Steven Spielberg (6 page)

“When I saw
Close
Encounters,
”
Millie Tieger recalls, “I thought, There's Leah with the music and Arnold with computers. That's Steve, the little boy. Steve wrote a movie about Mommy and Daddy.”

S
TEVEN
Allan Spielberg's birth certificate shows that he was born at Cincinnati's Jewish Hospital at 6:16
P.M.
on December 18, 1946—not December 18, 1947, as has often been reported.

Just why Spielberg has felt it expedient to appear a year younger than his true age throughout most of his Hollywood career became a matter of controversy in 1995, when the issue provoked an exchange of lawsuits between Spielberg and one of his former producers, Denis C. Hoffman. But the truth about his age was not entirely unknown over the years. In 1981, when Patricia Goldstone, a freelance feature writer for the
Los
Angeles
Times,
discovered college records indicating that Spielberg actually was born in 1946, the director “would not comment,” she reported. Spielberg's incorrect age and birthdate have been given in innumerable articles and several books, although all that was necessary to resolve the question was a request to the Cincinnati Board of Health for his Ohio Department of Health birth certificate. Prior to 1995, the only book on Spielberg or his work that reported his age correctly was
Outrageous
Conduct:
Art,
Ego,
and
the
“Twilight
Zone”
Case
(1988) by Stephen Farber and Marc Green, which cited Goldstone's article, commenting, “Almost everyone in Hollywood lies about his age; but
Spielberg, with a premature vision of the legend he wanted to build, may have started fudging earlier than anyone else.”

Spielberg's birth notice appeared in the December 26, 1946, issue of
The
American
Israelite,
a national Jewish newspaper published in his home town of Cincinnati: “Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Spielberg (Leah Posner), 817 Lexington Avenue, son, Wednesday, Dec. 18th.” Before he moved to California, Spielberg's age was reported accurately when his filmmaking activities were written up in the Phoenix papers.
The
Phoenix
Jewish
News
reported on December 25, 1959, that his bar mitzvah (the ceremony that takes place when a Jewish boy turns thirteen) would be held the following January 9 at Beth Hebrew Congregation. Spielberg's true birthdate also appears in the records of the high schools he attended in Phoenix and in Saratoga, California, as well as in the records of California State College (now California State University) at Long Beach. But after Spielberg began making his first inroads into Hollywood, his attitude toward his past history became more creative, and as a result the chronology of his early career has become a self-generated tangle of confusion.

On October 26, 1995, in response to questions prompted by Hoffman's lawsuit, Spielberg's attorney Marshall Grossman and his spokesman, Marvin Levy, acknowledged to the
Los
Angeles
Times
that “the director was born in 1946, and that any references to 1947 are incorrect,” the paper reported. “But they both refused to explain why Spielberg never corrected it, or why he lists it incorrectly in documents such as his driver's license.” Grossman told the paper, “I'm sure there's an answer. Maybe he didn't care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.”

C
OULD
Spielberg, as Farber and Green suggested, simply have been lying about his age all those years in order to make himself seem even more of a
wunderkind
than he really was? Or was there another reason for his obfuscation, one that, as Hoffman alleged, involved “a deliberate and outrageous lie perpetrated by defendant Spielberg in a calculated and malicious scheme to avoid his legal obligations”?

Spielberg was a genuine novelty when he arrived in Hollywood. The movie industry at that time “was still a middle-aged man's profession,” he has recalled. “The only young people on the [Universal] lot were actors. It was just the beginning of the youth renaissance.” Spielberg already had learned some valuable lessons about publicity during his teenage years, when he was hailed as a youthful filmmaking prodigy in Phoenix. So he was acutely conscious of the novelty of his age in Hollywood and the potential advantages of exploiting his precocity in the press.

One of the first contacts he made in Hollywood was Charles A. (Chuck) Silvers, Universal Pictures' film librarian, who became his earliest mentor in the film industry. Silvers remembers Spielberg telling him, “The only thing
I want to do is direct before I'm twenty-one.” Spielberg did manage to direct an independent short film called
Amblin'
in the summer of 1968, several months after his twenty-first birthday.
Amblin
'
was what brought Spielberg to the attention of Sid Sheinberg, then vice president of production for Universal TV, who offered Spielberg a directing contract in the fall of 1968. As Sheinberg has recalled their first conversation, Spielberg told him, “I just have one request and I'd like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr. Sheinberg, but a promise. I want to direct something before I'm twenty-one. That would be very important to me.”

Sheinberg, who may not have been entirely clear about Spielberg's actual birthdate, promised that would happen. Spielberg's age was given as twenty-one when Universal announced his signing in the Hollywood trade papers on December 12, 1968. That was indeed recognized as newsworthy, for as
The
Hollywood
Reporter
put it, “Spielberg, 21, is believed the youngest filmmaker ever pacted by a major studio.” But the trades didn't realize that Spielberg would turn twenty-two only six days later. Spielberg's first television assignment, a segment of the three-part TV movie
Night
Gallery,
went before the cameras in February 1969. So in spite of his discussion with Sheinberg at the time he was hired, Spielberg did not direct anything for Universal until he was
twenty-two,
a fact that in later years has not stopped him from making frequent claims to the contrary, such as his 1991 comment to
Premiere
magazine that “I got my contract at age twenty to be at Universal for seven years.”

When Spielberg was interviewed by
The
Hollywood
Reporter
during the first day of shooting on
Night
Gallery,
his age was accurately emblazoned in the headline 22-
YEAR-OLD TYRO DIRECTS JOAN CRAWFORD.
Spielberg also told the truth about his age to a rabbi who interviewed him for a Jewish newspaper in November 1970, when he was twenty-three, but shortly after that the history of his life began to undergo rewrites.

