Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Some of Arnold’s visionary qualities can be attributed to his avid interest in reading science fiction, a habit he later passed on to his son. “I’ve been reading science fiction since I was seven years old, all the way back to the earliest Amazing Stories,” Arnold says. “Amazing, Astounding, Analog—I still subscribe. I still read ’em. My kids used to complain, ‘Dad’s in the bathroom with a science-fiction magazine. We can’t get in.’”

  Sam and Becky Spielberg, who spoke mostly Russian around the house, were struggling to make ends meet during the Depression, and they could not afford to send Arnold and Buddy to college. After his graduation in 1934 from Hughes High School, Arnold barely missed out on a college scholarship and had to take a job far beneath his potential, working as a clerk in a chain of small-town department stores across the river in Kentucky, run by his mother’s relatives, the Lerman brothers.

  Before becoming a store manager for the Lermans, Arnold worked as an assistant manager in Cynthiana, Kentucky, for his older cousin Max Chase, a nephew of Rebecca Spielberg. Starting the process that eventually would make Arnold’s son Steven into a filmmaker, Max gave Arnold his first movie camera during the early 1930s. “I started taking home movies when I lived in Kentucky,” Arnold recalls. “My cousin bought one of the earliest 8mm movie cameras. He didn’t know how to use it, so he said, ‘Here, you use it.’ I was about seventeen years old when I started doing that. I used to take a lot of junk movies, you know what I mean? Family and stuff like that. But no class. Just pictures.”§

  Arnold continued to work for the Lermans until the coming of World War II. He enlisted in the U. S. Army Signal Corps in January 1942, but was soon transferred into the Army Air Forces. After serving as an airplane-parts shipping clerk in Karachi, Pakistan, he parlayed his ham-radio experience into a post as a radio operator. Stationed first in Karachi and then outside Calcutta, in the China-Burma-India theater of operations, he was part of a B-25 bomber squadron that destroyed Japanese railroad lines, shipping, and communications in Burma, earning them the nickname of “The Burma Bridge Busters.” Arnold recalls that although he “flew a couple of missions,” he spent most of the war running the squadron’s communications room: “At first I signed on to be a radio gunner, but they said, ‘No, if you know how to fix radios, you’re better off on the ground.’ They wouldn’t let me fly anymore.” He was rotated back to the United States in December 1944, serving out the rest of the war at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

  The country’s shared sacrifices and its victory over fascism, coupled with the eventual discovery of the full dimensions of the Holocaust, contributed to the postwar advancement of social acceptance and economic opportunities for American Jews. The Cold War climate of fierce American competitiveness with the Soviet Union also helped open doors in higher education, science, and business during the postwar years, while helping make Christians somewhat more tolerant in their social interactions with Jews, or at least less overt about their anti-Semitism.

  The most immediate and far-reaching benefit of wartime service for Arnold Spielberg was the GI Bill of Rights, which finally enabled him, like 2.2 million other American veterans, to attend college. The GI Bill gave veterans what one of them called “a ticket of admission to a better life.”

  It was that for Arnold Spielberg, making it possible for the former department store manager to earn a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Cincinnati in June 1949 and launching him on what would turn out to be a highly successful career in computer engineering. Arnold remembers that just before his father died, he was “so proud” to see his son enter college.

  “Arnold blossomed in an academic setting,” family friend Millie Tieger observed. “Arnold was such a turn-around person. He married Leah and she encouraged him to go to college. She pushed him. She was already a graduate of the University of Cincinnati; she was a smart girl, talented, very outgoing. I think she wanted Arnold also to have a good education. He turned out to be a brain, absolutely brilliant, a pioneer in computers. When Arnold was working in New Jersey, doing early computer research, he used to come to Cincinnati, and he would sit down at our kitchen table and calculate numbers to the thirteenth power. I had no idea what he was talking about. I would say, ‘Shut up, Arnold.’”

