Steven Spielberg (10 page)

“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
visual
ize
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 always 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.”

As a result of his father's long hours at work, Steven saw much less of Arnold than he would have liked. The elder Spielberg is remembered as a shadowy figure by most of his neighbors on Crystal Terrace. “I very rarely saw him,” says Steven's next-door playmate Scott MacDonald. “I remember him being tall, on the portly side, with dark hair. He always wore a white shirt, and I remember he had a pocket protector with pens. I don't remember seeing him playing in the yard. A lot of fathers would play catch with their
kids or coach baseball, but Steve's father never did. He would never do anything with him.”

Arnold's workaholic tendencies already were beginning to cause noticeable tensions in the household. When Arnold would come home from work, the neighbors would often hear him bellow, “Leah, I am home. Are you dead or alive?” According to the neighbors, Leah seemed to spend most of her time practicing on her piano or sunning herself in the yard, when she wasn't playing Scrabble or cards with her friends Grace Robbins and Cissy Cutler. Perhaps because of his growing distance from his father, Steven clung even closer to his mother emotionally. “Every time she had to go someplace he took sick,” Mary Devlin says. “He didn't want her to go. She was a good person, very loving. Leah had a wonderful disposition—everything was a big joke. If you'd have a bad day, you'd talk to Leah and feel better.”

“She seemed much more relaxed than our mothers, much more liberal, bordering on the artsy,” says Cholly Devlin. “She was unique in our neighborhood. In a sense, my mother and the rest of the mothers were right out of the Betty Crocker mold. At the time housewives would clean house and serve food. They would be the model mother of the fifties. But she wasn't. She was much more ‘with it.'”

A
N
incident that may have occurred near the end of the Spielbergs' stay in New Jersey symbolized for Steven his growing tensions with his father.

Arnold brought home one of the first transistors from RCA. Displaying it to his family, he proclaimed, “This is the future.” Steven promptly took the transistor and swallowed it. His father, he recalled, laughed involuntarily, but quickly became upset. No wonder, for that primitive transistor was not only his Dad's prized possession, but a piece of hardware half an inch in diameter and a quarter-inch thick, with “a few wires sticking out of it,” reports Arnold's boss at RCA, Wes Leas. Steven's impulsive gesture could be interpreted as a bizarre tribute to his father, his own literal way of internalizing Arnold's love of technology. But in Steven's telling of the tale, making the transistor disappear carried another, more defiant message to his father: “That's your future, but it doesn't have to be mine.”

Arnold says he doesn't recall such an incident. But it amuses him to hear Steven's story. He allows it “could have” happened. Steven, he says, “has a good memory [of what happened to him] as a kid. Plus a little exaggeration. He's a good storyteller.”

“I
SEE
pieces of me in Steven,” Arnold told
Time
magazine in 1985. “I see the storyteller.”

“When my kids were young,” he explains, “I used to love to tell them stories. I used to have running serials of adventures that I told the kids when they'd go to bed. For Steve, I had one set of stories, and for the girls, another.
I always involved them in the adventures. They were climbing caves, and going here and there. I invented time machines that they would get into and go back and look at things in time and rescue somebody. I invented all kinds of animals. I invented characters, a girl and a boy, Joanie Frothy Flakes and Lenny Ludhead, my kids' age, so they related to 'em. We did serials all the time. ‘Now I quit. Now you guys gotta go to sleep. I'll continue tomorrow.'”

Steven's own budding talents as a storyteller first manifested themselves when he lived on Crystal Terrace.

His neighbor Jane MacDonald Morley, who was six years old when Steven moved away, remembers, “On lazy summer afternoons when we were bored, we'd sit in the shade at the side of our house, five or six kids, and Stevie would be the one telling the stories. He always seemed to get the attention of the kids. The younger kids believed what Stevie said, because he was a good storyteller. They'd go, ‘Uh-huh,' ‘Really?,' ‘Wow!'

“It was out of those sessions that the bogeyman story came. He told me, ‘The bogeyman will get you.' I can remember telling him I wasn't afraid of the bogeyman because I slept on the second floor, and he couldn't get in my room. He said, ‘Oh, but the bogeyman is twenty feet tall and he can look into your window.' He told me it didn't matter how safe you were, he was
there.
I remember that night being awake, worried about the bogeyman.”

The stories didn't always convince kids closer to Stevie's own age, however, and sometimes the other boys would tell him to knock it off or would turn the tables on him.

“My sister would say, ‘Stevie scares me,'” Jane's brother Scott recalls. “Stevie was very sincere, and my sister was very gullible. He was pretty slick about throwing a few zingers at my sister and his sister. He would be bragging about this or saying that. We would all roll our eyes and we would never believe him. I said I had an alligator in my basement, and day after day he would beg me to let him see the alligator. He would ask me, ‘How do you feed him?' I said, ‘I put hamburger meat on the end of a pencil. He's only four or five inches long.' He would ask me, ‘Can I see it?' I would say, ‘He's not well.' Finally he accused me of lying to him. I had him going for a while.”

From telling scary stories to little girls, Stevie's imagination soon turned to ever more elaborate pranks.

“Even if he hadn't become famous, he's the kind of kid I would have remembered,” says Stanley (Sandy) MacDonald, the older brother of Jane and Scott. “You could see he had a theatrical bent. We both used to love storms. Most of the kids in the neighborhood didn't, but he was one of the few who liked storms. He had a real nice screened-in porch in back of his house, and when the sky would get dark and stormy we'd wear yellow slickers and sit on his porch in lawn chairs, reading comic books and looking for lightning.

“One summer somebody got a set of golf clubs, and he and I built a golf course in his back yard. We dug holes and planted tin cans and flags. That
summer we had the only tornado we ever had in the area. We could see the dark cloud and we had to go in our basements. But I liked to watch storms, so I looked out and saw Stevie out in his backyard running around knocking over the golf course flags, spinning around with his arms outstretched. I remember asking him later why he did it and he said, ‘I didn't break the golf course. The tornado did.' I said, ‘Stevie, I
saw
you.' He wouldn't admit it, but he
became
a tornado.”
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