Smith’s newfound awareness of Spielberg’s ethnic background, and his personal empathy with Spielberg’s outsider status in the school, made him more sensitive to the problems his friend began experiencing not long after arriving at Saratoga High, problems to which others were oblivious. Smith remembers Spielberg coming into the school library one Monday morning, looking “so depressed” that another person in the room asked him why he was so glum.
“You look like you just came from your mother’s funeral,” that person said.
“I had a really horrible experience on Saturday,” Spielberg replied.
When pressed about what happened, he offered little more than, “I ran into some guys from school.”
This may have been the incident Spielberg identifies in his letter to the San Jose Mercury News as “an unfortunate encounter with several seniors from my graduating class.” He wrote that it happened in nearby San Jose, but did not go into details; Smith recalls Spielberg mentioning that the place where he ran into the “guys from school” was a shopping center. Perhaps this was the time Spielberg first experienced the abject humiliation of being punched in the face, the time when, as he put it, “My world collapsed.”
There were other occasions, Smith remembers, when Spielberg “would say stuff like, ‘You know I had a hard time.’ He got bothered off campus. People would pester him. It wasn’t a major topic [in our conversations]—it was sort of like, ‘Oh, these assholes,’ and then we’d go on.” Smith also remembers Spielberg telling him that students were “giving him a hard time in the locker room”; Spielberg’s friend Mike Augustine says people were “being nasty to him in gym class. He was scrawny and awkward, he was not your athletic type, and they related that to being Jewish, which was a thing some people loved to do.”
One incident Smith personally witnessed occurred when he was walking a school corridor with Spielberg, “and one of our classmates threw some coins on the ground. He said something [to Spielberg] like, ‘Go ahead, pick it up! You want it, don’t you? Well, you can have it. I don’t want it, it’s all yours.’ This was all in a nasty, bullying tone.
“I was wondering what this was all about, figuring it must have reference to some private matter or something which had previously happened. He said, ‘It’s because I’m Jewish.’ I, being kind of dense about this sort of thing, asked what did that matter. He said, ‘Well, we’re supposed to be money-grubbing.’ So were Scots, was my way of thinking, but nobody did that sort of thing to them. I asked him how long this had been going on, and he said it had started recently and was the latest idea for how to bug him…. If this had happened to a black friend at that time, I would have unhesitatingly put it down to virulent racism. But I had a hard time believing that genuine anti-Semitism could have anything to [do] with Saratoga in the sixties, and since I couldn’t recall being exposed to any anti-Semitic ideas when growing up, I assumed other people hadn’t either. So I thought of it as phony anti-Semitism, put on to torment Steven. But in retrospect it doesn’t really seem like that.”
Smith also was with Spielberg when people coughed the word “Jew” at him. As Spielberg passed people in the corridors on the way to class, some would pretend to sneeze “Ahhh … Jew,” or say things like, “Oh, I think I see … [coughing] ‘Jew.’”
What “made an eerie impression on me at the time” Spielberg was undergoing this harassment, recalls Smith, “was the kind of blazing anger and intensity in this boy. It was not just upsetting, but downright creepy, the way he radiated this genuine but seemingly inexplicable rage and disgust. It’s creepier thinking back now than it was at the time, in fact, because back then I figured it was something personal, but now I think it was genuine anti-Semitism.”
*
THE situation became so awful for Spielberg that it colored his view of almost everyone and everything in Saratoga, eating away at his self-esteem. “It wasn’t like most people hated Steve,” Mike Augustine contends, “but Steve always felt as though they did. He came across as attractive—he had a real nice personality, joking and light. When his personality came out, girls liked him, they wouldn’t say ‘Ugh,’ but he didn’t understand that they liked him. He was fidgety and self-conscious and nervous about the way he looked. Steve was awkward, but he thought he was more awkward than he was.”