  *

  WHEN Steven Spielberg’s mother attended Walnut Hills High School, the college preparatory school for Cincinnati public school students, she was “kinda mousy. So was I,” recalls fellow student Edith Cummins. “We weren’t the prom queen types. She was very plain.” “I was different-looking,” Leah told Fred A. Bernstein, author of The Jewish Mothers’ Hall of Fame. “But I never wanted to change. If I had had a tiny pug nose, maybe I wouldn’t have had to develop a personality. But instead, I learned to play piano. I was somebody. I loved my life, and I believed in me.”

  “She was so different from the Spielbergs,” notes Millie Tieger. “She had a sparkle. They were all bigger, dark, and here is this under-five-foot young lady, blond, her eyes flash, she talks like this [moves her head and eyes rapidly as she talks]. Arnold was super-smart and accomplished, but I think Leah had a more all-encompassing ‘people’ personality. She’s a very insightful creature.”

  Leah started dating Arnold Spielberg in 1939. Arnold attended high school with Leah’s brother, Bernie. “We all played tennis together,” Arnold’s sister Natalie recounted. “Leah was going with somebody else at the time, but when she broke up with her boyfriend I introduced her to Arnold because I thought that would be a good match.”

  During the early 1940s, Leah pursued her musical ambitions as a student at the renowned Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, affiliated with the University of Cincinnati. She planned a career as a concert pianist and did some public performing, much to the pride and delight of her family. Leah was “a very talented concert pianist,” Arnold says. “She contributed a lot of artistic talent to Steven.”

  Leah, a home economics major in college, was graduated and took a job as a social worker for the Travelers Aid Society at the city’s Union Terminal. She married Arnold in South Avondale’s Adath Israel synagogue on February 25, 1945, while he was still in active service at Wright Field. Joining him in Dayton, Leah worked for the local social services department. After his discharge later that year and their return to Cincinnati, Leah helped administer electrocardiograms for a few months at the Jewish Hospital, but quit that job shortly before Steven was born at the same hospital. With her own artistic career sidetracked by the demands of raising a family, she passed on her artistic ambitions to her son, but never stopped playing the piano.

  “The first piece of furniture we got when we were married was a piano,” Arnold says. “We borrowed a bed, and we bought a Baldwin spinet.” Arnold, who took piano lessons as a boy, was always an avid music listener. “We had a big collection of classical records,” he recalls. “We had classical music playing in the house all the time, way back, early on.” While pregnant with Steven, Leah spent much of her time playing classical pieces on her piano, and when he was an infant in diapers, he would sit on her lap on the piano bench, listening and learning to tap out the music. Sometimes Arnold also got into the act: “I knew enough to know the notes, so when she’d play, I’d turn the pages.”

  Sometimes the music would affect Steven in unexpected ways. “Steven always had a highly developed imagination,” said Leah. “He was afraid of everything. When he was little he would insist that I lift the top of the [piano] so he could see the strings while I played. Then he would fall on the floor, screaming in fear.” But Millie Tieger, who remembers watching him as a small child sitting at the piano with his mother, suggests that the early influence of Leah’s music is “the key to the understanding” of his creative development: “What went into Steve when he heard his mother play music so beautifully?”

  Like fellow Wunderkind director Orson Welles, whose father was an inventor and whose mother was a concert pianist, Spielberg acquired his dazzling blend of artistic talents from
a synthesis of his parents’ disparate abilities. He once said he is the product of “genetic overload.” His father describes Steven’s personality as “a lucky piece of synergy,” explaining that Steven’s mother is “a very musically creative person, she’s a good dancer. And she’s a zany type. I’m a little more grounded. But I also like creative things. I was a great storyteller. I love science fiction.”

  Arnold’s pioneering creativity within his own field of computers has brought him several patents. When Steven was an infant, his father would put him to sleep by the imaginative means of using an oscilloscope to reflect wavy lines on the wall. Though Steven showed no interest in following his father into engineering, he picked up his interest in filmmaking from his father. Steven’s fascination with all kinds of cutting-edge technology and his mastery of the tools of filmmaking have been evident from the earliest days of his professional career.

