversational irrelevancies, was, Spielberg claimed, an amalgamation of his three ‘terrifying’ siblings.

Leah Posner was small, agile and nervous, like her son. She hated to fly, a trait he inherited. She’d trained as a pianist, but given it up as a possible career when she married Arnold Spielberg, another locally-born Cincinnatian whose parents, like hers, had come from Poland and Austria in the century’s first wave of immigrants. Almost immediately after their marriage, Arnold enlisted in the Air Force, flying as a B-25 radio operator in Burma with a squadron nicknamed the ‘Burma Bridgebusters’. Demobilised, he stayed with electronics, which had fascinated him since he was eight or nine. In 1948, Bell Telephone engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor, the tiny germanium diode that would replace vacuum tubes and make miniaturised electronics possible. Arnold found a job with the Burroughs business machine company, working on the beginnings of computers. An obsessive tinkerer, he would bring home bits of equipment, or drag the family off in the middle of the night to observe some natural wonder. His son thought him inflexible and workaholic. Richard Dreyfuss’s character Roy Neary in Close Encounters is a not entirely affectionate portrait of him.

Arnold read the science fiction magazines that proliferated after the war as publishing stumbled on a middle-class audience newly sophisticated in technology and interested in its potential. John W. Campbell built the monthly Astounding Science Fiction into the premiere sf magazine, discreetly alternating fiction with technical articles and the occasional outright piece of charlatanism, like Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind, in which L. Ron Hubbard, one of Campbell’s most successful pre-war fiction writers, expounded his pseudoscientific religion, Scientology. Sensing a shift in his readership towards technology, Campbell changed the title in 1960 to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and began publishing more thoughtful material, typified by Frank Herbert’s ecological saga Dune. Arnold Spielberg, an Analog fan, piled copies behind the lavatory cistern in the bathroom where he could read them in comfort and privacy.

Broadcast media permeated Spielberg’s childhood. When he was four or five, his father built him a crystal set. He would lie in his room at night, listening through an earpiece – and sometimes, he insists, through his teeth. ‘I remember one day, without the radio, hearing some music and then hearing this voice I was familiar with from the radio. It was the comedy programme Beulah.’

‘There are certain young directors, like Steven Spielberg,’ says film editor Ralph Rosenblum, ‘who were raised in the age of television and seem to have an intuitive sense of film rhythm and film possibilities.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I did begin by reading comics. I did see too many movies. I did, still do, watch too much television. I feel the lack of having been raised on good literature and the written word.’ As critic David Denby would say later of him and his generation of directors, ‘Cartoons exert a greater influence than literature on his tastes and assumptions.’ For the rest of his life, Spielberg would apologise for lacking the intellectual discipline to deal with print. ‘I don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. I have not read for pleasure in many, many years. And that’s sort of a shame. I think I am really part of the Eisenhower generation of television.’

TV had just begun to pervade America. 1952 saw the debut of the prototypical cop series, Dragnet, the celebrity tribute programme This is Your Life, The Jackie Gleason Show, with Gleason as a New York bus driver with delusions of grandeur and Art Carney as his dutiful sewer-worker friend, and Our Miss Brooks, one of many series to give a new career to a Hollywood character performer, in this case Eve Arden as an acerbic unmarried middle-aged schoolteacher.

It was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, however, which exerted the greatest influence over Spielberg’s generation. Band leader Ozzie Nelson transferred his situation comedy from radio, and with it his real-life family, including son Eric, known as Ricky, whom the series made into a pop star. TV cloned the Nelsons into a multitude, among them the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver and the white-bread Andersons of Father Knows Best, led by another Hollywood retread, Robert Young, whom Spielberg would find himself directing. As David Halberstam says, the sitcoms celebrated

a wonderfully antiseptic world, of idealised homes in an idealised, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions… Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house or could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys… Moms and dads never raised their voices at each other in anger… This was a peaceable kingdom. There were no drugs. Keeping a family car out late at night seemed to be the height of insubordination… Moms and dads never stopped loving one another. Sibling love was always greater than sibling rivalry. No child was favoured, no child was stunted.

The reality was very different. In 1955 teenage pregnancies reached a level unsurpassed even in the nineties, and one in every three marriages ended in divorce.

