Steven Spielberg (21 page)

T
HE
first friend Spielberg made in Saratoga was his next-door neighbor Don Shull, who also was new to the school, having recently moved from San Jose. “Big Don,” as he calls himself, is an affable, gentle man who stands six-feet-eight, a foot taller than Steven. “Steve and I were the odd couple—the Mutt and Jeff of Saratoga High,” says Shull, who is now a landscape architect. “I never looked at him as a nerd, just different, offbeat. I think we both felt like fish out of water. It was very difficult being accepted at Saratoga for both of us. I made it passable for him.”

Almost everyone who attended Saratoga High or taught there in Spielberg's day uses the same word to describe the student body: “cliqueish.” The student body was largely middle-class to upper-middle-class, with only a handful of minority students. “It was not a school to be the new kid in,” says Kendra Rosen Hanson, who is also Jewish. “If you stood out, if you were different, it was really tough to get integrated. If you were Jewish, you might have all the more reason for [feeling] different. Spielberg didn't fit in, anyway. It wasn't fashionable to be a nerd, and he was marching to a different drummer. He didn't belong in high school. He was so much more mature than the rest of them.”

“Spielberg found himself hung up with this weird social environment,” says classmate Jim Fletcher. “It was not a nice place. I remember guys throwing quarters at women who were supposed to be sluts—that's how low it was. It was a very cruel high school in a lot of ways, very white, more like a prep school than anything else—an adolescent, pampered, old-money environment.”

In spite of that element, Saratoga High had a reputation for high academic standards. Virtually all the students went on to college, many to nearby Stanford. Although Spielberg applied himself more seriously to his studies than he had in Phoenix, he had a lackluster record of mostly B's and C's at Saratoga. “My most poignant memory of Steven,” says his Saratoga neighbor Susan Didinger Hennings, “is that his father would push him to study math, and Steven would say, ‘Oh, Dad, leave me alone. I'm going to be a really famous movie director some day. I don't need all this school stuff.'” Describing Steven as “a bright kid who tended not to perform,” teacher Hugh Roberts points out, “It was not unusual to have a creative kid falling into that category.” His journalism teacher, Bert Pfister, remembers Spielberg as “very capable, a good student, but he very much kept to himself.
One
thing was really unusual—he occasionally wore a fedora similar to the one that Indiana Jones wore. It was something that you'd expect from another generation. He was not part of the high school scene. He was detached and distant—I don't mean to cast any aspersion or criticism, but he had other things that he was
occupied with. It's a source of considerable frustration for me that I had this creative genius in my class and I had no inkling of that.”

S
PIELBERG
often went to movies with Don Shull at the Saratoga Theater, the domed Century 25, and the downtown theaters in San Jose. “He would give me a critique afterward,” Shull remembers. “He mostly talked in terms of directors more than in terms of movie stars, and I wasn't up on who the director was or who produced the movie. He was always figuring out ways to make that damn movie better. He wore me out.

“His imagination was going all the time. As we walked home up the hill, he would see in his imagination a whole scene in a movie—a movie that had never been filmed but he had the whole scene in his mind—and he'd describe some off-the-wall scene as we would be walking up the hill. One scene I remember had something to do with aliens and the army. It was very similar to
Close
Encounters.

“He told me he'd see big boom tracks along the side of the hill, guys with flying saucers, the whole nine yards. I'd go, ‘You gotta be kidding!' It was a steep hill, so it took some engineering—cameras up on a hydraulic boom, helicopters buzzing around, the guys in helmets. I could see it in color! The flying saucer looked like the one in
Firelight
—like two pie plates stuck together, kinda wobbling through the air—but in
Close
Encounters
it looked more like a whole city. I saw that whole scene years and years before [on the hillside in Saratoga]—the flying saucer wasn't playing music, it was more in a destruction mode, like in
Firelight,
where he had somebody dressed up as an alien in a silver suit. It was fun. The guy is amazing.”