  The influence of music is also strongly evident in Spielberg’s career. He played the clarinet (though not very well) in his grade school and high school bands, and sat in as first clarinet for composer John Williams in the beach scene of Jaws. He still noodles on the instrument for pleasure and relaxation. He has been a passionate collector of movie scores since childhood, and has said, “If I weren’t a filmmaker I’d probably be in music. I’d play piano or I’d compose. I’d probably be a starving composer somewhere in Hollywood right now, hopefully not starving, but I probably would not have been successful.”

  In the view of Williams, who has written the scores for most of Spielberg’s films, he is being overly modest about his musical sense: “Steven could have been a composer himself. He has that rhythmic sense in his whole being, and I think that is one of the great things about his directing—this rhythmic, kinetic sense he has.”

  Through his parents, Spielberg inherited his love of music from Grandpa Shmuel, who performed in the Russian army band, and from Grandpa Fievel, the Russian immigrant Jew who was not allowed to go to school but used his music to proclaim “How wondrous are Thy works.”

  Perhaps the most joyous scene in all of Spielberg’s movies is the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the scientists finally devise a way of communicating with the alien mother ship by using their computers to play synthesized music together. The musical interchange between the humans and their extraterrestrial visitors starts as a few tentative notes and quickly becomes a rapturous duet of spiritual celebration.

  “When I saw Close Encounters,” Millie Tieger recalls, “I thought, There’s Leah with the music and Arnold with computers. That’s Steve, the little boy. Steve wrote a movie about Mommy and Daddy.”

  * While Spielberg’s maternal grandparents were Orthodox, his mother kept kosher only intermittently and his family attended Conservative synagogues.

  † Steven Allan Spielberg’s Hebrew name, Shmuel, is a tribute to his grandfather, who died before he was born. Asked why Steven was not given the first name of Samuel, Arnold says, “We gave him an Anglicized ‘Steven.’ We just artificially made it that. Leah and I wanted to give him a non-Biblical name. ‘Allan’ came from the Hebrew Aharon. And we just liked the name Allan, out of nowhere.”

  ‡ Spielberg announced in 1989 that he planned to make a movie dealing with his childhood years in Cincinnati, from a script by his sister Anne, I’ll Be Home. The movie would have to be shot on location, he said, because “there’s nothing in L.A. that looks like Cincinnati—nothing.”

  § Arnold is still shooting home movies today, mostly of his travels, using a Sony High-8 video camera and a professional-quality Avid editing system his son gave him. In his current occupation as an electronics industry consultant, Arnold also has been making industrial films: “Ever since I retired, they say to me, ‘With the name Spielberg, you’ve got to be able to make movies.’ So they got me making movies.”

  TWO

  “MAZIK”

  WE HAVE A WORD FOR HIM IN YIDDISH. WE’D CALL HIM A MAZIK – IT’S SAID LOVINGLY, YOU KNOW, BUT IT MEANS A MISCHIEVOUS LITTLE DEVIL. AND HE WAS THAT!

  – STEVEN SPIELBERG’S AUNT NATALIE GUTTMAN

  STEVEN Allan Spielberg’s birth certificate shows that he was born at Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital at 6:16 P.M. on December 18, 1946—not December 18, 1947, as has often been reported.

  Just why Spielberg has felt it expedient to appear a year younger than his true age throughout most of his Hollywood career became a matter of controversy in 1995, when the issue provoked an exchange of lawsuits between Spielberg and one of his former producers, Denis C. Hoffman. But the truth about his age was not entirely unknown over the years. In 1981, when Patricia Goldstone, a freelance feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, discovered college records indicating that Spielberg actually was born in 1946, the director “would not comment,” she reported. Spielberg’s incorrect age and birthdate have been given in innumerable articles and several books, although all that was necessary to resolve the question was a request to the Cincinnati Board of Health for his Ohio Department of Health birth certificate. Prior to 1995, the only book on Spielberg or his work that reported his age correctly was Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the “Twilight Zone” Case (1988) by Stephen Farber and Marc Green, which cited Goldstone’s article, commenting, “Almost everyone in Hollywood lies about his age; but Spielberg, with a premature vision of the legend he wanted to build, may have started fudging earlier than anyone else.”

