by Ron Suskind
It’s almost as though Cornelia and I are not there. The pointed questions fly fast; some responses are in professional jargon. You can almost hear the whir of collected consciousness—six diverse experts, with one hundred years of experience with autism spectrum disorder patients between them.
“It’s not so much how he’s used the movies to help with academics,” Suzie says. “It’s how he’s used them to guide emotional growth, which, of course, is the bigger and more complex challenge.”
Everyone nods to that.
Dan cites some surprising recent insights Owen has channeled, of course, through various voices: Rafiki on why change is so hard and how we manage it, Jiminy Cricket on the meaning of conscience, and how to converse with that “voice in your head.”
Last week, Dan recalls, he had asked Merlin how would he advise a boy like Owen who was concerned with high school ending, and what would come next. “So, as Merlin, he says, ‘Listen, boy, whistle the graduation song, a little bit every day. By the time the big day comes you’ll be fine.’”
At that point, they all seem to notice that Cornelia and I are in the room.
Bill Stixrud turns to me, and says, “Have you ever thought about writing a book, The Wisdom of Disney, as Told by Owen Suskind to His Father.”
I’m about to respond in full, but I don’t. I just say in a polite way. “Yes, well, we’ve thought about it.”
That phrase stopped me: the wisdom of Disney.
Then I look around the room, face to face, take in everyone’s gaze, and murmur, “I’m not sure if the wisdom is with Disney, though.”
Of course, we’d thought about a book from time to time, but not until Owen was old enough, and able enough, to fully participate. And certainly not about Disney being a repository of wisdom.
But I think about the meeting—and that question—many times in the next few days, especially that moment of overhearing, when everyone was talking as though Cornelia and I weren’t there. It’s the kind of thing you live for as a reporter—experts earnestly trying to assess a problem and maybe finding a solution among themselves; the presence of a reporter not corrupting the dialogue. And even with their collective century of experience, and long history with Owen, no one in the room could quite figure out what they’d been seeing.
But Cornelia and I knew. It’s not about the wisdom of Disney. It’s about family—sometimes wise, often not—and about the power of story in shaping our lives. Disney provided raw material—publicly available and ubiquitous—that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines.
Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable, and legend, that Disney lifted and retooled, just like the Grimm Brothers did, from a vast repository of folklore. Countless cultures have told versions of Beauty and the Beast, which dates back three thousand years to the Greek’s “Cupid and Psyche,” and certainly beyond that: these are stories human beings have always told themselves to make their way in the world. It’s how people embrace these archetypal tales, and use them to find their way—that’s where the wisdom lies. This is just one example.
The paradox is how to make our example useful to other families and other kids, whatever their burning interest—that’s what Team Owen seems to be talking about. How does this work? Is there a methodology? Can it be translated from anecdote to analysis, and be helpful to others in need. After all, they’re professionals; this is what they do: see parents and kids year after year pass through their offices, looking for answers. And when the day is done, they go home to their own kids.
But there’s no doubt that, in terms of autism, Disney stumbled into a strange, unexpected place. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and scenes should be so vivid and clear that they can be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.
The latest research that Cornelia and I came across shows that a feature of autism is a lack of traditional habituation, or the way we become used to things. Typically, people sort various inputs, keep or discard them, and then store them; our brains thus become accustomed to the familiar. After the third viewing of a good movie, or tenth viewing of a real favorite, you’ve had your fill. Many autistic folks, though, can watch that favorite a hundred times and feel the same sensations as the first time. Along the way, though, they’ll often look for new details and patterns in each viewing—so-called hyper-systemizing—an urge that underlies special abilities for some of those on the spectrum. In a way, it’s not so different from a celebrated musician spending a week working on a few chords or a filmmaker endlessly reviewing a short scene. In the autism world, this is often referred to as “over-learning;” yet in the arts, an expression of the old William Blake standard, “to see the world in a grain of sand…and eternity in an hour.” Is that distinction a value judgment, borne of a narrow perspective? What is indisputable: lots of ASD kids have bonded with Disney movies. In recent years, at least in our circles, ASD families have been among the most regular—one might say, tireless—visitors to Walt Disney World. Some have even relocated to the Central Florida area.
Then there’s the issue of ubiquity. Disney’s success means everyone, worldwide, has watched these films. That’s a great equalizer, that eventually spurred me, Cornelia, Walt, and every one of Owen’s therapists to pose an identical question: How can he match and then surpass the deepest insights we can summon watching these very same movies? That’s why the many ways he used Disney—turning it into both an analytical tool kit and emotional paintbrush—might have resonance. It shows comparative capability. And if he can do it there, then where else?
