by Ron Suskind
But Owen still needs us and may his whole life—or so we tell ourselves.
This desire to save him, an urge every parent feels when a child’s in distress, has certainly become as much about me, and Cornelia, too—about what we need, what gives us wholeness and a sense of worth—as it is about him. At this point, after so many years, it’s who we are. But watching the swirls of trash, I’m not sure if I haven’t slipped from shameless, my usual state, to desperate.
From the mind’s eye of New York, a famously ennobling and pitiless gaze, I sure look the part. Here I am, writing a love note from my family to a journeyman actor for voice work he did twenty years ago. I consider my pitch. Cornelia often says never mention the Pulitzer. It’s unseemly, she says. If other people do, that’s fine. And I agree.
Hell with it.
Dear Jonathan,
I’m Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, but you, my friend, are the true hero in my family. My son, Owen, now 18, has been a fan of your voice work since he was a small boy. He is an autistic spectrum kid, who makes sense of the world through his chosen passions and works of art. We waited at the stage door and must have missed you.
But next Wednesday is his birthday and if you have a minute to call him, you’d give him the thrill of his life. Jafar and Iago have been living in our house for years—Owen can recite every line and knows—lovingly—every voice work actor in 50 plus years of the Disney pantheon.
So, even if we don’t hear from you, thanks.
All the best,
Ron Suskind
At the bottom I jot down the numbers for my cell and the house line, and hand it to the guard.
Four days later, we crowd around the phone, its speaker on.
“Owen?”
“Yes?”
“This is Jonathan Freeman.”
I had talked to Freeman the day before. He called me on my cell. Lovely guy, sixty, single, lifelong Broadway actor and a Disney regular. After a few minutes of profuse thank-yous, I told him a good time to call was in the early evening, after Owen’s birthday dinner at home—just the three of us—was over. When we hear the ring, we nonchalantly tell Owen the call is for him and all crowd around the phone on the third-floor landing, the big Motorola, with all the features.
After Owen hears Jonathan’s voice, he falls silent. Just looks at the phone.
“Owen?” Freeman says.
“Yes.”
“Are you there?”
“I can’t believe it’s you.”
Then louder.
“I can’t believe it’s you!”
“Happy birthday, Owen. I understand you’re quite a fan of Disney.”
Cornelia and I stand beside him. He looks at us—eyes wide—and then at me, beseechingly.
And I see a reflection in his eyes—of us back in the bedroom of the old house; me, under the bedspread, pushing the puppet up to meet him. That was our big moment. He wants permission to replace it.
“Go ahead, buddy.”
His body snaps into form, arms akimbo.
“Okay, okay, Jafar, listen, yoooou be the chump husband…” And off he goes, exploding into Gilbert Gottfried’s crazy-cake staccato.
This time, Jafar’s voice comes through the Motorola. “Iago, I looove the way your foul little mind works.”
Owen literally lifts off the ground. Bouncing, giddy, taking flight.
“My God, I feel like I’m talking to Gilbert. I mean, Owen, I know Gilbert. I know them all,” says Freeman.
Owen asks about everyone in the movie he can think of. Jonathan does his best to give updates. Together, they commiserate over the passing of Douglas Seale, a British actor who played the Sultan and died in 1999.
“He was a very nice man, Owen,” notes Freeman. Both then rejoice over Jonathan’s good friend, Alan Menken. “You know Alan Menken! He’s the greatest composer ever!” Owen exclaims.
“Owen, I’ll tell him you said so—he’ll get a charge out of that.”
Then they do voices. Owen is gushing dialogue, mostly Iago, but throwing in stanzas of Genie dialogue and one of the Sultan’s. Jonathan, of course, does Jafar, until he pauses, giggling. “Owen, help me…what’s my next line?” Owen does Jafar, which is then repeated by Freeman. It’s symphonic.
After twenty minutes, Jonathan winds it down. “Owen, I’m tapped out. I can’t keep up. Listen—talk to me. You love this movie. What do you love about it?”
