Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  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.’”

  *

  AN 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.”§

  *

  WHEN it came to neighborhood sports, Stevie was hopelessly uncoordinated. “He would participate, but we would kind of tease him about not being able to throw a football or catch very well,” Scott MacDonald admits. “We wouldn’t really tease him in a cruel way, because he never reacted in a way for us to get a kick out of it. He would play for a while and then say, ‘I’m going to go in.’ Stevie wasn’t ostracized or anything, but he had a different style of play. You might call him a slightly nerdy kid, but he really wasn’t. We thought he was pretty cool in the areas he was interested in.”

  “One time someone got boxing gloves,” Sandy MacDonald relates, “and we made a ring between our two houses. When it was Stevie’s turn, he got hit and ran away. He got a bottle of ketchup from his house and every time he was hit he’d pour ketchup on himself. He had it all over his clothes and hair.”

  “Another time,” recalls Scott, “Stevie put a tomato in a pot on his stove. Three or four of us were gathered around watching. He said, ‘Watch what happens when I get this to explode.’ Before it happened, we heard his mom or dad pulling in the driveway and we all took off. He thought it was a new way to make blood; he liked anything that would look like blood, that would explode all red. He used to love mulberries. He would squeeze them on his head and arms and run into his house screaming to his mother that he was bleeding
.”

  Then there was the time Stevie managed to cause a commotion simply by locking himself into his bathroom on the second floor of his house. As Scott says, “Seeing the fire department coming through the window with ladders and everything, I thought that was really neat.”

  *

  THE future director of Jurassic Park had an early fascination with dinosaurs. That was not unusual for a boy growing up in the Haddonfield area, because the town, built on land once covered by a prehistoric ocean, was the discovery site of the Hadrosaurus foulkii, the first virtually complete dinosaur skeleton found in modern history. When Spielberg was a boy, schoolchildren often were taken on field trips to the site where the hadrosaur fossil was found. Some of the remains were on display at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, which sold brass models of dinosaurs.

  “I’ve been interested in dinosaurs since I was a child,” Spielberg said while making Jurassic Park. “As most of my films originate, the interest of the subject matter originates from kidhood. And I remember always collecting dinosaur models, and being interested in the fantastic size of these creatures.”

  Like almost every American boy growing up in the 1950s, Spielberg also imbibed a sense of fantasy and adventure from comic books, which had a strong influence in shaping the bold, sometimes exaggerated clarity of his visual style as a filmmaker. Among his favorites were the superhero and fantasy genres—Superman, Batman, and the Bizarro characters—and the Disney comics featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge. Stevie and friends also devoured Mad magazine, which became a cult favorite among aspiring hipsters throughout the United States during the 1950s with its refreshing irreverence, “sick” humor, and clever movie parodies.

  Mad paved the way for Spielberg and his fellow Hollywood “movie brats” to indulge their boyhood fondness for old movie clichés, reinventing and parodying genres and images with twists for the postmodernist era. A famous example can be seen in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The script called for an elaborate sword-and-bullwhip duel between Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones and an Arab foe. But Harrison Ford felt ill and Spielberg was trying to speed up the schedule, so they decided to have Indiana Jones abruptly terminate the duel by pulling out his pistol and casually blowing away his opponent. Spielberg said the scene reminded him of the Mad feature “Scenes We’d Like to See.”

  Perhaps it was largely through the influence of comic books that as a child in New Jersey, “Stevie had a surprising kind of morbid streak,” Scott MacDonald says. “We thought it was really cool. I remember his elaborate torture chamber. We used to go down in his basement, and he would show us how he would put his toy men in a guillotine he had made out of a black shoebox. He chopped off heads, he sawed a few heads off—it was a great effect. When my brother and I saw E.T., we said to each other, ‘Gee, that doesn’t seem like Stevie.’ He seemed kind of warped when he was little. When he moved to Arizona, I got a fascinating letter from him telling us about scorpions and about the Gila monster, how it had really cool poison spikes on its head. We couldn’t imagine what kind of lifestyle he had out there.”

  In Stevie’s basement there was also a big cardboard box he used for puppet shows. “I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life,” he remembered. “As a kid, I had puppet shows—I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.”

  • • •

  UNDOUBTEDLY the single most pervasive cultural influence on Spielberg in his early childhood years was television. “I was, and still am, a TV junkie,” he has said. “I’ve just grown up with TV, as all of us have, and there is a lot of television inside my brain that I wish I could get out of there. You can’t help it—once it’s in there, it’s like a tattoo.”

  The Spielbergs bought their first television set, a round-tubed DuMont, in 1949. At that time, national TV networks had been in full operation for barely two years and only one in twelve American families owned a set. Although television was still in its infancy in the early 1950s when Steven lived on Crystal Terrace, that era was so rich with creative invention that it now is regarded as the medium’s “Golden Age.” Few kids were watching highbrow anthology programs like Omnibus or Playhouse 90, but Steven and his friends grew up huddled around their small-screen black-and-white TV sets (many of them made at his father’s RCA plant in Camden), absorbing shows that are now considered classics. While the influence of TV on the baby boomer generation of filmmakers often has been lamentable—Spielberg’s own big-screen productions of The Flintstones and The Little Rascals are among the more witless examples of recycled TV nostalgia—much of what he and his friends watched as children was considerably more sophisticated than most of today’s TV offerings in terms of the quality of writing and performing.