And he’s just one kid. While our household may not be conventional, with a pair of certifiably insane parents and a fixation on stories—all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations—we have no doubt he shares a basic neurological architecture with autistic spectrum folks everywhere. At the time our therapists are meeting in the living room, in 2010, there are two million autistics in the United States, five hundred thousand of whom are children, with the total expected to reach four million by the end of the coming decade. Beneath the oft-cited incidence rate of one in eighty-eight children, is a more startling one. Due to the four-to-one prevalence in boys over girls: it’s one in every fifty-four boys, a number with few epidemiological precedents. Down syndrome, by comparison, occurs in one of every 691 children. And worldwide, autism incidence rates are surprisingly uniform. Globally, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Showing how affinity reveals underlying capability may, if properly presented, lead to a reappraisal of possibility. Namely, what is possible in how so many people might be helped to discover productive lives. The alternative is federal support that runs approximately $50 billion a year in 2010, and is sure to rise exponentially.
That’s more or less the calculus that’s secretly running through my head in the days after our therapist meeting. That is, until Cornelia and I go out on a date, about a week later, to talk seriously, for the first time, about it. A book.
I’m figuring out how she’ll respond, so I try to pre-empt it. I say a book would mean a convergence of competing and neatly separated parts of our lives—professional and personal, public and private—into one big headlong, heartfelt mess. She nods. Of course, she knows all this. We sit at a table in a Washington, DC, restaurant, as I go on and on about these lines being crossed, until she interrupts my monologue: “So, what’s wrong with that?”
She looks at me, squarely. “It might help people, like we needed help.”
All I have to do is nod.
It’s 1:40 P.M. on March 6, 2010, a few days before Owen’s nineteenth birthday, and we’re in the midst of giving him his present: a day in New York City, seeing the sights, and
meeting his Kennedy aunts for a pizza dinner immediately following the afternoon matinee of Mary Poppins.
It starts in twenty minutes. We’re inside a cheek-to-jowl scrum, inching forward across the ornate foyer of the New Amsterdam Theatre in Times Square. Cornelia and I—with Owen between us—are thinking the same thing: we’ve been here before. When we saw Disney make its initial mid-1990s foray onto Broadway, we figured this would be heaven for him. A play is a conversation of sorts between actors and audience. Owen was in a dense internal dialogue with his favorite characters, almost like he was staging little plays in his head. Onstage, they’d bring his beloved movies to life. Perfect fit.
This hypothesis was first tested with Beauty and the Beast on Broadway in 1996. As Belle began singing her opening number, Owen, then five, slipped into a thrashing panic, like he was drowning. I hustled him out. Cornelia stayed with Walt in their seats, along with her two sisters and all their kids. We were befuddled and, at $100 a ticket, dispirited. We figured this was something all the cousins could do together, a kind of group activity of shared enthusiasms, where Owen wouldn’t be the outlier.
After he calmed down in the lobby, I held him up to a small window in the swinging door at the back of the theater. Through that glass frame, about the size of a portable-TV screen, he could watch the distant characters of Beast and Belle, Cogsworth and Lumiere dance about, but with the sound on mute. I held him up, nose to the glass, until my arms began to shake.
At first, we thought it was the noise—that it was just an issue of it being too loud in the theater: a matter of what autism specialists call overstimulation.
In the coming few years, we began to realize it ran deeper than that. These movies, our allies—providing a passage to our son—had an independent power over him. They were engaged with him in an elaborate dance; you had to know their moves, to keep a flying elbow from bloodying your nose. For Owen, the movie Beauty and the Beast was a big, comforting buddy, a relationship built steadily across dozens of viewings and one he relied upon. To suddenly have an impostor burst onto the theatrical stage was like flipping him into a tornado—a profound loss of control. What was being flung about: his precisely crafted relationships with the movie’s animated characters, exactly as they appeared in the movie.
Round two of this perceptual experiment—movies vs. plays; autistics vs. neuro-typicals—occurred right here, at the New Amsterdam, a grand old show house that Disney took over in 1997 to cap the city’s renovation of Times Square. They signed a ninety-nine-year lease for the theater and poured millions into a restoration, giving the place back its beaux arts grandeur.
But people don’t come for the gold leaf cornices. They come for a show, and with The Lion King, Disney finally cracked the code—namely, how to make an animated blockbuster into a theatrical blockbuster. Beauty and the Beast, very closely matching the movie, did well commercially if not critically. With Lion King, they decided to make the play a truly original production, similar in plot, themes, and characters, but different in almost every other way. The play’s director, Julie Taymor, originally a puppeteer, designed ten-foot tall, human-operated puppets of elephants and giraffes to walk the aisles; the actors moved easily beneath shoulder scaffolds of their animal characters; a stronger African flavor, in songs and dialogue, gave the play a feel of authenticity.
Critics and audiences loved it—not all that common—and Owen loved it, too. At least he did when we all saw it in the spring of 2002 and for a few months afterward. When we saw him start to retreat, we could begin to understand why. It wasn’t a perceptual collision, a pileup, like with Beast; more of a steady push and shove across months, as the play struggled to hold its ground alongside the movie. By then we’d come to see how even slight alterations from a beloved movie were, to Owen, like nails on the blackboard. He hated knockoffs, whether badly drawn versions of his favorite characters or cinematic sequels, like Disney’s clunky follow up to Aladdin, The Return of Jafar.