  Spielberg’s birth notice appeared in the December 26, 1946, issue of The American Israelite, a national Jewish newspaper published in his home town of Cincinnati: “Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Spielberg (Leah Posner), 817 Lexington Avenue, son, Wednesday, Dec. 18th.” Before he moved to California, Spielberg’s age was reported accurately when his filmmaking activities were written up in the Phoenix papers. The Phoenix Jewish News reported on December 25, 1959, that his bar mitzvah (the ceremony that takes place when a Jewish boy turns thirteen) would be held the following January 9 at Beth Hebrew Congregation. Spielberg’s true birthdate also appears in the records of the high schools he attended in Phoenix and in Saratoga, California, as well as in the records of California State College (now California State University) at Long Beach. But after Spielberg began making his first inroads into Hollywood, his attitude toward his past history became more creative, and as a result the chronology of his early career has become a self-generated tangle of confusion.

  On October 26, 1995, in response to questions prompted by Hoffman’s lawsuit, Spielberg’s attorney Marshall Grossman and his spokesman, Marvin Levy, acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that “the director was born in 1946, and that any references to 1947 are incorrect,” the paper reported. “But they both refused to explain why Spielberg never corrected it, or why he lists it incorrectly in documents such as his driver’s license.” Grossman told the paper, “I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe he didn’t care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.”

  *

  COULD Spielberg, as Farber and Green suggested, simply have been lying about his age all those years in order to make himself seem even more of a wunderkind than he really was? Or was there another reason for his obfuscation, one that, as Hoffman alleged, involved “a deliberate and outrageous lie perpetrated by defendant Spielberg in a calculated and malicious scheme to avoid his legal obligations”?

  Spielberg was a genuine novelty when he arrived in Hollywood. The movie industry at that time “was still a middle-aged man’s profession,” he has recalled. “The only young people on the [Universal] lot were actors. It was just the beginning of the youth renaissance.” Spielberg already had learned some valuable lessons about publicity during his teenage years, when he was hailed as a youthful filmmaking prodigy in Phoenix. So he was acutely conscious of the novelty of his age in Hollywood and the potential advantages of exploiting his precocity in the press.

  One of the first contacts he made in Hollywood was Charles A. (Chuck) Silvers, Universal Pictures’ film librarian, who becam
e his earliest mentor in the film industry. Silvers remembers Spielberg telling him, “The only thing I want to do is direct before I’m twenty-one.” Spielberg did manage to direct an independent short film called Amblin’ in the summer of 1968, several months after his twenty-first birthday. Amblin’ was what brought Spielberg to the attention of Sid Sheinberg, then vice president of production for Universal TV, who offered Spielberg a directing contract in the fall of 1968. As Sheinberg has recalled their first conversation, Spielberg told him, “I just have one request and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr. Sheinberg, but a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one. That would be very important to me.”

  Sheinberg, who may not have been entirely clear about Spielberg’s actual birthdate, promised that would happen. Spielberg’s age was given as twenty-one when Universal announced his signing in the Hollywood trade papers on December 12, 1968. That was indeed recognized as newsworthy, for as The Hollywood Reporter put it, “Spielberg, 21, is believed the youngest filmmaker ever pacted by a major studio.” But the trades didn’t realize that Spielberg would turn twenty-two only six days later. Spielberg’s first television assignment, a segment of the three-part TV movie Night Gallery, went before the cameras in February 1969. So in spite of his discussion with Sheinberg at the time he was hired, Spielberg did not direct anything for Universal until he was twenty-two, a fact that in later years has not stopped him from making frequent claims to the contrary, such as his 1991 comment to Premiere magazine that “I got my contract at age twenty to be at Universal for seven years.”

  When Spielberg was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter during the first day of shooting on Night Gallery, his age was accurately emblazoned in the headline 22-YEAR-OLD TYRO DIRECTS JOAN CRAWFORD. Spielberg also told the truth about his age to a rabbi who interviewed him for a Jewish newspaper in November 1970, when he was twenty-three, but shortly after that the history of his life began to undergo rewrites.