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They all laughed, but nobody else around them was smiling. They were all staring with an almost hungry intensity as the frail man in the plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers moved toward them.
2 Modesto
If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place that’s furthest from it.
Luke Skywalker, on Tatooine, his home planet, in Star Wars
There is no easy way into Modesto – nor, for that matter, any easy way out.
Most people approach from the south, up Interstate 5, toughing out the flat emptiness of the San Joaquin, the ‘long valley’ John Steinbeck made famous in his stories of rural life in the twenties and thirties. Then, as now, this was fruit and vegetable country, the kitchen garden of California. Orchards, geometric patches of dense, dark foliage, interlock with fields of low, anonymous greenery which only a farmer would recognize as hiding potatoes, beets, beans. Occasionally, some town raises a banner against mediocrity – ‘Castroville, Artichoke Capital of the World!’ – but the norm is self-effacement, reticence, reserve.
Zigzagging among the fields, a great irrigation canal, wide as a highway, delivers water from lakes set back in the hills. No boats move on its surface, no kids fish from the concrete banks, no families picnic on its gravelled margins. This water, fenced off from the fields and the highway behind chain link, isn’t for leisure but, like everything else here, for use.
Modesto sits on almost the same parallel of latitude as San Francisco, but there any similarity ends. Californian or not, this is a Kansas town set down twelve hundred miles west. Even more than for most places in California, the people here are relative newcomers, migrants from the midwest and the south who fled the dust storms of the twenties and the farm foreclosures that followed.
Laid out flat as a rug on a landscape without a hill to its name, Modesto’s sprawl of ranch-style homes and flat-roofed single-story business buildings is divided as geometrically as Kansas City by a grid of streets, in turn cut arbitrarily by railway tracks. Splintered wooden trestles spanning gullies choked with weeds and the rusted hulks of Chevies and Buicks indicate the high tide of rail in the forties, but traffic still idles patiently at level crossings while hundred-car freight trains clank by.
A garage or a used-car lot seems to occupy every second corner – in farm country, anyone without a car might as well be naked – but one sees almost none of the Cadillacs, Porsches, even Volkswagens common in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pick-ups, trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles predominate, many of them old but mostly well-tended. Cars here aren’t playthings or success symbols, but farm machinery.
In so flat a landscape, anything resembling a skyscraper looks like insane audacity. The town’s one modern hotel, the Red Lion, twenty stories tall and stark as a wheat silo, respects scale as little as a chair-leg planted in a model-train layout. Building the Red Lion broke Allen Grant, the overambitious Modesto businessman who financed it. Defaulting on his loans, he sold out to a chain. Locals recount this cautionary tale with implicit disapproval of his recklessness. In Modesto, it’s the horizontal man who’s respected, not the vertical one. If he wanted to erect something, why not a mall? When Grant used to race sports cars, his mechanic and co-driver was George Lucas.
Appropriately, Modesto’s monument to its most successful son barely lifts its head higher than George Lucas’s five feet six inches. At Five Points, where the narrow downtown streets coalesce into McHenry, a ribbon development of shopping malls and parking lots, a small wooded park next to an apartment block shelters two bronze figures. They loiter against the forequarter of a ’57 Chevy, they and the car both cast from metal with the color and buttery sheen of fudge sauce. Toffee-colored Jane perches on the fender, ankles crossed, absorbed in mahogany Dick who, earnestly turning towards her, describes his latest triumph on track or field – it’s implicit that nothing which happened in class could remotely interest this couple. What they most resemble is an image from the Star Wars trilogy: Han Solo, frozen in carbonite to provide a bas relief for the palace of Jabba the Hutt.
A slab of green marble set into the sidewalk and incised in gold footnotes the figures:
GEORGE LUCAS PLAZA
The movie remembrance of Modesto’s past, ‘American Graffiti,’ was created by the noted film-maker, George Lucas, a Modesto native and a member of the Thomas Downey High School Class of 1962. This bronze sculpture, created by Betty Salette, also entitled ‘American Graffiti,’ celebrates the genius of George Lucas and the youthful innocence and dreams of the 50s and 60s.
The ritual that inspired American Graffiti no longer takes place: large signs specifically indicate ‘No Cruising.’ In Lucas’s time, drivers circulated on Tenth and Eleventh Streets downtown, exploiting a one-way traffic system introduced by shopkeepers to facilitate business parking. Later, the Saturday-night paseo moved to McHenry, but it wasn’t the same. McDonald’s didn’t provide either telephones or public toilets, so cruisers congregated in the parking lots of shopping malls, fields of naked asphalt lit by towering lamp standards.
