Secret Lives: Steven Spielberg

Close encounters of the cine kind

 

JUST SCAN these popular American movie titles ~ The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse .

Quick! Three guesses! What’s exceptional about this roll call? They come from a single director ~ Steven Spielberg! Isn’t that far out?

His Jewish mother Leah gave birth to Spielberg on December 18, 1946, at Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the next few years, he was followed by three sisters.

Oddly enough, on June 24, 1947, the first UFOs were sighted over the U.S. Equally strangely, Spielberg  ~ like Leah ~ still hates to fly.

Spielberg was a short boy with skinny arms. His beaked nose so embarrassed him that he once taped its tip tautly, hoping it would tilt. He had a piercing gaze, not unlike a bird’s unblinking eyes. He was physically so awkward that there were few school races he didn’t lose.

When Spielberg was four-plus, his father Arnold ~ an electronics engineer ~ built him a crystal set that entranced him. “I don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. I have not read for pleasure in many, many years,” the director confessed, as an adult. Instead his childhood fare was comics, then cartoons, and finally, TV.

At home, the siblings witnessed massive rows, as their parents’ marriage fell apart by degrees. How did Spielberg cope? By stuffing towels under his bedroom door, while constructing model planes.

Spielberg was unusual. Up to 14, he’d often try to hypnotize himself through a mirror reflection. His imagination worked round the clock. He remembers staring at a crack in his bedroom wall in the dark, “One day, the crack opened five inches and little pieces fell out. I screamed a silent scream… I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was stimulating.”

In 1952, Arnold shared two extraordinary experiences with his son. He bundled a blanket-wrapped Spielberg out to watch a meteor shower in an open field. And he took him to a theatre to watch his first ever movie, The Greatest Show on Earth, which was about a circus. Its train wreck was often recreated at the Spielberg home with a toy train set.

You won’t believe this, but little Spielberg used to be terrified of the movies, including Disney cartoons like Snow White and Bambi, perhaps because they were larger than life.

While growing up at Scottsdale, Arizona, Spielberg had eight free-flying parakeets as pets. By the way, he still loves those birds.

During the summer, the family often pitched tent in the Grand Canyon, immersed in trekking and nature study, including scorpion hunts in the Arizona desert.

Spielberg’s first camera was an 8 mm Kodak that Arnold was gifted on Father’s Day. As the family camper pulled out of the driveway, the young cameraman lay flat on his belly, shooting the rotating hubcabs, a glimpse of his future genius. But once Spielberg had mastered the single lens, flip-up viewfinder and 35-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his dad to buy him a three-lens turret camera.

As a Boy Scout of 12, instead of telling a story through still photographs, Spielberg filmed a 3 ½ minute, $8.50 western about a shootout. He raised the funds by whitewashing the trunks of neighbour’s citrus trees at 75 cents each. Other Scouts with plastic revolvers were its stars. The director even persuaded an adult to blow cigarette smoke into a gun barrel, so that the sheriff could thrust a smoking pistol into his holster!

Spielberg earned his Scout badge. “In that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he recalled. He hasn’t looked back since, as we know from our close encounters of the cine kind.

Even today, between shots, guess where you’ll spy Spielberg? Often on a camera crane, playing with a Game Boy! Or immersed in his iPod or iPad, on the sets of War Horse. Does he remind you of someone else? You? 

Secret Lives: J.K. Rowling

 

She cast the Harry Potter spell

 

ARE YOU totally bewitched by Harry Potter? Do you wish you could attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Or even better, do you wish you could step into best-selling author J.K. Rowling’s shoes? 

 But hang on a moment. What do you know of Joanne Kathleen Rowling? How did she grow up to be a wizard with words, who draws you into reading thick books without pictures, away from TV and video games?

Does Rowling think like you, or share in your fantasies? She said in an interview to Time magazine after the publication of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ in 1997, “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to eleven years old. I can remember being a kid and being very powerless and having this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable. I think I have very vivid memories of how it felt to be Harry’s age.”

