Steven Spielberg (79 page)

Despite Spielberg's nostalgia for his own formative days as a Boy Scout, “George felt Steven wouldn't go for it,” Boam recalls. “Steven felt, ‘I'm always doing movies about children. I did
Empire
and
E.T.
'
Then Steven asked his wife [Amy] and his friends and his business associates—he was kind of
polling his constituency—and said he would do it. I think Steven was most captivated by the idea of the circus train. He had a lot of fun coming up with different gags. Steven is very good with little touches. He is inspired by what is there—he's able to make it a little funnier, a little more exciting, but he waits until the recipe is written and the meal is cooked, and then he puts his little spices in it. He's very specific about what he wants. He doesn't have any ‘nagging qualms that he can't put his finger on,' like many people do. When he likes what you've done, he really shows his enjoyment. It's so gratifying to delight him. There's nothing in the least bit cynical or jaded about him. He responds like a kid with a popcorn box on his lap.”

As so often happens with directors, though, Spielberg may have become
so
delighted by his writers' contributions that he began to think he had come up with at least some of them himself. Once he seized on the father-son relationship, he shaped it according to his own emotional need for a more combative relationship. Lucas thought of Indy's father as a rather ineffectual old gent, “a John Houseman kind of person.” Spielberg wanted Sean Connery. The ruggedly sexy Scottish actor, in a sense, already
was
the father of Indiana Jones, since the series had sprung from the desire of Lucas and Spielberg to rival (and outdo) Connery's James Bond movies. Connery proves more than a match for his cinematic son, ordering him around and condescendingly calling him “Junior.” The elder Jones, Connery observed, is “eccentric, self-centered, and quite selfish. He does not have the
Saturday
Evening
Post
mentality of fatherhood. He's quite indifferent to his boy's needs.” At one point, Indy complains that in his childhood, “We never talked.” His father retorts, “You left just when you were becoming interesting.”

In the film's most memorable comic exchange, which was improvised by the actors, Indy is shocked to realize his father also had an affair with Elsa (Alison Doody), the sinuous blonde who turns out to be a Nazi spy. “I'm as human as the next man,” the elder Dr. Jones insists. “I
was
the next man,” his son replies. Spielberg had to overcome his own qualms about having Indy and his father sleep with the same woman, an obvious Freudian stand-in for Mom (in an even darker twist, the film also suggests that the treacherous Elsa has slept with Adolf Hitler). When Connery learned that the director, expressing concern about how women would react, had excised his sexual relationship with Elsa, Connery insisted on putting it back into the script. “I didn't want the father to be so much of a wimp,” he said. In a cocky bit of screen-hero one-upmanship, Connery added, “Aside from the fact that Indiana Jones is not as well-dressed as James Bond, the main difference between them is sexual. Indiana deals with women shyly. In the first film, he's flustered when the student writes ‘I love you' on her eyelids. James Bond would have had all those young coeds for breakfast.”

Indiana
Jones
and
the
Last
Crusade
is a graceful piece of popular filmmaking, bursting with the sheer pleasure of cinematic craftsmanship and gratifyingly free of the racist overtones that blighted the two previous films
in the series. Released by Paramount on May 24, 1989, to then-record opening figures,
Last
Crusade
was Spielberg's biggest hit since
E.T.,
with $494.7 million in worldwide gross on a production cost of $44 million. It was respectfully received by most reviewers, including the author of this book in
Daily
Variety.

Some reviewers, however, found the film distasteful when it mixes cartoonish jokes about Nazis (“Nazis! I
hate
these guys,” Indy snarls) with such real-life elements as a book-burning at a Party rally attended by Hitler (who gives Indy his autograph). “The idea about book-burning was Steven's,” Boam reports. “He said, ‘I really want to do a scene of them burning books.' At the time I thought, This must be a warming-up for
Schindler's
List.
But I had no idea what
Schindler's
List
was going to be like.”

With all its masterly technique, and the added sparks emanating from the father-son relationship,
Last
Crusade
is mostly a lark, a holiday outing for a director emotionally wrung out from his two previous films. It is also a farewell to a certain kind of soulless action filmmaking, pushed about as far as it can be along the scale of cinematic ambition (even if Spielberg still talks nostalgically from time to time about doing a fourth Indiana Jones movie). “I've learned more about movie craft from making the Indiana Jones films than I did from
E.T.
or
Jaws,
”
he said at the time
Last
Crusade
was released. “And now I feel as if I've graduated from the college of Cliffhanger U.”

O
N
April 24, 1989, Spielberg and Amy Irving announced they would divorce after three and a half years of marriage. “Our mutual decision, however difficult, has been made in a spirit of caring,” they said. “… And our friendship remains both personal and professional.”

They agreed to share custody of their son, Max, maintaining homes near each other in Los Angeles and New York to facilitate their joint parenting responsibilities. Amy also received a large settlement. Although the amount was never officially announced, it was reported that she may have received a sum approximating half of her husband's net worth. At the time Spielberg made his first appearance on the
Forbes
400 list of the nation's wealthiest people in 1987, his net worth was estimated at “well over $225 million.” Press estimates of Amy's golden parachute ranged from $93 million to $112.5 million.

The competing stresses of their professional careers were among the primary factors in the failure of their marriage, which had been the subject of rumors in the press for months before the announcement. “I started my career as the daughter of Jules Irving,” she said in 1989. “I don't want to finish it as the wife of Spielberg or the mother of Max.” Writer-director Matthew Robbins has recalled, “It was no fun to go [to their house], because there was an electric tension in the air. It was competitive as to whose dining table this is, whose career we're gonna talk about, or whether he even approved of what she was interested in—her friends and her actor life. He
really was uncomfortable. The child in Spielberg believed so thoroughly in the possibility of perfect marriage, the institution of marriage, the Norman Rockwell turkey on the table, everyone's head bowed in prayer—all this stuff. And Amy was sort of a glittering prize, smart as hell, gifted, and beautiful, but definitely edgy and provocative and competitive. She would not provide him any ease.”

