A year later during an interview to promote his film, Always, I asked him how Rainman would have been different had he directed it instead of Levinson. Referring to repeated snubs by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he said without any bitterness, “Well, if I’d directed it it wouldn’t have won all those Oscars.”
Although he wouldn’t complain about the Academy, he wasn’t above speaking his mind about the flaws of the project he gave up. “I find Rainman to be emotionally very distancing. I think I certainly would have pulled tears out of a rather dry movie,” he said.
The same year he gave up Rainman to make the third Indiana Jones flick, he passed—reluctantly—on another project that boosted the careers of several Hollywood principals. But this time, it was brotherly love, not scheduling problems, that made him walk away from a potential hit.
Big was the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who one morning wakes up to find himself a grown man. He’s still a teenager, but he looks like an adult. The film would turn Tom Hanks, as the boy-man, into a superstar, and it would make its director, Penny Marshall, the most successful woman in Hollywood.
But it was another credit on the film that made Spielberg shy away from adding one more hit to his resume. His sister, Anne, had cowritten the script with Gary Ross. The same man who as a child had tormented Anne and his other sisters was now so solicitous about overshadowing his sibling that he voluntarily dropped out of the project.
“Big was something I flirted with for a couple of months with Harrison Ford to play the Tom Hanks role. But my sister wrote the script, and I felt that she’d been standing in my shadow long enough. Most of my life she’s sort of been in the shade, and this was a great screenplay she and Gary Ross wrote—with no help from me. I began to consider the fact that if I directed it, people wouldn’t give Annie any credit. Essentially, I would have stolen Annie’s thunder, and I just didn’t want to do that,” he explained.
Such generosity more than makes up for having locked his sister in a closet and cut off her doll’s head when they were kids.
As much as Spielberg wanted to honor his promise to Lucas, he was not about to throw himself into a project he found unsatisfactory just to make good on a handshake deal a decade earlier on a beach in Hawaii.
Despite a lot of heavy breathing by executives at Paramount, Spielberg kept putting off the third Indiana Jones movie. The director rejected four different screenplays proposed for the third installment. “I wasn’t going to just go ahead and fulfill my obligation. I was going to make every effort to end the saga with a very unique and very thrilling finale. I wanted to take a risk, and I wanted to do a father-son story from the beginning,” he said.
In fact, it was the addition of a dad for Indiana Jones that finally made Spielberg agree to direct. Collaborating with screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, who wrote several James Bond movies, Spielberg wondered, “Why not give Indy a dad?”
After two Indiana Jones escapist flicks, Spielberg was growing tired of the cliff-hanger, Saturday afternoon serial genre. He wanted something with more meat.
Unfortunately for their collaboration, George Lucas loved the serial format and wanted to make a film about the search for the Holy Grail. The two best friends eventually compromised. They would make a movie about Indiana’s relationship with his father and the search for the Holy Grail.
Thus was born the third Raiders film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (“Holy Grail” was considered and dropped from the title because it sounded too much like a decades-old spoof by the British comedy troupe, called Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Spielberg and Lucas didn’t want any inappropriate comparisons made between their seriocomic adventure and the over-the-top farce by the Python people.)
The returning star, Harrison Ford, was pleased with the addition of a father to flesh out his largely one-dimensional role as a whip-wielding archaeologist fond of colorful hats. As much as Spielberg, Ford was tired of the Jones genre until the director gave Indy a pop. “It outfoxed the sequel syndrome,” Ford said with satisfaction. His director slyly added, “It was intentionally a father-and-son story I sneaked into an adventure plot.”
Budgeted at a then whopping $36 million, the film began principal photography on May 16, 1988, in Almeria, Spain.
Spielberg had a ball working with two taciturn actors, Ford and Connery. “The biggest thrill was putting Harrison and Sean in a two-shot and calling, ‘Action!’ and trying not to ruin the take by laughing,” he said.
In the two previous Indiana Jones adventures, the director had confronted his phobias over insects, heights, and bats. In the third film, he would deal with his fear and loathing of rats. For the project, 7,000 “custom-farmed” rodents were used for a particularly ghoulish scene that once again put Ford through his paces.
Every penny of the $36 million was on the screen, not in the principals’ pockets. The production employed tanks, zeppelins, camels—and those 7,000 rats. Spielberg, Ford, and Lucas all took gross points instead of a salary, which paid off when the film became the biggest money-maker of all three Indiana Jones episodes, grossing a staggering half a billion dollars!
Despite his stern public persona, Connery was pretty laid back on the set. During a scene in the cramped passenger lounge of the zeppelin, the actor grew very hot in his heavy tweed suit. When he was seated behind a table in the lounge and his legs were out of camera range, he would remove his heavy pants. Between takes, he would stroll around the set in his underwear.
With the successful completion of Indy III, Spielberg had more than lived up to his handshake deal with Lucas. He had such a good time on the project, especially working with Connery, that he tentatively agreed to make a fourth Indiana Jones film. That’s quite a departure for an artist who has refused to capitalize on all his other huge hits and crank out sequels.