It was into this real world that Spielberg descended from TV’s fantasies of domestic perfection. Leah and Arnold Spielberg were no Ozzie and Harriet. Leah was frustrated in her musical ambitions, Arnold harassed by the need to keep up in a competitive new industry. ‘He left home at 7 a.m.,’ Spielberg recalled, ‘and sometimes didn’t get home until 9 or 10 p.m. I missed him to the point of resenting him.’ Their children roved the emotional no man’s land between them. ‘[My mother] would have chamber concerts in the living room with her friends who played the viola and the violin and the harp. While that was happening in another room, my father would be conferring with nine or ten men about computers, graphs and charts and oscilloscopes and transistors.’ Sometimes the conflict degenerated into domestic arguments. When these started, the four children huddled together, listening to the marriage fall apart.

Steven learned to tune out the rage and fear. He’d go into his room, close the door and, stuffing towels under it, immerse himself in building model planes from Airfix hobby kits. ‘For many years I had a real Lost Boy attitude about parents,’ he said. ‘Who needs them?’ He carried his defence mechanism into adult life. When an employee of Spielberg’s told Leah she’d quit Amblin Entertainment, Leah laughed and asked, ‘Have you ceased to exist yet?’

‘She knew the deal,’ said the employee. ‘That’s his childlike personality. If you do something a baby doesn’t like, he just shuts you out.’

Television became at once Steven’s educational medium and security blanket. Leah and Arnold didn’t allow him to watch anything as violent as Dragnet, but he absorbed almost everything else, in particular the old movies which were TV’s cheapest and most reliable fodder. For him, as for many of his contemporaries who became directors in the seventies and eighties, TV was his film school.

It gave him a taste for Hollywood films of the thirties, in particular the A-pictures of MGM, which often featured an actor who, to him, was the epitome of fathers, Spencer Tracy. Tracy’s appearance in MGM’s 1937 adaptation of Kipling’s Captains Courageous, about a spoiled rich kid who, falling overboard from an ocean liner, is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and educated and civilised by him, profoundly affected Spielberg. It, and Tracy, would provide the key to his version of Empire of the Sun, just as another Tracy film, Adam’s Rib, in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play married lawyers who represent opposite sides in a domestic violence case, would inspire scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford coaxing kisses from Karen Allen parallels Tracy doing the same with Hepburn.

Spielberg was drawn even more to the fantasies of the period. His parents barred him from horror films – which, in any event, were not extensively programmed at the time – but he saw most of Hollywood’s imaginative classics, including Lost Horizon. The virtuoso first third of Frank Capra’s 1937 film of James Hilton’s novel, with the small group of refugees carried across the roof of the world in a montage of maps, mountainscapes, bantering dialogue, high-plateau refuelling stops and a final spectacular special effects crash, would be replicated in the Indiana Jones movies.

Mobs interested Capra. Nobody was more skilful at orchestrating crowds in motion, cutting between a few significant cameos as detonators to drive a screen filled with people into surging movement, and Spielberg learned his lesson well. He was influenced in particular by It’s a Wonderful Life. Offered by Capra and James Stewart as an affirmation to post-war America of everything it had fought to preserve, the fantasy of a savings and loan manager in rural Bedford Falls who sacrifices everything for his neighbours, only to lose faith, then regain it when an angel reveals the hell his town would have been without his contribution, the film endorsed everything Spielberg most needed to believe in: family, community, suburbia.

Steven’s first memory was a visual one, of being taken to a Hassidic Jewish temple in Cincinnati by his father. Still in his stroller, he stared in wonder as he was rolled down a dark corridor into a room filled with men wearing long beards and black hats. He only had eyes, however, for the blaze of red light flowing from the sanctuary where, in imitation of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the rolls of the holy torah were kept. The impression was indelible. ‘I’ve always loved what I call “God Lights”,’ he says, ‘shafts coming out of the sky, or out of a spaceship, or coming through a doorway.’ Asked to define the central image of his work, he nominated the scene from Close Encounters where six-year-old Cary Guffey, about to be kidnapped by aliens, stands in the open kitchen door; ‘the little boy… standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.’

