Steven Spielberg (7 page)

“When he was growing up, I didn't know he was a genius,” Steven's own mother later admitted. “Frankly, I didn't know what the hell he was. You see, Steven wasn't exactly cuddly. What he was was scary. When Steven woke up from a nap, I shook. My mother always used to say, ‘The world is going to hear of this boy.' I used to think she said it so I wouldn't kill him…. His badness was so original that there weren't even books to tell you what to do….

“He was my first, so I didn't know that everybody didn't have kids like him…. If I had known better, I would have taken him to a psychiatrist, and there never would have been an
E.T.

W
HEN
asked what Steven was like as a child growing up on Lexington Avenue in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Avondale, a next-door neighbor, Roslyn Mitman, replied in one word:
“Different.
”

Mrs. Mitman, who had two daughters several years older than Steven, explained, “There were times when I really wasn't all that happy my children played with him. I remember one incident. We all had pressure cookers, and they would very often explode. When his mother's pressure cooker exploded and food hit the ceiling and messed up their entire kitchen, he thought it was wonderful.”

Steven's anarchic sense of humor wasn't all that bothered Mrs. Mitman about the incident. She also found it troubling that Leah didn't scold him. An exploding pressure cooker “wouldn't have upset Leah,” she commented disdainfully. “It would have upset
me
—I would have killed
my
kids.”

From that conventional perspective, Steven did indeed seem hopelessly spoiled by his equally eccentric mother. “I'm certifiable, dolly,” Leah joked to an interviewer in 1994. “If I weren't so famous, they'd put me away.” Leah seemed to have an unusually strong sense of identification with her son,
finding him endlessly amusing and encouraging his rebellious, creative nature. It seems clear in retrospect that she was transferring to him her own abandoned hopes for an artistic career. People who knew both families commented that little Steven even looked more like a Posner than a Spielberg, more like his short, slender, blond mother than like his tall, stocky, dark-haired father. And if Steven increasingly showed the signs of being a special child, Leah also was generally recognized as a special mother, though the virtues of her tolerance seem clearer in retrospect than they may have to most people at the time.

Asked to describe Steven as a small child, his father says, “Precocious. Energetic. Curious. Wanting to get into everything. Wanting to ask questions about things. When he was still in a little go-car, he'd go to the store and he'd want to stop and look in the window. He was a very precocious kid in terms of wanting to fill his brain. He learned quickly. He spoke easily and early. He was into asking questions relating to fire engines, relating to things that get destroyed.”

Rabbi Fishel Goldfeder of Adath Israel offered Leah some advice on how to deal with her unusual son. One day, Millie Tieger remembered, the rabbi “saw Steve throwing a fit because he wanted some toy, maybe it was a fire truck. He raised a big fuss. The rabbi said to Leah, ‘Buy it for him, you're going to buy it for him anyway.'”

Leah took the rabbi's advice to heart. “Nobody ever said no to Steven,” she admitted many years later. “He always gets what he wants, anyway, so the name of the game is to save your strength and say yes early.” Asked how she influenced her son's development, she replied, “I gave him freedom. Steven and I happen to be very much alike. Our nervous systems, everything…. And everything Steven wanted to do, he did. We lived very spur of the moment; there was no structure. He has an amazing talent—this cannot be denied—but he also had the freedom to express it.”

W
HEN
Steven was a toddler, his father was earning his degree at the University of Cincinnati and “studying all the time,” Millie Tieger recalled. Arnold's absorption in his studies and, later, in his electronics career reflected his determination to make something of himself after his unpromising prewar beginnings. But it also made Steven view him as emotionally distant.

“I always felt my father put his work before me,” Steven has said. “I always thought he loved me less than his work and I suffered as a result…. My dad was of that World War II ethic. He brought home the bacon, and my mom cooked it, and we ate it. I went to my dad with things, but he was always analytical. I was more passionate in my approach to any question, and so we always clashed. I was yearning for drama.”

Still, Steven acquired what he called his father's “workaholic” personality, along with such traits as his love of storytelling and his fascination with high technology (somewhat ambivalent in Steven's case). Steven's tendency to
withdraw into his own world—so different from his mother's extroverted exuberance—also is a legacy from his father. “Steven's father was an intellectual,” recalls Rabbi Albert Lewis, who headed the temple to which the Spielbergs later belonged in New Jersey. “Like Steven, he was sort of an introverted person.” When asked about the period just before his marriage broke up in the 1960s, Arnold Spielberg said, “Whenever things hit me with stress like that, I plunge deeper into work, to compensate.”

If his father often seemed an aloof, even forbidding figure to Steven as a child, his mother at times may have seemed too much the opposite, too flighty and childlike. “We're all for immaturity in my family,” Leah once said. “The rule at home was, ‘Just don't be an adult.' Who needs to be anything but ten?” “We never grew up at home, because
she
never grew up,” Steven commented.

T
HE
combination of indulgence and emotional isolation Steven experienced in his childhood may have helped delay his own maturation process by allowing him to grow up as the privileged ruler of a narcissistic fantasy world. His mother often read him J. M. Barrie's
Peter
Pan
as a bedtime story, “one of the happiest memories I have from my childhood. When I was eleven years old I actually directed the story during a school production.” Doubtless he was mightily impressed by Peter's defiant declaration to Mrs. Darling, “I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” As Spielberg admitted in 1985, “I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up…. I'm a victim of the Peter Pan Syndrome.” The issue of whether Spielberg would ever “grow up”—both as a man and as a filmmaker—was much worried over by critics and other members of the press as he reached middle age.

