Steven Spielberg by Joseph McBride Read Free Book Online Page B

certificate shows that he was born at Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital at 6:16 P.M. on December 18, 1946—not December 18, 1947, as has often been reported.
    Just why Spielberg has felt it expedient to appear a year younger than his true age throughout most of his Hollywood career became a matter of controversy in 1995, when the issue provoked an exchange of lawsuits between Spielberg and one of his former producers, Denis C. Hoffman. But the truth about his age was not entirely unknown over the years. In 1981, when Patricia Goldstone, a freelance feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, discovered college records indicating that Spielberg actually was born in 1946, the director “would not comment,” she reported. Spielberg’s incorrect age and birthdate have been given in innumerable articles and several books, although all that was necessary to resolve the question was a request to the Cincinnati Board of Health for his Ohio Department of Health birth certificate. Prior to 1995, the only book on Spielberg or his work that reported his age correctly was Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the “Twilight Zone” Case (1988) by Stephen Farber and Marc Green, which cited Goldstone’s article, commenting, “Almost everyone in Hollywood lies about his age; butSpielberg, with a premature vision of the legend he wanted to build, may have started fudging earlier than anyone else.”
    Spielberg’s birth notice appeared in the December 26, 1946, issue of The American Israelite, a national Jewish newspaper published in his home town of Cincinnati: “Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Spielberg (Leah Posner), 817 Lexington Avenue, son, Wednesday, Dec. 18th.” Before he moved to California, Spielberg’s age was reported accurately when his filmmaking activities were written up in the Phoenix papers. The Phoenix Jewish News reported on December 25, 1959, that his bar mitzvah (the ceremony that takes place when a Jewish boy turns thirteen) would be held the following January 9 at Beth Hebrew Congregation. Spielberg’s true birthdate also appears in the records of the high schools he attended in Phoenix and in Saratoga, California, as well as in the records of California State College (now California State University) at Long Beach. But after Spielberg began making his first inroads into Hollywood, his attitude toward his past history became more creative, and as a result the chronology of his early career has become a self-generated tangle of confusion.
    On October 26, 1995, in response to questions prompted by Hoffman’s lawsuit, Spielberg’s attorney Marshall Grossman and his spokesman, Marvin Levy, acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that “the director was born in 1946, and that any references to 1947 are incorrect,” the paper reported. “But they both refused to explain why Spielberg never corrected it, or why he lists it incorrectly in documents such as his driver’s license.” Grossman told the paper, “I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe he didn’t care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.”
    *
    C OULD Spielberg, as Farber and Green suggested, simply have been lying about his age all those years in order to make himself seem even more of a wunderkind than he really was? Or was there another reason for his obfuscation, one that, as Hoffman alleged, involved “a deliberate and outrageous lie perpetrated by defendant Spielberg in a calculated and malicious scheme to avoid his legal obligations”?
    Spielberg was a genuine novelty when he arrived in Hollywood. The movie industry at that time “was still a middle-aged man’s profession,” he has recalled. “The only young people on the [Universal] lot were actors. It was just the beginning of the youth renaissance.” Spielberg already had learned some valuable lessons about publicity during his teenage years, when he was hailed as a