Smith was disappointed that Spielberg “wouldn’t take my advice to stand up to people and push back a little. I had discovered that this actually seemed to reduce your problems, and by my senior year at Saratoga I was happy to note that I seemed to have gotten a real handle on the situation. But he always seemed intent on catching the flies with honey, rather than dosing them with vinegar.” Smith also felt that Spielberg may have thought it more prudent to use the hulking Don Shull as his “bodyguard” than to be personally combative.
Spielberg later admitted that he kept most of his anger inside him at Saratoga, “and it’s one of the things I’m most ashamed of—I didn’t fight back.”
*
ONE of the coping strategies Spielberg developed at Saratoga was humor.
The witty comeback has been used by victims of persecution since time immemorial as a weapon of self-defense. Nowhere has this been seen more clearly than in the rich tradition of Jewish humor, which developed largely in response to prejudice and discrimination, as a means of empowering the powerless. “When the oppressed cannot revolt, he laughs,” writes Albert Memmi in The Liberation of the Jew. And as Leo Rosten observes in The Joys of Yiddish, “Humor also serves the afflicted as compensation for suffering, a token victory of brain over fear. A Jewish aphorism goes: ‘When you’re hungry, sing; when you’re hurt, laugh.’ The barbed joke about the strong, the rich, the heartless powers-that-be is the final citadel in which human pride can live.” That tradition has greatly influenced American comedy, becoming perhaps its dominant mode in the twentieth century, and it has left a strong (if largely unrecognized) imprint on the personality and art of Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg displayed a “very sharp” tongue during his time in Saratoga, and his “quick wit and quick mouth action” may have exacerbated the abuse he was suffering, Don Shull believes. The superior intelligence and wit of the person being bullied may itself be one of the causes for persecution, inspiring envy and hostility. The dilemma for the person being bullied is whether to suffer in silence and hope the bullying ceases from lack of response, or to stand up and fight back, hoping the bully will be stayed by his own essential cowardice. Spielberg chose to preserve his pride and self-respect by taking the middle ground between silence and physical response, by following the path of verbal resistance.
Mike Augustine, who became close to Spielberg when they both worked on the school paper, recalls, “His sarcastic humor was what I liked about him—‘sick’ humor—it had that cutting edge, like Lenny Bruce. He liked to surprise people. He was a jokester, mocking guys who were putting him down. It was almost like he had to. When they made remarks at him in a violent way, it would be his natural reaction to nervously come back with some kind of statement. Everybody would laugh, and he would disappear.”
Although Augustine felt that Spielberg was “depressed” to be in Saratoga rather than in Hollywood, and troubled over his parents’ impending divorce, he did not have the impression that Spielberg was terribly unhappy that year: “If he was, he had a shield of humor around him. He didn’t appear to be weighed down with remorse. He was a riot.”
Spielberg and Augustine became friendly in Bert Pfister’s journalism class, which met daily and put out the school paper, The Falcon. Augustine, a former football player at the school, was sports editor, and Spielberg, somewhat out of character, soon became his unofficial assistant. They covered varsity football games together, and Spielberg also wrote his own coverage of basketball, baseball, junior varsity teams, and even some sports that previously had not received much coverage in the paper, such as swimming and cross-country.
Although the class prophecy at the end of the school year predicted
that Spielberg would join the staff of The New York Times, his interest in journalism evidently was more social than professional. By the time Spielberg arrived that September, Augustine points out, “The cliques had been formed. Nothing except journalism class opened up to him. It wasn’t that we were into sports, it was that we were into reporting. Steve was able to fill a time and space in his life, and it was a way of being at these events even though he was not good at sports. He was able to feel good about himself being a reporter. He got more into journalism than he did other classes because it brought him more into play with people.”
Spielberg’s only other extracurricular activity at the school was crew work on the senior play, Twelve Angry Jurors, a coeducational version of Twelve Angry Men, Sherman L. Sergel’s stage adaptation of the television play by Reginald Rose. After trying out unsuccessfully for the cast of the March 1965 production, which was staged in the school cafeteria by English teacher Alden Peterson, Spielberg became involved with the lighting and helped cast members Dan Huboi and Augustine practice their lines.
