Steven Spielberg (70 page)

 

D
ESCRIBING
the kind of woman he liked to cast in his movies, Spielberg once said, “Maybe I've been searching for the ultimate
shiksa.
”
*
He found her when Kate Cap-shaw walked into his office to read for
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom.
He was captivated with Kate's finely sculpted model's features, lissome figure, and midwestern emotional bluntness. She resembled a corn-fed, all-American, more innocent-seeming version of Julie Christie. Though not a natural blonde, Kate was willing to dye her brown tresses to conform to Spielberg's fantasy image of a
shiksa
heroine. Sending her audition tape to
Temple
of
Doom
screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, he said, “I really liked this girl Kate. Could you say something good about her to George?”

Spielberg may not have recognized the element of calculation behind his future wife's wholesome facade. “I read an article [about him] when
E.T.
came out,” she recalled in 1996. “I knew that I had a love connection.” When she went for her audition, she “wasn't that interested in getting the job. I still
had those young notions of being an artist, doing only the sorts of movies that Meryl Streep would do. I couldn't imagine
her
doing a sequel to
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark.”
As
a result, she concentrated her entire attention on Spielberg himself.

Entering his office at Warner Bros., she was told to sit facing him, but sidled alongside and turned on the charm. “The minute I met him,” she recalled, “I sensed he was a sweet, shy guy who was kind of wondering, ‘How did I get here?' I love that in men, that shyness and humility.” She was careful not to gush over his movies, as most young actresses would have done in that situation. As she left, he told her, “Thanks for not saying anything about
E.T.
”
On their next meeting, he offered an unmistakable sign of his affection, inviting her to play a video game.

Kate had “an immediate, full-throttle reaction” to meeting Spielberg. “I went home and I said, ‘I think I'm in really big trouble here.'” Although she has not disguised the fact that she campaigned fiercely to marry him, Cap-shaw portrayed her romantic attraction to Spielberg as instinctive, if somewhat maternal: “What attracted me was the way he smelled. Like babies when they are born, like he was mine. They say if you blindfold a mom and present her with twenty babies, she'll be able to pick hers out because of the smell. It was like that.”

B
ORN
Kathy Sue Nail in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1953, Kate Capshaw was raised in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, the daughter of a beautician and an airline operations manager. Her family was Methodist, middle-class, and Middle-American to its core. “My parents were the first generation to leave the farm,” she said in 1984. “I looked very WASPy, but I wanted to look ethnic. I wanted to be a Jewish intellectual. I also wanted to be an actress, but I didn't know to study to be one. ‘What can I do in Missouri?' I asked myself…. Teaching was a very socially acceptable, respectable position, so I became a teacher.” Earning a master's degree in learning disabilities at the University of Missouri, she spent two years teaching in a rural Missouri school district but was “not really very happy with what I was doing. It was what everyone else thought I should do, not what
I
thought I should do.”

Kate married her college sweetheart, Robert Capshaw, who became a high school principal. They had a daughter, Jessica, in 1977. Bob accompanied Kate to New York so she could pursue her dream of becoming a professional actress, but the marriage soon became a casualty of her ambition. She raised her daughter while modeling, appearing in TV commercials, and acting in soap operas. Her movie debut as the girlfriend of womanizer Tim Matheson in
A
Little
Sex
(1982) led to her casting in another box-office dud,
Windy
City
(1984), written and directed by Armyan Bernstein. Capshaw was living in Los Angeles with Bernstein when she was cast in
Temple
of
Doom.

Willie Scott, her character in Spielberg's film, proved to be a dreary role—
in Kate's own words, “not much more than a dumb, screaming blonde.” A spoiled nightclub singer, Willie looks ravishing in the slinky red dress she wears in the opening scene, but becomes bedraggled and whiny while tagging along on Indy's adventures. Spielberg's adolescent relish in putting Indy's girlfriends through physical ordeals made the filming a trying experience for Kate, who reluctantly allowed bugs to meander over her body but drew the line at taking a bath with a fourteen-foot boa constrictor. “I felt that some days all I did was shriek, and it was exhausting,” she admitted. “It wasn't hard to play Willie Scott, who is always bitching about things, because it
was
hot, the bugs
were
disgusting, and the elephant was a pain in the butt.” Seeing how gleefully Spielberg tortures, mocks, and humiliates her character, one wonders whether he was expressing the kind of ambivalence insecure adolescent boys feel in the presence of the prettiest girl in school. Coming at such a vulnerable time in his life, Spielberg's attraction to the dazzling, aggressive
shiksa
may have shaken him emotionally and found perverse expression in juvenile teasing and hostility.

The film's blatant sexism deprived Capshaw of even the tomboy gutsiness Karen Allen was allowed to display in
Raiders.
Rather than blaming the writers and the director for creating and molding the character, reviewers were merciless toward Capshaw for playing what Gene Siskel called a “whining deadhead…. When we see Willie dangling over molten lava, frankly, we wish she would fall in.” Capshaw was so upset by the hostility of the press that she cut short her publicity tour for the movie: “I was getting absolutely killed, and finally said, Relax, will you? You're wasting your breath on a B movie. It's an adventure, it's popcorn, it's for Saturday afternoon.”
†

She initially had “difficulty understanding Steven” because she was not a movie buff. “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? That's what I want here.' And I'd say, ‘Steven, I never saw that movie.' And he'd groan and reply, ‘Kate, how can I possibly communicate with you?'” Still, she found him so personally agreeable to work with that she could later say, “I fell in love with him watching him direct a movie.”

