Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
Jeep, Spielberg made the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, about a World War II American platoon evading a Nazi army in the Libyan desert. He found a few fake German helmets, put them on friends and had them walk slowly past the camera, passing the helmets back down the line so that it looked like an army. Leah drove the Jeep and created uniforms in Wehrmacht grey in which Steven costumed his sisters and friends, who were then machine-gunned and forced repeatedly to roll down a hill in the desert which stood in for North Africa.
‘There was always a camera in his hands,’ Leah says. ‘Once he took a big cardboard carton from the supermarket and cut windows and doors and took it in the back alley and set it on fire to film it. When we saw it, it looked like a real building burning. These are things that in retrospect you try to figure out, but at the time it just seemed normal. He was my first child, and having no prior experience I thought all kids played like that.’
Escape to Nowhere won a prize at the Canyon Film Festival – a 16mm camera. Knowing he couldn’t afford 16mm film processing, Spielberg traded it for a more sophisticated H8 8mm Bolex. At the same time, with a little help from his father, he got a Bolex Sonorizer, with which he could put a soundtrack on his magnetically striped film.
He began to have friends, nerds like himself with over-active imaginations. During the run of the dinosaur film The Lost World in 1960, he and friends mixed white bread, Parmesan cheese, milk, creamed corn and peas in a paper bag and smuggled it into the Kiva. Then they made vomiting sounds and dripped the mixture from the balcony. It started a chain reaction of vomiting. The film was stopped and the lights went up as the malefactors escaped down the fire stairs.
Other attempts at sophistication didn’t work. ‘I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls,’ he says. ‘I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age. My growing up was like a sitcom ABC buys for a season before they drop it.’ Never passion’s plaything, except where movies were concerned, Spielberg would have a chequered emotional life that headed inexorably towards a marriage Ozzie and Harriet Nelson would have envied.
By the early sixties, Arnold and Leah’s marriage was failing. Spielberg recalled Arnold storming out of the house, shouting, ‘I’m not the head of the family, yet I am the man of the family’ – a line he would recycle in Duel. Steven fled from the cold silences of the house to the cinema’s warmth. In 1962, he saw the film that was to inspire him above all others. David Lean had spent years in the desert making Lawrence of Arabia, a truly epic picture of a larger-than-life historical character whose acts were mirrored and amplified by the landscapes in which they took place. Robert Bolt’s dialogue was minimal – indeed minimalist; aphorisms, orders, insults, seldom more than a sentence long. This was Ford crossed with Capra, but mediated by Lean. For the rest of his life, Spielberg would rate Lawrence as the one true classic of his early film-going. ‘I really kicked into high gear,’ he said of seeing it, ‘and thought, “This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.”’
Single-minded as ever, Spielberg set out to make his first feature, a science fiction adventure called Firelight. He wrote the first draft of the script in a night; the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet.
Every weekend for a year, Spielberg worked on the film with anyone he could cajole or bully into helping. No girl, no football games, no summer jobs diverted him. His enthusiasm and persistence were infectious. When he needed someone exploded in the living room, Leah opened cans of cherries and stood by as her son balanced them on one end of a board and had someone jump on the other. She never got the stains off the furniture. Once again the airport closed a runway for him. A local hospital where he had worked as a volunteer in his holidays lent its corridors for a shot, though Spielberg found the experience disconcerting. ‘I saw things that were so horrifying that I had to fantasise that there were lights, props, make-up men, just to avoid vomiting.’
Once he was finished, Spielberg edited the film to 140 minutes. Actors had come and gone over the year, but he persuaded students at the nearby University of Arizona to post-synchronise the speaking parts as he ran the film on a sheet stretched over one end of the den. The Arcadia school band recorded some music for it.
The result, though he now deprecates it as ‘one of the five worst films ever made’, was good enough to screen for an audience. He persuaded his father, who had already invested $300 in the project, to gamble another $400 for the hire of a local cinema. Spielberg rented a limousine to bring him to the theatre with Leah, who had cudgelled enough friends, relatives of the actors, ex-Boy Scouts and local film fans to fill the seats. Most stayed to the end, and Arnold pocketed $100 profit.
Spielberg’s entry into the cinema was also his exit from childhood and Phoenix. Arnold had decided on another move, this time to join IBM at Saratoga, ten miles from San Jose, near San Francisco. Almost immediately, they packed up, and set out for California.
Show business is high school plus money.
Hollywood saying
AFTER THE parched landscape of Arizona, Spielberg loved the hills and vineyards of Saratoga. But this move finally wrecked the rickety marriage of Leah and Arnold Spielberg. Arnold had barely finished sketching a design for the house he hoped to build when the couple separated. Leah returned to Phoenix and started divorce proceedings. The separation wrenched Steven, who developed insecurities about marriage and a sense of loss that would be reflected in his films, which are filled with sons seeking fathers and children deprived of their families.
Saratoga also exposed him to anti-Semitism for the first time. Unlike her parents, Leah hadn’t kept a devout household. Spielberg called their style of Judaism ‘storefront Kosher’. When the rabbi called, the mezuzah was put on the door frame and the menorah on the mantel, and removed after he left. Spielberg understood vaguely that his mother’s family fled from Odessa to escape pogroms. His first memory of numbers is of a man, one of a group his grandmother was tutoring in English, trying to entertain him by displaying his concentration camp tattoo, and illustrating by turning his arm to show how 6 upside-down became 9.
As a boy, Spielberg was embarrassed by his heritage. ‘My grandfather would come to the porch when I was playing football with my friends and call out my name in Hebrew. “Schmeul! Schmeul! Dinner’s ready.” They would say, “Isn’t that your place? Who’s this Shmoo?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It’s not me he’s calling.”’ To anyone who asked, his name was German. He resisted the pressure from his grandmother to conform to what he called ‘the Orthodox mould’, but at the same time the religion’s emphasis on family values fed his need to belong. As an adult, he became a classic Jewish father – and, sometimes, mother. Though no enthusiast for cooking, he would prepare Leah’s recipes at home, and occasionally get up early on location to make matzoh for 150 people, an almost sacramental act that reaffirmed the production unit as his surrogate family.
The America in which Spielberg grew up accepted racial discrimination as a fact of life. Medical and law schools operated quotas for Jewish students, and colleges had Jewish fraternities. One still occasionally encountered a discreet ‘Christian Only’ in ‘Positions Vacant’ ads. Many golf clubs operated a racial ban. Realtors wouldn’t sell houses in certain districts to Jewish families. ‘Neighbourhoods for [a Jew],’ wrote William Manchester, ‘like his summer camps and winter cruises, would advertise “Dietary rules strictly enforced.”’
In Phoenix, even as one of only five Jewish children in his school, Spielberg hadn’t stood out, but Saratoga was actively anti-Semitic. Pennies were tossed at him in study hall, and he was mocked so much in gym that he gave up sports altogether; admittedly no great sacrifice for him. The Spielberg house, the only one not to display lights at Christmas, was just a walk away from the school, but after he’d been bullied on the way home, Steven insisted Leah