Spielberg still was “a little weak in the girl department,” as Shull puts it, but he came enough out of his shell in Saratoga to go to school dances and to start dating.* One of the girls he dated was Shull’s sister Kathy, who was a freshman at the time and later was crowned Miss Saratoga. Recalling Steven as “the class cut-up,” she says, “It wasn’t any big romance. We necked in the car a couple times. That’s why I remember it was winter—we steamed up the windows. I was fourteen and it was experimental dating for me. Mostly we would just talk. He loved telling us stories. He was fun, he was a really loyal good friend, but we weren’t really suited to each other. He was short, and I’m five-foot-eleven, so the two of us going out was like Mutt and Jeff. I think he never thought of himself as studly. On a scale of one to ten, he was probably a four.”
Most girls at Saratoga High probably agreed with the editor of The Falcon, Bonnie Parker, who considered Steven “really nerdy. The gals in the typing department would say he would come in all disheveled and they would give him a comb and tell him to comb his hair. In my crowd [she was also the senior football princess], he wasn’t considered someone that anyone even considered going out with. In those days, you were going out with the cutest, most popular guys. The football guys were more attractive. Sometimes you just miss some of the best people that way.”
Sportswriting for The Falcon was not only Spielberg’s way of finding some kind of niche at the school, it also seemed to be a clever form of protective coloration for a boy being harassed by jocks. “They’re going to love him,” Gene Smith thought. “They’re not going to want to annoy him if he writes about them in the school paper.” But Smith was troubled and hurt by Spielberg’s pragmatic decision to chronicle the exploits of the jock crowd: “It was some of these jock types who were harassing him for being Jewish. I thought, ‘Why are you sucking up to them?’ In some sense, I felt he was a traitor to our class; he betrayed our intellectual clique. But then I had the impression he wanted not to be isolated and cut off. That’s a healthy attitude. I thought the jock clique accepted him after a while. He was having a hard time with these guys and suddenly he was hanging out with them.”
Spielberg developed his own idiosyncratic method of covering varsity football for the paper. “I have to film that,” he told Augustine, who recalls, “I would be making notes on what they were doing and he would keep track of it on film, running up and down the sidelines with the camera. He would show the films to the players and the coach, and we would sit down later and put together the story. He was jazzed about that.”†
The Spielberg prose style in The Falcon’s sports pages was a blend of energetically marshaled sports clichés, rah-rah school boosterism, and some unsparingly critical judgments about underperforming athletes. A Spielberg article that October about the football junior varsity team began: “As precious seconds ticked away, fingernail fragments flew high into the static-filled air, nerves were on the brink of disaster, hope was everywhere but spirit and determination were not.” Spielberg charged that the team’s “unnecessary defeat” proved the “flame of determination just wasn’t there.” And while reporting the following March on a game in which the varsity baseball team blew a ninth-inning lead, Spielberg acidly observed that a “cloud of disgust” hung over the Saratoga players.
The experience of being a reporter, however briefly, helped prepare Spielberg for his dealings with the press in later years. He learned some basic lessons about how reporters put together a story, and, perhaps most importantly, he learned what made a good quote. He also may have learned some lessons about the potential dangers of negative press coverage. Eventually, Spielberg’s attempt to ingratiate himself with the jock crowd at Saratoga High painfully backfired, colliding with his sense of journalistic ethics and also, perhaps, with an underlying resentment of athletes. One day he told Gene Smith, “They beat me up because they didn’t like something I wrote in the paper.”
*
WHILE Spielberg was trapped in the “time warp” of Saratoga, the outside world was on the cusp of a momentous transformation. He has recalled being “apathetic” throughout the social upheavals of the late 1960s: “I grew up in the sixties, but I was never into flower power, or Vietnam protests, like all my friends. I was always at the movies.” And he said in a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone, “I was never part of the drug culture. I never took LSD, mescaline, coke, or anything like that. In my entire life I’ve probably smoked three joints. But I went through the entire drug period. Several of my friends were heavily into it. I would sit in a room and watch TV while people climbed the walls. I’ve always been afraid of taking drugs. I’ve always been afraid of losing control of myself…. One of the reasons I never got into drugs is that I felt it would overpower me.”