There are a few exchanges. Owen describes what he likes about different characters. Jonathan tries to bridge it into what Owen thinks the movie is about, its themes, which they begin to discuss.
Cornelia and I listen to the back-and-forth.
She grabs my arm.
“What?”
“Don’t you see? Jonathan’s running up our path,” she whispers. “A whole decade of it, from the voices on to the themes, the deeper meanings.”
Right to the present.
“Isn’t it about the forces of good and evil fighting it out,” Jonathan proffers. “And how in the end, good triumphs.”
“Umm. Sort of. I think it’s about more than that,” counters Owen.
There’s a look Owen gets when he does one of his deep dives, a downward gaze, like his eyes are folding inward. That’s what he’s doing.
Jonathan can’t see him, but he must sense Owen is thinking—no one speaks—and a moment later, Owen resurfaces. His voice is soft, otherworldly.
“I think it’s about finally accepting who you really are. And being okay with that.”
The sound of sighs and sniffles comes from the phone. “Oh my. How is it I never saw that.”
Three months later, Cornelia is sitting in the auditorium of a synagogue in the Maryland suburbs. Owen’s high school uses this hall once a year for graduation day.
Walt’s at her side and the extended family, both sides, fill two rows, a sizable contingent that last gathered for Walt’s high school graduation three years before and, before that, the bar mitzvahs.
Cornelia looks left and right, checking that the gang seems settled and happy—the product of exhaustive planning, about flights, hotels, and the weekend’s schedule of events. Now, with five minutes until the ceremony, everything’s set, just so. She’s grown accustomed to this chair: working, scheming, organizing, lifting, creating—across the years, for both boys—and then stage-managing the finale…where her husband steps to the podium. I’ve spoken at several of the kids’ graduations, starting with Walt’s graduation from sixth grade. I always feel guilty that Cornelia’s not up here. She’s a fine public speaker, but, by nature, private. It’s a sensible division of labor. I’m good at this. She’s good at just about everything else.
And she can’t help but feel that this is a moment of earned rewards. After sixteen years of round-the-clock effort on her part—much of her adult life, really—he’s graduating from a high school. The real deal. He’ll get a diploma.
The school has been a good place—maybe a perfect place—for him. She often wonders if the nightmare with the bullies was avoidable; if the school could have, or should have, caught it sooner, or how those two kids ever even ended up in the building. But the school certainly responded forcefully and their care for him, their attentiveness, in the two years since then has been exemplary.
Especially in this last year, he’s been thriving. Maybe knowing it will soon end, and being uncertain about what’s ahead, has focused him. He’s been embracing everything the school offers—from gym to art to his homework each night to the prom, just last week. To see him in his tuxedo—Cornelia’s grandfather’s old J. Press tux, which fits him just fine—is stunning, one of those moments when you see them differently, though they don’t even know it. They just smile back and step forward.
She’s pulling together the transition program for next year, just three children—Owen, Brian (two of the three Movie Gods), and another boy, Ben, whose mother introduced us to Maureen. Ben, a year older than Owen, already has a job, bagging grocerie
s at a local supermarket. There’s so very much to do—a huge undertaking, just now under way, including the prospect of finding Owen a job.
The high school’s final assessments were painfully clarifying about the complications ahead. As Stixrud said, testing will always be a problem. Even he, a master of innovative testing, struggled to tease out Owen’s uneven, well-concealed abilities.
The wider world won’t be as creative or patient, or even as attentive as the school’s vocational assessment office, which sends home its final report in the late spring. Under JOBS TO CONSIDER they list: COLLECTING TICKETS, ASSISTING WITH CLEAN-UP, ASSISTING WITH ARRANGING AND CARING FOR PLANTS IN A NURSERY OR GREENHOUSE, and—because of his drawing acumen—ASSIST WITH ARTISTIC ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN, ADULTS AND THE ELDERLY. That last one was the only suggestion that credited Owen with having any developed skill—his drawing.
Cornelia showed me the report a month ago, at a particularly inopportune moment. All I could hear were echoes of Owen’s early descriptions of the sidekicks. That they were underappreciated.
