Читать книгу George Lucas: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 10

I love things that are fast. That’s what moved me toward editing rather than photography. Pictures that move – that’s what got me where I am.

George Lucas, Los Angeles Times magazine, 2 February 1997

George Lucas at fourteen, in 1958, was not much different to George Lucas forty years later. He had already, at five feet six inches, reached his full height. High-school class photographers habitually stuck him in the front row, where even classmates of average height loomed over him. The clothes his mother bought for him – jeans, sneakers, green polyester sweaters, open-necked blue-and-red-checked shirts with pearl buttons – would become a lifelong uniform.

By then, Lucas had discovered rock and roll. That was by no means typical. In the hit parade of 1958, ballads like ‘It’s All in the Game,’ ‘All I Have to do is Dream,’ and ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ far outnumbered Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ But Lucas raced home to spend hours playing Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, the Platters, the Five Satins. An autographed photo of Elvis adorned his wall. He adopted the personal style that went with rock. His hair grew longer, but no amount of Dixie Pomade could plaster its natural curl into the classic Elvis pompadour. His compromise – undulating waves at front and side, slicked down on top – only called to mind the Dick Tracy villain Flattop.

Lucas’s mood was unsure and often depressed: ‘I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant. It was just … frightening. I remember that I was unhappy a lot of the time. Not really unhappy – I enjoyed my childhood. But I guess all kids, from their point of view, feel depressed and intimidated. Although I had a great time, my strongest impression was that I was always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.’ In short, he shared the fears and anxieties of every imaginative child, but did not suffer the traumas associated with the break-up of his family or the loss of a loved one – emotional disturbances experienced by many of the people with who he would later work. Steven Spielberg’s parents were divorced; Paul Schrader’s Calvinist family forbade most secular diversions, including the cinema.

Thomas Downey High was the more modern of Modesto’s two high schools. With its echt-Californian frontage in modified fifties art deco, set well back from the road in wide playing fields, it was an agreeable place to spend one’s time; but Lucas took no pleasure in it. ‘I was never very good in school,’ he says, ‘so I was never very enthusiastic about it. One of the big problems I had, more than anything else, was that I always wanted to learn something other than what I was being taught. I was bored. I wanted to enjoy school in the worst way and I never could. I would have been much better off if I could have skipped [the standard curriculum]. I would have learned to read eventually – the same with writing. You pick that stuff up because you have to. I think it’s a waste of time to spend a lot of energy trying to beat education into somebody’s head. They’re never going to get it unless they want to get it.’

His sister Wendy would get up at 5 a.m. and go through Lucas’s English homework, correcting the spelling, but she couldn’t be there to help in the classroom. Another Modestan who graduated from Downey a few years after Lucas remembered the battery of tests inflicted by the teachers:

Some liked ‘big’ comprehensive tell-me-everything-you’ve-learned-this-semester tests, and others preferred exams that covered materials since the previous exam in the class. Some classes had quizzes on a weekly or intermittent basis. Others would have weekly or twice/thrice weekly assignments (essays, math homework, book reviews, stuff for art portfolios, language assignments) that would be more cumulative, requiring fewer exams for the teacher to evaluate your progress. I suspect, if George Lucas had a D average, he was constantly late on a lot of assignments and papers […] Either that, or he didn’t ‘buckle down’ and learn. Or he had/has an undiagnosed learning disability that made it difficult for him to complete the assignments, irregardless of his intelligence.

Lucas’s one aptitude was art. At home, he drew elaborate panoramas, and labored over hand-crafted greeting cards. ‘I had a strong interest even in high school in going to art school and becoming an illustrator,’ he says, ‘but my father was very much against it. Said I could do it if I wanted to, but he wasn’t going to pay for it. I could do it on my own.’ Teachers were no more encouraging. Schoolmate Wayne Anderson remembers the art teacher snapping, ‘Oh, George, get serious,’ when she found he’d ignored the subject assigned and had instead sketched a pair of armored space soldiers.