The blank TV screen exercised a similar fascination. When Spielberg’s parents went out, they draped the set with a blanket and booby-trapped it with strategically placed hairs to reveal if Steven was viewing surreptitiously. He learned to note the position of the hairs and replace them. Then he would turn on the set and watch it, even if nothing was being transmitted. He was fascinated by the hissing ‘snow’, and the ghosts of faraway stations. Pressing his face to the tube, he would pursue them as they drifted in and out of range.

Sensory overload became Spielberg’s preferred state of mind, and remained so for decades. He functioned best, he told a journalist, in a soup of received impressions: radio and television blaring, record player going, dogs barking, doorbell ringing – all while he answered a telephone call. Directing Hook in 1990, he would sit on the camera crane between shots, playing with a Game Boy and at the same time eavesdropping with earphones on flight controllers at LA International Airport.

As a child, alone in his room, he induced an aesthetic frenzy by a sort of optical masturbation, throwing hand shadows on the ceiling and scaring himself with them. Seeing himself as both artist and medium encouraged a schizophrenic division of personality. Until he was fourteen, he would stare into the mirror for five minutes at a time, hypnotising himself with his own reflection. As an adult, he would reach for a camera at moments of stress and photograph his tearful face in a mirror, the film-maker dispassionately recording the stranger inside him.

Insecurity bred fantasies of domestic disaster. He imagined creatures living under his bed, monsters lurking in the closet, waiting to suck him in. At night, he would lie shivering under the blankets, fancying that the furniture had feet, and that tables and chairs were scuttling about in the dark. ‘There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time,’ he said, ‘imagining little friendly people living in the crack and coming out to talk to me. One day while I was staring at the crack it suddenly widened. It opened about five inches and little pieces fell out of it. I screamed a silent scream. I couldn’t get anything out. I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was very stimulating.’

In 1952 Arnold introduced Steven to two phenomena that fundamentally affected his life.

My dad woke me in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes. I didn’t know what was happening. It was frightening. My mom wasn’t with me. So I thought, ‘What’s happening here?’ He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple of hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, and we both lay down. He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower. All these incredible points of light were criss-crossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau… Years later we got a telescope and I was into stargazing.

To memorialise this incident, Spielberg has incorporated a shooting star in all his films.

The other event of 1952 was his first experience of a movie theatre. Again it was Arnold who took him, after carefully explaining what they were going to see. Not carefully enough, however, since Steven thought Cecil B. DeMille’s film about a circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, was a real circus and not one on film. The circus interested him, since his mother had told him how an uncle had run away with one as a boy; the same uncle, it seems, who had been in the black market, and had hidden contraband watches under the family bed.

DeMille’s film conflated all the fantasies of circus life: the clown, played by James Stewart, whose permanent make-up hides his tragic past as a surgeon; sadistic animal trainer Lyle Bettger; French trapeze artist Cornel Wilde (‘Ze Great Sebastian’); tough boss Charlton Heston, and all-American love interest in the person of raucous blonde Betty Hutton, all culminating in the collision of two trains where Stewart’s long-suppressed skills are called upon.

Arnold told Steven, ‘It’s going to be bigger than you are, but that’s all right. The people in it are going to be up on the screen and they can’t get out at you.’ (This is a common fantasy of suggestible children. Stephen King shared it, and as an adult persuaded his children not to sit too close to the screen by telling them that people who did so fell into the picture and became the extras visible behind the stars.) Spielberg recalls:

So we stood in line for an hour and a half, and we go into this big cavernous hall and there’s nothing but chairs and they’re all facing up, they’re not bleachers, they’re chairs. I was thinking: something is up, something is fishy. So the curtain is open and I expect to see elephants and there’s nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas… I retained three things from the experience: the train wreck, the lions and Jimmy Stewart as the clown.

As soon as he had a train set, Spielberg repeatedly recreated the crash, and shadows of DeMille’s cardboard characters drift through many of his films. Indiana Jones has something of Heston, while Betty Hutton is the model for Willie, the shrill nightclub singer heroine of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Above all, DeMille’s showmanship left an indelible impression. ‘I guess ever since then I’ve wanted to try to involve the audience as much as I can,’ said Spielberg, ‘so they no longer think they’re sitting in an audience.’