For much of their final months as a married couple, Steven was in London and Spain making
Last
Crusade,
and Amy was on the New York stage in Athol Fugard's
The
Road
to
Mecca.
They previously had agreed to alternate their work assignments, with neither accepting a job that would keep them apart while the other was working. Amy gave up film offers to spend an “isolated and miserable” time in Spain with Max and Steven for
Empire
of
the
Sun,
and Steven accompanied her when she appeared in director Joan Micklin Silver's 1988 film
Crossing
Delancey.
When Amy accepted her role in the Fugard play, however, Steven did not want to pass up the opportunity to make
Last
Crusade.
They flew back and forth across the ocean to visit each other whenever they could, but found the situation “impossible,” Amy said. “Everything suffered…. I used to think I could do it all before Max was born. Now everything's changed.”

She admitted five years after the divorce that she had never managed to shake the “loss of identity” she felt as the wife of Hollywood's most powerful filmmaker: “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.” Part of what made her uncomfortable, evidently, was their complicated, hectic, and extravagant lifestyle. A woman whose idea of heaven has long been her relatively modest adobe home in Santa Fe, Amy never became accustomed to running four additional households: their estates in Pacific Palisades and East Hampton, beach house in Malibu (which was damaged by fire in July 1988 but subsequently rebuilt), and Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan. “This is not really my style,” she complained. “We're surrounded by live-in help and tennis courts and vegetable gardens…. the last thing I want is to be ‘the lady of the house.'”

Her biggest complaint was not that she had to pass up jobs to be with her husband and son. “It's been frustrating,” she acknowledged, “but it's more important that Max is with us and we're a happy group…. [W]ork has to be really special for us to do it now.” What bothered her even more was her belief that being married to Spielberg made her something of an untouchable in Hollywood. “I know I've never gotten work because of Steven,” she said in 1988. “I know I have
not
gotten work because of Steven. Certain directors' egos are such that they don't want somebody from Steven's camp on their territory. I've known of instances when I was supposed to get a part, but they started to worry about Steven Spielberg getting more of a focus on them.”

At least one instance when Amy became upset over not being cast in a part involved an Amblin Entertainment production. When Joe Dante was preparing the 1987
Innerspace,
he was having trouble casting the role of astronaut Dennis Quaid's girlfriend. “It was a very awkward situation,” Dante recalls, “because Amy Irving wanted to play the part. Steven would not make me hire Amy Irving, which may have been the cause of a certain dissension in the household. I didn't think she was right for it. [The character] was supposed to be a tough reporter type. I didn't want to go through the rigmarole of meeting her and reading her. Every other actress that would come up, Steven would veto. Finally it got close to shooting the role, and [Warner Bros. executive] Lucy Fisher suggested Meg Ryan. We thought she was perfect. Amy was very upset. She sent me a letter: ‘I'm not Mrs. Steven Spielberg. I'm an actress.'” Asked if part of his concern about casting Amy was what might happen if he did not get along with her, Dante conceded that was a situation he “didn't want to have on the set.”

As it turned out, the only roles Amy played for Amblin during her marriage to Spielberg were the singing voice of cartoon character Jessica Rabbit in
Who
Framed
Roger
Rabbit
and a virtually invisible cameo (along with her mother, Priscilla Pointer) as a train passenger in Spielberg's
Amazing
Stories
program “Ghost Train.” Following the divorce, she also played the voice of a cartoon character in
An
American
Tail:
Fievel
Goes
West
(1991).

Although she has continued to do notable stage work, such as her role as a Brooklyn Jewish woman haunted by Nazism in Arthur Miller's play
Broken
Glass,
Irving has played only occasional film roles since her divorce from Spielberg. “I think it hurt being Steven Spielberg's wife, and then it hurt being the ex-Mrs. Steven Spielberg,” she said in 1994. “It was awkward for a while. I don't know why. I only know that I felt nonexistent…. I'd do a movie with Steven, but I think it would be awkward for him. Our friendship is very valuable to us, and that would probably put a strain on it.” However, she has appeared in films directed by her companion Bruno Barreto, a Brazilian filmmaker she met when he cast her in
Show
of
Force
in March 1989, shortly before her divorce announcement.
†††

The press often linked Kate Capshaw with Spielberg in the months preceding that announcement, but Spielberg's spokesmen denied there was any romantic attachment between them. However, the marital problems between Steven and Amy were also denied up until the time the marriage collapsed. Kate and Steven kept a low profile together until he invited her to London at the end of June 1989 for the premiere of
Last
Crusade.
They made no attempt to keep their relationship clandestine, and Steven thought Amy would have no way of finding out. But Amy read about their tryst in the
National
En
quirer.

While waiting for Steven's divorce, Kate cared for a newborn African American foster child, Theo, whom she and then also Spielberg later
adopted. On May 14, 1990, she gave birth to her first child with Spielberg, a daughter named Sasha. After converting to Judaism, Kate married Steven in a traditional Jewish ceremony on October 12, 1991, at their country estate in East Hampton, under a tent filled with Hollywood friends, including Steve Ross, Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, and Robin Williams.

The two worst times of his life, Spielberg recalled in 1994, were the divorce of his parents and his own divorce from Amy. But he has always remained guarded about the subject of his divorce. “I've never talked [to the press] about my personal life with Amy,” he said in 1989. “She talks about it.” The way he has expressed his feelings is to make movies about them.