When he was fifteen, George’s life underwent a fundamental disturbance. Modesto was spreading as fruit-growers sold their orchards for building lots, and planted less fragile and labor-intensive crops. In 1959, George Sr bought thirteen acres under walnut trees at 821 Sylvan Road, on the outskirts of town, and moved his family into a ranch house on the property. George loathed his new home, which cut him off from all his friends. Until he could get his driver’s license and, more important, a car, he was a prisoner. When school ended each afternoon at 3 p.m., he rode his bike or took the school bus home, went straight to his room and spent the hours before dinner reading comics and playing rock’n’roll. Emerging, he’d eat in silence, watching the family’s Admiral TV, which, fashionably for the time, sat on a revolving ‘Lazy Susan’ mount that swivelled through 360 degrees. After that, it was back to his room again. Hoping to revive his son’s interest in construction, Lucas Sr designed a large box, with a glass top and front, in which he could continue to create his imaginary battlefields. He gave him a 35mm camera for his birthday, and turned the house’s second bathroom into a dark room. But while George fitfully pursued these enthusiasms, his heart was no longer in them. He was fifteen – in America, the age when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of wheels.

When America went to war, the car industry was one of the first to be militarized. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. By February 1942, every automotive assembly line in America had been turned over to tanks. The government impounded any cars Detroit had in stock, and doled them out to the military and to people in protected occupations. By 1945, the supply of new cars was down to thirty thousand – three days’ worth by 1939 rates of sale. The shortage didn’t ease for five years, when the government permitted the importation of a few vehicles from Europe, almost entirely luxury cars like the Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, or Bentley, or, at the other end of the market, the Volkswagen and the Fiat Innocenti and the Autobianchi – the kind of ‘toy’ cars with which Detroit, still committed to the gas-guzzler, refused to soil its hands. (Curt Henderson in American Graffiti drives a clapped-out Citroën Deux Chevaux.) The occasional independent, like Preston Tucker, who tried to build and sell cars in competition with Detroit was ruthlessly put down.

‘If you didn’t have a car back then,’ says Modestan Marty Reiss, ‘basically you didn’t exist.’ Lucas agrees: ‘In the sixties, the social structure in high school was so strict it didn’t really lend itself to meeting new people. You had the football crowd and the government crowd and the society-country-club crowd, and the hoods that hung out over at the hamburger stand. You were in a crowd and that was it. You couldn’t go up and you couldn’t go down. But on the streets it was everyone for himself, and cars became a way of structuring the situation.’

If a kid couldn’t afford a VW or Fiat, he grabbed what he could, and adapted it. Four years of tinkering, repairing and making-do, added to the repair skills expected of kids who often needed to service farm machinery, had turned farm boys into fair auto mechanics. Prewar Detroit made its cars as simply as possible, to standardize spare parts. Two rusting wrecks might be cobbled together into one vehicle. During the war, undertakers could still buy hearses. Ranchers usually got a station wagon, farmers a pick-up. All were ingeniously adapted in the late forties and early fifties.

Surfers liked the long vehicles, ideal for carrying boards, but kids looking for something hot sought out the 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe and the ’47 Chevrolet, which they ‘chopped’ – lowering the roof as close to the hoodline as possible – and ‘channelled’ – dropping the body down between the wheels. Playing with the suspension could make the car look nose- or tail-heavy, or simply close to the ground in general: the ‘low rider’ look that signalled a driver looking for trouble. (In American Graffiti, John Milner reassures a cop that his front end is the regulation 12½ inches above the road.) Fitted with an engine souvenired from some much heavier car, with a ground-scraping new suspension, the low roofline giving the divided windscreen the look of threatening slit eyes, all the chrome stripped off, door handles removed, only the legal minimum of lights retained, and the whole thing repainted yellow, with flames down both sides, Grandpa’s 1932 Ford became that most ominous of post-war cultural artefacts, the hot-rod.

