It was a double whammy: being married to Steven Spielberg and then not being married to the most powerful man in Hollywood.
“I was out there trying. I couldn’t get meetings. I couldn’t beg through the door,” she said of life post-Steven.
“I think it hurt being Steven Spielberg’s wife, and then it hurt being the ex-Mrs. Steven Spielberg. It was awkward for a while. I don’t know why. I only know that I felt nonexistent. During my marriage to Steven, I felt like a politician’s wife. There were certain things expected of me that definitely weren’t me. One of my problems is that I’m very honest and direct. You pay a price for that. But then I behaved myself and I paid a price too.”
But the good times still outweighed the bad times. Years after they split, she remembered the good old days as the girlfriend, then wife, of the biggest name in the movie business.
She said wistfully, “When we were together, I used to have terrific dreams.”
By 1994, her dreams must have seemed like nightmares, at least as far as her career was concerned. Her latest, Kleptomania, couldn’t even get a distributor. It was still on the shelf, which must be particularly galling, since she felt the film was a personal showcase.
“I think Kleptomania is the best work I’ve ever done. I put my heart and soul in that film, and it breaks my heart that it may never get released,” she said.
Some speculated that her fading career had more to do with her reputation as being difficult and less to do with being the ex-Mrs. Steven Spielberg, a charge she summarily dismissed. “I’m not a princess. I’ve had a lot of shit to swallow and stuff to work out. I have scars nobody knows about. People shouldn’t waste time thinking about whatever happened to Amy. I’m living in a very beautiful, intimate way. Maybe I’m less ambitious, but my life is so full. So excuse me for having an incredibly wonderful life.”
In 1994, the Los Angeles Times almost gleefully reported, “While her ex-husband glories in unprecedented success, the 40-year-old actress finds herself working for relatively little money at a small regional theater.” It wasn’t quite as bad as the Times made out. The “regional theater” was the prestigious Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut, and the play, Broken Glass, happened to be the latest by America’s preeminent playwright, Arthur Miller. As for working for very little money, that was hardly a concern since she had pocketed $100 million in the divorce settlement.
Ironically, Spielberg’s film company, Amblin, was set to produce her boyfriend’s next film, Casanova, with Antonio Banderas in the title role. Irving wouldn’t have a role in the film, however, admitting she was “too old.”
A semiotician would have enjoyed the iconography at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award ceremony honoring Spielberg in May of 1995. Seated next to the director on the dais was his second wife, buxom and blonde and gorgeous. Her ear-to-ear grin suggested she was thoroughly enjoying her reign as consort of the King of Hollywood.
Every so often, the camera would almost mischievously focus on a tiny, shriveled-looking woman who appeared exceedingly glum. Her hair was frizzy and pulled back in an unflattering chignon. Her dress looked as though it had come from grandma’s closet. It took a while to figure out who this sad-sack figure was and why the camera was focusing on an unknown while Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood were within camera range. It was, of course, the first Mrs. Spielberg.
It wasn’t until a year after the divorce that Capshaw made the director’s reacquaintance. Then she moved fast. She knew right away that this was Mr. Right, but not because of his position as the most successful filmmaker of all time. It was her nose that told her to follow her heart.
“I think it was just the way he smelled,” she said in all seriousness. “He smelled like my family. It was a smell of familiarity. I’m speaking not just metaphorically but olfactorily. They say once a woman takes a whiff of her infant you can blindfold her and march twenty babies in front of her and she’ll pick hers, and that’s how it felt to me. I felt like I was blindfolded and took a smell and said, ‘This is the guy.’ ”
A year after she took her first whiff, they were married on October 12, 1991, at his home on Long Island. On Friday night, they had a casual dinner at Nic and Tony’s in East Hampton.
There was a civil service the next morning at Guild Hall. Saturday afternoon they played a Kennedy-esque touch football game. That night there was a formal black-tie wedding, a traditional Orthodox ceremony in a large tent, presided over by a rabbi flown in from California.
