Spielberg has confirmed elements of this story. He did ask, at some point, to become a formal parental figure in her life, a request that was declined, but he did become her godfather — a role he took seriously enough that it would lead to some of the more memorable interventions of her later adolescence.
In November 1982, Drew Barrymore hosted Saturday Night Live. She was seven years old. She remains, by Guinness World Record confirmation, the youngest person ever to host the program. There is something genuinely remarkable about watching footage of that broadcast: a tiny person, already a polished professional, navigating the logistical demands of a live television production with the composure that most adults struggle to achieve. She was funny. She was comfortable in front of the camera and the audience. She handled the material with a poise that had clearly been developed through professional experience.
She was seven.
The question of what it costs a child to develop that kind of professional poise at seven — what it requires, what it forecloses, what it does to the developmental trajectory of someone who is learning adult professional skills before she has learned many of the things that childhood is supposed to teach — is not a question that the entertainment industry of 1982 was particularly interested in asking. Drew Barrymore was a commodity of enormous value, and the industry’s relationship with valuable commodities of that era was not primarily characterized by protective instinct.
Her subsequent films in the mid-1980s — Irreconcilable Differences (1984), for which she received her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Firestarter (1984), Cat’s Eye (1985) — kept her working and visible. She was, by any professional measure, a success. She was also, by any developmental measure, a child who was navigating circumstances that no child should have to navigate.