My response—if not necessarily a remedy—was to find a first-rung graduation speaker. That was my way to show the kids, to show everyone, that—whatever those tests showed—these kids had accomplished more in terms of distance traveled than any graduates, near or far. A battle over the graduation speaker had already been raging for much of the spring. I’d spoken at KTS’s graduation the previous year and had figured I would just be a dad in the audience—where I hoped to be—when Owen walked to “Pomp and Circumstance.” But the night after the telephonic lovefest with Jonathan Freeman, Owen forced the issue. “You talked at Walter’s graduation,” he said simply. “I want you to talk at mine.”
Not surprisingly, the school said they couldn’t have the same speaker two years in a row, and I began to look for someone I could introduce.
First call—Dustin Hoffman’s office. Sorry, he’s shooting a movie. Very nice, but no dice.
Two months and a hundred phone calls later, I’d worked my way down to the Shriver brothers (I’ll take either one); both had schedules they thought could be changed…but no. Last hope, Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, arguably the U.S. Senate’s leading advocate for the disabled. She thought she could do it, but then not.
I was tapped out and outraged. “I suppose this means they shouldn’t have a graduation speaker. That no one can give up an hour of their life to make this a day for them to remember!” I said to Corn.
Cornelia put her hand on my shoulder. Her voice was calming. “Let’s just think this through. These kids don’t care about the Shrivers or Barbara Mikulski—the parents may know those people; the kids don’t.” I could see something had dawned on her. “There’re only eighteen students graduating. You go to school, do a speech-writing workshop, and have each one of them write a short speech. You can be master of ceremonies—they get to be the stars.”
Cornelia looks over at the eighteen capped and gowned students clamoring into folding chairs, three rows of six, on the far edge of the stage, and whispers to Walt, “Wait until you hear the speeches—I saw some copies Dad brought home.”
“Bet he’s happy not to be working tonight.”
“I’m sure your father will have something to say.”
He laughs—he’s now twenty-one. He’s beginning to see us as we really are.
Thirty feet due east, and four feet elevated, I offer just a few words, mostly for Owen’s measure of equivalency with Walt. Then, “We have eighteen valedictorians tonight.”
They come, one by one. I have copies of the speeches, most about two paragraphs long, and they each have their own. A few freeze and ask me to read for them. I have to do that for only one kid. The rest step up, some with surprising confidence.
A boy named Robbie, said that at KTS he “discovered my confident stride,” showing “the world, that, even though you may have your downfall, you are happy and proud to be you”—but that to “soar like an eagle you need support, love, and passion.”
A girl named Tynisha spoke about being bullied at her old school, but “now I have so many friends to hug.”
A boy named Mickey, who was ousted from Lab School a year before Owen, spoke of what he learned at KTS about friendship: “To me, being a good friend is being there in difficult times and helping others out when they’re having trouble. I am a good friend because I’m always there.”
A girl named Elena spoke as well about lessons in friendship, and that “just as important as the skills I have learned in class, are the things I learned about myself.”
One of The Movie Gods, Brian, credited teachers who showed him “kindness and compassion,” while his fellow Movie God Connor spoke about becoming a “fearless, intelligent, and funny person” in his “full transformation into a man,” and ended with a Ron Burgundy flourish: “So stay classsy, Katherine Thomas School.”
The third Movie God, Owen, went with a movie reference from his own vault—intoning, in Merlin’s voice, that “Knowledge and Wisdom are the real power!”—and finished with a story about a story:
A long time ago, I wrote a short story about a boy who found a magic stone. The stone was like a mirror—looking into it, he could see glimpses of the future. One day, the boy lost the stone, but he found that he wasn’t sad, because he knew his future would be fine. KTS has been a little like that stone for me. KTS has helped me see into the future, and see bright things and great things up ahead. Leaving here is a little like losing the stone. But it’s okay, because I know now that the future will be fabulous, and full of joy. Thank you KTS.