One end of the post-war car world was represented by customizers like George Barris, who turned Cadillacs into lavish display vehicles for Hollywood stars, with lashings of chrome, iridescent and multiple-layered lacquer finishes, and whorehouse interiors upholstered in animal skin, velvet or fur. At the other extreme was Junior Johnson, a North Carolina country boy who dominated the dirt-track circuits of the rural South, winning such a reputation that Detroit and the tire and gas companies began investing in the burgeoning worlds of stock cars and hot-rods.

Long, straight country roads offered the perfect laboratory for testing and perfecting often bizarrely adapted vehicles. The mythology of cars flourished particularly in predominantly white Northern California. Black musicians seldom sang about cars, but white ‘surfer’ groups like Jan and Dean and, particularly, the Beach Boys made them a staple. The latter’s ‘Little Deuce Coupe,’ ‘Shut Down’ and ‘409’ – named for the cubic-inch displacement of a Chevrolet engine – were major hits.

All over Stanislaus County, kids worked on their cars through the week and, on Saturdays, brought them to downtown Modesto, where they took advantage of the one-way system imposed by merchants to make a leisurely tour d’honneur along Tenth Street, across one block, down Eleventh and onto Tenth again.

Lucas said later, ‘When I was ten years old, I wanted to drive in Le Mans and Monte Carlo and Indianapolis,’ but his real interest in cars actually began when he was around fifteen, and became a ruling passion. On any Saturday from 1959 onwards, you could have found him on Tenth Street from around four in the afternoon to well after midnight.

Cruising in Modesto had a lot to do with sex, but, though Lucas claimed he lost his virginity in the back of a car with a girl from Modesto High, the tougher and more sexually active of the town’s two high schools, nobody has ever admitted to being his girl. John Plummer recognizes a lot of Lucas in the inept teenager played by Charles Martin Smith in American Graffiti: ‘There’s so much of George in Terry the Toad it’s unbelievable. The botching of events in terms of his life, his social ineptness in terms of dealing with women.’ His mother said, ‘George always wanted to have a blonde girl friend, but he never did quite find her.’ In Graffiti, Terry, who normally bumbles around on a Vespa scooter, inherits the car of his friend Steve Bolander when Steve goes off to college, and immediately snags Debbie (Candy Clark), the most bubble-headed blonde anyone could desire.

As cruising petered out in the early hours, more aggressive drivers peeled off and headed to the long, straight roads on the edge of town, where they could prove just whose car was the fastest. A mythology grew up around these dawn races, which Lucas celebrated in American Graffiti. In the film, they take place on Paradise Road – a real Modesto thoroughfare, but too twisty, locals agree, for racing. Dragsters preferred Mariposa Drive, Blue Gum Avenue, or, best of all, Rose Lane, where painted lines marked out a measured quarter-mile. The film showed drivers gambling their registration papers – ‘pink slips’ – though this was almost unknown: even a $20 side bet was daring. Most kids didn’t own the cars anyway: ‘You’re racing your daddy’s car tonight,’ was a favorite gibe – used by Harrison Ford as Bob Falfa in American Graffiti when he challenges John Milner. If parents bought a second car for their kids, they normally retained title. Most kids simply cruised in the family Chevy or Ford, the automatic transmissions of which they wrecked in a few months by intemperate ‘peeling out’ at high speed from the kerb, or by racing.

The bad boys of the car culture were the gangs. Modesto already had a hot-car club, the Century Toppers, which went back to 1947 and was led by Gene Wilder, later a prominent professional customizer. A car modelled on his chopped Mercury, the roof so low that the windscreen is barely a slit, features in American Graffiti, but Lucas preferred to confer immortality on a later and raunchier gang, the Faros, archetypal juvenile delinquents who hung out at a burger joint called the Round Table.

In American Graffiti, the Pharaos (sic) and their slow-talking, gum-chewing leader Joe, played by gangling Bo Hopkins, are every mother’s nightmare, in glitzy satin jackets and skin-tight jeans. They kidnap Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and put him through an initiation rite that involves hooking a chain to a police car and ripping out its back axle.