The reception was star-studded. The reclusive Barbra Streisand attended, as did Sally Field, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, and Richard Dreyfuss, who pronounced the ceremony “very sweet.” Spielberg’s longtime mentor and father figure, Steve Ross, chairman of Warner Brothers, spoke after the service. Robin Williams did shtick under the big tent.
It was Spielberg’s second marriage, his wife’s third.
As with Irving, his first child with Capshaw, a daughter named Sasha, was born before they got married. After the marriage, they had a son, Sawyer, named after Huck Finn’s pal.
Earlier, Capshaw had adopted an African-American foster child, Theo, when she was single. She also had a daughter, Jessica, now nineteen, from a previous marriage.
Spielberg described this blended brood. “It’s an interesting group. I’d make them into a sitcom, but I don’t do very well on TV. I don’t want to screw around with my family and fail,” he said, recalling his disastrous excursion into television with Amazing Stories.
Unlike his icy first wife, Capshaw was a nurturing, mothering type. Before becoming an actress, she had enjoyed an entire life and different career. She earned two degrees, a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in learning disabilities from the University of Missouri, and taught educationally handicapped children in Missouri schools for two years before chucking it all for a modeling and acting career in Manhattan.
“I was working one-on-one with the learning disabled, and I didn’t like it,” she recalled, adding guiltily, “Yet by comparison, acting is a very vain, selfish profession. I found it hard, at the end of a B.A., M.A. and two years of teaching to say, ‘I want to go to New York and be an actress.’ It wasn’t like I was going to New York to save the world.”
Long before Spielberg made her crawl on her hands and knees through an ocean of bugs, she had married a school principal, her college sweetheart, and had a daughter by him.
From the beginning of their relationship, Capshaw was a much better psychological match than Spielberg’s first wife.
He once described himself as “the guy at the party in the corner eating the dip.” Capshaw was no social butterfly herself. “There’s a whole Hollywood scene that I don’t even know about. It’s the scene that has to do with big parties and drugs. I’m not a part of that. But I do love going to the movies, and so when they have a screening of something I want to see, I’ll be there. Then, when they take my picture and it’s in the Hollywood Reporter, it looks as if I’m making the Hollywood scene when I’m really just going to see the movies.”
A Methodist, Capshaw converted to Judaism before the marriage, she said, “because I like the religion’s emphasis on family, and I wanted my child to be born a Jew. When I converted, Steven was delighted, but then all the people in his family who were supposed to fall to their knees in exultation didn’t say a word, because they so wanted me to know that it didn’t matter to them.”
And in contrast to Irving, Capshaw was willing to subvert her career in the service of her husband’s.
She recalled watching Temple of Doom one night on television and turning to her husband to ask, “What happened to my career after that movie?” Spielberg replied, rather chauvinistically, “You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.”
Instead of hitting him, Capshaw agreed: “It’s true. I think you have to have a great deal of ambition—these careers of our A-list ladies don’t happen by accident. And if they do, they don’t sustain. An
d I didn’t do the things you have to do. My focus was on Steven and a large family.”
She says she has no intention of ever starring in one of her husband’s films, and not for the aesthetic reservations his first wife had about his style of filmmaking. Capshaw says simply, “I’d rather be in life with him than make a movie.”
The only area of incompatibility, it seemed, was his obsession with films.
“My problem,” she once said, “is that I’m not a movie buff. So I had difficulty understanding Steven. He talks in movie language, you see. He’d say, ‘Remember that scene in It Happened One Night—the one where Claudette Colbert did such-and-such?’ And I’d say, ‘Steven, I never saw that movie.’ And he’d groan and reply, ‘Kate, how can I possibly communicate with you?’
“Really, I must get hold of some of those old movies and study them. Otherwise, I’m never going to know what people like Steven are talking about,” she said.
Despite his wife’s low movie IQ, friends claimed the workaholic director became more serene and happier after having two children with Capshaw. His former producer, Kathleen Kennedy, feels his second marriage brought a new balance to his life. “He has a personal confidence now and isn’t trying to prove anything to himself anymore.”
