“Our father would threaten to kill Steven for years because he was torturing Janie,” her brother Glenn reports. “Later he took credit for Spielberg’s success because he didn’t kill him.”
As upsetting as it was to the Fuhrmans, Stevie’s fondness for scaring Janie was an early manifestation of his creative impulses. Even Arnold Fuhrman had to admit that Stevie was “bizarrely creative.” He gradually would learn to express his aggression and hostility in more constructive ways, although his penchant for teasing younger children, especially girls, would long retain an edge of cruelty. He would delight in scaring his friends and his three younger sisters, whether it was with spooky stories, weird makeup, ghoulish games, or, eventually, with movies that made people scream.
From his early childhood, Spielberg has been intimately acquainted with fear. “He had a lot of phobias that were slowly worked out,” his father says. “He had a lot of imagination, and it was not difficult for him to visualize anything scary or frightening or threatening out of simple things.”
After his family moved in 1952 to the Camden suburb of Haddon Township, Steven was haunted by a single spindly maple tree in front of their house, illuminated by a streetlight. The moving shadows it cast at night on the wall of his second-floor bedroom seemed to Steven the shapes of monsters with gnarled heads and waving tentacles. Other monsters, he was convinced, were living under his bed and in his closet. And he would study the crack in the plaster above the closet door, persuading himself that more amiable creatures dwelled inside the crack. He remembered having the eerie experience of seeing the crack burst open and pieces of plaster tumble out of it.*
Steven began to find that the fears generated by his imagination could be strangely enjoyable, especially if he could discover ways of manipulating them and conjuring up new kinds of visual effects. “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow,” he said. “I would sit in bed at night, see how white the ceiling was—there was a big stucco ceiling and I would put a small lamp on the floor and turn the light on with a naked bulb and I would do these hand shadows. I would scare myself with hand shadows.”
The solitary burden of all these phobias increasingly demanded some kind of outward release. He was fortunate to have a captive and pliable audience to help satisfy his need for self-expression: “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.”
His sister Anne, who became a Hollywood screenwriter, once said, “At the preview of Jaws, I remember thinking, For years he just scared us. Now he gets to scare the masses.”
*
NOT much has been written about Spielberg’s years in New Jersey, the period in which he grew from two and a half to ten years old, a crucial time in anyone’s psychological and social development. Perhaps this neglect stems largely from Spielberg’s own fuzzy memories of that time and place. His boyhood reminiscences tend to focus on his subsequent years in Arizona, but it was while living in New Jersey that he first showed real signs of creativity.
His memory has created a distorted picture of his neighborhood in Haddon Township. In a 1994 interview with Julie Salamon for Harper’s Bazaar, he spoke at length about his feelings of growing up Jewish, remembering how distressed he was that “everybody else” on his street put up lights on their houses during the Christmas season. His house, by contrast, seemed like “the black hole of Crystal Terrace.” Spielberg’s subjective childhood feelings of exclusion, of being “different,” became so intense that his memory exaggerated the degree to which his family was seen that way by their New Jersey neighbors—many of whom, in fact, were also Jewish.
Crystal Terrace, which has changed very little since the Spielbergs lived there, is a lovely, tree-lined street curving in a gentle arc off one of the main thoroughfares in Haddon Township, Crystal Lake Avenue. The residents use the adjacent town of Haddonfield as their mailing address, and Spielberg never tells interviewers that he actually lived in Haddon Township. But especially for Jews in that era, the more welcoming Haddon Township, with its plethora of newly arrived and upwardly mobile middle-class families, was quite different from staid, old-monied, WASPish Haddonfield.
The Spielbergs’ two-story Colonial-style house at 267 Crystal Terrace, which they bought from Peter and Helen Rutan for $14,000, had been built in 1949, when the street was developed from rustic land, the site of an old potato farm. During Steven’s childhood, vestiges of the farm could still be seen behind his house, a block away. He and his playmates ventured with some trepidation into the Gothic wooded area and field surrounding the weathered farmhouse and a rusting hulk of abandoned farm machinery. Steven evidently combined his memory of the old farm with the single tree on his front lawn to conjure up the synthetic memory image of a spooky “forest outside my window.” He used that memory as the basis for the scene in his 1982 movie Poltergeist of a menacing tree bursting through a boy’s bedroom window (Poltergeist also contains a scary clown doll, another object of Steven’s childhood fears).