Surviving Faros reject this characterization, and deny charges that they instigated fist-fights or poured gasoline onto roads and set it afire. ‘We never got in trouble,’ insists Ted Tedesco, one of three brothers, all foundation members of the Faros when the gang formed in 1959. To hear the Tedescos and other ex-members like Marty Reiss tell it, the Faros were just decent kids high on the car culture. ‘I don’t think more than five people smoked cigarettes,’ says Reiss. ‘Nobody was on drugs. Any obscenity, including “Hell” and “Damn,” was punished by a swat from the club paddle, as was spinning your tires within two blocks of the clubhouse.’ They’re silent, however, about Lucas’s accusation that though he was never a member, they used him as a stooge, sending him in to enrage other gangs who, when they chased the pint-sized troublemaker down an alley, found themselves facing the Faros armed with bike chains.

Lucas was right, they agree, about initiations, but they deny ever having done anything as drastic as trashing a police prowler. (Lucas insisted ‘some friends’ did try this trick one Halloween, but without the film’s spectacular result: ‘The car just sort of went clunk, and it was really very undramatic.’) The worst a potential member might endure was being rolled through a supermarket on a trolley, dressed only in a diaper, or being blindfolded and forced to eat dogfood, or a live goldfish – and even then, they insist, the fish was replaced by a piece of peach. ‘That was the big, tough club,’ says Reiss, now a respectable local businessman, like most other members. The Faros’ last president, Marty Jackman, even became the local representative of the Sierra Club.

As a teenager, Lucas wanted to join the Faros, or at least win their acceptance. He let his hair grow even longer, fitted silver toecaps to his pointed boots, and wore black Levi’s that remained unwashed for weeks at a time. Nagging his parents finally got him a car, a tiny Autobianchi, nicknamed, when Fiat bought up the company, the Bianchina. It had a two-cylinder engine, hardly more powerful than a motorbike, and with an appalling clatter. Even then, there was a trade-off: George would become the delivery boy of his father’s business.

Lucas was grateful and resentful at the same time. He had a car, but it was barely a car. It had ‘a sewing machine motor in it. It was a dumb little car. What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter.’ Some of his humiliation would pass to Terry the Toad in American Graffiti, forced to bumble about on a Vespa. The deal with his father to work at the store didn’t last long. George was expected to haul large, heavy boxes of paper in the summer heat, then sweep up the store, clean the toilets, and lock up. After a few weeks he had a blazing fight with his father, who fired him and offered the job to George Frankenstein. ‘The damn kid won’t even work for me,’ he told Frankenstein, ‘after I’ve built this business for him.’ Privately, he called his son ‘a scrawny little devil.’ Lucas later said of American Graffiti: ‘In a way, the film was made so my father won’t think those were wasted years. I can say I was doing research, though I didn’t know it at the time.’

Still a few months shy of the date on which he could get his license, Lucas could only drive on the family ranch. Once, trying to make the Bianchina behave like a high-powered rod, he swung its back end into a walnut tree. He got his license after one failure, for forgetting traffic rules, but promptly drove the Fiat so fast that he rolled it at seventy miles an hour going round a bend.

Lucas had the car towed forlornly to Modesto’s Foreign Car Service. Fortunately, his friend John Plummer worked there. Also into cars, he’d rescued and restored an old MG, and offered to help George fix up his Fiat. For weeks, the two boys worked side by side in the garage, which was also the local Renault dealership. After hours, they turned the Fiat into at least an approximation of a lean, mean machine. They cut away the mashed roof entirely, fitted a new low windscreen, and a rollbar. They souped up the engine and put in a silencer, the ominous growl of which belied the feebleness of the motor. Better shock absorbers improved the suspension and minimized the chance of another roll, and Lucas also installed extra-wide professional seat-belts. The Fiat, never very attractive, now looked ungainly and foreshortened – a ‘weird little car,’ in the words of one friend – but George loved it. He had wheels at last, and he was ready to roll.

