young lady, blond, her eyes flash, she talks like this [moves her head and eyes rapidly as she talks]. Arnold was super-smart and accomplished, but I think Leah had a more all-encompassing âpeopleâ personality. Sheâs a very insightful creature.â
Leah started dating Arnold Spielberg in 1939. Arnold attended high school with Leahâs brother, Bernie. âWe all played tennis together,â Arnoldâs sister Natalie recounted. âLeah was going with somebody else at the time, but when she broke up with her boyfriend I introduced her to Arnold because I thought that would be a good match.â
During the early 1940s, Leah pursued her musical ambitions as a student at the renowned Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, affiliated with the University of Cincinnati. She planned a career as a concert pianist and did some public performing, much to the pride and delight of her family. Leah was âa very talented concert pianist,â Arnold says. âShe contributed a lot of artistic talent to Steven.â
Leah, a home economics major in college, was graduated and took a job as a social worker for the Travelers Aid Society at the cityâs Union Terminal. She married Arnold in South Avondaleâs Adath Israel synagogue on February 25, 1945, while he was still in active service at Wright Field. Joining him in Dayton, Leah worked for the local social services department. After his discharge later that year and their return to Cincinnati, Leah helped administerelectrocardiograms for a few months at the Jewish Hospital, but quit that job shortly before Steven was born at the same hospital. With her own artistic career sidetracked by the demands of raising a family, she passed on her artistic ambitions to her son, but never stopped playing the piano.
âThe first piece of furniture we got when we were married was a piano,â Arnold says. âWe borrowed a bed, and we bought a Baldwin spinet.â Arnold, who took piano lessons as a boy, was always an avid music listener. âWe had a big collection of classical records,â he recalls. âWe had classical music playing in the house all the time, way back, early on.â While pregnant with Steven, Leah spent much of her time playing classical pieces on her piano, and when he was an infant in diapers, he would sit on her lap on the piano bench, listening and learning to tap out the music. Sometimes Arnold also got into the act: âI knew enough to know the notes, so when sheâd play, Iâd turn the pages.â
Sometimes the music would affect Steven in unexpected ways. âSteven always had a highly developed imagination,â said Leah. âHe was afraid of everything. When he was little he would insist that I lift the top of the [piano] so he could see the strings while I played. Then he would fall on the floor, screaming in fear.â But Millie Tieger, who remembers watching him as a small child sitting at the piano with his mother, suggests that the early influence of Leahâs music is âthe key to the understandingâ of his creative development: âWhat went into Steve when he heard his mother play music so beautifully?â
Like fellow Wunderkind director Orson Welles, whose father was an inventor and whose mother was a concert pianist, Spielberg acquired his dazzling blend of artistic talents from a synthesis of his parentsâ disparate abilities. He once said he is the product of âgenetic overload.â His father describes Stevenâs personality as âa lucky piece of synergy,â explaining that Stevenâs mother is âa very musically creative person, sheâs a good dancer. And sheâs a zany type. Iâm a little more grounded. But I also like creative things. I was a great storyteller. I love science fiction.â
Arnoldâs pioneering creativity within his own field of computers has brought him several patents. When Steven was an infant, his father