By December 28, 1970, ten days after his twenty-fourth birthday, a year had been subtracted from Spielberg’s age in Hollywood press coverage: he was still twenty-three when Universal announced it was extending his contract. And when the Reporter talked with Spielberg again the following April, the “23-year-old” filmmaker was quoted as saying he had first set foot on the Universal lot “one day in 1969, when I was 21.” The story changed again the following year, when a profile in TV Guide stated that Spielberg arrived at Universal “[i]n 1968, just before his 20th birthday.” In subsequent interviews, Spielberg gradually began moving the date of his arrival farther and farther back, giving it as 1967, 1966, 1965, and the summer of 1964. At least he was getting closer to the truth in that respect, for it actually was in late 1963 or early 1964 when Spielberg made his first visit to Universal and met Chuck Silvers. Spielberg was then only sixteen or seventeen years old and still a high school student.*
It’s understandable that people could have been confused about how old Spielberg was when he started in Hollywood, for apart from his precocious knowledge of filmmaking, Spielberg appeared “very young for his age in all other respects” when Silvers first met him. “Physically he was very young—thin, slight—he looked a couple or three years younger than he was.”
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DENIS Hoffman, who owned a Hollywood optical and title company, produced and financed the making of Amblin’ in the summer and fall of 1968. Spielberg’s first completed 35mm film was a slickly made short whose professionalism made it an impressive calling card for the young director. Hoffman paid Spielberg no salary for making the film, and in exchange for his investment, the producer acquired an option on Spielberg’s services.
On September 28, 1968, Spielberg signed an agreement with Hoffman reading in its entirety:
To recompense for financing my story to be made into a short film I agree to direct one feature film for DENIS C. HOFFMAN sometime during the next ten years.
I will be paid $25,000 plus 5% of the profit after all expenses.
I will direct any script of DENIS HOFFMAN’S selection and I will perform my services for him anytime during the next ten years at his choosing unless I am involved in a project. In which case I will make myself available to him immediately following said project.
Although Amblin’ won Spielberg his seven-year contract with Universal that December, Hoffman’s plans to produce another film went nowhere. Hoffman claimed in his 1995 lawsuit that he tried unsuccessfully for the next few years to get Spielberg to commit to a project. When Jaws became a blockbuster hit in June 1975, making Spielberg the hottest director in Hollywood, Hoffman pressed Spielberg to comply with their agreement. According to the suit, Spielberg surprised him that July by asserting that the agreement was unenforceable. Spielberg and his attorney, Bruce Ramer, allegedly claimed that at the time he signed the agreement, he was only twenty years old and, as a minor, unable to enter into a contract under California law. Believing Spielberg’s assertion that he was born on December 18, 1947, Hoffman, on January 3, 1977, accepted a $30,000 buyout offer from Spielberg for all rights to Amblin’, including the right to use the title of the film for the name of his production company. As early as July 1975, Spielberg formed a company called Amblin’, but for unexplained reasons, his Amblin Entertainment, founded in 1984, never included the apostrophe in its name.
After obtaining a copy of Spielberg’s birth certificate in 1994, Hoffman renewed his claim to an option on Spielberg’s services.† Discussions with Spielberg’s attorneys failed to produce a settlement, and Spielberg filed a preemptive lawsuit against Hoffman in Los Angeles County Superior Court on October 24, 1995. Spielberg’s suit made no specific reference to the age issue but said Hoffman had demanded $33 million “based on specious claims that the 1977 Buy-Out Agreement had been procured by Spielberg through fraud. Spielberg refused to yield to these baseless claims and prefers that they be litigated in a court of law.” Hoffman filed his suit the following day, charging Spielberg with “fraud and deceit” and seeking damages for the “many millions of dollars” a producing credit on a Spielberg feature might have been worth to his career. Although Hoffman claimed he had offered Spielberg several scripts to direct, Spielberg not only denied that but also alleged that when approached by Hoffman with the buy-out offer, he “offered to try to obtain a producer’s position for Hoffman on one of Spielberg’s next films. Hoffman declined that offer and responded that he did not want and was not equipped to be a producer and that he wanted the $30,000 instead.”
