Steven Spielberg (22 page)

What they had most in common was their passion for science fiction. Smith remembers Spielberg as “a fiend for science fiction. I'd read everything on the shelf labeled science fiction at the Saratoga library, and he probably had done the same in Phoenix. We'd talk about the big names—Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke—and even some of the lesser names.”

From an early age, Spielberg was particularly fond of Clarke and Ray Bradbury. In his 1968 film
Amblin',
Spielberg paid homage to Clarke by having the male lead carry a copy of the author's 1953 novel
The
City
and
the
Stars
in his guitar case. Spielberg responded to the poetic nature of Bradbury's work, its way of magically transforming reality. When
Close
En
counters
of
the
Third
Kind
was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, “How did you like
your
film?
Close
Encounters
wouldn't have been born if I hadn't seen
It
Came
from
Outer
Space
[1953] six times when I was a kid.” Spielberg
also admired J. R. R. Tolkien's
The
Two
Towers
(the second part of the
Lord
of
the
Rings
trilogy) and the work of sci-fi author J. G. Ballard, whose 1984 autobiographical novel,
Empire
of
the
Sun,
he would make into a film.

The teenaged Spielberg “was peculiar in that he was both well read and
not
well read,” Smith observes. “Inside the sci-fi, fantasy-adventure field he was well read, but outside that field he wasn't. I would try to get him to read all these books—I would talk about Ralph Ellison's
Invisible
Man,
which came up during a discussion of H. G. Wells. I also talked about James Baldwin's essays,
The
Fire
Next
Time,
and probably also
Nobody
Knows
My
Name
and
Notes
of
a
Native
Son
… I certainly would
not
have mentioned
Giovanni's
Room,
despite my particular liking for that book. When I brought up something like
The
Brothers
Karamazov,
he would respond like he knew what I was talking about, but we would move on to something else; he would burble on about sci-fi books. I kept trying and it was hopeless. I tried to get him to read Joyce, for instance, pushing
Ulysses
as a kind of book which was fantastic without being fantasy, and carefully avoiding any suggestion that it might be difficult reading, but I couldn't sell him on it. Typically, it simply didn't occur to me to bring up a Jewish connection.”

“
Y
OU
know I am Jewish, don't you?” Spielberg asked Gene Smith one day in the school library.

Smith replied that he didn't know that.

“Didn't you recognize my name was a Jewish name?” Spielberg wondered.

That hadn't occurred to Smith either.

“When Spielberg brought up this whole subject, it was very educational,” Smith recalls. “I figured, ‘Your parents go to a synagogue on Saturdays. My parents go to Presbyterian church on Sundays. Let's change the subject and talk about something interesting.' [Smith, who is of Swedish descent, was a ‘dedicated agnostic at the time.'] But I realized the guy was really interested in the subject. I guess he was doing what everybody was doing in high school—he was questioning what he believed. He didn't know what to make of religion in general, and I got the impression he didn't quite know how seriously to take Judaism. He said his parents weren't very religious anymore and they had to pretend to be. He didn't seem to me to be very religious at the time, but he was very serious about ‘Jewish identity.'”

Smith's newfound awareness of Spielberg's ethnic background, and his personal empathy with Spielberg's outsider status in the school, made him more sensitive to the problems his friend began experiencing not long after arriving at Saratoga High, problems to which others were oblivious. Smith remembers Spielberg coming into the school library one Monday morning, looking “so depressed” that another person in the room asked him why he was so glum.

“You look like you just came from your mother's funeral,” that person said.

“I had a really horrible experience on Saturday,” Spielberg replied.

When pressed about what happened, he offered little more than, “I ran into some guys from school.”

This may have been the incident Spielberg identifies in his letter to the
San
Jose
Mercury
News
as “an unfortunate encounter with several seniors from my graduating class.” He wrote that it happened in nearby San Jose, but did not go into details; Smith recalls Spielberg mentioning that the place where he ran into the “guys from school” was a shopping center. Perhaps this was the time Spielberg first experienced the abject humiliation of being punched in the face, the time when, as he put it, “My world collapsed.”

