His demeanour is uncoordinated, itchy, boyish: five foot nine or so, 150 pounds, baggy T-shirt, jeans, running-shoes. The beard, in particular, looks like a stick-on afterthought, a bid for adulthood and anonymity. Early photographs show the shaven Spielberg as craggy and distinctive; with the beard, he could be anyone. ‘Some people look at the ground when they walk,’ he said later. ‘Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky. This means that when you walk into things, you don’t cut your forehead, you cut your chin. I’ve had plenty of cuts on my chin.’ Perhaps this explains the beard. Perhaps this explains the whole phenomenon.
Spielberg sank on to a sofa in his gadget-crammed den, a wide, low room whose walls bear the usual mementoes of movie artwork and framed magazine covers. ‘I had three younger sisters,’ he began. ‘I was isolated, left alone with my thoughts. I imagined the very best things that could happen and the very worst, simply to relieve the tedium. The most frightening thing, the most uplifting thing.’ He stared round the room, seemingly flustered by the obligation to explain himself for the thousandth time — weighed down, indeed, by the burden of all these mega-hits, these blockbusters and smasher-oos. ‘I was the weird, skinny kid with the acne. I was a wimp.’
His mother Leah has confirmed that Steven ‘was not a cuddly child’. Evidently he kept a flock of parakeets flapping around wild in his room. Leah never liked birds, and only reached a hand through the door once a week to grope for the laundry bag. She didn’t go in there for years. Steven also kept an 8mm camera. According to his sister Anne, big brother would systematically ‘dole out punishment’
while forcing the three girls to participate in his home movies. This technique is well-tried in Hollywood: it is known as directing.
Spielberg’s films deal in hells and heavens. Against the bullying and bedevilled tike, we can set the adolescent dreamer, the boy who tenderly nursed his apocalyptic hopes. One night, when he was six, Steven was woken by his father and bundled into the car. He was driven to a nearby field, where hundreds of suburbanites stood staring in wonder (this is probably the most dominant image in his films). The night sky was full of portents. ‘My father was a computer scientist,’ said Spielberg. ‘He gave me a technical explanation of what was happening. “These meteors are space debris attracted by the gravitational…” But I didn’t want to hear that. I wanted to think of them as falling stars.’
All his life Spielberg has believed in things: vengeful ten-yard sharks, whooping ghosts, beautiful beings from other worlds. ‘Comics and TV always portrayed aliens as malevolent. I never believed that. If they had the technology to get here, they could only be benign … I know they’re out there.’ The conviction, and desire, lead in a straight line from Firelight (one of his SF home movies) to the consummation of E.T. ‘Just before I made Close Encounters I went outside one night, looked up at the sky and started crying. I thought I was falling apart.’
In Poltergeist, a suburban family is terrorised by demons that emerge from the household television set. When Spielberg describes the film as ‘my revenge on TV’, he isn’t referring to his own apprenticeship on the small-screen networks. ‘TV was my third parent.’ His father used to barricade and boobytrap the set, leaving a strand of hair on the aperture, to keep tabs on Steven’s illegal viewing. ‘I always found the hair, memorised its position, and replaced it when I was through.’
Rather to the alarm of his girlfriend, Kathleen Carey, Spielberg still soaks up a great deal of nightly trivia. ‘All I see is junk,’ she says, ‘but he looks for ideas.’ It is clear from the annuals and pot-boilers on his office shelves that Spielberg is no bookworm (this is Hollywood after all, where high culture means an after-dinner game of Botticelli). TV is popular art: Spielberg is a popular artist who has outstripped but not outgrown the medium that shaped him. Like Disney – and, more remotely, like Dickens — his approach is entirely non-intellectual, heading straight for the heart, the spine, the guts.