Show Business: I Dream for a Living

Steven Spielberg, the Prince of Hollywood, is still a little boy at heart

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Mom is a stitch. At 65, Leah Adler still has enough vim to run a kosher restaurant in West Los Angeles with her second husband Bernie while moonlighting as an extra in the Amazing Stories episode directed by Clint Eastwood. Back in the early '60s, though, in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Leah Spielberg could summon just enough energy to ride the roller coaster called Young Steven. "He was my first, so I didn't know that everybody didn't have kids like him," she recalls with a happy shrug. "I just hung on for dear life. He was always the center of attention, ruling his three younger sisters. And me too, actually. Our living room was strewn with cables and floodlights -- that's where Steven did his filming. We never said no. We never had a chance to say no. Steven didn't understand that word."

Spielberg's memories of his childhood (see following story, page 62) are as dramatic and fantastic as you might expect from a master fabulist. Could real life have been nearly so much fun? "It was creative and chaotic at our house," says Steven's father Arnold, 68, a computer executive with twelve patents to his name. "I'd help Steven construct sets for his 8-mm movies, with toy trucks and papier mache mountains. At night I'd tell the kids cliffhanger tales about characters like Joanie Frothy Flakes and Lenny Ludhead. I see pieces of me in Steven. I see the storyteller."

In every Spielberg "family" film since Close Encounters, the mother figure is the repository of strength and common sense; Dad is either absent or a bit vague, less in touch with the forces of wonder. As described by Steven, Arnold was neither a hero nor a villain, but a hardworking perfectionist. "Steven's love and mastery of technology definitely come from our father," says Steven's sister Sue, 31, a mother of two who lives outside Washington. "Mom was a classical pianist, artistic and whimsical. She led the way for Steven to be as creative as he wanted to be. We were bohemians growing up in suburbia. And everything was centered on Steven. When he was babysitting for us he'd resort to creative torture. One time he came into the bedroom with his face wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy. He peeled off the paper layer by layer and threw it at us. He was a delight, but a terror. And we kept coming back for more."

Why not? Each evening alone with big brother meant a new Amazing Story. The youngest, Nancy (now 29 and a jewelry designer in New York City), remembers: "We were sitting with our dolls, and Steven was singing as if he was on the radio. Then he interrupted himself 'to bring us an important message.' He announced that a tornado was coming, then flipped us over his head to safety. If we looked at him, he said, we'd turn to stone." Nancy played a featured role in Steven's minimum opus Firelight, a sci-fi thriller made when he was 16 and she was eight. "I played a kid in the backyard who was supposed to reach up toward the firelight. Steven had me look directly at the sun. 'Quit squinting!' he'd shout. 'Don't blink!' And though I might have gone blind, I did what he said because, after all, it was Steven directing."

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