Shull, whose ancestry is Swedish and German, was raised as a Lutheran and a Congregationalist. When the controversy over Spielberg's problems with anti-Semitism broke out, he wrote a letter to the
San
Jose
Mercury
News
insisting, “As for bloody noses, getting beaten up, anti-Jewish slurs, I
never
saw it and I
never
heard a word from Steve on the subject. Furthermore, I don't think anyone knew Steve was Jewish, and I'm sure no one cared if they did know. He kept the thing pretty much under wraps.

“If somebody had beaten up Steve, I would have known, and you can bet I would have had words with that person or persons. I submit to you:
It
never
happened
….

“So why was Steve so unhappy in Saratoga? It had to do with the breakup of his family and the move from Arizona.

“The whole thing was a nightmare for Steve…. No filmmaking. No winning film awards. No future in Saratoga. A very bad divorce rearing its ugly head. A very
mad
mother and two [
sic
] sisters who didn't want to be in Saratoga. And a very unhappy dad, seeing his wife and family slipping from his grasp.

“Sounds like a time of ‘personal horror.' But it had
nothing
to do with being Jewish. At least from my angle.”

Shull's letter, and others which questioned Spielberg's account of being abused, prompted a response to the
Mercury
News
from another classmate who befriended Spielberg at Saratoga High, Gene Ward Smith. Recalling that he and Spielberg often spoke about movies, science-fiction novels, and other subjects while spending study hall time together, Smith wrote, “One subject we discussed was his Jewish background. It is false that he was reticent about this, or that nobody knew of it…. It was clear that being Jewish was an important part of his definition of himself.

“Moreover, some people learned of it and used it to tease him. I think some of the boys did this not out of any deep dislike of Jews, but because they knew it bothered Steven. Regardless, it was anti-Semitism; and real hate can grow from such seeds.

“Why didn't Shull see this? I think whether or not he knew it, he was in effect Steven's bodyguard.”

Spielberg responded with a letter to the
Mercury
News,
published on January 11, 1994: “I read the article from an old friend of mine, Don Shull, who lived down the street from our house in the Saratoga foothills. I was very interested to hear Don's take on my life, because I feel many kids as friends presume to know a lot more about their buddies than they really do.

“When asked the question by countless journalists about anti-Semitism in my past, the grand lie would have been to conceal (as I did from people like Don Shull, other friends of mine and even my family) my experiences in that one semester [
sic
] at Saratoga High School, on weekends, on holidays, and even in San Jose where I had an unfortunate encounter with several seniors from my graduating class….

“I have nice memories of Don Shull, but he certainly did not know very much about what I was going through—he could not have known.

“I actually remember a moment when one of the bullies who had been tormenting me because I was a Jew got into a fight with Don on the basketball court. I remember this because Don stared the boy down. Only one punch was thrown—Don took it, stood his ground, and continued to stare. The boy turned and walked away.

“It was one of the most heroic things I witnessed as a young person, but it made me feel bad about myself—that's the way I wished I could have reacted.”

Asked about that incident, Shull says, “I vaguely remember it may have had something to do with Steve being Jewish, but I was reacting to Steve being the little guy being picked on. I didn't stand for that. I remembered my mom telling me never to hit anybody, because I'd take their head off. I just said, ‘Buzz off.' No big deal.”

As for Steven's recollection that he concealed his problems at Saratoga High from his family, Arnold Spielberg admits, “I never knew he ran into that. I was so damn busy at IBM at that time that I hardly knew anything that was happening. And besides, my marriage was breaking up at that time, so it was a very stressful overall period for me. Our relationship was so sad that
I lost track of the fine-grain stuff. I used to work from seven-thirty in the morning till seven or eight o'clock at night, and I think Leah absorbed all that stuff.”