  Among their favorites were the brilliantly inventive comedy skits on Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; uproariously funny variety programs such as The Milton Berle Show and The Colgate Comedy Hour, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; sitcoms such as The Honeymooners and The Phil Silvers Show, with Silvers as Sergeant Bilko; and Jack Webb’s police drama Dragnet (which Stevie found frightening). They watched such kiddie programs as Howdy Doody; Don Herbert’s Mr. Wizard; Andy’s Gang, with Andy Devine showing jungle serials; and the adventure sagas Captain Video and His Video Rangers, Superman, Hopalong Cassidy, The Roy Rogers Show, The Cisco Kid, and The Lone Ranger.

  Most popular of all with the kids in Stevie’s neighborhood were Walt Disney’s Sunday night Disneyland series, which began in 1954, and The Mickey Mouse Club, the daily variety program starring the Mouseketeers which first aired in 1955. Stevie had crushes on three of the girl Mouseketeers in succession: perky Darlene Gillespie, winsome little Karen Pendleton, and the sultry-yet-wholesome Annette Funicello, whose spectacular emergence into puberty awakened many American boys’ libidos. For Steven, that was the time when puppy love turned into “sexual awe—I hate to use the word sexual; it’s a little heavy, but there it was.”

  Playing Davy Crockett was a neighborhood obsession on Crystal Terrace for more than a year following the December 1954-February 1955 broadcasts of the Disneyland TV serial “Davy Crockett” (later released as a feature film titled Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier). Unfortunately for Stevie, everyone else got a coonskin cap before he did, so he wound up being chosen to play the “bad guy,” Mexican general Santa Anna. He and his playmates battled to the death with cap pistols and long toy rifles at their makeshift “Alamo,” a stockade fence in the backyard of a neighbor family.

  Steven was not only fascinated by what appeared on television, but by the tube itself. “I believe there’s something in there trying to get out,” he once said. “I used to stick my eye right up to the snow. I was this far away from the TV set and there would always be some out-of-the-way channel, some far-off channel that was getting its signal through the station that wasn’t broadcasting, and there would be ghosts and images of some broadcasting station five hundred miles away.” In Poltergeist, which Spielberg has described as “my revenge on TV,” a little girl is sucked into the family TV set by ghosts she greets in the opening scene by staring into the snow on the tube and announcing, “They’re here.”

  Steven often has claimed that, aside from such bland fare as The Mickey Mouse Club and some comedy programs, he was “forbidden to watch TV.” His parents, he said, not only rationed TV viewing on principle, but after he became distraught watching a documentary on snakes, they also tried to shield him from such potentially disturbing shows as Dragnet and M Squad. Steven even remembered his parents trying tricks to discourage his surreptitious TV viewing: “Sometimes my father would attach hairs in exact positions so he could tell if I had lifted up the dust ruffle over the RCA nineteen-inch screen and snuck a peek…. I always found the hair, memorized exactly where it was and rearranged it before they came home.”

  Arnold Spielberg responds, “He used to complain I never let him watch television, that his parents were real st
rict. Well, he saw plenty of TV. It just wasn’t enough. The TV was on all the time. But, you know, we said, ‘Homework time.’ And I guess I was kinda hard-nosed about that. I would not let them watch too much television, so he resented that.”

  Steven’s conflict with his father over that issue may help explain why he later declared that “my stepparent was the TV set.” He also pointed out that before the advent of television, “[P]arents would read to the kids from a rocking chair, and families were very, very close. They used to gather around the reader, or the seer, of the household, and in the twenties and thirties, usually it was the father. And then television replaced the father, and now it seems to be replacing both the father and the mother.” Since his father’s nightly storytelling ritual once had been so important to Steven, and since he had to turn elsewhere for entertainment when Arnold became consumed with his job in the 1950s, it was literally true, in that sense at least, that in Steven’s house, “television replaced the father.”

  Spielberg’s parents also tried to control his movie-watching habits in his preadolescent years. “I could only see films in their presence and usually pictures that appealed more to them.” The Spielbergs attended family-audience movies such as The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, the Fred Astaire–Audrey Hepburn musical Funny Face, and of course, Disney movies. “And yet when I came screaming home from Snow White when I was eight years old, and tried to hide under the covers, my parents did not understand it,” Steven recalled, “because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthrall. Between Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi, I was a basket case of neurosis.”¶

  Because his parents “didn’t know what backfired” at the movie theater, Steven recalled, they “tried very, very hard to screen violence from my life.” He and his friends occasionally went to Saturday matinees at the Westmont and Century theaters in neighboring Westmont and Audubon, paying a quarter to watch a program consisting of cartoons and a monster movie, a sci-fi movie, or a Western with Hopalong Cassidy or the Cisco Kid. But Steven’s parents’ concern over his moviegoing fare and the freer availability of TV discouraged him from becoming a movie addict until later in his boyhood, after he moved to Arizona. The most enduring feeling about movies he took away from that period in New Jersey was his frustration at being kept away from them. As he said later, “I feel that perhaps one of the reasons I’m making movies all the time is because I was told not to [watch movies].”