Many of the fathers in Steven’s neighborhood were, like Arnold Spielberg, young veterans buying their first homes under the GI Bill. Crystal Terrace swarmed with dozens of children, and one of Steven’s neighbors, Marjorie Robbins, remembers, “He looked like all the other boys—thin, with a crew cut and a baseball cap that covers the whole face, with the ears sticking out.” “There were a lot of Protestants, a lot of Jews, Italians, Irish, Germans—we all got along,” says Robert Moran Sr., an Irish Catholic who lived across the street from the Spielbergs. “It was a great place for kids to be raised. What made it nice is that it was a new neighborhood and people came in from different areas. Most of them were young people and they got along.”
There were at least three other Jewish families among the twenty-six households on Crystal Terrace in that period, and the adjacent Crystal Lake Avenue was predominantly Jewish. “That was the Jewish neighborhood, the Jewish ghetto” for the Haddonfield area, according to Rabbi Albert Lewis of Temple Beth Shalom, who taught Steven in Hebrew school from 1953 to 1957.† Before World War II, Haddonfield was restricted against Jews, and despite the postwar migration of Jews from Camden and nearby Philadelphia, it “liberalized but very slowly,” the rabbi says. “There were some country clubs in which Jews weren’t allowed. That’s why the Jewish community created our own country club.”
“My sense of anti-Semitism as a kid wasn’t so great [as Steven’s],” says Marjorie Robbins, who grew up around the corner from Steven on Crystal Lake Avenue and, like him, is Jewish. “I think because the Jewish community was very warm, very loving, so that gave a security. We lived in a community where the doors were always unlocked. We had freedom to express ourselves, freedom to imagine, freedom to create. But the street where he lived was very Christian, and it was very obvious at Christmastime that we live in a Christian world. I remember seeing Santa Claus outside the A&P; on Kings Highway, and we used to get in the car—we all did this—and drive through Haddonfield looking at the Christmas lights. It was spectacular.”
Crystal Terrace had its own lavish Christmas displays. Each year the Morans prominently displayed a large Nativity scene, with spotlights and brightly colored Christmas lights, that the Spielbergs could not avoid seeing from their living-room window. Steven’s next-door playmate Scott MacDonald, who was a Presbyterian, remembers Christmas being “a stressful time for him. We would bring our presents outside, and I remember him kind of being in a huff. It was not one of his more positive times. Nobody knew the difference about a Jewish kid, except they didn’t have Christmas. He might have gotten some kind of ribbing about, ‘What do you do? You don’t get presents.’”
When Scott’s sister, Jane MacDonald Morley, asked Anne Spielberg why they didn’t celebrate Christmas, Anne “said their father was Santa Claus; he was so busy, and that’s why they didn’t have time to celebrate it. I knew he didn’t look anything like Santa Claus, and he smoked a cigar. I couldn’t imag
ine that Santa Claus smoked a cigar. So I asked my mother and she told me, No, Mr. Spielberg was not Santa Claus.”
Steven was “quite inquisitive—he asked everybody else about their religion,” recalls next-door neighbor Mary Devlin, a Catholic. Steven often quizzed her son, Charles F. (Cholly) Devlin, about his duties as an altar boy. “He would usually ask about the services—he would ask about the observances rather than about the faith,” Devlin says. “He was interested in rituals—‘What is that you are carrying?’ I would be carrying a cassock and a surplice. ‘Where are you going at six A.M.?’”
