In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (59 page)

Amanda had been wrestling against Presley’s grasp, but suddenly, she stopped and found her voice. She uttered the word “mad.” Then she said, “love.” And with that, she was cured.

That was how the movies usually treated autism in the twentieth century, in the rare instances when it did: autism was a problem only solvable by love. It was the fundamental message of 1979’s
Son-Rise
,
whose subtitle was
“A Miracle of Love.” It told the story of real-life parents Suzy and Barry Kaufman, who claimed to have rescued their son from autism—which they traced to a lack of parental bonding—by showering their boy with attention, respecting his impulses, and mimicking his behaviors.

Back in the purely fictional category, 1993’s
House of Cards
portrayed a young girl who, in response to her father’s death, went silent, cold to human interaction. At the same time, she became adept at building elaborate towers out of playing cards and balancing in high places. Tommy Lee Jones, as a psychologist, diagnoses autism, but the mother, played by Kathleen Turner, refuses to accept the diagnosis, arguing defiantly that “all she needs is a little more attention from her mother.” Working from some maternal instinct, the mother constructs her own tower out of plywood, higher than a house, mimicking her daughter’s playing-card construction but on a much larger scale. The woman and the girl climb the tower together, and at that point, the child is cured.

Love was the answer, one way or the other, in each of these films, which did not veer far from the well-ingrained message, rooted in the era of mother blaming, that autism flourished where proper love was lacking.

On the other hand, an episode of the television medical drama
Marcus Welby, M.D
. showed its grandfatherly yet iconoclastic doctor practicing an early version of Lovaas-style applied behavioral analysis on a little boy named Paulie. Trying to get Paulie to look him in the eye, Welby rewards the boy with gumballs and a warm smile whenever he complies. When the boy resists, Welby shrieks at him, chasing the small child around the room, and finally slapping him hard across his cheek. When Paulie’s mother objects, Welby turns to her with a stern reprimand:
“You will see Paulie spanked,” Welby lectures her. “You will learn to spank him yourself—or you’ll see him in an institution for the rest of his life!”

In 1969, when this episode aired, autism parents viewed the broadcast of this episode as a positive—not so much because of the ABA message but because at this time, autism still barely registered in the public consciousness. Perhaps television’s most beloved doctor would
cause the public to finally pay attention. But it did not. Just as Welby, a week later, had moved on to some other malady, so too did viewers. That tended to be the pattern when Hollywood made forays into autism: it would create a blip of interest, but then most people stopped thinking about it.

Documentaries and the occasional print story also had little influence. Many of them depicted autism as exotic or as an intriguing puzzle. Magazine stories had headlines like: “The Trance Children,”
“The Strangers in Our Midst,”
“The Children of the Fairies,” and
“The Kids with the Faraway Eyes.” Autistic children were cast as curiosities of nature, strange, mystical, and unreal. Another brand of story acknowledged the severity of autism and the strains it put on families by adopting a tone that was callously bleak. There was, for example, that notorious 1965
LIFE
magazine headline that called the children
“Far Gone Mental Cripples.” Rather than describe autistic children as odd, such articles described children as too broken to be fully human.

It is true that around this time, narratives about real people with autism were becoming easier to find. As a rule, these were books written by parents about their children, a model that harkened back to
the original mother’s memoir of autism,
The Siege
, which had landed on shelves in 1967. Its author, Clara Claiborne Park, was an early autism activist who taught literature and writing at a New England college. Her story of the first eight years of raising her daughter Jessie—to whom she gave the name “Ellie” in the book—became assigned reading for young people training in special education during the 1970s, and inspired more than one student to specialize in autism.
The Siege
was also a persuasive counterweight to Bruno Bettelheim’s
Empty Fortress
, which had appeared at about the same time and was positioned as the authoritative book about autism.