Born on July 31, 1966, in the tiny English hamlet of Chipping Sodbury, dreamy Joanne loved to play games of pretence, either in her room or in the grassy backyard. Her parents Peter and Anne, both bookworms, read aloud to her from a very young age. “My most vivid memory of childhood is my father sitting and reading ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (by Kenneth Grahame) to me,” she confessed to the Daily Telegraph in London. “I had the measles at the time, but I don’t really remember that. I just remember the book.”

Once her younger sister Di arrived two years later, Joanne invented a constant supply of fantastic stories for her. One was about how Di fell through a rabbit hole, and was fed strawberries by its furry-tailed inhabitants. But Di was upset because, with each re-telling, the story changed. So, Joanne picked up a pencil and paper to write her first rabbit story. She’s been writing ever since.

The young writer continued to devour books at a phenomenal pace. Her favourites included ‘The Little White Horse’ by Elizabeth Gouge, ‘Manxmouse’ by Paul Gallico, and the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. 

When the Rowling family shifted to the small town of Winterbourne, Joanne’s closest buddies were Ian and Vikki Potter, who loved to try her madcap ideas, often dressing up as witches or wizards. “Their surname was Potter,” Joanne later recalled. “I always liked the name.” You do too, don’t you?

When Joanne was nine, discovering the James Bond novels and Jane Austen, the family relocated to Tutshill, by the river Wye. She got into trouble at the local primary school. She fared badly in a fractions test on her first day, so the teacher seated her among the duller students. How did Joanne cope? She studied extra hard until she ensured a seat among the bright stars.

By the time she moved on to Wyedean Comprehensive School, Joanne felt ill at ease with the world. “I was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and rubbish at sports,” she recalled. 

But when she emerged from her shell, she made friends easily enough. In an essay, Joanne confessed, “I used to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories during lunchtime. They usually involved us all doing heroic and daring deeds we certainly would not have done in real life.”

Joanne was soon obsessed by author Jessica Mitford, a human rights and feminist activist who ran away and joined the Spanish Civil War at 19. “I remember reading the book ‘Hons and Rebels’ at age fourteen, and it changed my life,” wrote the Potter author.

She ended high school as the head girl, through she dreaded addressing the whole school.  She played her audience a record on one occasion, to cut down on speaking time. “The record was scratched. It began skipping and played the same line over and over again. Finally, the deputy headmistress came out on stage and kicked it,” Joanne recalled on a website.

Would you have guessed that the creator of Harry Potter had a childhood like this? Not for a zillion Chocolate Frogs or Every-Flavour Beans, I bet.

Secret Lives: Walt Disney

 

(December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966)

The man who invented Mickey Mouse

DO YOU love watching Disney films? Is a visit to Disneyland an adventure you dream of? Do you want to draw cartoons when you grow up?

Walter Elias Disney, who’s made millions of you dream of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and his other characters coming alive, was once a child like you. Born in Chicago in 1901, he grew up on a farm at Marceline in Kansas. At 16, he returned to Chicago to study art.

By 1923, he moved to Los Angeles to unsuccessfully try his hand at films. So, he set up his first cartoon film studio in a garage, but struggled for years to pay his bills. Fame came his way only in 1928, when his short films featuring Mickey Mouse became a hit. Guess who spoke for Mickey? None other than Disney.

As a five-year-old, Walt picked up a farm creature to ride on his own. Guess what it was? Porker, the biggest sow in the herd of pigs on the farm. What a strange charger to choose! Walt leapt onto her back, grabbed the snorting animal by the ears and was carried away on a wild, noisy ride, whooping all the way across the farmyard.

But did Porker enjoy the ride as much as her piggyback rider did? Not at all. Within minutes, the angry sow ploughed into a duck pond and tossed Walt into the mud! Can you imagine Walt’s face when he dragged himself back to the farmhouse to clean up?

Did Walt give up on piggyback rides just because Porker tossed him off? No way. Instead, he took to riding Porker almost every day. He must have been very stubborn. Does he sound like someone you know?

