Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
in other people. ‘Directing is 80 per cent communication and 20 per cent know-how,’ Spielberg says. ‘Because if you can communicate to the people who know how to edit, know how to light, and know how to act – if you can communicate what you want… and what you feel, that’s my definition of a good director.’ One of the warmer stories about him describes him winning over ageing star Joan Crawford on his first job by presenting her each day with a rose in a Pepsi-Cola bottle: Crawford was the widow of Pepsi’s chairman. At an American Film Institute seminar, however, Spielberg recollected cynically: ‘I put the day of the week on the Pepsi bottle, and each day I’d give her one. She didn’t know it was a countdown. I couldn’t wait to get off the picture. Oh yeah, I did a lot of that bullshit.’
What sort of man prefers to be seen as a cunning manipulator than a charming collaborator? The same kind who will get up early on a film set to bake matzoh for 150 people? With Spielberg, it is safer to suspect the easy answers. He is stranger than we know – perhaps stranger than we can know.
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,