Spielberg would not disagree with his colleague’s assessment. Of fatherhood, he says, “The best thing that ever happened to me, really, is having kids. I only make a movie every eighteen months as a director, and between movies I’m in my kids’ face. I’m in my house every night by 5:15, and I’m not in the office until 9:30 a.m. I get on the floor and play with everybody. I can act sillier than my seven-year-old. I’m the guy who tries to keep the kids downstairs when my wife is trying to get them to bed.”
Ironically, before the director fell in love with Capshaw, and while he was still going through a painful divorce from his first wife, he made one of his most lushly romantic films. The fact that it would fail at the box office hints that Spielberg’s heart may not have been in the right place to take on such romantic subject matter.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Never
“THERE ARE CERTAIN PICTURES THAT ARE blatantly exploitative, that are terribly cast and executed, like poorly made sequels or bizarre remakes.”
Steven Spielberg wasn’t thinking about his own decision to remake the 1944 film, A Guy Named Joe, but his remake, renamed Always, was strangely cast and unevenly executed.
When he was fourteen, he saw the original film starring Spencer Tracy as a World War II fighter pilot who dies and comes back as the guardian angel of his best friend, a fellow pilot. Tracy also helps his buddy romance Tracy’s ex-girlfriend.
Spielberg was so entranced with the story he countermanded his own belief that remakes rarely work. “This is the only remake I would really ever consider directing myself,” he said before Always went into production. “It’s a story that touched my soul when I was fourteen years old and saw it on television. It was the second movie that ever made me cry that didn’t have a deer in it. And it’s a reassuring story. It’s about life and saying it while you’re here and doing it while you can.”
Still, he resisted the whole concept of remakes. “I wouldn’t have done a remake if I had been able to do a movie that was about the same thing as A Guy Named Joe, but I couldn’t find a script as good as the original.”
Almost a decade earlier, the director had commissioned a screenplay based on A Guy Named Joe, but he felt he wasn’t mature enough to make it at the time.
It wasn’t just immaturity that kept the film in preproduction hell. The industry’s biggest workaholic attributed the delay to laziness. He hadn’t gotten around to making the film, he insisted, “because I’m lazy. I couldn’t get the script right. I couldn’t get the tone right. I guess I just didn’t know what kind of movie I wanted to make. Between 1980 and 1985, eight drafts of the script were written. Then four more after that.”
Eventually, Spielberg decided to update the story to the present day and turn the fighter pilots into fire fighters in the Pacific Northwest.
Richard Dreyfuss and Spielberg had discussed the idea of remaking the film while shooting Jaws. “After I told him that some day I wanted to do a remake of A Guy Named Joe, he kept nagging me to play the Spencer Tracy role. He told me, ‘If you cast anyone else in the role I’ll kill you!’ ”
Friendship only goes so far, and Spielberg resisted Dreyfuss’s entreaties and sought out more traditional leading men. “At the time, Richard had this little round face and wasn’t right for the role. He grew into the role over the last fifteen years!”
Both Robert Redford and Paul Newman were interested in the role Dreyfuss coveted. Spielberg wanted to cast one in the Tracy role and the other as the best friend. Superstar egos got in the way.
As Spielberg recalled, “They both quite liked the notion of the story, but both of them wanted to play Pete, the Spencer Tracy character, so I couldn’t make that work.”
Spielberg had never made a full-blown love story and he was intrigued by the challenge. However, he hedged his bets by sticking close to a theme that had worked well for him before, the supernatural. He’d take a risk making a love story, but he’d insure box office by throwing in a high concept about coming back to life.
His casting decisions were not so well thought out. Giving in to Dreyfuss’s pleas, he cast the nerdy actor in the romantic lead. The director defended his decision, saying, “I think the best love stories are about people we perceive to be just like us. And I’ve always looked at Richard Dreyfuss as Everyman.”