At that point, though, he had also acquired more flexibility, and had grown more practiced at moving between his parallel planes—the Disney world and the real world—especially in how he took the movies with him into the wider world. For instance, when Owen himself acted in a play like the character Br’er Rabbit or in James and the Giant Peach, there wasn’t a problem—he was just playing out the movies running continuously through his head on the plane of reality.
A play, though, played by others—neither the original movie nor his expressed reality—was intrusive, wedging itself between those parallel planes. The fact that Taymor’s play could coexist for that long beside his beloved movie showed real progress. He was managing the dissonance. Not surprisingly, the movie eventually won out. The $40 Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway book we bought in the foyer of the New Amsterdam ended up under Owen’s bed collecting dust.
But we’re feeling hopeful as we settle into our velvety seats for Mary Poppins. The 1964 movie is a combination of live-action and animation, with live actors—originally Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke—that dominate. As far as we knew, there weren’t any beloved sidekicks about to be remolded by stage actors.
Most importantly, we want it to be a good birthday. That’s the real point. If he likes the play—if this time things work out—it will be a successful day, one we can affectionately rehash with him for months or even years. So Cornelia and I embrace every bit of excitement we can grab. This is his day. And it is Disney’s theater.
The houselights dim and rise, signaling everyone that it’s time to shimmy into their seats. I see Owen, beside me, flipping intently through the playbill. To be fair, he was not all that crazy about this idea at the outset. That’s why Cornelia made sure her sisters, Alice and Marita, who he loves, would come in from Connecticut for the pizza dinner.
He’s still flipping through the playbill at this point. There are lots of actors in the play and he seems to be reading their credits, though they’re almost all stage credits. To ease the tension, he’s looking for something familiar, something to hang his hat on. I’m happy to see him reading. He flips a page and gasps.
“I can’t believe it!”
“What, honey, what?” Cornelia, from the other side, asks, hoping nothing’s gone haywire.
“Jonathan Freeman—he’s playing the admiral!”
My brain races to connect. Yes, the admiral: the guy in Mary Poppins with the hat and muttonchops who fires the cannon from a nearby rooftop on Cherry Tree Lane.
Freeman?
“Dad? Jonathan Freeman is the voice of Jafar from Aladdin!”
I’m pretty sure Owen is the only one in the theater who knows this, or certainly who cares so much.
The curtain rises. It takes a while before Freeman appears in one of the bit parts, doing his exaggerated British captain’s accent and elaborately saluting Bert the chimney sweep.
I can see Owen’s face in the half-light. It’s like he’s spotting a famous recluse, an elusive figure he’s thought about for years.
The play is fine. Owen seems to be attentive and upbeat. He hums the songs, the ones by the Sherman brothers made popular by the movie.
As the actors take their bows on the second curtain call, he grabs the sleeve of my shirt, eyes aflame.
“Can we go to the stage door to meet him?”
Which is where we spend the next hour. The lead actors pass as a few enthusiasts press them for autographs or iPhone shots. Owen pays no attention, up on tiptoes, craning his neck to keep focused on the stage door.
Then, we’re pretty much the only ones left. Cornelia looks at me, eyebrows up in a “so now what?” expression.
“Maybe he went out a different door,” I demur.
We both look at Owen. He’s already got the plastered-on smile, his mask. “It’s okay Dad. Noooo problem.” He does the big-head nod at “noooo,” like someone just punched him in the chest.
I slip under the felt rope and tap the security guard on the shoulder. He’s a little startled, but I start rig
ht in—telling him we’re waiting for Jonathan Freeman. The guard, a youngish African American guy in a yellow Lion King shirt, seems to know Freeman—“yeah, he’s a good guy”—but is vexed. Freeman? If we were to write a note to Freeman, I ask the guard, could he leave it in his dressing room? He thinks this over for a moment. “Sure, whatever,” responds the guard.
Then we talk some more and I tell him a bit about Owen, and watch his expression shift. It’s amazing, really, how far we’ve come. All of us. A hundred years ago, what fate would have befallen Owen or some Down syndrome kid? It’s unthinkable, really. Many were abandoned or worse. JFK’s sister was lobotomized. Now you mention to someone that a kid with special needs has a problem, and they stop everything. Of course, I don’t have what I need. The guard goes inside to find me a pad and pencil.
I tell Cornelia and Owen to go ahead to the nearby restaurant, as—a moment later—I settle on a nearby stoop, a Disney Theatrical Productions pad on my knee. If I spend an hour getting this note just right, it’ll be time well spent.
The wind picks up as dusk arrives, blowing litter down the caverns of Midtown. There’s a wildness about it. Garbage flying upward gives scale to the soaring vastness of the city. And to me, sitting on a dirty stoop.
It’s wrong, somehow, that Owen’s struggle has made me better than I deserve to be; kept my eyes clear, as long as they’re focused on how to help him, restore him, though I know now this is the way he was meant to be. I’ll do anything for the boys, even when it might be better for them to fail and learn and recover on their own—that’s what gives us strength. And Walt, at twenty-one, is well past really needing much from me.