The controversy provoked head-shaking surprise in the media, which had been fooled for so many years by Spielberg’s false story about his age. Even the Los Angeles Times, which seemed to have no institutional memory that Patricia Goldstone had revealed the truth in its pages in 1981, called the age issue the “strangest twist in the case.”
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“I TOLD Steve, if I’d known how famous he was going to be, I’d have had my uterus bronzed,” his mother quipped in 1994.
Steven Allan Spielberg arrived at the end of the first year of the greatest baby boom in the nation’s history. Millions of returning GIs and their young brides were making up for lost time, starting families during 1946. As the first-born child and only son of Arnold and Leah Spielberg, and as the first grandchild born on either side of the family, Steven “was very loved,” Millie Tieger remembered. “Everybody was so thrilled with him, this first grandchild. He was a smart little kid, very talkative, a lot of fun, and cute-looking, with bangs, a camel-hair coat with leggings, and a little hat.”
“From the time he was able to open his mouth his first word, I think, was ‘Why?,’” his aunt Natalie Guttman said. “He’d see a shadow on the wall and want to know why it was there…. I used to baby-sit for him, and I can tell you, he was something. You just had to answer every question, and then there would be more. Most of what I remember is Steve’s curiosity and inquirious [sic] nature. He was just curiouser and curiouser … like his father, like Leah, really like the whole family. Steven comes by his genius honestly, I have to tell you. It’s in the genes.”
Photographs from the period, and Arnold Spielberg’s home movies, show Steven as an elfin creature with a huge cranium, protuberant ears, pale white skin, a nimbus of soft blondish-brown hair, and wide, quizzical eyes. The child’s expression is penetrating, amused, and serenely confident. It’s hard to escape the feeling that there is something otherworldly about Steven’s appearance in his early childhood pictures. With his oversized head and eyes and his spindly body, he looks more than a bit like E.T., whom Spielberg once described as “a creature only a mother could love.”
“When he was growing up, I didn’t know he was a genius,” Steven’s own mother later admitted. “Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell he was. You see, Steven wasn’t exactly cuddly. What he was was scary. When Steven woke up from a nap, I shook. My mother always used to say, ‘The world is going to hear of this boy.’ I used to think she said it so I wouldn’t kill him…. His badness was so original that there weren’t even books to tell you what to do….
“He was my first, so I didn’t know that everybody didn’t have kids like him…. If I had known better, I would have taken him to a psychiatrist, and there never would have been an E.T.
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WHEN asked what Steven was like as a child growing up on Lexington Avenue in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Avondale, a next-door neighbor, Roslyn Mitman, replied in one word: “Different.”
Mrs. Mitman, who had two daughters several years older than Steven, explained, “There were times when I really wasn’t all that happy my children played with him. I remember one incident. We all had pressure cookers, and they would very often explode. When his mother’s pressure cooker exploded and food hit the ceiling and messed up their entire kitchen, he thought it was wonderful.”
Steven’s anarchic sense of humor wasn’t all that bothered Mrs. Mitman about the incident. She also found it troubling that Leah didn’t scold him
. An exploding pressure cooker “wouldn’t have upset Leah,” she commented disdainfully. “It would have upset me—I would have killed my kids.”
From that conventional perspective, Steven did indeed seem hopelessly spoiled by his equally eccentric mother. “I’m certifiable, dolly,” Leah joked to an interviewer in 1994. “If I weren’t so famous, they’d put me away.” Leah seemed to have an unusually strong sense of identification with her son, finding him endlessly amusing and encouraging his rebellious, creative nature. It seems clear in retrospect that she was transferring to him her own abandoned hopes for an artistic career. People who knew both families commented that little Steven even looked more like a Posner than a Spielberg, more like his short, slender, blond mother than like his tall, stocky, dark-haired father. And if Steven increasingly showed the signs of being a special child, Leah also was generally recognized as a special mother, though the virtues of her tolerance seem clearer in retrospect than they may have to most people at the time.
