George Lucas: A Biography

With a business and a family to run, George Sr didn’t go to war. Instead, ever the horizontal man, he deepened and widened his niche in Modesto. In shipbuilding, aircraft production, munitions manufacture, prefabricated housing, petrol and rubber production, food growing and canning, and, not least, film production, California led the rest of the Union. Both those wunderkinder of World War II’s construction industry, shipbuilding king Henry Kaiser and Howard Hughes, his aeronautical counterpart, operated from the state. ‘For tens of millions,’ writes social historian William Manchester, ‘the war boom was in fact a bonanza, a Depression dream come true.’

In 1945, when George Jr was eight months old, the Lucases’ fourth and last child, Wendy, was born. Two pregnancies so close together severely strained Dorothy’s health. She was never well again, and for the rest of George’s childhood the Lucas house, like Ramona Avenue itself, lived in shadow. Dorothy spent long periods in hospital, suffering from elusive internal disorders. Her doctors diagnosed pancreatitis, but later removed a large stomach tumor. Georgie and his sisters were brought up mostly by Mildred Shelley, known as ‘Till,’ a businesslike housekeeper who moved from Missouri to look after the family, and who became a fixture of the Lucas household.

George Lucas Sr did just as well in the post-war boom and the expansive business climate under Eisenhower as he had during the war. Like Ike, he became a devoted golfer; and he was a pillar of the local chamber of commerce and the Rotary, for both of which his father-in-law served as long-time president. The most doting of grandfathers, Paul Bomberger was around at Ramona Avenue most weekends with his 16mm camera, recording the progress of his three daughters and his diminutive grandson: watchful, silent, and tiny – only thirty-three pounds and three feet seven inches tall at six years of age – but with a reservoir of nervous energy which most of the family believed he inherited from his mother’s brother Robert, who was also short and feisty.

Georgie’s inquisitive look was accentuated by the Bombergers’ trademark protruding ears. His were so prominent that his father contemplated having the fault corrected surgically. Instead, the family doctor persuaded him to tape back the more protruding ear for a year. With childhood memories of lice infestation, George Sr insisted on having his son’s head shaved every summer. ‘It didn’t matter to us,’ says Lucas’s childhood friend John Plummer, ‘but George was humiliated.’ In his first feature, THX1138, Lucas would show a future repressive society in which everyone’s head is shaved.

When George was nine, the fiancé of his oldest sister Ann died in Korea, a loss which affected George deeply: lacking an older brother, he’d co-opted his future brother-in-law into that role. George also recalled a period of existential anguish when he was six. ‘It centered around God,’ he recalled. ‘What is God? But more than that, what is reality? What is this? It’s as if you reach a point and suddenly you say, “Wait a second, what is the world? What are we? What am I? How do I function in this, and what’s going on here?” It was very profound to me at the time.’ At least one other film-maker went through an almost identical crisis at the same age. Woody Allen’s parents recalled that, at age six, their son became ‘sour and depressed,’ setting the scene for his later films.

In 1949 Leroy Morris sold George Sr the rest of the business, retired, and died three days later. Immediately, Lucas moved the store to new premises on I Street, reopening as The Lucas Company. He began specializing in office machines, becoming the major supplier of calculators, copiers and office furniture to Modesto and nearby Stockton. Later he moved to Kansas Avenue as Lucas Business Systems, district agent for the 3M corporation and its products. In his first year of independence he grossed $30,000, a respectable sum for those days. He had built the sort of business any man would be proud to hand on to his son – if his son was interested.

George Jr was not interested, though for a while his father imagined he’d been born for a life of commerce. Georgie impressed everyone with his practical skills, his creativity, energy, seriousness, and persistence. His sisters remember him at two and a half studying workmen making repairs to the house, then finding a hammer and chisel and attacking a perfectly good wall. By the time he was ten, he showed a talent for construction: ‘I had a little shed out back with tools, and I’d build chess sets and dolls’ houses.’ A childhood friend, Janet Montgomery Deckard, says, ‘Georgie made an entire doll house out of a cardboard box for my Madame Alexander doll. The top was missing so you could look down into it. The walls were wallpapered and everything was in proportion to Madame Alexander.’ A quart milk carton became a sofa, which Lucas covered in blue-and-white chintz, and an old gold lipstick tube served as a lamp.

Lucas also built cars – ‘lots of race cars that we’d push around, like Soap Box Derby.’ With his friends John Plummer and George Frankenstein, he seized the opportunity of a new phone line being laid in the area to appropriate the giant wooden spool on which the cable was wound and, with a rickety runway and a home-made car, improvised a rollercoaster. Plummer, whose father knew people in construction, procured lumber and cement. Under George’s direction they created miniature fortifications and landscapes on which, using toy soldiers and vehicles from the Lucas Company, battles could be fought and refought.

A Lionel model-train set, the best in town, wound through the elaborately re-landscaped garden – a gift from the doting Dorothy. George always knew where to go for help with an ambitious scheme. ‘He never listened to me,’ said his father. ‘He was his mother’s pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it.’