Still, he hasn’t signed on the dotted line yet. It all depends on what he considers the most important component of any project. “If someone can get the script right, I will direct the fourth Indiana Jones,” he said.
With the box-office success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Spielberg was at the top of his form as a mass-market entertainer.
Some critics, however, felt he had gone back to the same well one too many times with the third installment of Raiders. The box-office formula which he and his best friend had concocted was derisively referred to as “lucasberger.”
Not surprisingly, Spielberg defended his popcorn tastes: “Is this Indiana Jones adventure worth the amount of emotional energy the audience has to give to the film? It’s a group experience for large numbers of people sitting in movie theatres, not for two or three people sitting in front of the television at home. You need to feel the audience clapping and yelling and screaming in order to get the total effect of the Indiana Jones saga.”
If this meant he was serving up lucasberger, so be it. The public couldn’t get enough of it even while the critics were complaining about all those empty calories.
Unfortunately, his personal life was not prospering apace with his professional triumphs. The same year that Indy III grossed half a billion dollars, his four-year marriage to Amy Irving was falling apart. Even casual observers could tell that something was definitely wrong. At a charity tribute to the director, Spielberg enthusiastically spoke about his desire “to direct my wife in a movie.” At that, Irving turned away “coolly,” in the words of an eyewitness.
Occasionally, Irving sounded more amenable to the idea of working with Spielberg. “I’m not insecure about it. We’ve been together twelve years and I’ve gotten along fine without him in my career. If I were to work with him now, I’m not worried about being accused of his taking over my career at this point. I come from a family that worked together. I watched my father direct my mother [Priscilla Pointer] all my life. So it’s a natural progression for me,” she said.
What she didn’t say was that despite their professional collaboration, her parents eventually split.
Despite
her misgivings, Spielberg did direct his wife once, but the project was one of his least successful, the premiere episode of his disastrous television series, Amazing Stories.
A year before the divorce, the couple was apparently deep in denial. Through their attorneys, they sent cease and desists orders to magazines and newspapers that reported they were about to divorce. A year later, the same publications announced the end of their four-year union.
The one thing their friends all agreed on was that his second wife was not the cause of the split from his first. It was logistics, not infidelity, that caused the breakup.
Some magazines reported that ever since she starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Capshaw had been trying to snare Spielberg. A London magazine quoted her as calling her wooing of Spielberg a “hunt.”
He denied the charges. In fact, he admitted that during filming, he had come on to her, and she had rebuffed him.
Despite Spielberg’s gallant denials, Capshaw herself admitted that there was some hanky-panky going on between them while he was still married to Irving.
She told gossip columnist Liz Smith in 1994 that she never lost hope that she would bag her man. She almost threw in the towel when Irving and Spielberg’s son Max was born in 1985. “I thought, ‘That’s it,’ ” Capshaw said.
But Spielberg invited her to meet him on the sly in London in 1984 while they were promoting the European release of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “Steven thought nobody would find out,” Capshaw admitted with more amusement than guilt. “Naive. Everybody found out. Amy found out through the National Enquirer.”
Capshaw wasn’t exactly discreet, and the Times of London even accused her of “taking every opportunity to be photographed” with the director. And when there were no inquiring paparazzi around, she was even more indiscreet.
She told the London paper, “I didn’t even hide when room service brought something into his room.”
A mutual friend thought it was understandable that the director was so smitten. “It’s easy to see how he fell in love. She is the warmest, sweetest woman.”
While in London, the romantic pursuit continued in a rather adolescent fashion. During a joint appearance on a British talk show to promote Indy II, Spielberg claimed that he passed mash notes to Capshaw during the commercial breaks. “I remember that,” he said with a laugh. “I did appreciate her, but she wouldn’t have me then, so it never worked out. She sort of rejected me back in ’84 so I gave up on her for years.” Within a year of his fling with Capshaw, Spielberg became a father as Irving gave birth to their son Max. That was followed by his marriage to Irving. Capshaw had by then seen the writing on the wall, dropping out of Spielberg’s sight until 1989 when his marriage to Irving was clearly on the rocks.
So what broke up the marriage? Amy dismissed competition as the source of the split. Maybe she realized she would never be able to meet, much less surpass, her husband’s success. It was the demands of two separate careers that caused the rift. As Irving tersely put it, “You try having a relationship with someone who’s on a set in China for four months. It’s close to impossible.”
Irving was fiercely protective of her independence. About a year before they divorced, I asked her if being Mrs. Steven Spielberg had helped or hurt her career. She bristled and said, “I’ve been an actress a lot longer than I’ve been Mrs. Steven Spielberg. I still have to read for certain things. I had to audition for one film because the writer didn’t know if I could do it.”
I also asked why she had never starred in one of her husband’s blockbusters, which would have been a good career move. “We’ve talked about it for the far-off future,” she said of a future that was never to be. “When we come home, we park our careers at the door, and we’re just husband and wife and Max’s mom. Our careers are already complicated enough.”