There were other occasions, Smith remembers, when Spielberg “would say stuff like, ‘You know I had a hard time.' He got bothered off campus. People would pester him. It wasn't a major topic [in our conversations]—it was sort of like, ‘Oh, these assholes,' and then we'd go on.” Smith also remembers Spielberg telling him that students were “giving him a hard time in the locker room”; Spielberg's friend Mike Augustine says people were “being nasty to him in gym class. He was scrawny and awkward, he was not your athletic type, and they related that to being Jewish, which was a thing some people loved to do.”

One incident Smith personally witnessed occurred when he was walking a school corridor with Spielberg, “and one of our classmates threw some coins on the ground. He said something [to Spielberg] like, ‘Go ahead, pick it up! You want it, don't you? Well, you can have it. I don't want it, it's all yours.' This was all in a nasty, bullying tone.

“I was wondering what this was all about, figuring it must have reference to some private matter or something which had previously happened. He said, ‘It's because I'm Jewish.' I, being kind of dense about this sort of thing, asked what did that matter. He said, ‘Well, we're supposed to be money-grubbing.' So were Scots, was my way of thinking, but nobody did that sort of thing to them. I asked him how long this had been going on, and he said it had started recently and was the latest idea for how to bug him…. If this had happened to a black friend at that time, I would have unhesitatingly put it down to virulent racism. But I had a hard time believing that genuine anti-Semitism could have anything to [do] with Saratoga in the sixties, and since I couldn't recall being exposed to any anti-Semitic ideas when growing up, I assumed other people hadn't either. So I thought of it as phony anti-Semitism, put on to torment Steven. But in retrospect it doesn't really seem like that.”

Smith also was with Spielberg when people coughed the word “Jew” at him. As Spielberg passed people in the corridors on the way to class, some would pretend to sneeze “Ahhh …
Jew,
”
or say things like, “Oh, I think I see … [coughing]
‘Jew.
'”

What “made an eerie impression on me at the time” Spielberg was undergoing this harassment, recalls Smith, “was the kind of blazing anger and intensity in this boy. It was not just upsetting, but downright creepy, the way
he radiated this genuine but seemingly inexplicable rage and disgust. It's creepier thinking back now than it was at the time, in fact, because back then I figured it was something personal, but now I think it was genuine anti-Semitism.”

T
HE
situation became so awful for Spielberg that it colored his view of almost everyone and everything in Saratoga, eating away at his self-esteem. “It wasn't like most people hated Steve,” Mike Augustine contends, “but Steve always
felt
as though they did. He came across as attractive—he had a real nice personality, joking and light. When his personality came out, girls liked him, they wouldn't say ‘Ugh,' but he didn't understand that they liked him. He was fidgety and self-conscious and nervous about the way he looked. Steve
was
awkward, but he thought he was more awkward than he was.”

Smith was disappointed that Spielberg “wouldn't take my advice to stand up to people and push back a little. I had discovered that this actually seemed to reduce your problems, and by my senior year at Saratoga I was happy to note that I seemed to have gotten a real handle on the situation. But he always seemed intent on catching the flies with honey, rather than dosing them with vinegar.” Smith also felt that Spielberg may have thought it more prudent to use the hulking Don Shull as his “bodyguard” than to be personally combative.

Spielberg later admitted that he kept most of his anger inside him at Saratoga, “and it's one of the things I'm most ashamed of—I didn't fight back.”

O
NE
of the coping strategies Spielberg developed at Saratoga was humor.

