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In Phoenix, where the Spielbergs lived from 1957 to 1964, four kids--Steven and his three younger sisters--filled the house with noise, joyful or just oyful. "There was so much yelling," Leah recalls, "that Steven says he sometimes thought we were really Italian." No, they were Jewish, and Steven was a one-man commando unit against neighbors who made anti-Semitic slurs; he'd sneak up and smear their windows with peanut butter.
The boy's imaginative sense of destruction made him a terror to his sisters as well. He pulled the head off one of their dolls and set it on a plate garnished with lettuce and tomatoes, like a pig at a luau. After the kids had seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its alien pods that take over humans while they sleep, he built a giant pod and hid it under his sister Anne's bed. "When I was a baby," she says, "they had to put chicken wire around the crib so he wouldn't throw toy cars at me."
Against Leah's best instincts, Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer, played the disciplinarian in the family. "My father would be upset that Steven got detention," recalls Anne, "while my mother encouraged him to play hooky. Dad would ask what we were going to do with our lives, while mom would say, 'Don't worry, just live for today.'" Arnold worked hard to be a good, traditional dad. "Steve was terrible in chemistry," he says, "and I'd try helping him with his homework. Once, when he got a D in the subject, he came home and said, 'Dad, you flunked.'"
But some of Arnold's teaching took. He had been an Air Force sharpshooter in World War II, and he taught Steven this skill. In a grander game--filmmaking--Arnold was the knowledgeable flight instructor spurring his boy to be top gun. "Arnold turned Steven on to filmmaking," notes Joseph McBride, author of the new Steven Spielberg (Simon & Schuster; $30), easily the finest and fairest of the 20-odd unauthorized biographies of the director. "Arnold helped Steven learn to direct; he was the family storyteller; he was interested in science-fiction. Steven is the combination of two remarkable parents, not just one."
The collaboration is evident in three rarely seen films from Steven's apprentice years. For Fighter Squad, a hymn to male bonding made in 1959-60 when the novice director was in seventh grade, Arnold got permission for Steven and his all-boy cast to film inside a plane. But it was Steven who cleverly simulated ascents, dogfights, bailouts and crashes by interweaving tilt-a-whirl camerabatics with stock footage from a World War II documentary.
Escape to Nowhere, a 22-minute color film shot in Steven's high school years, continues the boy's obsession with his father's war. The narrative is pretty jerky, but, man, can this kid direct second unit! He handsomely marshals his cast of dozens, smartly intercutting from the Germans to the Americans, accelerating the tempo of shots until the film's climax: victorious G.I.s leaving a village in a swath of deadly red smoke. The best-known film from Steven's youth, Firelight, is a space-invasion movie, and the couple, played by two Spielberg friends, whose home is suffused in the aliens' eerie red light are kin to the mother and child in the first scenes of Close Encounters. But it is also an arid view of modern marriage on the road: most of Firelight could be about a bickering couple on a Sunday drive.