By December 28, 1970, ten days after his twenty-fourth birthday, a year had been subtracted from Spielberg's age in Hollywood press coverage: he was still twenty-three when Universal announced it was extending his contract. And when the
Reporter
talked with Spielberg again the following April, the “23-year-old” filmmaker was quoted as saying he had first set foot on the Universal lot “one day in 1969, when I was 21.” The story changed again the following year, when a profile in
TV
Guide
stated that Spielberg arrived at Universal “[i]n 1968, just before his 20th birthday.” In subsequent interviews, Spielberg gradually began moving the date of his arrival farther and farther back, giving it as 1967, 1966, 1965, and the summer of 1964. At least he was getting closer to the truth in that respect, for it actually was in late 1963 or early 1964 when Spielberg made his first visit to Universal and met Chuck Silvers. Spielberg was then only sixteen or seventeen years old and still a high school student.
*

It's understandable that people could have been confused about how old Spielberg was when he started in Hollywood, for apart from his precocious knowledge of filmmaking, Spielberg appeared “very young for his age in all other respects” when Silvers first met him. “Physically he was very young—thin, slight—he looked a couple or three years younger than he was.”

D
ENIS
Hoffman, who owned a Hollywood optical and title company, produced and financed the making of
Amblin'
in the summer and fall of 1968. Spielberg's first completed 35mm film was a slickly made short whose professionalism made it an impressive calling card for the young director. Hoffman paid Spielberg no salary for making the film, and in exchange for his investment, the producer acquired an option on Spielberg's services.

On September 28, 1968, Spielberg signed an agreement with Hoffman reading in its entirety:

Although
Amblin
'
won Spielberg his seven-year contract with Universal that December, Hoffman's plans to produce another film went nowhere. Hoffman claimed in his 1995 lawsuit that he tried unsuccessfully for the next few years to get Spielberg to commit to a project. When
Jaws
became a blockbuster hit in June 1975, making Spielberg the hottest director in Hollywood, Hoffman pressed Spielberg to comply with their agreement. According to the suit, Spielberg surprised him that July by asserting that the agreement was unenforceable. Spielberg and his attorney, Bruce Ramer, allegedly claimed that at the time he signed the agreement, he was only twenty years old and, as a minor, unable to enter into a contract under California law. Believing Spielberg's assertion that he was born on December 18, 1947, Hoffman, on January 3, 1977, accepted a $30,000 buyout offer from Spielberg for all rights to
Amblin',
including the right to use the title of the film for the name of his production company. As early as July 1975, Spielberg formed a company called Amblin', but for unexplained reasons, his Amblin Entertainment, founded in 1984, never included the apostrophe in its name.

After obtaining a copy of Spielberg's birth certificate in 1994, Hoffman
renewed his claim to an option on Spielberg's services.
†
Discussions with Spielberg's attorneys failed to produce a settlement, and Spielberg filed a preemptive lawsuit against Hoffman in Los Angeles County Superior Court on October 24, 1995. Spielberg's suit made no specific reference to the age issue but said Hoffman had demanded $33 million “based on specious claims that the 1977 Buy-Out Agreement had been procured by Spielberg through fraud. Spielberg refused to yield to these baseless claims and prefers that they be litigated in a court of law.” Hoffman filed his suit the following day, charging Spielberg with “fraud and deceit” and seeking damages for the “many millions of dollars” a producing credit on a Spielberg feature might have been worth to his career. Although Hoffman claimed he had offered Spielberg several scripts to direct, Spielberg not only denied that but also alleged that when approached by Hoffman with the buy-out offer, he “offered to try to obtain a producer's position for Hoffman on one of Spielberg's next films. Hoffman declined that offer and responded that he did not want and was not equipped to be a producer and that he wanted the $30,000 instead.”

The controversy provoked head-shaking surprise in the media, which had been fooled for so many years by Spielberg's false story about his age. Even the
Los
Angeles
Times,
which seemed to have no institutional memory that Patricia Goldstone had revealed the truth in its pages in 1981, called the age issue the “strangest twist in the case.”

“I
TOLD
Steve, if I'd known how famous he was going to be, I'd have had my uterus bronzed,” his mother quipped in 1994.

Steven Allan Spielberg arrived at the end of the first year of the greatest baby boom in the nation's history. Millions of returning GIs and their young brides were making up for lost time, starting families during 1946. As the first-born child and only son of Arnold and Leah Spielberg, and as the first grandchild born on either side of the family, Steven “was very loved,” Millie Tieger remembered. “Everybody was so thrilled with him, this first grandchild. He was a smart little kid, very talkative, a lot of fun, and cute-looking, with bangs, a camel-hair coat with leggings, and a little hat.”

“From the time he was able to open his mouth his first word, I think, was ‘Why?,'” his aunt Natalie Guttman said. “He'd see a shadow on the wall and want to know why it was there…. I used to baby-sit for him, and I can tell you, he was something. You just had to answer every question, and then there would be more. Most of what I remember is Steve's curiosity and inquirious [
sic
] nature. He was just curiouser and curiouser … like his father, like Leah, really like the whole family. Steven comes by his genius honestly, I have to tell you. It's in the genes.”

Photographs from the period, and Arnold Spielberg's home movies, show Steven as an elfin creature with a huge cranium, protuberant ears, pale white skin, a nimbus of soft blondish-brown hair, and wide, quizzical eyes. The child's expression is penetrating, amused, and serenely confident. It's hard to escape the feeling that there is something otherworldly about Steven's appearance in his early childhood pictures. With his oversized head and eyes and his spindly body, he looks more than a bit like E.T., whom Spielberg once described as “a creature only a mother could love.”