G
ENE
Ward Smith, now a professor of mathematics, acknowledges that he was even more of a “nerd” than his friend Steven Spielberg. Chubby and bespectacled, Smith was ‘Very much an outsider being picked on by people. All the people who bothered him were the same ones who bothered me.” Smith was so advanced in math and science that he was allowed to spend most of his time in the school library studying calculus and general relativity at his own pace. That was where he had most of his contact with Spielberg.

Spielberg impressed Smith because his way of looking at things was so unusual: “He had ideas, he had definitive points of view, and he was creative. He had a terrific influence on how I looked at films. I felt if I talked to him I would learn things; I thought
that
was astounding. I thought of him as a diamond in the rough. I had a kind of project to turn him into more of an intellectual, and a correlative one to make of him a kind of exclusive best friend, of a type that I had had before and would have again. However, he wasn't so easily influenced; he was really an intellectually autonomous person, which was part of the reason he was so interesting. I felt a bit resentful and jealous of Don Shull because of this, and didn't feel as close to Steven later on in the year as I did at first.”

Smith had an elitist's attitude toward movies, particularly Hollywood movies. When Spielberg talked about movies being an art form—a notion not yet widespread in the United States—Smith was taken aback. He was all the more surprised to find that, while Spielberg admired the movies of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Orson Welles, the director he “absolutely revered” was Alfred Hitchcock:

“I remember him talking about Hitchcock films all the time—he would go on and on about
North
by
Northwest,
which I hadn't seen, and
Vertigo.
He would talk about
Psycho
and
Rear
Window.
A lot of it went over my head. He read all about Hitchcock, and he would talk about camera movements and all this kind of stuff, but I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He said, ‘I call him the Master.' I thought, ‘Wow, that's going pretty far!' I would read
The
New
Yorker
and
The
Saturday
Review,
and I would take my opinions from other people. Reviewers were very condescending in praising Hitchcock's mastery of the film art while deriding his subject matter. I thought of him the way people think of Steven Spielberg today—a guy who makes these wonderful, entertaining movies but not with much depth. I don't think Spielberg made up his mind on the basis of what other people said. If he liked Hitchcock, it was because he
liked
him. It made him an original thinker.”

While Spielberg talked about his admiration for Hitchcock's enormous technical ability, Smith came to realize that there was a deeper reason for
Spielberg's affinity with Hitchcock, one that suggested the direction and philosophy the younger filmmaker's own career would follow:

“Spielberg said movies were
the
great art form, because they moved the most people. He said movies produce a strong reaction in the average person, the common man, and he was interested in the way Hitchcock would put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Spielberg wanted to get the entire audience to react. He didn't want to play to an audience of the elite. He seemed terrifically enthralled by the idea of influencing a mass of people. He said, ‘The movies reach out and grab you.' That's what he thought was great about Alfred Hitchcock. Spielberg kept saying that the film medium could relate to ordinary people and doesn't rely on some kind of intellectual process to make it work with a broad group. Back then that idea was virtually radical. That was what was thought to be
bad
about movies, this broad appeal, and he thought that was what was
good
about movies.

“Spielberg taught me that you should appreciate movies for what they are, what they try to do, rather than seeing a movie as an inferior version of a book. One thing I keep hearing about Spielberg is that he's always after money, making a buck. But he wasn't going out to reach their pocketbooks, he wanted to reach their hearts.”

Spielberg's compulsion to connect with the mass audience was, Smith realized, part of his deep-seated need for acceptance by a society that made him feel an outsider. Those feelings became particularly acute during his time of crisis at Saratoga High.

“I got the impression he wanted to be assimilated and liked by people in general,” Smith says. “He liked to be liked, but he was having trouble with that, because people weren't liking him. He didn't like to place himself apart in some sort of snobbish way. That was one of the things that annoyed me. My impression of him was that he was very intelligent but in some sense not an intellectual. He didn't fit my idea of how I divided the human race into two parts—‘them' and ‘us'—‘us' is intellectual, ‘them' is non-intellectual. To me, he was an ‘us' but he wanted to make himself into a ‘them.'”