Spielberg’s tastes in cinema during the 1960s were more attuned to the classicism of David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock than to the iconoclasm of Jean-Luc Godard and Dennis Hopper, and his essentially “unconfrontational” nature kept him from being a social activist in his younger days. Even so, he was more socially aware than his own statements would indicate.
Spielberg and Mike Augustine shared a strong emotional commitment to the civil rights movement, even to the point that, as Augustine recalls, “We wanted to be black. We wanted to be associated with something people didn’t like. I felt the old generation had to go, and Steve felt the same.” Augustine, who recognized that Steven’s Judaism and his minority status in the school made him especially sensitive to discrimination, was one of the few people who was not surprised in 1985 when Spielberg made a film about African Americans, The Color Purple. For as their cultural hero, Lenny Bruce, had declared, “Negroes are all Jews.” Spielberg and Augustine played Lenny Bruce records—especially his Togetherness album—and emulated his hip, iconoclastic attitudes. The new movie that made the greatest impression on them was Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1964 black comedy about the madness of war and nuclear annihilation, Dr. Strangelove.
“The thing that attracted me to him, that interested me as a friend,” Augustine says of Spielberg, “was that I always had empathy or love for somebody who seemed to have something bothering him. It seemed he needed someone to befriend him and stand up for him. I remember people saying things to him, and I said, ‘What are you, a victim?’ I got him out of it with humor.”
Spielberg has recalled that during his time in Saratoga, “I didn’t understand why I was so different from everybody else, and why I was being singled out. And I began to question my Judaism.” Augustine remembers “a conversation with Steve about why the Jews were persecuted. He used to ask, ‘Why are we persecuted? No one will tell me. I asked my parents, I asked everybody. We must have done something really bad.’ Not why am I persecuted, but why are we persecuted. Steve was very aware of Jewish history, all the way back. He told me the story of Masada, how the Jews at Masada killed themselves by jumping off a cliff [in 73 A.D., to escape Roman persecution].
He said, ‘It’s true, the Jews did it, and I’m one of them.’ I said, ‘Come on, Steve, lighten up.’ We all were saying, ‘Well, far out, Steve. What’s been happening lately?’ He was grappling with [his Jewish identity] by going back thousands of years.
“I asked him what it was like to be Jewish, because I had never known anyone who was Jewish. He invited me to his house at Hanukkah. He was bringing me over to take part in the celebration. After dinner, his mother and father were fighting. I was in the middle. He pointed to them and said, ‘That’s what it’s like to be Jewish—you have an extra glass of wine a day so you can yell louder at one another.’ We left and went outside. I left due to embarrassment on the part of Steve.”
Augustine felt Spielberg was deeply troubled by the fact that his parents, in the last stage of their marriage, could be so angry at each other and yet still devoted to each other. Spielberg, according to Augustine, considered his parents’ religious beliefs “hypocritical” in that light and as a result wondered if Judaism “was a false religion—[that] maybe it was expressed in talk, in rituals, but not in daily life. That maybe was why he didn’t embrace it as a religion. Steve was like me, he was curious about what other religions were. He and I went to Catholic Mass with another guy at school.”
Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Stan Freberg, and the ecumenically irreverent Mad magazine, Augustine and Spielberg came to believe that mockery was the best antidote to prejudice. Augustine is of Austrian and German descent, and he says that when he and Spielberg joked around together, “Sometimes he would be the Jew and I would be the Nazi. Sometimes he would be the Nazi and I would be the Jew. He was very good at being ‘Herr Steven Spielberg.’ He talked with a German accent, as an actor would: ‘You swine!’ We would do that kind of thing humorously.” Don Shull says Spielberg was “fascinated” by the subject of Nazism and had what appeared to be an authentic Nazi helmet amid the clutter in his bedroom.
Steven Spielberg Page 18