Without the sense of community it enjoyed downtown, cruising became a magnet for the area’s rowdies, especially on the second Saturday in June – high school graduation night. In 1988, Modesto’s city council belatedly caught up with its own bandwagon and formalized the June weekend bash as an American Graffiti festival. As many as 100,000 people converged on Modesto to line McHenry and watch the parade of ’32 Deuce Coupes and ’57 Chevies. Deejay Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, was master of ceremonies, an honor he enjoyed six more times, the last when he was Cruise Parade Marshal for the 1994 Graffiti USA Car Show and Street Festival. By then, night-time cruising had been banned after repeated problems with drinking and violence. The 1994 parade took place in mid-afternoon. Jack didn’t approve: ‘My favorite thing was the cruising and me being on the radio, and we don’t do that anymore,’ he said nostalgically. ‘Now they do it in the heat of the day with everyone roasting in their convertibles.’ He longed for the days ‘when the carbon monoxide was so thick you could hardly breathe.’
Meanwhile, Reno and Las Vegas, to the irritation of some Modestoans, launched what they called Hot August Nights, encouraging local owners of classic cars to cruise; and Roseburg, Oregon, launched an annual Graffiti Week. In Los Angeles, Wednesday night was Club Night on Van Nuys Boulevard, in the dormitory suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. After he made American Graffiti, Lucas enjoyed hanging out there. ‘It was just bumper to bumper. There must have been 100,000 kids down there,’ he said. ‘It was insane. I really loved it. I sat on my car hood all night and watched. The cars are all different now. Vans are the big thing. Everybody’s got a van, and you see all these weird decorated cars. Cruising is still a main thread in American culture.’ But by the late eighties, the Van Nuys ritual too had disappeared.
One isn’t surprised at Modesto banning the Cruise. Cruisers did not plant, nor cultivate, nor harvest. They were a plague, like locusts, and all the more loathed for being locally hatched. Most people in Modesto, if they were honest, would admit they were glad the gleaming cars, the horny guys and giggling girls, the throbbing exhausts and squealing tyres had moved on, taking their creator with them.
Future friends of Lucas like Steven Spielberg who, Angelenos to the heels of their fitted cowboy boots, joked about ‘Lucasland,’ which they visualized as a place of hot tubs, meditation, and marijuana, couldn’t imagine how little his birthplace resembled the satellite communities of San Francisco which furnished this fantasy. ‘Southern California ends at Carmel,’ any San Franciscan will tell you. ‘Once you get to Monterey, you’re in Northern California.’ And Modesto? ‘It’s neither. It’s the Valley.’ Their contempt is obvious, and Lucas shared it. When anyone in Los Angeles asked him where he came from, he said evasively, ‘Northern California.’
Nevertheless, the San Joaquin Valley put its stamp firmly on both Lucas and his films. Without the white upper-middle-class Methodist values he absorbed during his upbringing in this most complacent and righteous of regions, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones series, even the more eccentric THX1138, let alone American Graffiti, would have been very different. Indeed, they might not have existed at all, since Lucas, unlike the directors who joined him in building the New Hollywood in the sixties and seventies, is anything but a natural film-maker. Nothing in his character fits him to make films. The process irritates and bores him, even makes him physically ill.
Actors lament his failure to give them any guidance towards character. Harrison Ford, recalling the making of American Graffiti in Modesto, remembers staring for hours out of the windscreen of his car at the camera car towing it. ‘The cameraman, the sound man and the director could all sit in the trunk, and every time I looked at George, he was asleep.’ Cindy Williams, one of the film’s stars, was flattered when Lucas called her performance ‘Great! Terrific!’, until she found he said exactly the same thing to everyone.
It is easy to forget that Lucas, for all his fame and influence, has only directed four feature films in almost thirty years. Repeatedly he’s handed the job to others, supervising from the solitude of his home, controlling the shooting by proxy, as Hollywood studio producers of the forties did. As critic David Thomson remarks, ‘Lucas testifies to the principle that American films are produced, not directed.’
Martin Scorsese agrees that Lucas differs radically from both himself and others in New Hollywood, especially Spielberg. ‘Lucas became so powerful that he didn’t have to direct,’ he told Time magazine. ‘But directing is what Steven has to do.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I love the work the way Patton loved the stink of battle.’
Lucas has less in common with Scorsese and Spielberg than with a producer like Sam Goldwyn, who fed the public taste for escapist fantasy and noble sentiment forty years before him, with films like Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a young critic, the British director Lindsay Anderson met Goldwyn, and was impressed by his conviction that nobody knew better what his public wanted and needed. ‘Blessed with that divine confidence in the rightness (moral, aesthetic, commercial) of his own intuition,’ Goldwyn was, Anderson decided, one of the ‘lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears that it likes to weep.’ Today, the grandchildren of Goldwyn’s audience laugh at Chewbacca the wookiee, cry at the love of Princess Leia for Han Solo, feel their hearts throb in tune to John Williams’s brassy score for Star Wars.
‘He came from a very practical era,’ the supervisor of Stanislaus County said of George Lucas Sr when he died in 1991. ‘There was never a day that I didn’t see George hailing me over. He’d be gesturing with his hands and pointing, and everyone knew that George was on the warpath with the government.’