Once, when Walt fell ill, Porker came to the porch of the farmhouse and honked as if her heart would break. She refused to stop until Walt, the patient, was sent out to calm her down. “I never did learn to stay on Porker’s back,” Walt later said. “And I always ended up the same way, covered in duck feathers and mud.”

“I think Porker got as much of a kick as I did,” he added. “She used to stand there in the pond after she’d tossed me in the slime, her curly tail whirling away like a watch spring and her piggy eyes streaming with water and what used to look like tears. Tears of laughter, I always used to think. She just loved throwing me into the mud.” What a comic sight that must have been!

Of course, Walt’s first drawings were of the farm animals ~ Porker, the ducks, chickens and pigeons.

Would you believe it if I told you that one of his farm favourites was a hen called Martha? What made her special? You’ll never guess.

Whenever Walt hollered for her, Martha would appear ~ and lay an egg right on Walt’s palm! Isn’t that cool?

Disney’s Mickey Mouse celebrated his 70^th birthday in 1998. His lisping, twit-brained, often-cranky Donald Duck reached the same landmark more recently on June 10. Billions of us around the globe read Disney books or magazines. Over 25 million people have visited Disneyland to date.

How come? Perhaps because Disney had “that precious, ageless something in every human being which makes us play with children’s toys and laugh at silly things and sing in the bathtub and dream,” as his brother Roy recalls.

Today, when Tokyo has a Disneyland and Paris a Disney theme park, the legend of the man behind Mickey continues to grow.  What would the world’s most original cartoonist, who died in 1966, have said to that? Perhaps just “Aw, phooey! Nothin’ to it,” like the sailor-suit clad snow white duck with outsize eyes and a golden beak that he created.  

 

Secret Lives: Enid Blyton

(August 11, 1897–November 28, 1968)

Beyond the Famous Five

AUGUST 11, 1997. That’s when the world celebrated the birth centenary of one of its most popular children’s writers. An author whose 600-plus books have been translated into 40 languages, including Mandarin. Her name? Enid Blyton!

If you’ve shared high jinks with the twins at St. Clare’s, laughed at Mam’zelle’s accent at Malory Towers, or joined the excitement on the Famous Five’s Island of Adventure, I imagine there’s a question that’s teasing you. What was Blyton like, off the printed page?

First, let’s share a few secrets. Did you know she also wrote under another name? As Mary Pollock. She’d probably come in fourth among all-time best-selling children’s writers ~ behind J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl and the Asterix books. And though Blyton passed away in 1968, her books had sold over eight million copies by 1995.

As a child, Blyton learnt to read very early. She loved the humour of Alice in Wonderland, the thrill-packed Coral Island. She enjoyed Black Beauty and Little Women because she could identify with the ‘real children’ on their pages. Was there a book she disliked? Yes, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which she found cruel and frightening. Do you agree?

At St. Christopher’s School for Girls in England, Blyton ~ who became both the head girl and captain of games ~ left a mark because of the practical jokes she constantly played. She’d plague her teachers and classmates with rubber-and-tin tipped pencils, artificial blots and similar tricks. Her friends admired Enid for her daring. She was the first to have her long plait cut off, to wear her hair shoulder-length.

Enid entered a children’s poetry context at 14 or 15, conducted by Arthur Mee (who compiled the famous Book of Knowledge series). Imagine her glee when Mee wrote to say he would print her verses.

Originally a trained teacher, Blyton told hundreds of stories to her little students. Her stories first appeared the Teacher’s World magazine, until her first novel was published in 1938. Imagine this ~ during the 1940s, she wrote over 30 books a year!

Blyton’s older daughter, Gillian Beaverstock, once said her mother’s vivid imagination was “rather like seeing the whole story on a TV set which was in her mind.” Blyton wrote very quickly, sitting in her garden all summer with her typewriter, while her two cats romped around. For instance, she began The Island of Adventure on a Monday ~ and it was done by Friday! And her mother allowed Gillian to read the adventures of the Famous Five right away.