Irving took Max that year to London to be on the set of Empire of the Sun. It was a difficult time. The actress felt unemployed and adrift. “I miss acting,” she told me. “It’s very frustrating for me to be on the set of a movie I’m not in. But right now my ‘project’ is to be a wife and mother.”
Spielberg had tried to hold the marriage together by following his wife all the way to Israel in 1986 when she made the execrable Rumpelstiltskin, an embarrassing vanity production directed by her brother and co-starring her mother and stepfather.
That was quite a sacrifice for the world’s most successful and busiest director to make—becoming in effect Mr. Mom in order to spend time with his wife.
Ironically, Irving participated in one of her husband’s big screen projects, but she didn’t appear in it. Although Kathleen Turner supplied the speaking voice of Jessica Rabbit in the Spielberg produced Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it was Mrs. Spielberg who did Jessica’s singing.
Irving’s involvement was serendipitous. In fact, she was a pinch hitter on the film. She explained, “They needed someone to sing a temporary track so the animators would have something to draw from. It was a complete surprise to me that they were gonna use it in the movie! I saw what Jessica looked like—and my voice changed; it wasn’t how I sing normally.”
Despite her ice princess image, Irving had her defenders. And it says something about the veracity of the defense that one of her biggest boosters was also one of her husband’s best friends, Richard Dreyfuss.
“She’s protective of her family and friends,” Dreyfuss insisted. “I don’t think she lets a lot of people get to know her. But if people perceive her as cold, it’s not true. She’s got a real soft heart. And she can hurt. She’s very vulnerable. There’s a side to Amy that is so giving and caring.”
On the other hand, Dreyfuss would not prove himself a good analyst of the marriage’s prospects. The same year the couple divorced, Dreyfuss said not very presciently, “They’ve been together a million years. I think they’re getting better. If she leaves the room, he’s asking, ‘Where’s my wife?’ They’re very attached.”
A cynical observer suggested that if Spielberg was indeed wondering where his wife was, it was so he could slip his girlfriend Kate Capshaw into the room during Irving’s absence.
Just as she had avoided getting sucked into her husband’s films, Irving had no intention of letting her son Max join the family business any time soon. Although her mother and stepfather costarred with her in Rumpelstiltskin, and her brother directed the embarrassment, when he asked Max to play the baby, she turned her brother down flat.
“I turned down the role for Max. I don’t want him to be in the movies. When he’s old enough he can make that choice, but when he doesn’t even have a say in the matter, I don’t think that’s fair.”
I asked Irving how old Max would have to be before he could “have a say in the matter.” She replied with a firm laugh, “Twenty-one.”
On the surface, their life together was perfect. They shared a refurbished home in Brentwood; a glass walled co-op in the ultraluxurious Trump Tower; Amy’s small adobe house in Santa Fe; a Pennsylvania Dutch-style barn they moved from Pennsylvania to East Hampton, Long Island; and a sumptuous compound of homes in Pacific Palisades, California, overlooking the ocean.
The official announcement of their split was noteworthy in its amicability. Their joint statement said, “Our mutual decision, however difficult, has been made in a spirit of caring. And our friendship remains both personal and professional.”
Indeed, a week after the announcement, the two were seen dining together at a Los Angeles restaurant.
Irving basically summed up why they split when she said, “I started my career as the daughter of theater director Jules Irving. I don’t want to finish it as the wife of Spielberg or the mother of Max.”
The marriage and the prior relationship in the seventies had been troubled from the start. At least the breakup was civilized. Irving got a reported $100 million, or half the money her husband had earned during their four-year-marriage.
Irving had always protected her financial independence. Even
when they were married, she kept their finances separate. “I wouldn’t call it a fuck-you fund,” she said a year before the split, “but we don’t have the same checking account. I have a lot that’s mine.”
Fortunately for the director, his wife was not a gold digger. She rejected advice from attorneys that she sue for even more money, palimony, based on the time they had lived together before their marriage.
The one person who didn’t suffer from the breakup was their son, Max. Remembering the feeling of abandonment when his father left the family, Spielberg remained a fiercely involved dad, saying, “I have joint physical custody. Amy has Max one week, and I have Max the next since we live very close to one another. I’m a full-time, hands-on parent. What they call in California an ‘involved parent.’ The week Max is with me, I stay home and don’t work. When he’s not here, I work overtime to make up for the week I’m not working. I’m mad about Max. I drive him to school, feed him, tell him stories. When he was very small I used to give him his bottle and change his nappy. I was present at his birth—I even cut the umbilical cord. By the time Max was one, I no longer had any choice. He took first place and nothing else would do.”
Irving’s life post-Spielberg has been a downward spiral professionally if not personally. In 1990, she had a son by Brazilian director Bruno Baretto, whom she met on the set of A Show of Force. That film, which Baretto directed her in, went nowhere as did her other screen efforts following the divorce.
Irving was too classy to use the term “blacklisted,” but she couldn’t help noticing that directors and producers who were only too happy to consider Mrs. Steven Spielberg weren’t falling over themselves to audition Bruno Baretto’s girlfriend.
Spielberg Page 19