He began to explore the pleasures of driving fast. He and Plummer raced on an old go-kart track behind the garage. Plummer inclined to heftiness, but George was light, like the Fiat. He found he could take turns faster than larger cars and still not spin out, which made up for his lack of speed on the straightaways. The experience was exhilarating: ‘The engine, the noise, being able to peel rubber through all four gears with three shifts, the speed. It was the thrill of doing something really well. When you drift through a corner and come up at just the right time, and shift down – there’s something special about it. It’s like running a very good race. You’re all there, and everything is working.’

What wasn’t working was everything else. George’s camera lay unused, the environment box his father built him was discarded. His schoolwork limped along at a D+ average, barely high enough to graduate. Worst of all from the perspective of George Sr, he showed no inclination to take over the Lucas Company. ‘I was a hellraiser,’ Lucas conceded. ‘My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. My parents – not my mother: mothers never write off their sons – but my father wrote me off.’ He overstates the case, but not by much. Even when George began his film career, his father was pessimistic. ‘He kept telling me he wanted his son to go into his business,’ recalled a friend, Modesto city councilman Frank Muratore, ‘and didn’t think he would do very well in movies. I recall how sad George [Sr] was about that.’ George Sr confessed later, ‘Frankly, we just didn’t understand George. I’d try to get my point across and he’d just sit there and look at me. I’d just run out of breath. He wouldn’t pay any attention.’

At sixteen, the gap between Lucas and his father seemed an abyss, but over the next twenty years George would become more and more recognizable as the son of a small-town Methodist businessman. ‘It’s sort of ironic,’ he muses about his father, ‘because I swore when I was a kid I’d never do what he did. At eighteen, we had this big break, when he wanted me to go into the business and I refused, and I told him, “There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars … and two, that I will never be president of a company.” I guess I got outwitted.’

Almost as soon as he won his license, George started getting traffic tickets. For the police, hot-rodders were anathema, and trapping them something between a sacred calling and a sport. Most of the local cops were young themselves, had grown up with the low-riders and hot-rodders, and envied their lawless opposite numbers. In More American Graffiti, Lucas brings back Bob Falfa, the rodder defeated by John Milner in the first film, as a California Highway Patrol cop on a motorcycle, booking the people who used to be his rivals. Called into traffic court, Lucas went with his father, who insisted his son get a haircut and wear a suit – the only time anyone ever saw George in collar and tie. Business clothing became the symbol of everything his generation despised: functionaries of all sorts came to be dismissively called ‘suits.’

The car culture thrust Lucas into a new, pragmatic world. All that counted were your skills, your capacity for action. Life wasn’t for reflection: it was for use, like the landscape around Modesto. ‘George has this idea about a used universe,’ says sound engineer Randy Thom. ‘He wanted things in his films to look like they’ve been worn down, rusted, knocked about. He didn’t want things to look brand new.’

It’s not hard to trace this vision to those days in 1960 and 1961 when Lucas kicked around the world of Northern Californian car racing. Plenty of fairgrounds had installed raceways. They staged demolition derbies on weekends, preceded by auto-cross – racing sports and stock cars against the clock. Like hot-rodding, auto-cross was a first step into the pro world of the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR), or Class C sports car competition. Detroit was already taking an interest in what happened at circuits in Stockton, Goleta, Willow Springs, Cotati, and Laguna Seca, just outside Monterey. New tires, new fuels, new engines could be tested to destruction by these rural daredevils, some of whom might make it to the sponsored big time, as had Junior Johnson and Freddie Lorenzen, backed by Chevrolet, Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear. Lucas delved into this world in More American Graffiti, where John Milner, having made his reputation as a hot-rodder, tries to break into big-time drag racing, with its professional teams sponsored by big automotive companies.