Where did Blyton’s characters come from? George of the Famous Five was based on a real tomboy named Georgina, while Fatty was sparked by a “plump, ingenious, very amusing boy I once knew,” she recalled.

Did she plot her stories in detail? “Sometimes, when I have finished writing for the day, I think, ‘Good gracious! Poor characters, I simply do not know how they will get out of this situation.’ But the next day ~ hey presto! ~ they resolve their fix in some miraculous way of their own,” she explained in The Big Enid Blyton Book, published in 1961.

Blyton set up four children’s clubs. Her Famous Five Club raised funds for the little Children’s Home in Beaconsfield, which cared for deserted children, while the Busy Bees assisted animal dispensaries. Their members raised funds by washing dishes, doing the shopping, staging junior shows or selling old goods.

Her popularity got Blyton into trouble. During the 1950s and 1960s, British librarians and teacher banned her books because they thought the golliwog in the Noddy stories stood for blacks! As a result, the golliwogs were replaced by goblins in the revised Noddy books of the 1980s.

But no matter how alien the cucumber sandwiches and small-town adventures of her characters appear, Blyton remains one of your favourites, right? I think I spotted a Noddy-style nod in response.

Secret Lives: Leonardo da Vinci

(April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519)

The guise of a genius

WHY ARE some people ticklish? How does it feel to walk on water? Would a fly sound different, if it had  honey on its wings? These and a million other questions constantly buzzed around the brain of one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci.

His 1519 gravestone in France reads: “First painter, engineer and architect of the King.” But in reality, Leonardo packed much more into his life. You’ve probably heard of him as the artist behind the‘Mona Lisa’, the most famous painting in the world, known for its model’s mysterious smile. It’s the pride of the Louvre museum in Paris. Was Mona Lisa the real Lisa La Gioconda, a banker’s wife? Was she trying not to laugh at the comedians Leonardo hired to keep her from getting bored while he did her portrait? Nobody knows for sure. But we do know that the artist held on to the portrait all his life.

Leonardo is equally famous for his wall painting of ‘The Last Supper’ in the Italian city of Milan, depicting Christ and his 13 disciples, which took him three years to complete. The 1497 masterpiece still attracts long and winding queues of tourists at the Church of della Grazia, which houses it. Each face looks human enough to touch, each shadow is scientifically placed.

The work has missed destruction by inches time and again. During the French Revolution, Napoleon’s soldiers threw stones at it. A bomb landed close by during World War II. But 500 years of grime has now been removed, inch by inch, in a recent restoration project that took 20 years. Aren’t we lucky it’s still real for us?

If Leonardo hadn’t been an artist, he would have excelled at other skills ~ as a city planner, an architect, an engineer, an inventor, a botanist, an astronomer, even a physician. How come? Because his ever-curious mind darted to and fro in his detailed notebooks, which include 5,000 pages of drawings. These take in flying machines, still on display at Milan’s scientific museum, named after Leonardo. Are there other surprises on these pages? Sure. Sketches of the first cars, bicycles, machine guns, tanks, and even moveable bridges. Wasn’t he amazing?

Very little is known about Leonardo’s childhood, except that he was born in the Italian town of Anchiano in 1452. His father was a lawyer, his mother an unschooled peasant. As a teenager, he was sent to learn painting from Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo, who drew angelic faces better than anyone else, so stunned his master that Andrea is said to have thrown down his own brushes and sworn never to paint again.

Neighbours thought Leonardo strange because of his undying curiosity. He dissected corpses from prison executions or from shelters for the homeless to study the human body, though this was banned by the Catholic church. They thought he was influenced by the devil because he wrote left-handed! Leonardo puzzled them further by writing his notes backwards, to keep them private. Wasn’t he cool?

Leonardo was a handsome man with a carefully curled beard, who wore short, rose-coloured robes ~ unlike the long ones others donned. He hated to have paint stains on his fingers and was always clean, in an age when other people didn’t bathe much.