The witty comeback has been used by victims of persecution since time immemorial as a weapon of self-defense. Nowhere has this been seen more clearly than in the rich tradition of Jewish humor, which developed largely in response to prejudice and discrimination, as a means of empowering the powerless. “When the oppressed cannot revolt, he laughs,” writes Albert Memmi in
The
Liberation
of
the
Jew.
And as Leo Rosten observes in
The
Joys
of
Yiddish,
“Humor also serves the afflicted as compensation for suffering, a token victory of brain over fear. A Jewish aphorism goes: ‘When you're hungry, sing; when you're hurt, laugh.' The barbed joke about the strong, the rich, the heartless powers-that-be is the final citadel in which human pride can live.” That tradition has greatly influenced American comedy, becoming perhaps its dominant mode in the twentieth century, and it has left a strong (if largely unrecognized) imprint on the personality and art of Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg displayed a “very sharp” tongue during his time in Saratoga, and his “quick wit and quick mouth action” may have exacerbated the abuse he was suffering, Don Shull believes. The superior intelligence and wit of the person being bullied may itself be one of the causes for persecution, inspiring envy and hostility. The dilemma for the person being bullied is whether to suffer in silence and hope the bullying ceases from lack of response, or to stand up and fight back, hoping the bully will be stayed by his own essential cowardice. Spielberg chose to preserve his pride and self-respect by taking the middle ground between silence and physical response, by following the path of verbal resistance.

Mike Augustine, who became close to Spielberg when they both worked on the school paper, recalls, “His sarcastic humor was what I liked about him—‘sick' humor—it had that cutting edge, like Lenny Bruce. He liked to surprise people. He was a jokester, mocking guys who were putting him down. It was almost like he
had
to. When they made remarks at him in a violent way, it would be his natural reaction to nervously come back with some kind of statement. Everybody would laugh, and he would disappear.”

Although Augustine felt that Spielberg was “depressed” to be in Saratoga rather than in Hollywood, and troubled over his parents' impending divorce, he did not have the impression that Spielberg was terribly unhappy that year: “If he was, he had a shield of humor around him. He didn't appear to be weighed down with remorse. He was a riot.”

Spielberg and Augustine became friendly in Bert Pfister's journalism class, which met daily and put out the school paper,
The
Falcon.
Augustine, a former football player at the school, was sports editor, and Spielberg, somewhat out of character, soon became his unofficial assistant. They covered varsity football games together, and Spielberg also wrote his own coverage of basketball, baseball, junior varsity teams, and even some sports that previously had not received much coverage in the paper, such as swimming and cross-country.

Although the class prophecy at the end of the school year predicted that Spielberg would join the staff of
The
New
York
Times,
his interest in journalism evidently was more social than professional. By the time Spielberg arrived that September, Augustine points out, “The cliques had been formed. Nothing except journalism class opened up to him. It wasn't that we were into sports, it was that we were into reporting. Steve was able to fill a time and space in his life, and it was a way of being at these events even though he was not good at sports. He was able to feel good about himself being a reporter. He got more into journalism than he did other classes because it brought him more into play with people.”

Spielberg's only other extracurricular activity at the school was crew work on the senior play,
Twelve
Angry
Jurors,
a coeducational version of
Twelve
Angry
Men,
Sherman L. Sergel's stage adaptation of the television play by Reginald Rose. After trying out unsuccessfully for the cast of the March 1965
production, which was staged in the school cafeteria by English teacher Alden Peterson, Spielberg became involved with the lighting and helped cast members Dan Huboi and Augustine practice their lines.

Spielberg still was “a little weak in the girl department,” as Shull puts it, but he came enough out of his shell in Saratoga to go to school dances and to start dating.
*
One of the girls he dated was Shull's sister Kathy, who was a freshman at the time and later was crowned Miss Saratoga. Recalling Steven as “the class cut-up,” she says, “It wasn't any big romance. We necked in the car a couple times. That's why I remember it was winter—we steamed up the windows. I was fourteen and it was experimental dating for me. Mostly we would just talk. He loved telling us stories. He was fun, he was a really loyal good friend, but we weren't really suited to each other. He was short, and I'm five-foot-eleven, so the two of us going out was like Mutt and Jeff. I think he never thought of himself as studly. On a scale of one to ten, he was probably a four.”