Spielberg Honored as One Terrific Tree

Steven Spielberg has had his share of honors, but it’s fair to say that the proceedings never began with the question “In what way is Steven Spielberg like a tree?”

Similarities to Barbara Walters interviews notwithstanding, that was the provocative question posed to the all-star crowd by Rabbi Laura Geller during her invocation at the American Jewish Committee’s Sherrill C. Corwin Human Relations Award dinner Thursday night.

The Regent Beverly Wilshire’s grand ballroom was filled to capacity. Clint Eastwood, honoree for 1994, was the warmup. As the rabbi pointed out, Thursday being Tu B’shevat, the Jewish tree-planting holiday, it was an appropriate question.

Geller’s Talmudic response? “How do you bless the perfect tree? You say, ‘May all your saplings--Jessica, Max, Theo, Sasha, Sawyer, Mikaela and Destry--be like you.’ ”

“I loved the rabbi’s blessing of the saplings. . . . Do you believe how many children he has?” asked Oprah Winfrey, as she revved up her keynote address--from her first acting audition for Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” to his guesting on her show to talk about his Shoah Foundation--during which not a jaded soul fled for his limo.

If ever there was an eat-and-run crowd, this could have been it. As Northern Californian George Lucas rather succinctly put it when he arrived on the scene, “I just got off work. Just came down. And when it’s over, I fly back. I have to work tomorrow.”

Local all-stars included Spielberg’s partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, mentor Sid Sheinberg, Lucy Fisher, Jonathan Dolgen, George Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Wise, Morgan Freeman, Leslie Moonves, Howard Weitzman, as well as Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw, in a sexy, black cocktail dress and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-style, thrown-together topknot.

The perfect, well, tree had been sought after by the American Jewish Committee for years. Bruce Ramer, Spielberg’s friend and lawyer of 25 years, who is chairman of AJC’s national board of governors, pushed.

“There’s a kind of reticence and shyness to him. He’d rather direct a film or put together a foundation than be in the spotlight himself,” Ramer said, adding, “Eventually I prevailed.”

“It really means a great deal because Steven truly exemplifies the family values and Jewish values and the human spirit, and these are also the ideals and objectives that we share,” he said by way of explaining what the 91-year-old human relations group is all about.

After watching video clips of the Spielberg oeuvre, the director bounded to the stage and burst out, “Oh, my god. How do I follow me?” Then he pretty much threw out his speech and allowed that he became a humanitarian “when my films stopped eating people. And I pledge I will continue even though in ‘The Lost World’ a lot of people still get eaten.”

As proof, he announced a gift of $500,000 to the AJC through his Righteous Persons Foundation. Then people fled for their limos.