He continued to find movies, unlike television, emotionally overwhelming. Especially Disney cartoons. At eight, he said, he ‘came screaming home from Snow White…’ – in some interviews he’s eleven, and the film is Bambi – ‘and tried to hide under the covers. My parents didn’t understand it, because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthral. Between Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi, I was a basket case of neurosis.’ Though he was allowed to watch the Wonderful World of Disney TV shows, with their compilations of cartoons and behind-the-scenes documentaries about Disney films in production, his parents tried to keep him away from the feature cartoons. It gave them a glamorous sense of the forbidden they never lost.

One price of Arnold’s job in a sunrise industry like electronics was the occasional moves in search of work or promotion. In 1950 the Spielbergs had relocated in Haddonfield, New Jersey, when he joined RCA. In 1953 he took a job with General Electric in Scottsdale, Arizona, then a dormitory town east of Phoenix, but now a suburb. They were to spend eleven years there. The move wrenched Steven, and instilled his lifelong sense of dislocation and loneliness. ‘Just as I’d become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend,’ he complained, ‘the FOR SALE sign would dig into the front lawn and we’d be packing. And it would always be that inevitable goodbye scene, in the train station or at the carport, packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we’d say goodbye to each other and I would leave. And the older I got the harder it got.’ Among the first phrases he learned to say was ‘looking forward to’. His grandparents would occasionally come from New Jersey to Ohio to visit, and he loved it when his mother said it was something to look forward to.

His mother had been no less anguished. ‘I was hysterical,’ she recalled. ‘I mean, in 1955 what nice Jewish girl moved to Arizona? I looked in an encyclopedia – it was published in 1920, but I didn’t notice at the time – and it said: “Arizona is a barren wasteland.” I went there kicking and screaming. I had to promise Steve a horse, because he didn’t want to go either. I never made good on that promise, and he still reminds me of it today.’ Phoenix, as Jodie Foster was famously to remark in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, is ‘weird’. Scottsdale, described by one visitor as ‘suburbia on steroids’, itself mixed mass-produced bungalows of the kind in which the Spielbergs lived with sprawling ranch-type houses set in gardens of sand, rock, spiky yucca and twenty-foot-high saguro cactuses. The desert around Scottsdale attracted more than its fair share of visionaries who exploited its open spaces and frontier manners to experiment. Frank Lloyd Wright started building his winter home Taliesin West just north-east of the town in 1937. Despite the discomfort of the fieldstone building, it became a centre for his students from Wisconsin, and after his death in 1959 metamorphosed into an arts centre and museum. One of Wright’s students, Paolo Soleri, chose another spot outside Scottsdale to build Arcosanti, his ‘arcology’, a community of futuristic shell-like buildings integrated into the desert environment.

Spielberg seems never to have visited either Taliesin West or Arcosanti. The visions offered him nothing. He enrolled in Scottsdale’s Arcadia High School but, whatever school meant to him, it wasn’t higher education. He’s always avoided discussing classes or his academic record, which, in common with most of the Movie Brats, was dismal. A survey of America’s twelve most influential media personalities in the nineties found that more than half never finished college. Three of them, including Ted Turner, were dyslexic. Spielberg has always had to struggle with the written word. There are no extant Spielberg letters, no diaries, and he never brings a script on set, preferring to memorise the shots beforehand. ‘He wasn’t a good student,’ Leah says. ‘He was less than mediocre. He needed tutors in French and math.’ Asked to dissect a frog in biology class, he threw up, an incident recycled in E.T. His sole reference to English class is a memory of turning a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a flip book by drawing cartoon characters on the corner of each page.

More important than anything that happened in class were the friendships and alliances of the playground. Like any sensitive child Spielberg loathed new places and people but, once accepted, he embraced them with jealous fervour. The metaphor of the new school remained with him for life. When he encountered George Lucas’s tight team, he found it like changing schools. He felt, he said, as if he’d moved into Lucas’s eighth-grade class.

At Arcadia High School he signed up with the Boy Scouts, and was admitted to its honour society, the Order of the Arrow. He began to study the clarinet too, and to march in the school band. Leah’s preoccupation with her piano prejudiced him against the classical repertoire, and he would never warm to pop or rock. His ideal was movie music, of which he soon had an encyclopaedic recall. Once he began making his own amateur films, he would noodle tunes on his clarinet, but only for Leah to transcribe for piano and record as soundtracks.