Their early relationship, however, amounted to little more than what she called a “flirtation.” Determined on something more serious, she was pained that Spielberg did not reciprocate her feelings: “I felt, this is a man who must get everything he wants. What if I'm just one more flavor of ice cream? I knew if I became involved with him he wouldn't take my feelings as seriously as they needed to be taken care of. I also felt there was something unfinished with Amy. And I knew who would lose in that one.”

A
MY
was playing an Indian princess in the cable TV miniseries
The
Far
Pavilions
when she learned that Spielberg was en route to India to scout locations for
Temple
of
Doom.
As his plane touched down at the airport, she was there to surprise him with a reunion. “We saw each other across the runway,” she recalled, “and by the time we came together, I
knew.
”
Spielberg remembered it somewhat differently: “Love in her eyes, and anger and resentment in mine. But we fell in love again.”

Following their breakup in 1979, Amy had found her elusive professional identity on the New York stage, giving well-received performances in such plays as
Amadeus
and
Heartbreak
House.
She received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in Barbra Streisand's 1983 musical version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's
Yentl,
playing Hadass, the softly feminine young woman who marries Streisand's cross-dressing title character. Although Amy's father was Jewish, she had been raised by her mother as a Christian Scientist, so Streisand had to give her books about Judaism to study as background for playing a traditional Jewish wife.

Streisand herself was rumored in the press to have been romantically involved with Spielberg in the early 1980s. Streisand “pitched
Yentl
to him” in 1979, Amy recalled, and while editing the film, Streisand showed him some assembled footage. He told her, “Don't change a frame.” But when it was reported that he was giving her advice about the editing, Streisand took umbrage: “That's like saying this woman, this actress, could not make the movie without the help of a man…. Do you know how repulsive that is to me? I hate it. It's like they're already taking my film away from me!” After seeing the completed film, Spielberg told her, “This is the greatest directorial debut since
Citizen
Kane.
”

Amy, with acclaimed film and stage performances in her résumé and a career full of promise ahead of her, began to lose the “chip on my shoulder” about being considered “the little girlfriend that Steven brought along. I've earned my wings.” That self-confidence made her less obsessed with her career and enabled her to reestablish a romantic relationship with Spielberg, with whom she had remained on friendly terms. His bond with Amy was strong enough to survive their painful breakup and their subsequent relationships with other people. He also had begun to show greater interest in her work, often going east to watch her onstage.

After Kate Capshaw appeared in
Temple
of
Doom,
she was cast in
Best
Defense,
a comedy directed by Willard Huyck and produced by Gloria Katz. “Steven and Kate got into an enormous fight,” Katz recalls. “They were not speaking. Amy had come back into his life.” Kate was in a studio relooping lines for
Best
Defense
while Steven was on an adjoining stage mixing
Temple
of
Doom.
Informed by the Huycks that Steven was next door, Kate replied, “I don't want to talk to him. He's so immature.”

On Amy's thirty-first birthday, September 10, 1984, she and Steven celebrated with a dinner by candlelight. It was on that night that Amy became
pregnant. “This pregnancy,” she said, “is something Steven and I have wanted for a long time.”

Steven was so delighted at the prospect of fatherhood that he became upset when Amy picked out maternity clothes without him. When she reported hearing their child's heartbeat for the first time in her doctor's office, Steven insisted on taking her back to the doctor so he could have the same experience. “When the baby comes,” Amy said only half-jokingly, “Steven will have somebody to share his toys with.” He even started cutting back a bit on his work schedule to be closer to his new family. But Amy and Steven saw no reason to get married before their child was born. “We're so married in our hearts,” said Amy, “it seems
redundant
to think of a wedding now.” Steven did, however, sign an agreement formally assuming all the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood.

“For the first time in my life,” he said of Amy, “I'm committed to another person.” But he admitted that commitment was difficult for him, “since I have a tendency to dramatize real life…. I often want to direct reality, to direct the scene, to say, ‘Stay in your frame. I'll deal with it, but stay there.' When I commit to a movie, it's like … marriage. I'm hoping it's the same in real life.”

Steven and Amy were married on November 27, 1985, at a private ceremony before Judge Thomas A. Donnelly at the courthouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico. By then their son, Max, was five months old. “We got married like the characters in a Frank Capra film, before a wise old judge,” Steven said. He had proposed to Amy while “sitting in a bubble bath. Max was crawling on the floor. Amy had stuff on her face. It wasn't very romantic…. I knew she'd say yes because she'd already asked me to marry her seven or eight times.”

I
N
1984, the year he formed Amblin Entertainment with Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg moved from his offices at Warner Bros. into lavish new headquarters on a quiet corner of the Universal back lot.

In a move Sid Sheinberg engineered to keep Spielberg underfoot, the studio absorbed the entire $3.5 million cost of building him a Santa Fe–style adobe office compound, later adding a postproduction annex across the road. “There are very few things Steven could ask of us that he would not get,” said Sheinberg. Sheinberg had earlier offered him the more modest-sized bungalow long occupied by the late Alfred Hitchcock, but Spielberg rejected the idea as “sacrilegious.” Spielberg did not even have to sign an exclusive production agreement with Universal to receive the extraordinary largesse of his own office complex. Determined not to be bound to any one company, he insisted on remaining in frequent business with Warner Bros. and its chairman, Steve Ross, whom he came to regard as a second father.