George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  George was more than just hardworking; he was ambitious and savvy, and he knew how to read people. And it didn’t hurt that he and LeRoy Morris hit it off immediately, both perhaps knowing that they needed each other. While the fifty-year-old Morris had two grown married daughters, he had no son, no successor to whom he could pass on the business.18 Meanwhile, George Sr.—who had lost Walton Lucas to diabetes less than a decade earlier—had no father, no paternal figure, no family legacy to inherit. Each filled a role for the other. It was a subtle, complex mentor-apprentice relationship, exactly the kind that George Sr.’s own son would covet—and explore on the movie screen—decades later.

  Things were going well enough that only a little more than a year into his employment with Morris, George Sr. somewhat brazenly mentioned to his employer that he hoped to have a store of his own, “or at least part of one,” by the time he was twenty-five.19 In 1937—when George Sr. was twenty-four—Morris offered his industrious protégé 10 percent of the business, with an eye toward an eventual full partnership. George protested that he had no money to invest in the firm, but Morris wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ll sign a note you owe me so much,” Morris told the young man. “This business is no good if it won’t pay out.”20 With an official share in the company, George Sr. began working six days a week, determined to vindicate Morris’s professional and paternal devotion.

  While George Sr. was concentrating on business at L. M. Morris, Dorothy was attending to their home life with an equal dedication. In late 1934 she gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Ann, followed two years later by a second daughter they christened Katherine, but whom everyone would always call Katy or Kate. With his family growing and business succeeding, George bought a lot at 530 Ramona Avenue out on the edge of Modesto and, using $5,000 borrowed from Dorothy’s parents, built a respectable single-story stuccoed house he was certain he and Dorothy would fill with more children.

  But two pregnancies in three years had taken a toll on Dorothy’s health. Delicate from the start, and likely suffering from pancreatitis, Dorothy found each pregnancy harder than the last, compelling her to take long periods of bed rest—and after Kate’s birth, doctors advised her to stop having children.21 Yet she and George would continue to try to conceive over the next eight years, suffering through at least two miscarriages.

  Finally, in late 1943, Dorothy became pregnant again, this time with a baby she carried to term. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 14, 1944—a pleasant, clear Mother’s Day morning—Dorothy gave birth to a son. Perhaps recognizing that with Dorothy’s frail health, this might be his only chance for a namesake, George abandoned the name Jeffrey, which had earlier been considered for the newborn, in favor of a name much more appropriate for an heir apparent: George Walton Lucas Jr. The baby was very small—only five pounds, fourteen ounces—but healthy, squirming so much when the attending doctor put the infant on Dorothy’s stomach that she nearly dropped him. “Don’t let him fall off,” she warned. “This is the only son I’ve got!”22

  Like his parents, George Jr. had dark hair and dark eyes, as well as another distinguishing feature that ran through the Lucas line: ears that had a tendency to stick out. George Jr.’s, in fact, were more prominent than most, and one was even a bit floppy—a defect that George Sr. was quick to remedy by taping it up. George Sr. would eventually proclaim it “a good ear,”23 but George Jr.’s ears, which leaned upward and stuck out, would always be one of his defining features. “[He] was a scrawny little guy with big ears,” recalled sister Kate warmly.24

  Scrawny. It was one of the many diminutive adjectives Lucas would hear for decades. As a toddler “[he] was quite small,” said his mother. “Really a peanut then.”25 At age six, Lucas weighed thirty-five pounds; by high school he would reach his full height of five-foot-six and barely tip the scales at a hundred pounds. “A scrawny little devil,” said George Sr.26

  Lucas’s youngest sister, Wendy, would be born three years later, the last child Dorothy would have. Perhaps predictably, the two pregnancies had severely taxed her strength, and for most of George Jr.’s childhood, Dorothy would spend much of her time in and out of hospitals or confined to bed. “Her health kind of went downhill,” remembered Kate. The care of the children was left largely to an outgoing housekeeper named Mildred Shelley, whom everyone called Till. Till could be strict and quick with the back of her hand, but she was also loud and funny, telling stories in a southern drawl, and the Lucas children adored her. Because of Till, said Kate, “we were never without a mother figure.”27 But it was George, she thought, who had a special place in Till’s heart. “He was the only boy in the family, so he was sort of the apple of everybody’s eye,” said Kate.28 For his part, Lucas would always speak fondly of the lively Till. “I have very warm feelings about that time,” he said—a positively glowing remembrance from the famously tight-lipped Lucas.29

  In 1949, when George Jr. was five years old, LeRoy Morris—making good on his promise of a decade earlier—sold George Lucas Sr. the L. M. Morris Company. Morris and Lucas announced their transaction on January 26 in the pages of the Modesto Bee, after which Morris retired—and unexpectedly died seven days later.30 “He was one of God’s gentlemen,” George Sr. said of his partner, surrogate father, and benefactor. “He prepared me to little by little take over his business.31 Now George Sr. planned to do the same for his own son. If all went as intended, George Jr. would work hard—apply himself—join the company, and, little by little, take over the family business. It was an ambitious goal—and it would also prove to be a major point of contention between father and son.