While painting, he often forgot to eat for over a day. When he did, he’d have his favourite, a vegetable and macaroni soup called minestrone. And guess what? He was a vegetarian, aeons before it became fashionable!

Leonardo loved animals and often bought birds in the market. Did he cage them at home? No, he set them free, so that he could study their flight. The thought of flying kept him in high spirits (this was years before the Wright brothers), so did his drawings for a submarine.

While he worked for the royal courts in Italy and France, Leonardo was popular at parties, where he’d rattle off riddles on the spur of the moment. He rode horses, sang well, and even invented his own musical instruments. Once, he brought a strange guest to a party, which made others scream in fright. They imagined it was a dragon, but it was just a large lizard!

Since he never married, Leonardo once adopted a peasant boy for 26 years. He nicknamed the lad, who even stole from his patron, Salai (devil). Whenever Leonardo moved between courts, all he took with him were his notebooks, the ‘Mona Lisa,’ and Salai. Now, isn’t that called travelling light?

Like many of us, Leonardo hated to wake up early. When he had to, he came up with a water-operated alarm clock. Another creation of the wonder man?

Though Leonardo was an awesome sculptor too, most of his work was shattered to smithereens by invading armies. Imagine what we’ve been deprived of! He enjoyed experimenting with new ways of painting. He even started on a fresco or wall painting by an untried method he’d read about. To his horror, soon his colours melted into one another. He hadn’t read the fine print: Don’t try this on walls!

When Leonardo died in 1519 near Amboise in France, his last patron ~ the king of France ~ was shattered. The master’s pupil Francesco da Melzo, who was with the 67-year-old genius when he died, wrote to Leonardo’s half-brothers:  “It is a hurt to anyone to lose such a man, for nature cannot again produce his like.”

The world hasn’t seen another one-man wonder like Leonardo da Vinci since. Isn’t that incredible?

Secret Lives: Herge

(May 22, 1907 – March 3, 1983)

The truth about Tintin

DO YOU feel you can never have enough of Tintin? Do you wish you were in  Snowy’s place, so that you could share every single adventure with the young Belgian reporter and globetrotter?

Did you know that when Belgium minted a limited edition of 50,000 silver 10 euro coins to mark Tintin’s 75^th birthday in January 2004, it was sold out within hours? The Royal Dutch Post’s release of Tintin stamps on October 8, 1999, vanished just as quickly.

But who created Tintin? What was special about the Belgian artist Herge, the brain behind your favourite comic book, which has sold over 200 million copies in 50-plus languages?

Herge’s real name, I must confide, was Georges Prosper Remi. Just look at his pseudonym hard. It is made up of his initials in reverse ~ or R.G., instead of G.R.! Clever, right?

Born on May 22, 1907, in Belgium, he is considered the best ever European comic book artist. He is known for his clear line style, which others often aped.

You’d never guess, would you, that Tintin had his beginnings in Herge’s early experiences as a Catholic and a boy scout? The character grew out of Totor, whom the artist invented for the scouting magazine, Le Boy Scout Belge!

It was on Jan. 10, 1929, that the character in tan pants first went into print as ‘Tintin au pays de Soviets’ (yes, in French!) in The Petit Vingtieme, the youth supplement of a Belgian daily. Like you, European readers soon grew addicted to him

Oddly enough, Herge has created other comic characters, including Quick et Flupke and Jo, Zette et Jocko. But Tintin is the one his fans know him by best. During  World War II, Herge found himself in trouble because his political views differed from those in power in Europe. So, he had to continue Tintin in Le Soir, a magazine that the Germans supervised.

What was wrong in the political sense with Tintin, Calculus, Haddock, Thomson and Thompson? To begin with, Herge was said to be a racist. Some felt his non-European characters were caricatures. But beginning with ‘The Blue Lotus’ (1934), which was set in China, Herge began to research his themes deeply, thus clearing some myths about the Chinese. Similarly, ‘Tintin in America’ (1932) ran into such deep trouble that Herge had to re-colour some black characters white!