Asked to describe Steven as a small child, his father says, “Precocious. Energetic. Curious. Wanting to get into everything. Wanting to ask questions about things. When he was still in a little go-car, he’d go to the store and he’d want to stop and look in the window. He was a very precocious kid in terms of wanting to fill his brain. He learned quickly. He spoke easily and early. He was into asking questions relating to fire engines, relating to things that get destroyed.”
Rabbi Fishel Goldfeder of Adath Israel offered Leah some advice on how to deal with her unusual son. One day, Millie Tieger remembered, the rabbi “saw Steve throwing a fit because he wanted some toy, maybe it was a fire truck. He raised a big fuss. The rabbi said to Leah, ‘Buy it for him, you’re going to buy it for him anyway.’”
Leah took the rabbi’s advice to heart. “Nobody ever said no to Steven,” she admitted many years later. “He always gets what he wants, anyway, so the name of the game is to save your strength and say yes early.” Asked how she influenced her son’s development, she replied, “I gave him freedom. Steven and I happen to be very much alike. Our nervous systems, everything…. And everything Steven wanted to do, he did. We lived very spur of the moment; there was no structure. He has an amazing talent—this cannot be denied—but he also had the freedom to express it.”
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WHEN Steven was a toddler, his father was earning his degree at the University of Cincinnati and “studying all the time,” Millie Tieger recalled. Arnold’s absorption in his studies and, later, in his electronics career reflected his determination to make something of himself after his unpromising prewar beginnings. But it also made Steven view him as emotionally distant.
“I always felt my father put his work before me,” Steven has said. “I always thought he loved me less than his work and I suffered as a result…. My dad was of that World War II ethic. He brought home the bacon, and my mom cooked it, and we ate it. I went to my dad with things, but he was always analytical. I was more passionate in my approach to any question, and so we always clashed. I was yearning for drama.”
Still, Steven acquired what he called his father’s “workaholic” personality, along with such traits as his love of storytelling and his fascination with high technology (somewhat ambivalent in Steven’s case). Steven’s tendency to withdraw into his own world—so different from his mother’s extroverted exuberance—also is a legacy from his father. “Steven’s father was an intellectual,” recalls Rabbi Albert Lewis, who headed the temple to which the Spielbergs later belonged in New Jersey. “Like Steven, he was sort of an introverted person.” When asked about the period just before his marriage broke up in the 1960s, Arnold Spielberg said, “Whenever things hit me with stress like that, I plunge deeper into work, to compensate.”
If his father often seemed an aloof, even forbidding figure to Steven as a child, his mother at times may have seemed too much the opposite, too flighty and childlike. “We’re all for immaturity in my family,” Leah once said. “The rule at home was, ‘Just don’t be an adult.’ Who needs to be anything but ten?” “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up,” Steven commented.
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THE combination of indulgence and emotional isolation Steven experienced in his childhood may have helped delay his own maturation process by allowing him to grow up as the privileged ruler of a narcissistic fantasy world. His mother often read him J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as a bedtime story, “one of the happiest memories I have from my childhood. When I was eleven years old I actually directed the story during a school production.” Doubtless he was mightily impressed by Peter’s defiant declaration to Mrs. Darling, “I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” As Spielberg admitted in 1985, “I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up…. I’m a victim of the Peter Pan Syndrome.” The issue of whether Spielberg would ever “grow up”—both as a man and as a filmmaker—was much worried over by critics and other members of the press as he reached middle age.