  For George Lucas Jr., growing up in Modesto as the son of the town’s most prosperous stationer was never a bad life. But Lucas would always remain ambivalent, and slightly conflicted, about his childhood. “I had my share of traumas and problems,” he said later, “but at the same time I enjoyed it quite a bit.”32 At times his father irritated him; each summer George Sr. would force his son to shave his head down to a tight crew cut, a ritual Lucas hated. “My father was strict,” Lucas noted later, though even that memory became somewhat muddled. “I mean, he wasn’t overly strict,” Lucas added. “I mean, he was reasonable. And he was fair. My father was extremely fair.”33 Fair or not, when it came down to it, Lucas remembered being “very angry” with his father for most of his childhood.

  While Lucas’s most devoted boyhood companion was probably his younger sister, Wendy, he did have a stable group of friends, including best friend John Plummer, whom Lucas met when he was four and would remain a lifelong friend, and the slightly older George Frankenstein. The three of them would regularly play together at Lucas’s house on Ramona Avenue, where even Plummer and Frankenstein gave George Sr. a wide berth. “My memory is, you never crossed him,” said Frankenstein of Lucas’s father. “I mean, if you ever did something to tick him off… he was like a one-strike kind of person.”34 As John Plummer put it, “Every time Mr. Lucas came around, you just kind of hid.”35

  Still, there were advantages to hanging out with the son of a stationer: George Jr. could get the latest toys and gadgets right off the shelves of his father’s store. “He had all the goodies,” said Frankenstein, “and he was very willing to share.”36 George was particularly proud of sharing a gigantic three-engine Lionel train, which, he admitted, “took up most of my bedroom,” winding through elaborate miniature sets George had made using army men, toy cars, and weeds and small plants pulled from the yard.37 At one point he even managed to lay his hands on concrete from a local lumberyard, which he and his friends poured into handmade molds to form small buildings for the train to whiz past. Later he would build small dioramas—which he always called “environments”—that he would display in a wooden case with a glass top and side. “I was always interested in building things,” said Lucas, “so I had a little shed out back where I had a lot of tools, and I would build chess sets and dollhouses and cars—lots and lots of race cars that we would push around and run down hills and
things.”38

  One of his most memorable projects—built with the help of the always willing Plummer—was an elaborately constructed kid-sized roller coaster that used a winding coil of phone cable to pull a cart up to the top of a steep incline—at which point the cart would be released to go clattering down another series of ramps to the ground. “How we didn’t kill people, I don’t know,” confessed Plummer.39 “It was probably only four feet tall, but we did it. It was fun, it was a great event; all the neighborhood kids came over. And we kind of got known for doing stuff like that. George was creative. He wasn’t a leader, but he was much more imaginative.… He always came up with a lot of the ideas.”40

  “When I was very young, I loved make-believe,” said Lucas. “But it was the kind of make-believe that used all the technological toys I could come by, like model airplanes and cars. I suppose that an extension of that interest led to what later occupied my mind, the Star Wars stories.”41 Still, “there wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult.”42 Or so he would always claim.

  Unlike a later friend and collaborator, Steven Spielberg, who made magical childhoods a centerpiece of many of his films, Lucas never had a romantic or idealized view of childhood. “I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant, it was just… frightening,” Lucas said later. “I remember that I was unhappy a lot of the time. Not really unhappy—I enjoyed my childhood. But I guess all kids, from their point of view, feel depressed and intimidated. Although I had a great time, my strongest impression was that I was always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.”43

  Sometimes the monsters were the other kids on his own block, who bullied and intimidated the small George Jr., holding him down while taking his shoes off his feet and throwing them into the lawn sprinklers. George wouldn’t even fight back, leaving his sister Wendy to chase away the aggressors and retrieve his wet shoes.44

  It makes sense, then, that throughout much of his life, the diminutive Lucas would seek out big brother figures to serve as mentors and protectors. One of the first was the fiancé of George’s oldest sister, Ann; Lucas was absolutely devoted to him. “That’s one of the ways of learning,” Lucas acknowledged later. “You attach yourself to somebody older and wiser than you, learn everything they have to teach, and move on to your own accomplishments.” When the young man was killed in Korea, Lucas was devastated. It was little wonder Lucas always looked back on his childhood with slightly jumbled emotions. It was a “normal, tough, repressed childhood filled with fear and trepidation all over the place,” said Lucas. “But generally I enjoyed it. It was good.”45

  He was equally ambivalent about Modesto. For years, a slight embarrassment would tinge the way he talked about his hometown. While he would eventually come to embrace his status as a son of Modesto with pride—and his film American Graffiti would practically make it a destination—Lucas was, for the first several decades of his life, always slightly self-conscious about his Modesto roots. When asked where he was from, Lucas would respond with an ambiguous and unhelpful “California.” If pressed, he would admit to coming from “northern California,” or sometimes the slightly more specific “south of San Francisco,” before finally muttering, “Modesto.”46 Still, he knew his hometown had its charms. “Modesto was really Norman Rockwell, Boys’ Life magazine… raking leaves on Saturday afternoons and having bonfires,” Lucas put it later. “Just very classic Americana.”47