By the time Herge died in 1983, Tintin was a household word. By then, his studio had trained artists like Bob de Moor, Jacques Martin, Roger Leloup and Edgar P. Jacobs, each of whom launched their own comic series.     

Herge, who was a workaholic, created 24 Tintin books, which inspired five films. Since the 1980s, Steven Spielberg has owned the rights to produce a trilogy of live action Tintin films. Finally, in 2011, the first of the films on Tintin appeared on screen.

Secret Lives: Rabindranath Tagore

(May 7, 1861 to August 7, 1941)

 Where the mind is without fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake…

DO YOU remember Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet who won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for Gitanjali? He was the first Asian to be so honoured. Recall his flowing grey mane and smiling eyes? But he’s equally famous for the unusual gurukula or school he set up in 1901 at Shantiniketan, West Bengal. Besides, he’s the only poet ever whose songs were chosen as the national anthems of two countries ~ India and Bangladesh. Isn’t that remarkable?

What shaped the talent of this boy, named Rabi by his family? He was born on May 7, 1861, the second youngest of the nine sons and six daughters of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. Can you imagine life within a large joint family?

Rabi was never lonely. Not even when his infant brother died, leaving the future poet as the baby of the family. His closest companion was his older sister’s son, Satya.

The Tagore ancestral home lies in Kolkata’s Jorasanko. It often held over a thousand people in its inner courtyard for musical or theatrical gatherings. Rabi later wrote, “I do not remember a time when I could not sing.” No wonder his songs, or Rabindra Sangeet, are still so popular.

The teeming Tagore children faced a daily stream of tutors, each armed with a cane.  Thieir gruelling routine included wrestling and drawing. But Rabi was most fascinated by the skeleton-based anatomy lessons by Aghor Babu, the science teacher.

At five or six, Rabi often chose to play alone. He’d pick a large room, surrounded by verandahs with straight, tall railings, which he pretended were his students. The make-believe teacher would hit each railing with a cane to ensure discipline. Or else, he would stealthily creep into an old palanquin that rested in the mansion. With its curtains drawn, his imagination whisked him away to mysterious lands on impossible adventures.

Rabi hated his first school, the Oriental Seminary, where he was enrolled in 1868. If he didn’t do his lessons, he had to stand on a bench with his slate on his head. Isn’t that awful? He was often caned for daydreaming. Rabi spent hours looking out of the window at the blue sky, the leaves on the trees or the bright flowers. Perhaps that’s what inspired Shantiniketan, where lessons are held under shady trees, without classrooms.

Rabi missed his saintly Baba, Debendranath, who lived at Dalhousie, in the Himalayan foothills. At 11, the youngster took a long train trip to visit his father, despite Satya’s terrifying stories of how the vehicle would toss Rabi out of the window as it jerked along! After a cold morning bath, Debendranath would teach him Sanskrit, which Rabi loved. At dusk, Rabi’s Baba would point out the stars and planets during long walks. 

Debendranath asked absent-minded Rabi to keep their daily household accounts. Rabi’s notebook showed sums left over, even when it had all been spent! Sounds familiar to you?

Rabi was next sent to Kolkata’s Normal School. By this time, his older brothers were proud of Rabi’s poetic talent. Intrigued, the school principal made up two lines of poetry, challenging Rabi to complete the verse. He did, with ease and perfect sense.

As an adult, Rabi often doodled over unwanted words when his poems proved stubborn, until the page looked like a fantastical picture. These drawings are now at Shantiniketan.  In time, he came to be regarded as a father of modern Indian art.

And when his great-grandnephew spent a vacation with Rabi at Shantiniketan, he was promised a special treat for his constant colds. Guess what it was? Garlic ice-cream!

He was just 14 when he read out his poems at the Hindu Mela in Kolkata. That’s when the world first heard of Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who was proud to be an Indian. Does he sound like someone you’d like as a friend?