Dr. Dan Kiley's popular 1983 book,
The
Peter
Pan
Syndrome:
Men
Who
Have
Never
Grown
Up,
was strongly influenced by feminist analyses of the problem of delayed maturation in baby boomer males. Men who suffer from the syndrome, writes Kiley, perpetuate adolescent modes of behavior because of a “poor adjustment to reality” in their interpersonal relationships, such as an avoidance of commitment and a compulsion to find self-acceptance by seeking the approval of others. Such men are typically the product of a permissive upbringing by parents who “nurture the development of irresponsibility … in which the child believes that rules don't apply to him.” From childhood onward, sufferers from the syndrome “are filled with anxiety. Early in life, tension begins to pervade the atmosphere of the home. It grows every year…. The cause of this free-floating anxiety is parental unhappiness.”

Spielberg, who still bites his nails to the quick, “combines an incredible security with an incredible insecurity…. I wouldn't have known it, but he
says he comes to work every day wanting to vomit,” reported Dustin Hoffman, who played the title role in
Hook,
Spielberg's 1991 contemporary gloss on
Peter
Pan.
Spielberg dealt directly with the damaging effects of the Peter Pan Syndrome in that uneven but autobiographically very revealing film, with Robin Williams playing Peter as an anxious middle-aged yuppie workaholic who emotionally neglects his own son, making him hostile and rebellious while driving him into the clutches of Captain Hook, the child-hating surrogate father.

In a penetrating 1991 essay on Spielberg's work, Henry Sheehan wrote, “[I]n fragments, that story is the story of nearly every Spielberg film…. Although Spielberg's films are usually described as warm or even exhilarating and euphoric, their most prevalent temper is anxiety. Every Spielberg hero from
Duel
onward is, to one extent or another, worried that he is failing at some essentially male role, either lover or father. In
Hook
these twin fears are merged in Peter, who is plainly a poor father and who, less conspicuously, wants to retreat from the issue of sex in general.”

Those prone to the Peter Pan Syndrome and all its attendant anxieties also tend to share some positive attributes, Kiley reminds us, and they are attributes Spielberg has had in abundance since childhood: “a rich imagination and a yearning to stay young at heart. Cannot these traits be portals to brilliance and serenity?” However stunting Spielberg's upbringing may have proved to his emotional growth, it allowed him the psychological license to explore his creativity with a rare degree of boldness and self-confidence. A “poor adjustment to reality” is not necessarily a handicap for a filmmaker, particularly one who often works in fantasy genres as Spielberg does, although it would help account for his frequent difficulties working himself up to dealing with adult subjects.

S
PIELBERG
grew up hearing his parents talking about “the murdering Nazis” and hearing stories from his “verbal grandparents who constantly spoke about” the extermination of the Jews. Since the Nazis' rise to power, European Jews had found refuge in the close-knit community of Cincinnati's Avondale, and there were many Holocaust survivors living in the neighborhood. In the English classes taught four times a day by Steven's grandmother, Jennie Posner, for eight or ten students gathered around the dining room table at her home on Glenwood Avenue, survivors told stories of what they referred to as “The Great Murder.”

Steven would visit with his mother when the lessons were in progress, and he learned his numbers from one of Jennie's pupils. The man showed Steven the tattoo that had been burned into his arm at Auschwitz for identification. As Steven remembered, “He would roll up his sleeves and say, ‘This is a four, this is a seven, this is a two.' It was my first concept of numbers. He would always say, ‘I have a magic trick.' He pointed to a six. And then he crooked his elbow and said, ‘Now it's a nine.'”

“Every person there had a history, either their own or about their family or someone they knew,” recalled Leah, who often repeated stories she heard to Steven. “Some of the stories were so horrible that there was almost a movie-like quality to them. It was hard to imagine terrible things like that actually happening. It brought the Holocaust close to home, because you were talking to people who had lived through these unimaginable things….

“I remember one woman's story. The Nazis wanted her ring. She couldn't get it off. They were about to cut her finger off, but the ring suddenly fell off on its own. I guess it was her panic. It just freaked me. I'm sure it affected Steven…. Who knows how much our children absorb when they're very young? Perhaps more than we imagine.”

“In a strange way my life has always come back to images surrounding the Holocaust,” Steven agreed in 1993. “The Holocaust had been part of my life, just based on what my parents would say at the dinner table. We lost cousins, aunts, uncles. When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.”

M
OVING
from the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Avondale and choosing to raise her children largely among gentiles was “my one really big mistake,” Leah once said, recalling the incidents of overt anti-Semitism that Steven began to encounter while growing up in mostly WASP suburbia. Although it was Arnold's career path that primarily motivated the family's movements around the country, Leah took responsibility for the fact that from 1950 onward, the family lived in neighborhoods that were progressively less and less Jewish. “I didn't want to be part of any community or deal with any labels,” she explained. “I've never been very comfortable traveling in a pack.”
‡

But the Spielbergs' living situation was never as simple or clear-cut as either Steven or his mother remembers. They had gentile neighbors in Avondale, some of whom looked upon them with barely repressed hostility, and they were not entirely lacking for the company of Jewish neighbors and friends in New Jersey, Arizona, and California. The distinctions among their living places were subtle, and helped shape Steven's evolving personality.

L
IVING
in a Jewish neighborhood such as Avondale could be fraught with nightmarish images for a small child in the immediate postwar years, but Steven did have the advantage of starting life in an insular, cocoonlike
setting that shielded him from many of the harsher realities outside his middle-class ghetto. Relations between Jews and their minority of gentile neighbors were outwardly polite, but not without submerged tension.