Dr. Dan Kiley’s popular 1983 book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, was strongly influenced by feminist analyses of the problem of delayed maturation in baby boomer males. Men who suffer from the syndrome, writes Kiley, perpetuate adolescent modes of behavior because of a “poor adjustment to reality” in their interpersonal relationships, such as an avoidance of commitment and a compulsion to find self-acceptance by seeking the approval of others. Such men are typically the product of a permissive upbringing by parents who “nurture the development of irresponsibility … in which the child believes that rules don’t apply to him.” From childhood onward, sufferers from the syndrome “are filled with anxiety. Early in life, tension begins to pervade the atmosphere of the home. It grows every year…. The cause of this free-floating anxiety is parental unhappiness.”
Spielberg, who still bites his nails to the quick, “combines an incredible security with an incredible insecurity…. I wouldn’t have known it, but he says he comes to work every day wanting to vomit,” reported Dustin Hoffman, who played the title role in Hook, Spielberg’s 1991 contemporary gloss on Peter Pan. Spielberg dealt directly with the damaging effects of the Peter Pan Syndrome in that uneven but autobiographically very revealing film, with Robin Williams playing Peter as an anxious middle-aged yuppie workaholic who emotionally neglects his own son, making him hostile and rebellious while driving him into the clutches of Captain Hook, the child-hating surrogate father.
In a penetrating 1991 essay on Spielberg’s work, Henry Sheehan wrote, “[I]n fragments, that story is the story of nearly every Spielberg film…. Although Spielberg’s films are usually described as warm or even exhilarating and euphoric, their most prevalent temper is anxiety. Every Spielberg hero from Duel onward is, to one extent or another, worried that he is failing at some essentially male role, either lover or father. In Hook these twin fears are merged in Peter, who is plainly a poor father and who, less conspicuously, wants to retreat from the issue of sex in general.”
Those prone to the Peter Pan Syndrome and all its attendant anxieties also tend to share some positive attributes, Kiley reminds us, and they are attributes Spielberg has had in abundance since childhood: “a rich imagination and a yearning to stay young at heart. Cannot these traits be portals to brilliance and serenity?” However stunting Spielberg’s upbringing may have proved to his emotional growth, it allowed him the psychological license to explore his creativity with a rare degree of boldness and self-confidence. A “poor adjustment to reality” is not necessarily a handicap for a filmmaker, particularly one who often works in fantasy genres as Spielberg does, although it would help account for his frequent difficulties working himself up to dealing with adult subjects.
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SPIELBERG grew up hearing his parents talking about “the murdering Nazis” and hearing stories from his “verbal grandparents who constantly s
poke about” the extermination of the Jews. Since the Nazis’ rise to power, European Jews had found refuge in the close-knit community of Cincinnati’s Avondale, and there were many Holocaust survivors living in the neighborhood. In the English classes taught four times a day by Steven’s grandmother, Jennie Posner, for eight or ten students gathered around the dining room table at her home on Glenwood Avenue, survivors told stories of what they referred to as “The Great Murder.”
Steven would visit with his mother when the lessons were in progress, and he learned his numbers from one of Jennie’s pupils. The man showed Steven the tattoo that had been burned into his arm at Auschwitz for identification. As Steven remembered, “He would roll up his sleeves and say, ‘This is a four, this is a seven, this is a two.’ It was my first concept of numbers. He would always say, ‘I have a magic trick.’ He pointed to a six. And then he crooked his elbow and said, ‘Now it’s a nine.’”
“Every person there had a history, either their own or about their family or someone they knew,” recalled Leah, who often repeated stories she heard to Steven. “Some of the stories were so horrible that there was almost a movie-like quality to them. It was hard to imagine terrible things like that actually happening. It brought the Holocaust close to home, because you were talking to people who had lived through these unimaginable things….
“I remember one woman’s story. The Nazis wanted her ring. She couldn’t get it off. They were about to cut her finger off, but the ring suddenly fell off on its own. I guess it was her panic. It just freaked me. I’m sure it affected Steven…. Who knows how much our children absorb when they’re very young? Perhaps more than we imagine.”
Steven Spielberg Page 5