The Lucases arrived in central California from Arkansas in 1890, after having left Virginia a century before. Before that, the family history is shadowy. ‘Nobody knows where we originally came from,’ George Jr said later. ‘Obviously some criminal, or somebody who got thrown out of England or France.’ The remark wasn’t made out of embarrassment. In a sort of reverse snobbery, his father had taught him that it was better to trace your roots to Billy the Kid than to the Mayflower.
In 1889, Washington and Montana achieved statehood, and California, with its orchards blossoming, its fishing industry thriving and oil being pumped along its central coast, looked like the place to be. Just before World War I, Walton Lucas, an oilfield worker, settled in Laton, a grim little town south of Fresno, where his son George Walton Lucas was born in 1913. George Walton Sr, the film-maker’s father, never lost the wiry look of a frontiersman, nor the sense, reinforced by Methodism, that life and work were two sides of the same coin. ‘He was one of those people who, at the dinner table, always had little talks about those kind of things,’ his daughter Kate recalled. ‘He quoted a lot of Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true.” He said a lot of things like that.’
In 1928, when George Sr was fifteen, his father died of diabetes, a disease whose gene would skip a generation and pass to his grandson. His widow Maud moved into Fresno, shuffling her son from school to school while she looked for work, a commodity in short supply as America’s economy imploded in the worldwide slump. In 1929 they relocated sixty miles from Fresno, to Modesto, and George enrolled in Modesto High School with the idea of studying law. Already convinced by events that the Lord only helped those who helped themselves, he was a serious student, becoming class president in his senior year. His vice president, who also co-starred with him in the senior-class play, was pretty, dark but frail Dorothy Bomberger, daughter of Paul S. Bomberger, a wealthy local businessman who’d built his father’s property interests into a large corporation that also included a seed company and a car dealership. They married in 1933, the year Lucas graduated. He was twenty, Dorothy eighteen.
With a wife to support, Lucas abandoned any thought of a law degree and found work in an old established Modesto stationery store, Lee Brothers. Shortly afterwards, one of the biggest stationery stores in the state, H.S. Crocker in Fresno, offered him a job at $75 a week. The couple moved, but Dorothy missed her family, so they returned to Modesto. With Dorothy’s father in real estate and her uncle Amos in loans, there was no problem finding a place to live. Lucas and Dorothy moved into an apartment repossessed from a defaulting borrower.
Lucas went to work for LeRoy Morris, who owned the town’s oldest stationery supplier, the L.M. Morris Co. Morris had been in business since 1904, and his shop showed it: school supplies and office materials shared space with books, gifts, and toys. With no children of his own, Morris was on the lookout for someone to whom he could hand on the thriving business. Lucas Sr wasn’t backward in making it clear he was a candidate.
‘This is the next-to-last move I plan to make,’ he told his boss. ‘By the time I’m twenty-five, I hope to have my own store.’
‘That’s a very ambitious goal,’ Morris said mildly.
But the young man’s directness had impressed Morris. Two years later he sought out Lucas in the basement where he was shifting boxes, and asked, ‘Are you satisfied with me?’
When Lucas looked blank, Morris continued, ‘If you are, I’m satisfied with you. Do you think we could live together for the rest of our lives? You know, a partnership is like getting married – maybe harder in some ways.’
‘But I have no money,’ Lucas said.
Morris shrugged this off. ‘You’ll sign a note you owe me so much. This business is no good if it won’t pay it out.’
Lucas switched from earning wages to owning 10 per cent of L.M. Morris. His employer’s generosity reinforced his belief in patriarchy. When he had a son, he would put him into the family business too, and help him run it until he was ready to take over.
In 1934 the Lucases had their first child, Ann, and two years later Katherine, always called Kate. The pregnancies sapped Dorothy’s strength, triggering the ill-health that was to haunt the rest of her life, and looking after her two daughters placed a further strain on her frail constitution. Nevertheless, she encouraged her husband, accepting his decision to spend six days a week at the store, and helping with the book-keeping on Sundays. She even got pregnant again, though two miscarriages had convinced her doctors she should not have any more children. Confident of prosperity, Lucas bought a $500 lot on Ramona Avenue, a wide street on what was then the edge of town. With $5000 borrowed from Paul and Amos Bomberger, he built a single-story house at number 530. It was here that his only son, five-pound nine-ounce George Walton Jr, was brought home after his birth on 14 May 1944 – Mother’s Day.
3 An American Boy
I might be a toymaker if I weren’t a film-maker.
George Lucas to critic Joseph Gelmis, 1973
Ramona Avenue has changed little since 1944. Only two blocks long, and twice as wide as more modern streets, it illustrates the generosity of space with which town planners could indulge themselves in those days of unrestricted development. By comparison, its homes, all bungalows, appear cheap – though now, as in 1944, this corner of Modesto exudes prosperity. No sagging campers or rusting wrecks litter the front yards. Hedges are trimmed, flowerbeds weeded. There are few fences, and those that do exist are low enough to step over. In most cases, immaculate lawns run from the kerb right up to the front door, interrupted only by mimosas, four times taller than the houses, that turn the street into a permanent avenue of shade.
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.’