  And for a boy growing up in the 1950s, that Americana also involved regular attendance at Sunday school—an obligation Lucas quickly grew to loathe. “When I got to be old enough—twelve or thirteen—I rebelled against it,” he said.48 In fact, even as a child, Lucas already had a complicated relationship with God; at six—an age when most children see God as simply a benevolent bearded man in the sky—Lucas had a “very profound” mystical experience that would shape the way he looked at spirituality in his life and work. “It centered around God,” he recalled. He found himself wondering “‘What is God?’ But more than that, ‘What is reality? What is this?’ It’s as if you reach a point and suddenly you say, ‘Wait a second—What is the world? What are we? What am I? How do I function in this, and what’s going on here?’”49 They were questions Lucas would struggle with, explore, and, with the creation of the Force in Star Wars, attempt to answer in his films.

  “I have strong feelings about God and the nature of life, but I’m not devoted to one particular faith,” Lucas said later.50 While Lucas was raised a Methodist, he was more intrigued by the services at Till’s German Lutheran church, where worshippers still wore broad hats and bonnets and spoke in sharply accented, reverential tones. Lucas was fascinated by the formality of their rituals, which were much like an elaborate, well-scripted play in which everyone knew their roles. “The ceremony provides something essential for people,” Lucas acknowledged.51 He would always remain “curious, academically, about organized religion,” and his views on God and religion would continue to evolve over time.52 He would eventually describe his religion as a melding of Methodist and Buddhist. (“It’s Marin County,” he said in 2002, noting the area’s famously left-leaning ways. “We’re all Buddhists up here.”)53 For now, however, he would remain a devoted, albeit frustrated, Methodist. George Lucas Sr. would have it no other way.

  As bad as Sunday school could be, for Lucas it had nothing on the regular classroom. He remembered being terrified his first day of classes at John Muir Elementary School—“a feeling of total panic,” he called it—and things would never get much better: “I was never very good in school, so I was never very enthusiastic about it.”54 In the beginning, he seemed to show promise. “He did well. He was bright,” noted Dorothy Elliot, his second-grade teacher. “[But] George was… quiet as a little mouse. He never spoke unless you spoke to him first.”55 To Lucas, however, there just wasn’t much in school worth talking about. “One of the big problems I had, more than anything else, was that I always wanted to learn something other than what was being taught,” he said. “I was bored.”56 While he enjoyed his art classes and diligently performed in the third-grade play—where he received last billing—Lucas hated math, his spelling was terrible, and writing would always be a painfully slow process. Even in high school, he had to rely on his sister Wendy, three years younger, to read through his assignments, looking for errors.

  Lucas may have struggled with spelling and writing, but he enjoyed reading, a pursuit likely encouraged by his mother, who spent long stretches recuperating with a book in and out of hospital beds. His mother had often read him Grimm’s fairy tales as a toddler; but when he was left on his own, Lucas’s tastes ran toward adventure stories like Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson. He also amassed an enormous collection of Landmark books, a series of histories and biographies written for younger readers. “I was addicted to [them],” said Lucas. “I used to love to read those books. It started me on a lifelong love of history.… As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.”57

  Still, Lucas would admit later, “I wasn’t that much of a reader.”58 And yet, that wasn’t entirely true either. Besides the Landmark books, there was something else Lucas collected and read ravenously: comic books. “I was never ashamed that I read a lot of comic books,” he said.59 Lucas discovered comics at a moment when they were selling in the millions in nearly every genre imaginable, from romance and western, to crime and horror, to superheroes and science fiction. John Plummer, whose father had a connection with the operator of the local newsstand, would bring home armloads of comics every week, their front covers missing and filed as unsold. “George used to sit out on my front porch all the time just reading them,” Plummer remembered.60 Even long after Plummer had been called inside for dinner, George would stay on the porch by himself, hunched over his pile of comics, reading intently.

  Eventually, George and his sister Wendy would pool their allowances to buy comics of their own, ten for a dollar, and soon h
ad a collection large enough that their father built a shed in the backyard with a space devoted solely to them. George and Wendy would throw quilts on the ground inside the shed and sit for hours, poring over comic books.61 It was no wonder Lucas was attracted to comics; given his struggles with spelling and writing, his learning style was clearly more visual than verbal. Comics were “storytelling through pictures,”62 he said, and pointed out that it was in comic books where he first learned “strange facts” and exotic vocabulary, words like scone.63 At Lucas’s best, his own storytelling style would mimic the colorful rat-a-tat bravura of the comic book page: words and images working together to propel the action forward, with little time for speeches or soliloquies.

  Perhaps predictably, Lucas preferred science fiction comics to superheroes. “I liked adventures in outer space,” he admitted.64 While Lucas may have swooned over the sumptuous Wally Wood art and science fiction stories-with-a-twist in EC’s hugely popular Weird Science comics, he preferred DC’s more colorful intergalactic policeman, Tommy Tomorrow, who had taken up regular residency in the back pages of Superman’s Action Comics. Plummer thought he understood his friend’s preferences. “One of the things that came out of them… was the values that were so important to us,” Plummer said. “There were the good guys and the bad guys. I think that put a pretty strong [im]print on him.”65