Staying Five Moves Ahead

By John Skow

He will not go into an elevator alone because he knows the thing will get stuck between floors and his whitened bones will be found two weeks later. He is a hypochondriac. He owns twelve video games and plays with them for an hour a day. He is convinced that his Malibu beach house will be undermined by waves, although it does not seem to be in danger, and when asleep there he spends arduous eight-hour nights dreaming of piling sandbags around the foundation. He will not set foot in the ocean because there are sharks out there. He should know. "I think we survive on our fears," he says of Americans. "We're a tough race."

Such a survivor. Such a complicated mass of neural wiring. Such a tangle of contradictions. His upbringing should have produced a temperamental brat. He peanut-buttered the neighbors' windows. As his endlessly indulgent mother Leah says, "His badness was so original that there weren't even books to tell you what to do." Steven Spielberg's precocious success might have created a pampered tyrant. But as Leah says, and as everyone who knows him agrees, "He doesn't have a blown-upness about him."

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, 32, who wrote the script for E.T., was struck by the unusual warmth of the production family Spielberg has gathered around him, notably Producers Frank Marshall, 35, and Kathleen Kennedy, 28. Says Mathison: "None of us is afraid to tell Steven he is wrong. He's a softy, as big a sap as anyone. But he rarely lets that show in his movies. He kept fretting that E.T. was too soft, until finally he stopped worrying about pleasing the men in the audience." Spielberg sees his relationship to Mathison as symbiotic: "Melissa is 80% heart and 20% story logic. It took her sensitivity and my know-how to make E.T. Besides, I work better with women. I claim no profound understanding of women, but I have an agreeable faith in them."

There is a tough face to Spielberg. "You have to ride people hard," he says. "You have to say things more than once. About the third time you get what you want." Still, this is hardly the portrait of the director as autocratic auteur, in the French model. In fact Spielberg is the kind of American, extremely intelligent and utterly unintellectual, who can baffle Europeans. He claims without regret that his mental development stopped at 19. When he says he is not satirizing the amiable suburban householders of Poltergeist, who never turn off their television set, he means it. He has no quarrel with subdivisions, polyester, freeways, patio living, junk food for belly or mind, or people who sometimes seem to be cassette-recorded copies of each other. His lively mind grew out of such a mulch.

He, too, seldom turns off the TV set in his Coldwater Canyon house in Beverly Hills. But TV dramatic shows make him wince because their makers are so clearly contemptuous of their audience. Actually, he says, audiences are very sophisticated about film, so that making a movie like Raiders is like "some kind of kinetic chess--if you don't stay five moves ahead of them, you're dead."

Spielberg is a lean, brown-bearded, medium-size man whose considerable physical presence seems stressed by his steadily ticking analytical intelligence. He wears a standard director's outfit, a khaki safari jacket and jeans. Otherwise, there is very little that is standard about him and almost nothing suggesting Hollywood. He is obsessive about self-control and, perhaps for that reason, takes no drugs, virtually no alcohol and carries herbal tea bags to avoid caffeine drinks. When he is in Beverly Hills he does the food shopping, to the frustration of his maid Bertha Kanafil, and cooks often ("I've ruined a lot of good food," he admits). He is apt to spend four nights a week with his girlfriend Kathleen Carey, 33, a slight, pretty blond woman who works in the music business signing songwriters for Warner Bros. Music. "She has taught me that there's a life after movies," he says.

Maybe. He says he likes to sleep till noon. But we cannot go around doing what we like, can we? He gets up at 6:45 a.m., reads the front page and the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times, and is at work playing video games by 9 a.m. He shares an open, interconnected warren of offices with his close associates and alter egos Kennedy and Marshall. She is bright, quick and Irish, he relaxed and softspoken. The director trusts them totally. Between the two of them, they gently but firmly supply organization to the organization. That is not easy in an office atmosphere resembling, as Spielberg says proudly, the raunchy cantina in Star Wars. When he makes movies, Spielberg explains, "it's like a Middle Eastern bazaar. The more chaotic it is, the more I find my priorities. If it is calm, it is el snoro." Says Marshall: "He has an idea every 13 seconds. I have to figure out how serious they are. If he wants to do something, I figure out how to make it possible financially. Steven doesn't think in monetary terms."

A day in this life of dazzle and glitter ends, typically, with Spielberg, wearing a body shirt, hopping into bed at 8:15 with a carton of take-out tacos, to read scripts and watch TV. He falls asleep watching Nightline. Says he: "TV is video Valium for me."

At week's end he was in Manhattan doing TV interviews for the new movies. A frightening wave of publicity is building, and at one point, by actual count, Spielberg had filmed 36 separate, distinct, eight-minute taped question-and-answer sessions without pausing for a cup of herbal tea. He finished, holding his jaw and blinking, looking like one of the sinners near the bottom of the great wall of the Sistine Chapel who have just spotted the true horror of hell. "Nothing like this has ever happened to me before," he said weakly. But then he was off to the Cannes Film Festival to show his movies and to loaf. That done, he will have nothing much to accomplish until January, when he begins preparing to shoot Raiders II. Nothing much, in Spielberg's terms, is a fairly impressive level of frenzy in anyone else's; but the relative calm felt good. There was only one ritual that could not be ignored. After every one of their films, he and George Lucas, singly or together, have made a solemn journey to Hawaii and there, on the beach, have constructed a large sand castle. Lucas is busy editing Revenge of the Jedi, the third chapter of Star Wars. So Spielberg will go there and, as writer, producer, director and chief sand hog, erect the suitably grand, appropriately perishable shrine to honor their strange and wondrous priesthood.

--By John Skow.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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