Another neighbor boy, Gerald McMullen, admits, “I was one of the kids who tried to convince him that Jesus Christ was really who he was. I was going to Catholic school and thought Christianity was it. Most of the kids were Christians; Steven was the only one who didn’t recognize Christ. He told me something to the effect that ‘My mother says no, Jesus was not the Messiah.’ I remember telling him to go home and tell his mother that she was wrong. He wasn’t upset to the point that he reacted with any kind of emotion or anger, but you could tell from the way he reacted to it that he felt bad. I don’t recall him as being different, he was actually quite well liked, but he probably felt it more keenly. His parents were really nice people, even to me, in spite of what I told him to tell his mother. She always welcomed me when I came over. I felt pretty bad about it when I got older and realized what I had done. The older I was, the more embarrassed I was I didn’t know the difference between Catholicism and Judaism.”
The lesson Steven took from such encounters was: “Being a Jew meant that I was not normal. I was not like everybody else. I just wanted to be accepted. Not for who I was. I wanted to be accepted for who everybody else was.”
At Christmastime, Julie Salamon related in her profile of Spielberg, he wanted his parents to put up lights for the holiday season. They told him, “We’re Jews and Jews don’t put up lights like the gentiles.” Steven tried to compromise by suggesting that he could put up blue and white Hanukkah lights, but his father said, “We have a nice menorah. If you’d like, we can put the menorah in the window.”
“No! No! No!” screamed Steven. “People will think we’re Jewish.”
One night before Christmas, according to Salamon’s account, Steven created his own holiday tableau on the family’s front porch. Using extension cords, he hooked up a color wheel—a revolving device that projected light patterns through colored gels—and had his four-year-old sister Anne wait at the switch. Then he draped himself in a white sheet and struck a Crucifixion pose, giving Anne the signal to start the color wheel turning. As people drove along Crystal Terrace to look at their neighbors’ Christmas decorations, Steven could be seen on his porch playing the role of Jesus, dramatically bathed in a nimbus of shimmering colored lights, a precursor of the lighting effects that would herald the arrival of extraterrestrial creatures in such Spielberg movies as Close Encounters and E.T.
“His parents were furious,” Salamon wrote. “They dragged their son, kicking and screaming and crying, away from the door, muttering that he was making a shande (a shame) in front of the neighbors.”
When that story was recounted to Arnold Spielberg by the author of this book, Arnold responded, “I don’t remember him dressing up like Jesus. I think I would have said, ‘No way.’” But Steven’s father added, “I can visualize him doing that. Because I know he wanted in the worst way to have Christmas lights. I said, ‘No, we’re Jewish. We can have Hanukkah lights, and we’ll put up the Hanukkah lights in the window.’ So I went and found a candelabra of some kind and I got blue little bulbs and put ’em in that, and I said, ‘Keep that in the window for the eight days of Hanukkah.’”
Even if it may have been somewhat transformed in Steven’s memory, the incident over the Christmas lights is a revealing illustration of the creative process by which he took his painful feelings of being different and learned to transform them into his own individualized form of art—an art that also would appeal to the widest audience he could think of commanding.
*
A YEAR and a half after joining RCA, Arnold Spielberg became the engineer in charge of advanced development on the company’s first venture into computers, the Bizmac. Covering an entire floor at the Camden plant, the Bizmac contained 100,000 vacuum tubes and was built as a cost-inventory control unit for the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. While it was being completed, transistors were introduced, revolutionizing the field of computers. RCA delivered the Bizmac to the Army, but it became a costly white elephant. Before leaving in 1957 to join General Electric in Phoenix, Arnold also worked on RCA’s first transistor computer, a communications computer project, and a computerized sales recording system.
Arnold “had the reputation of being one of the way-out engineers,” recalls his Camden neighbor Miriam Fuhrman, who also worked for RCA. “He was an absolutely brilliant guy.” “He was the absent-minded professor,” adds her niece, Jane Fuhrman Satanoff. “He once stopped to get gas. Leah got out to go to the bathroom. He was an hour on the road before he realized it.” Arnold’s superior on the Bizmac project, J. Wesley Leas, remembers him as “somebody you would give a job to and you knew he would do what it took to get it done. He would work his ass off. He would give his life for you. You would see him Sundays and late at night, if that was needed. He would stick with a problem no matter how difficult it was. But don’t ever put ‘creative’ with him. His technical talents were very good, as were his managerial talents. He just wasn’t imaginative. He was more methodical, more of a plodder. His wife was the one with vision, flair, creativeness.”