In his defense, Spielberg may have been influenced by Dreyfuss’s romantic role the year before in the cop movie, Stakeout, when Newsweek hailed him as a new kind of romantic hero.
The female lead was harder to cast. After a long search, Spielberg happened to be watching a film about a feisty female television news producer, Broadcast News. Although he had never seen the actress before, ten minutes into the film he knew he had found his leading lady. Holly Hunter would re-create the role originated by Irene Dunne.
“Holly Hunter is Everygirl, feisty, smart and extremely opinionated. I’ve always been attracted to forthright women who aren’t afraid to lay it on the line, even if sometimes that line goes right across our chests.”
The script for Always had an exalted pedigree. One of Britain’s greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard, wrote several drafts, although he didn’t receive a credit. Spielberg and the playwright had become close friends after collaborating on the script for Empire of the Sun.
It’s a mutual admiration society that continues to this day. Stoppard, in fact, has a contract with Amblin, Spielberg’s production company, to read books and screenplays and offer his opinion.
“It’s a good partnership because what I think I’ve done is to introduce Tom to telling the story with pictures and Tom introduced me to telling the story with some dialogue. He showed me an interesting way of talking, not to the point, but around the point. You don’t just come out and say what you mean. Let the audience figure it out for themselves. Give them all the clues and then confirm, after they figure it out, that they were right.”
Always may be most memorable because it gave fans one last on-screen look at Audrey Hepburn before her untimely death just a few years later.
Spielberg originally had wanted Sean Connery to play the role of God since their working relationship on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had been so fruitful. But Connery had other film commitments, so in a burst of inspiration Spielberg decided to recast God as a woman!
In one scene, Hepburn appears in a burned-out forest. The script called for her to be dressed all in white. In order not to smudge her costume, Hepburn literally had to be carried on a stretcher to the middle of the forest by six burly members of the crew.
Spielberg recalled, “She was embarrassed to be carried around like a queen and kept explaining to anybody who would listen that her unusual mode of transportation was just to keep her clean.”
&n
bsp; Spielberg loved his cast. At the conclusion of filming, he gave each of his stars an unusual present, a Mazda Miata.
Spielberg explained his unusual generosity: “I loved working with those people so much. Usually you just have a cake at a wrap party and say goodbye. I wanted to give them something to remember the film by.”
The Miatas were indeed memorable. The cars had just been introduced into the United States at the time, and they were so immensely popular they were almost impossible to come by. As Always’ co-star John Goodman, a recipient of the director’s largesse said, “When you’re Steven Spielberg, it’s not hard to get anything you want.”
The gigantic Goodman struck an amusing figure driving around town in the tiny Mazda, but he liked the car and didn’t mind the cramping.
Always was a modest commercial success, although the critics barbecued it. The film cost $30 million, a bargain considering the expensive aerial footage of forest fires and crashing planes. It grossed $77 million.
But you get the impression Spielberg would have made the film even if he had a crystal ball that could predict which of his films would hit and which would miss.
“I don’t look at a screenplay and say I can’t make this because it won’t make a lot of money. It’s all a throw of the dice. So, I just make a movie and don’t worry about its commercial potential because you never know at that stage whether it will make money or not. Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple didn’t look like money-makers on paper, but The Color Purple turned out to be a huge hit. It’s all a crapshoot.” You will notice he didn’t comment on Empire’s paltry box-office take. Empire was the downside of the crapshoot.
Most importantly, regardless of its box-office take, Always was a film Spielberg was completely satisfied with. Or as he more strikingly described it, “Always is a film I can stand naked on top of!”
Spielberg may have felt so gemutlich about the blah Always because its story line vaguely paralleled his own personal life at the time. Always deals with the end of one suffocating relationship and the beginning of a healthy, enriching one. In 1989, Spielberg’s romantic life was in transition as he ended his tortured relationship with Amy Irving and renewed his on-again, off-again affair with Kate Capshaw. The glow his new liaison gave off must have been reflected in his rhapsodic crowing over a turkey like Always.
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