Steven Spielberg (23 page)

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.”

W
HILE
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.

Spielberg's indulgence in “sick” humor about Nazis in high school appears to have been a vent for his anguish and outrage over his feelings of victimization as a Jew. Flouting a taboo and treating the subject of the Holocaust as black comedy may have relieved some of the pain he was feeling. “A joke,” observed Nietzsche, “is an epitaph on an emotion.” In flip-flopping between the roles of Jew and Nazi, Spielberg may have been distancing himself psychologically from his predicament at a terrible time of confusion, bitterness, and self-hatred. The boy who admittedly was “so ashamed of being a Jew” and “wanted to be a gentile with the same intensity that I wanted to be a filmmaker” may have felt compelled to put himself into the mind of the enemy.

A
FTER
he left Phoenix, Spielberg recalled, “[M]y life changed and I went without film for about two years [
sic
] while I was trying to get out of high school, get some decent grades, and find a college. I got serious about studying.” Although the stress of his senior year in a new city and school made it impossible for him to undertake anything as ambitious as
Firelight
,
‡
  Spielberg was not entirely inactive as a filmmaker during that year in Saratoga. He kept in practice by filming high school football games and by making two other movies, inexpensively but imaginatively.

The murder of President Kennedy, which occurred while Spielberg was a high school junior in Phoenix, was the watershed event for the baby boomer generation, marking the end of its political innocence and the beginning of its distrust of the U.S. government. Spielberg and Augustine, fervent admirers of the late President Kennedy, wanted to find some way of expressing their
pain and anger over his death. “I had a wooden Kennedy rocking chair,” recalls Augustine. “It was made for the 1964 election and it was put out right after JFK was killed. You wound it up and it would play ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.' I showed it to Steve and he thought it was ironic that the thing would have come out after JFK died. He thought people should see that irony.”
§

With Augustine's help, Spielberg made a three-minute film of the musical rocking chair, turning what could have seemed like a sick joke into an elegy to President Kennedy. “He shot into the sun setting in the wheat outside his house,” reports Augustine. “I had a piece of cardboard box or masonite I was waving up and down, blowing on the wheat to create a ripple effect. The rocking chair wound down slowly with this incredible, horrible, tear-wrenching sound and stopped on an off-note.”

Spielberg also made a jocular documentary about Senior Sneak Day, the annual outing by Saratoga High's graduating class to the beachfront amusements at nearby Santa Cruz. An elaborately edited series of Mack Sennett-like gags showing the students frolicking in the sand on a chilly day in May, forming pyramids and having a pie-eating contest, it was rounded out with a few scenes shot around the school.

Without explaining why, Spielberg also filmed shots at the beach of several classmates looking up at the sky while flinching and covering their eyes. When he edited the film, the director mischievously spoofed Alfred Hitchcock's
The
Birds
by intercutting “dive-bombing” sea gulls with the reaction shots of his classmates cowering in the sand. Among the victims of the gag was one of the bullies who had been tormenting Spielberg. When the movie was shown several times at the all-night graduation party on June 18–19, 1965, at the Bold Knight restaurant in Sunnyvale, Spielberg expected the bully to react angrily to the gag. But after seeing the film, his tormentor “came over a changed person,” Spielberg recalled. “He said the movie had made him laugh and that he wished he'd gotten to know me better.”

W
ITH
Vietnam suddenly and unexpectedly looming on the horizon after the U. S. Marines landed in Da Nang on March 8, 1965, the problem of the draft hung like a black cloud over the boys in Spielberg's class. High school seniors graduating that year were forced to confront the question of what to do about the draft, along with the more traditional problem of deciding whether and where to attend college.

The draft law required a young man to register for the draft when he turned eighteen. Spielberg was in the middle of his senior year at Saratoga High School when he turned eighteen in December 1964 and had to register for the draft. With his love of a good story, he has implausibly claimed that
his first close encounter with the Selective Service System came several months before that when he was standing in line to see
Dr.
Strangelove
the first weekend that film played in San Jose: “[M]y sister pulled up with my father and ran out with the Selective Service envelope, which converted me to 1-A for the first time, eligible for the draft. I was so consumed with [the] possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see [
Dr.
Strangelove
]
a second time to really appreciate it, and that's when I realized what a piece of classic, bizarre theater it was.”
¶

Although Spielberg appears to have been relatively uninterested in politics during his senior year in high school, other than in issues involving racial and ethnic discrimination, he clearly had no desire to join the Army. He did not accompany Augustine and other friends to an antiwar protest against Lyndon Johnson in San Francisco during the spring of 1965, but according to Augustine, Spielberg already had antiwar feelings by that time, putting him ahead of many others in his generation in questioning the American involvement in Vietnam. Discussing his decision to attend California State College at Long Beach rather than spending all his time hanging out at Universal, he once said, “I was actually just staying there so I wouldn't have to serve in Vietnam. If the draft had not been after me, I probably wouldn't have gone to college at all.”