The Bianchina was a toy in the high-powered world of auto-cross, but even if Lucas had had a better car, Californian law forbade anyone to race until they were twenty-one. Always the team player, he attached himself to a winner and insinuated himself into his group until he made himself indispensable, much as he would do with Francis Coppola a few years later.

The winner in this case was Allen Grant, a coming sports-car driver whom Lucas met at Laguna Seca. Four years older than Lucas, he had graduated from Downey in 1958 with grades almost as poor as Lucas’s. Now he drove a dazzling Ford Mustang Cobra and was attracting attention from big sponsors. Good-looking, well connected, successful with women, Grant had already embarked on a business career which would make him, for a while anyway, one of the richest entrepreneurs in Northern California.

Grant offered a potent role model. Lucas became his mechanic, and a conveniently light co-driver. He also joined the Ecurie AWOL Sports Car Competition Club, and began editing its newsletter, BS. His drawings of sports cars and caricatures of drivers appeared in BS, and he sold or gave the originals to his friends, including Grant. Through Grant, Lucas began to sense that another life existed outside Modesto; but he wasn’t sure how to exploit this knowledge. He was well into his last year at high school, but didn’t delude himself that his grades would get him into junior college, let alone either of California’s two main universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with its main campus in Westwood, a luxury suburb of Los Angeles, or the University of Southern California (USC), situated in a funkier corner of the city, on the edge of the old downtown area. UCLA, the official state college, required no tuition fees, but its academic requirements were high. USC had lower requirements, but demanded fees.

Lucas and John Plummer pored over college prospectuses. ‘We wanted a school,’ says Plummer, ‘that didn’t have a lot of requirements in math or anything else, but that would let us go into more of the creative side.’ If they didn’t find one, they had more or less decided to go to Europe together, though with Dorothy Lucas in hospital again and three other children to put through school, George Sr showed no inclination to fund such a trip. Nor could he countenance his son going to study in Los Angeles, which he ridiculed as ‘Sin City.’

George persisted. Of the two universities, USC looked the more promising. It even offered a film course, one of the first in the country. ‘In those days, film school wasn’t like it is now,’ says Willard Huyck, the screenwriter who would graduate from USC and, with his wife and writing partner Gloria Katz, script American Graffiti. ‘Nobody knew about it, and they sort of stood outside the door of film school and grabbed you as you walked by, and asked if you’d like to become a film major.’

The USC course included animation and photography, and Lucas wondered if he could bluff his way in with a portfolio of drawings and his skill with a 35mm camera. First, however, he had to graduate from Downey – and with a D average, that was anything but assured. School ‘commencement,’ the end of the academic year, was on a Friday in the middle of June. As the day approached, he still had three ‘incompletes,’ and unless he delivered the papers necessary to finish the coursework, he could fail to graduate.

These things were on his mind when, on a hot Tuesday, 12 June 1962, he drove the Bianchina out of the gate of the walnut ranch and headed for town. His mother was resting, having just returned from another spell in hospital, weak and emaciated: she and her son now both weighed the same, eighty pounds. He’d tried to persuade his sister Wendy to come to the library with him, as she often had before, to help with his spelling and sentence structure, but she preferred to stay by the pool and keep an eye on her mother.

George spent a few hours at the library, but did little work. He would always hate writing, and on a hot day like this, he hated it more than usual. At around 4.30 p.m. he left, and roared the little Fiat back along the road home. He arrived outside his home at 4.50, and swung the car to the left to enter the dirt track leading to the house. He never saw the Chevrolet Impala driven by seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, a classmate from Downey, coming up fast behind him. It tried to overtake just as Lucas swung across the road. The heavier Chevy slammed into the side of the Fiat, level with the driver’s seat, and sent it bounding like a toy. On the third roll, Lucas’s seatbelt snapped and he was thrown clear, flying high into the air before landing with stunning force on his chest and stomach. The car bounced twice more, showering dust and pebbles of safety glass, crashed into a walnut tree at sixty miles an hour, and stuck there, wrapped around the trunk. So great was the impact that the tree, roots and all, shifted two feet.