With his friend Melvin Cellini, who lived on the next street, George created one of his most complex ‘environments.’ Atmospheric lighting and careful arrangement of props converted the Cellini garage into a haunted house. Kids paid to see it, and there were queues for the first couple of days. George had the idea of encouraging repeat visits by changing the effects periodically. ‘George always was gifted with creative talent and business sense,’ says Cellini. Through Cellini, Lucas also made his first film. Melvin had a movie camera, and they did a stop-motion film of plates stacking themselves up, then unstacking themselves – Lucas’s first experiment in special effects. He never forgot the wonder of it: ‘We were so excited, like a pair of aborigines with some new machine.’

Modesto in general wasn’t a reading town, but comic books were ubiquitous, fanned by the momentum of the war years, when color printing and the demand for propaganda had turned them into an international enthusiasm. John Plummer’s father had a friend who ran a news-stand. Once a month he returned unsold comic books for a refund, but since wholesalers were satisfied with the torn-off covers, the Lucas gang got the books themselves. Georgie’s collection of five hundred comics became the envy of the town, and rather than have drifts of Captain Marvel and Plastic Man litter the house, his father resignedly added shelves to his backyard shed to accommodate it. His sister rescued the comics when George tired of them. Years later, she re-presented them to him. They became the nucleus of a large and valuable collection.

The first TV sets filtered into Modesto in 1949, and the Plummers immediately bought one. Georgie begged his father to do the same, but Lucas refused to allow such a distraction into his house. The Lucases didn’t get their own set until 1954. In their home, as in America in general, radio remained the primary entertainment. Eighty-two per cent of people still tuned in every night. ‘We didn’t get a television set until I was ten years old,’ Lucas recalled. ‘So for the first ten years, I was in front of the radio listening to radio dramas. It played an important part in my life. I listened to Inner Sanctum, The Whistler, The Lone Ranger – those were the ones that interested me.’

But TV couldn’t be stopped. So many people wanted to see the Plummers’ set that Mr Plummer put it in the garage and built bleachers to hold the crowd. George and his friends gathered there to stare at the tiny, bulging, almost circular screen of the old brown bakelite Champion. There was only one station, KRON-TV from San Francisco. It broadcast mostly boxing and wrestling matches, with the occasional cartoon, but the idea of an image piped into one’s own home awed them; they would have watched the test pattern. Lucas went round religiously to the Plummers’ every night at six for Adventure Theater – a twenty-minute episode of an old serial, with a Crusader Rabbit cartoon. Among the serials was Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Lucas never forgot it. Once the Lucases got a set, George sat in front of it for hours, especially during the Saturday-morning cartoon programs, with his black cat Dinky curled round his neck.

Lucas has often cited his early experience of television, but is more reticent about movie-going. ‘Movies had extremely little effect on me when I was growing up,’ he has said. ‘I hardly ever went, and when I did it was to meet girls. Television had a much larger effect.’

In 1955, George made the newspapers for the first time. The Modesto Bee reported that he and Melvin Cellini had launched a kids’ newspaper, the Daily Bugle. Cellini saw the idea on TV and co-opted his friend as star reporter, for reasons not unconnected with the family business: George Sr typed the paper’s wax stencils and ran them off on his office duplicator, though he insisted the kids paid for supplies from their profits.

In August 1955 they published their first daily one-sheet issue, printing two hundred copies. ‘You will get your paper free for two weeks,’ it announced, ‘but then it will cost 1 cent. Papers will be given out Monday to Friday. But this Friday it won’t be out because the press broke down.’ Even with George Lucas as reporter, however, the Daily Bugle didn’t flourish. Although the paper was padded out with jokes and riddles, they had trouble filling its pages with events around Modesto. George’s father had flown the family to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland, which opened in July 1955, and George described a different attraction in each issue, but by the second week even this resource was exhausted. ‘The Daily Bugle stops,’ announced their issue of 10 August. ‘The Weekly Bugle will be put out on Wednesday only. There is the same news.’

That the Bugle went out of business so soon is the oddest thing about it, since everyone who knew Lucas as a child agrees that his persistence and tenacity were prodigious. Once launched on a project, he would follow it through to the end. At eleven, given the job of mowing the lawn once a week to earn his pocket money, he saved his allowance until he had $35, borrowed a further $25 from his mother, and bought a power mower to lighten his task. His father, not recognizing the stringy resilience of his own father and grandfather in his son, was furious. Pushing the old mower round the yard every weekend was a valuable discipline. Getting through the job quickly with a power mower demeaned the lesson.

One could imagine Lucas devoting the same energy to the Bugle as to lawnmowing: hiring kids as reporters and vendors, making the paper a paying proposition, and ending up a professional publisher at fifteen. Though a team player, he would often in later life begin working with some charismatic and forceful individual, then gravitate to leadership, and finally supplant his mentor. Some people have suggested that this was his response to the lack of a sympathetic father, but Lucas’s explanation is more pragmatic: ‘That’s one of the ways of learning. You attach yourself to somebody older and wiser than you, learn everything they have to teach, and move on to your own accomplishments.’ He needed to be both part of a group and in charge of it; otherwise, he lost interest. In childhood, as in adulthood, Lucas belonged with the entrepreneurs who defined ‘teamwork’ as ‘a lot of people doing what I say.’

4 Cars

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.