From where I stand, next to each speaker, I can see, most clearly, the array of expressions crossing the faces of the assembled. This is the one thing many of the speakers don’t see, or can’t swiftly process—and today it is their charm. It is rare for any speaker to be truly independent in front of an audience, because they all care—we all care—what the audience thinks. Why else would you be at the podium? And the shifting reactions, face to face, second to second, alters the presentation, any presentation, because every speaker plays to an audience, with some exceptions.
Today, there are eighteen exceptions. Each speaker simply says the truest thing they know. And that’s why there are so many awed faces looking up toward the stage, waiting for their moment to express the truest thing they know: that, yes, each graduate is more than worthy. When the crowd gets a chance at the end to cheer, they won’t stop.
They can’t.
Cornelia figured that a dinner with the twenty-two out-of-town guests would be the best way to end the day.
She reserved the upstairs room at a French restaurant near our home. Owen’s request—the same place Walt had a lunch for his graduation. Again, she planned it to a fare-thee-well, setting the table for everyone.
But what occurs confounds even her finely tuned predictive capacities. As dinner ends, Cornelia gives a toast. Then me. Then one of Cornelia’s sisters. Owen is appreciative. But he wants more. He turns to an aunt next to Cornelia. “What do you have to say to me?” A bit surprised, she stands and speaks from the heart. He goes to the next chair. “What do you think about me today.”
Then, chair by chair. All twenty-two.
Not done, though, not quite.
“And what about the people who are not here. What would they say? Can someone speak for Granny?”
Cornelia stands and speaks for her mother, the family matriarch, who died a year ago. And another of her sisters speaks for Owen’s grandfather, while others talk on behalf of the lost aunt, Lizzy, and Uncle Martin. He asks me to speak for my father, who he calls “Big Walter.”
Not being able to read peoples expressions, doesn’t mean you don’t want to know what they feel. Especially about you.
On your big day.
A week later, on June 24, 2010, Owen Suskind finally makes it home.
We still live in Washington. But he’s been living here in his mind and in his heart since before he knew that Los Angeles was a ci
ty, or California a state.
As the car idles, he sits silently in the backseat, breathing lightly.
The guard takes my ID, disappears into his booth, and returns with three passes: one for me, one for Cornelia and one for Owen.
“Welcome to the Disney Animation Studios,” he says, rosy and cheerful. “Park ahead and to your right.”
Freeman made calls. I had to travel to New York to visit former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker for the next book—about the fall of the economy and rise of Obama—so I called him. Freeman, that is. I carried a large flat box to the lunch with Volcker. He looked at it, but didn’t ask. I didn’t offer. Inside was a two-foot square drawing of an Arabesque nobleman and his parrot. Afterward, I hustled across town to a diner, outside of which waited a man whose blue eyes and expressive eyebrows matched those of the boxed picture. Jonathan and I talked for three hours. He was deeply moved by the phone call. I told him the whole saga of Owen, and handed him the portrait of Jafar with Iago on his shoulder. He called Burbank.
Those are the mechanics of it: how we end up, here, gazing up at a cobalt blue sorcerer’s hat, dwarfing the front entrance of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building.
The reality of it is more complex, having to do with a silent boy who spoke in dialogue and lived on a diet of myth and fable. Cornelia and I wrote all that up in a few thousand words—Owen’s story—and sent it ahead of us.
That’s so they’d know who was coming.
If it is the nature of originality to ignore consensus, he is strikingly original in his convictions. In his mind, these are the greatest people in the world; presidents and popes, step aside.
Howard Green, a longtime Disney publicist, meets us, a female assistant in tow, at the welcome desk in the front foyer. This is the guy Jonathan called, who then read our treatise about Owen and is now providing us passage. Cornelia and I are in a state of bliss that’s deepening with each step. We know the issues of scale, how long a distance it is from our basement to this place. Owen greets Howard with delight—they are fellow members of the Disney family—but, without a transactional sensibility, he’s otherwise focused on the people, the creators, he imagines are waiting up ahead.