While a trickle of similar memoirs appeared in the 1970s and 1980s—notably 1973’s
For the Love of Ann
, based
on a father’s diary, and 1989’s
A Child Called Noah
,
which inspired a story on
60 Minutes
, the readership for these books was always limited. Mostly, they were read by people who were already in the autism “family.” The shared stories offered a sense of community, which softened the loneliness the families experienced, but they rarely told their readers
anything about autism that they did not already know from firsthand experience.

Whether they were dramatic shows on television, or loving stories written by parents, or bleak articles published in magazines, the perceived rarity of autism gave the general public an excuse to keep thoughts of it at a comfortable distance. People could feel safe knowing autism had nothing to do with them and never would. It was a psychological novelty item, pushed out of mind when the channel was changed or the page was turned.

Then
Rain Man
was released, the first good movie about autism.

—

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1988, when
Rain Man
arrived in theaters, the effect was immediate. All over the United States and Britain, anyone with an intimate connection to autism suddenly began getting questions. They came from friends and family, and, in many cases, from reporters, all of whom were newly curious about this fascinating condition they had never given much thought to, or even heard of, before seeing the movie. Bernie Rimland himself took dozens of calls. He told the readers of his newsletter that “
Rain Man
has stimulated every newspaper and magazine in the country
to run an article on autism.” Ruth Sullivan, still the doyenne of autism activists, sat on the set of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
and declared,
“
Rain Man
has advanced the field of autism by twenty-five years!” A headline in the
Orlando Sentinel
, appearing
eight days after the movie’s premiere, nailed what had just happened: “
Rain Man
Puts Autism on the Map.”

Most people in the autism community agreed and were delighted by the film. Their sentiment was captured by the British autism researcher Uta Frith, who praised the movie for rendering
“an outstanding portrayal” that “helped to lessen any feelings of fear and dread about autism.”

Rain Man
was not perfect, but it was nearly so—the first movie to get autism right, and to reach so many people while doing so. To be sure, lesser films about the subject had preceded
Rain Man
, and lesser films would follow it. But that only underscored
Rain Man
’s longstanding uniqueness as what it was: a good film about autism.

—

T
HE FIRST SCRIPT
for
Rain Man
, in fact, had nothing about autism in it. The original big idea was a story about a man who had what is called “savant syndrome.” In 1983, screenwriter Barry Morrow bumped into such a person, thirty-two-year-old Kim Peek, at a conference of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Texas. Peek, too intellectually disabled to live on his own, lived with his father in Utah. He did not have autism. He did, however, have a phenomenal talent for ingesting and remembering information. He had memorized symphonic scores, the works of Shakespeare, and entire telephone directories. He was also a calendar calculator, able to name the day of the week for any calendar date going forward or backward for thousands of years. When he read books, he used his eyes independently, reading the left and the right page simultaneously.

Morrow was captivated. By October 1986, he had completed a draft script entitled
Rain Man
, about two brothers, one of whom had Peek’s
prodigious mental gifts. The younger brother, Raymond, is developmentally disabled and heir to a fortune. The older brother, Charlie, a sour soul who has only recently discovered Raymond’s existence, just wants the money.

It was Dustin Hoffman who killed off that version of
Rain Man
, deciding that he wanted in on the project but that he did not want the part being offered—sour Charlie, the older brother. Instead, he wanted to play Raymond. He had seen a
60 Minutes
program in 1983 about a musical savant by the name of Leslie Lemke. Unable to speak or see, Lemke could play complex piano pieces nearly flawlessly after hearing them only once. Hoffman was deeply touched by Lemke’s story.
An associate producer, Gail Mutrux, was dispatched to learn more about savants. Savant syndrome was rare, she learned, and more likely to be present in people who were intellectually disabled than people with autism. At the same time, the producers became aware of actor Cliff Robertson’s Academy Award–winning portrayal of an intellectually disabled adult in a 1968 movie called
Charly
. Nobody wanted merely to repeat that. And so it was settled: there had been no portrayal of an adult with
autism
.
Raymond would be autistic.