In some ways, though, the dichotomy Steven and others have drawn between his mother (creativity) and his father (logic) is not quite so clear-cut. Whether or not Arnold Spielberg can be described as a “creative” or “imaginative” person in the way those words are used in the arts, his pioneering work in computers demonstrated an ability to break new technological ground while devising complex and innovative systems of communication. Steven Spielberg has mastered an equally complex modern art form that depends to a large degree on the creative synthesis of technology, including computer technology, which his films have helped pioneer. And when Steven started making his first amateur films, he was imitating his father, who had been shooting home movies since the age of seventeen. After the family moved to Arizona on Valentine’s Day 1957, Arnold became an enthusiastic tutor and partner in Steven’s amateur filmmaking ventures.
Unlike Leah, however, Arnold was not as encouraging as Steven would have wanted about his choice of filmmaking as a career. From an early age, Steven could not help disappointing his father with his overwhelming lack of aptitude for engineering. “I hated math in school,” Steven admitted. “I didn’t like when they’d stack the numbers on top of one another. My father used to say things like three into four won’t go, and I’d say, ‘Of course it won’t. You can’t put that three into the little hole on top of the four. It won’t fit.’”
Nevertheless, Arnold is convinced that his technological background did have an influence on his son’s career as a filmmaker: “At first he absolutely was against learning anything mathematical or scientific. He still doesn’t care for it that much, but he has to now. It’s his game. And he’s caught up in it. His use of a computer is different from mine. I’ll use it to do business on it, I hardly ever play games. He only plays games on the computer. His house has a whole row of video games. He’s got a flight control simulator. I was over at his house the other day [in December 1995] and he was shooting down planes with a skill that a pilot would have.”
Leah’s attitude toward Steven’s education eventually would become more laissez-faire, but after he entered Edison School in Haddonfield, she too was frustrated over his lack of interest in conventional intellectual pursuits. “His mother was quite upset because his marks weren’t what she was expecting,” Mary Devlin recalls. “He only got C’s” during his four years at Edison, adds Jane Fuhrman Satanoff, “and she was al
ways disappointed because he was so bright but he was just a mediocre student.” Leah would compare Steven’s marks with those of a certain neighbor boy, and “she couldn’t understand how [Steven] wasn’t doing better,” Mary Devlin says. “He didn’t have time for it—he was always playing. He was a nice boy, very small and thin, but just involved in what he wanted to do. We didn’t sense he was very bright.”
“He was a very quiet youngster and remained so for many years,” says Rabbi Lewis of Temple Beth Shalom. Attending Hebrew school three afternoons a week, Steven and his fellow students would arrive on the bus “very exhausted” following a full day at public school, the rabbi says. “Steven sat there. He did what he had to do.” Remembering his religious education as a “punitive” ordeal, Steven has tried to make his children’s training in Jewish tradition more “fun” than his own. “I don’t think I was really trained properly. I think it would have stuck with me a lot longer had the training been less like going to the dentist and having my teeth pulled.”‡ Although Steven was also a member of the temple’s Cub Scout troop, Rabbi Lewis could see he needed something more than school and Scouting to develop his social skills: “He needed a way to express himself. He needed that because he was pretty much a loner.”
“I remember him just walking along in a daydream, with that kind of towhead,” says Leah’s friend Grace Robbins. “I never remember him with other children. To me he looked like he was in a dream world. Not that he was lost in oblivion, but lost in thought. I didn’t see it because I didn’t spend much time with him, but I know Leah thought he had something. She said, ‘He is different. Without a doubt, he is different.’ His mother got a big kick out of him, in spite of the things he did. I think she was the right mother for him. She had a lot of wit, she wasn’t dull.”
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