(7 of 9)
Is the couple Arnold and Leah? The elder Spielbergs divorced when Steven was 19; he remained close to Leah and her new husband Bernie Adler. "Bernie didn't want me around," says Arnold. "It became an uncomfortable situation. The kids suffered, and I just had to ride it out. At the premiere of Jaws, we sat at separate tables." With his father at a distance, Steven looked for new father figures, finding one in Steven J. Ross, the charismatic boss of Warner Bros. "When my son got his honorary degree at Brandeis, I saw the way he looked at Steve Ross, and I could tell Ross was his surrogate father," Arnold says. "I'll admit I had a touch of envy--not enough to make me feel sour, just enough to give me a little itch."
A few years ago, both Ross and Adler died. Says Anne: "It shocked Steven into seeing the fragility of people's lives." Deprived of surrogate fathers, he thought more about his real one. "I didn't want to be as wrapped up in my work as my dad," says Spielberg, "and yet inexorably I was becoming my dad. So we finally reached out to each other. It was like coming home again, making up for lost time--and we have a lot of lost time between us. Now we're so close, it's fantastic." So close that when Arnold remarried last month, his son was best man.
In many ways, the best man is still a boy. He has an infantile obsession with putting his hands in his mouth. He gave up his longtime addiction to nail biting only after Capshaw told him, "I'd like your paws better if you weren't biting them." So he stopped. "It just shows how willful he can be," she says. "Now the problem will be he'll turn into Howard Hughes and never cut them." On the set, when pondering a serious issue, Spielberg will put a forefinger in his mouth; crew members call it "his think stick." When they saw him wearing mittens in the brutal Polish winter of the Schindler's List shoot, they wondered how their boss would ever be able to think things out.
Among Hollywood directors Spielberg may have set the sartorial fashion of slob chic. "He's got pretty bad clothes," notes Hanks. "Sometimes you want to say, 'Steven, the hat! The hat!' I mean, he's written the book on ball caps." And he remains a connoisseur of cheap food. On a recent drive after a respectably solid lunch, he abruptly pointed out the window and exclaimed, "There's where we should have eaten!" It was, of course, a Wendy's. Jokes his mother Leah: "Steven may be rich, but he has no class."
The eternal kid is, after all, human, so as it must to most men, lower-back pain has come to Steven Spielberg. "Occasionally I'll bend down to pick up my children's dirty underwear," he says, "and my entire back will give out." Thus he found the mattress uncomfortably soft when he slept over at the White House, twice, in the Lincoln Bedroom. Like many a public-spirited businessman, Spielberg made donations ($660,000) to the Clinton re-election effort. He stresses that he has never used his money muscle to push policy on the President and that he returned the favor by having the First Family over to chez Spielberg. (Leah wryly notes that "Clinton did not have to make a donation to DreamWorks before he stayed at Steven's.") Spielberg recalls that he made matzo brei for the Clintons, "and grits, which I blew by not adding enough salt. Clinton was such a gentleman that he fully consumed it without blinking."