of the new school remained with him for life. When he encountered George Lucas’s tight team, he found it like changing schools. He felt, he said, as if he’d moved into Lucas’s eighth-grade class.
At Arcadia High School he signed up with the Boy Scouts, and was admitted to its honour society, the Order of the Arrow. He began to study the clarinet too, and to march in the school band. Leah’s preoccupation with her piano prejudiced him against the classical repertoire, and he would never warm to pop or rock. His ideal was movie music, of which he soon had an encyclopaedic recall. Once he began making his own amateur films, he would noodle tunes on his clarinet, but only for Leah to transcribe for piano and record as soundtracks.
Shorn of friends and relations by the move to Arizona, and hungry for acceptance, Spielberg took refuge increasingly in showmanship. ‘I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life. As a kid, I had puppet shows – I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.’ For the rest of his life, displays of virtuoso invention would alternate with attempts to create the suburban contentment for which he envied others.
Physical awkwardness remained his greatest humiliation. In a school footrace, he once found himself second last, only just ahead of an even slower handicapped boy. It was this boy the crowd cheered on, yelling, ‘C’mon, John, you can beat Spielberg!’ With the compulsion to win but also to satisfy the expectations of an audience that became characteristic of him as an adult, Spielberg contrived to trip so that the other boy could pass him. Then, once the other was well ahead, he threw himself into almost catching up, coming in a close last. John was carried off in triumph, while Spielberg, winner and loser at the same time, stood on the field and cried for five minutes. ‘I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my whole life.’
In adulthood, Spielberg’s ideal social and intellectual level remained that of his life as a suburban schoolboy in the late 1950s. George Lucas was to have Luke Skywalker say of provincial Tatooine in Star Wars, ‘If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place it is furthest from.’ But for Spielberg, suburbia would always radiate a prelapsarian glow. He came to revere middle-class virtues. Richard Dreyfuss says Spielberg has ‘a love affair with the suburban middle class. I don’t share his fascination, but Steven could do whole movies about block parties if he wanted to.’ If he’d been making All the President’s Men, Spielberg said, he would have concentrated on the White House typists rather than the reporters. His favourite painter was, and remained, Norman Rockwell, whose covers for the Saturday Evening Post showing scenes of gentle whimsy, often set in churches, soda fountains and domestic interiors, exemplified a sunny vision of America as God’s Country.
A later writer was to sum up Rockwell’s style in terms that make clear Spielberg’s affinity for the artist: ‘At his peak, Rockwell reflected an American dream which did not at the time seem ridiculous or unobtainable — the dream of international power, domestic pleasure and civil tranquillity. Rockwell’s arcadia was peopled by clever kids, indulgent grandparents, bourgeois shopkeepers, shy courting couples and pious schoolteachers – all painted in a style which was a strange blend of fairy-tale, cinematic still and comic strip.’ Another critic wrote: ‘To be feeling good at home is the secret and desire of the world Rockwell narrates. “Home” is also his narrative horizon and his project. Having a comfortable, solid, lived-in home, being confident in oneself and one’s values, are everyday and prosaic values which are obvious, lived and shared. It is art for, and about, Joe Sixpack. It plays very well in Peoria.’ Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with Rockwell culminated in him becoming a collector of his works, and a trustee and major financial contributor to the Rockwell Museum.
Unlike the Haddonfield house, which was surrounded by trees, and in particular a large one just outside his window on which Spielberg focused his scarier fantasies, the house in Scottsdale was part of a modern development sprawling over flat semi-desert. Spielberg loved its sense of community, the way one could look into the kitchen windows of the families on either side. ‘You always knew what your neighbours were cooking because you could see them preparing dinner and you could smell it. There were no fences, no problems.’ In the nineties, ensconced in a mansion in Los Angeles’ luxurious suburb of Pacific Palisades, he still felt the same affection. ‘I live in a different kind of suburbia, but it still is. There are houses next door and across the street, and you can walk, and there are street lamps on the street and sidewalks, and it’s very nice.’
The Spielberg household placed a premium on work and hobbies. Leah would invite her musician friends for musical evenings. Steven was encouraged to have pets. He filled his room with eight free-flying parakeets which perched on the curtain rod and left their droppings underneath. He would continue to keep them as an adult, naming them serially, as he had as a child. In the seventies he still had a pair, called Schmuck I and Schmuck II. On holidays, his parents drove as far as the White Mountains and the Grand Canyon, pitching their tent and, particularly in Leah’s case, throwing themselves into serious hiking and nature study. One of Spielberg’s most vivid memories is of his mother on a mountaintop, whirling in ecstasy, and while shooting Raiders in Tunisia he reminisced of scorpion hunts with his father in the Arizona desert.
His first encounter with a movie camera sprang from these camping trips. Leah gave Arnold an 8mm Kodak for Father’s Day. He hosepiped like any amateur until Steven, sensitised by prolonged viewing of movies on TV, became impatient. After being criticised repeatedly by his son for shaky camera movements and bad exposure, Arnold handed over the camera. After that, holidays were never the same. His mother recalled:
My earliest recollection of Steven with a camera was when my husband and I were leaving on vacation and we told him to take a shot of the camper leaving the driveway. He got down on his belly and was aiming at the hubcap. We were exasperated, yelling at him, ‘Come on! We have to leave. Hurry up.’ But he just kept on doing his thing, and when we saw the finished results, he was able to pull back so that this hubcap spinning around became the whole camper – my first glimpse of the Spielbergian touch, and a hint of things to come.
A hundred yards before they arrived, Steven jumped out and filmed them driving through the campsite gate. After that, every part of the trip was recorded. ‘Father Chopping Wood. Mother Digging Latrine. Young Sister Removing Fishhook From Right Eye – my first horror film. And a scary little picture called Bear in the Bushes.’
1959 was a year of significance for Spielberg. References to it riddle his films. It was the year he was bar mitzvahed, only managing to mumble through his ill-memorised extract from the torah with the help of the old men in the front row, who muttered along with him. This was also the year he began actively to resent his father’s obsession with work, and his insistence on precision and order. His father brought home a transistor, and told him, ‘Son, this is the future.’ Spielberg grabbed it and swallowed it.
Detroit’s disastrous attempt at manipulating the American public by designing cars according to theories of subliminal sexual symbolism reached fruition in 1959 with the Ford Edsel. Spielberg used one of these doomed gas-guzzlers with its calculatedly vaginal front grille in his first film, Amblin’. One of the year’s big hits, Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, revived by the black singing group The Platters, provided the theme of Always.
More important, CBS premiered a new half-hour TV series in October. An anthology of quirky science fiction or fantasy stories, each with an ironic trick ending, it was introduced each week, and often written by, its creator, TV writer Rod Serling, already well-known for original dramas like Requiem for a Heavyweight. In his dark suit and with his crooked smile and off-handedly intellectual comments, Serling, like Arnold Spielberg, was an ex-GI with a revisionist view of the America Fit For Heroes To Live In. Through the window of The Twilight Zone, he invited his audience to spy on a puzzling future with more than a hint of threat.
The Twilight Zone influenced not only Spielberg but a whole generation of film directors-in-waiting.