Inevitably, Mutrux’s search to learn more about autism quickly led her to Bernie Rimland, who was running his Autism Research Institute out of a storefront around the corner from his house in San Diego. When Mutrux reached Rimland by phone, he told her he would be happy to take a look at the script and share some information about autism.

A few days later, Mutrux drove down to San Diego to meet Rimland in person. He had an armload of books and articles waiting for her, and he regaled her with all the ways that autism was fascinating.
Rimland wanted Raymond to be autistic; he could foresee the publicity a good Hollywood film would bring to the cause.

The project, meanwhile, picked up and lost a series of directors—Marty Brest, Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack—each coming aboard and then begging off for different reasons. Ultimately, the job went to Barry Levinson, who was fresh off directing 1987’s
Good Morning, Vietnam
. Levinson and Hoffman were both attracted to the challenge of creating a character whose inner world would not be easy to identify with, and who, by the movie’s end, would not experience the usual cathartic leap of self-discovery. Hoffman could not wait to get started. “When people look back on my career, I’ll be remembered for two roles: Ratso Rizzo and Rain Man,” Hoffman said at an early meeting. “I want to do this picture, and I
want to do it fast.”

Rimland was hired as a technical consultant, along with Darold Treffert, an
authority on savants. Hoffman, of course, wanted to see what autism looked like, to try to get inside it. With help from Rimland, Mutrux dug out some documentaries, including two that were completed nearly twenty years apart but featured the same person—Joe Sullivan, Ruth Sullivan’s son. It had only been a year or so since the second of these films,
Portrait of an Autistic Young Man
, had been completed and aired on PBS, so the outtakes were still available. Hoffman watched all fifteen-plus hours of them. When Hoffman eventually met Sullivan, he was eating cheese puffs the way he always did—one at a time with a toothpick. Hoffman took note. In the movie, Raymond would spear his food with a toothpick.

Bernie Rimland also brought his son Mark to a meeting with Hoffman and some of the producers. Mark, then in his early twenties, had grown up to get along at a relatively high level. He painted, and he
helped his father out, running errands and sweeping up at the ARI office. It seems that he had also paid close attention to an autographed photo of Hoffman his dad hung up in the office after an earlier visit to Los Angeles, because that day, at lunch, it struck Mark that the movie star’s hair had a lot more gray in it in real life. When he blurted this out in a loud monotone, his father cringed. Hoffman chuckled. He had officially seen autism in action.

It was Ruth Sullivan who steered Dustin Hoffman to a young man living independently in Princeton, New Jersey. Peter Guthrie, in his twenties, had a range of savant skills—calendar calculation, a phenomenal mind for statistics, and the ability to draw objects with near-perfect perspective and in minute detail. He also had autism. He read books with no sense of their meaning and was terrified of rain. He also had great difficulty conducting a conversation; he seemed better at collecting statistics about someone he was going to meet, and then talking about those when face-to-face with that person. Yet, of everyone Hoffman met in his research phase, Peter was the one he connected with best.

Peter had a caring and protective older brother, Kevin, who drove him into New York the first time Peter was invited to meet with the production team. It was Kevin’s idea that Peter and Hoffman go bowling together, along with Tom Cruise. A real friendship got started that day. Over the coming months, Hoffman kept up with the Guthrie brothers, inviting them to his home, watching TV with them, and watching how they interacted.
The posture, the voice, and the facial expression that Hoffman would wear throughout most of
Rain Man
were, to anyone who knew Peter Guthrie, more than familiar.

The plot of
Rain Man
was ultimately shaped, Levinson later said, by the characters of the two brothers. Charlie, a born manipulator, finds it impossible to manipulate Raymond. Instead, he has to figure out who Raymond is, and in doing so, enlarge his capacity for human connection. Raymond, for his part, does not reveal his inner self easily, not because he is deliberately evasive, but because of his autism. Little by little, more action-oriented plot points from the original script were dropped from the story, and
Rain Man
became a fresh, different kind of “relationship” movie.