By ChrisDFW on Tuesday, August 21, 2001 - 12:47 pm:| By ChrisDFW on Tuesday, August 21, 2001 - 12:47 pm: |
Tom Hanks: Man With a Mission
Interview by Stephen Ambrose
TOM HANKS never was a soldier. As the Vietnam War wound down, he was still a teenager, a junior-college kid in California, trying to figure out which end was up. One thing he did know: He loved to hear tales of soldiering, especially from World War II. It's an obsession that never waned, and with his role as Capt. John Miller in Steven Spielberg's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, Hanks passed on to the rest of us his fascination with the war. Nine books about World War II have made the bestseller lists this year alone, and by January, Hollywood will have produced at least four big-budget war movies.
Hanks delivers his own World War II epic this month, HBO's ten-part miniseries, Band of Brothers. Directed by Hanks and others, it follows E Company, an Airborne unit, from training camp in Georgia to the capture of the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's private lair in Bavaria. The miniseries tells the improbable stories of 100 or so American soldiers -- one-time farm boys, college students and Philadelphia street kids -- who helped save the world.
The story of Hanks's life has its improbable chapters as well. His parents, Amos and Janet, split up when he was five. Janet kept baby Jim, and Amos took the others -- Tom and his older siblings, Larry and Sandra -- and set out to make a new life as a restaurant manager. It was at times a knockabout existence; by one account Tom attended five different elementary schools. But the repeated introduction to new people and experiences helped shape the likeable, adaptable man we see today.
But really, who would have expected so much from an actor who first appeared on TV as a Happy Days guest star? Hanks is at the top of the actor's game after winning back-to-back Best Actor Oscars, for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). He's hardly all work and no play though: Hanks is married to actress Rita Wilson, the daughter of Greek immigrants who came to the United States after World War II. Hanks and Wilson have two children, and Hanks has two others from an earlier marriage.
To ask our questions, we called on historian Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book on which Band of Brothers is based. A professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, Ambrose, 65, interviewed Hanks in Chicago.
Ambrose: Let's talk about your generation. You were born in 1956. You've gone through a lot: nuclear scares, the civil rights ferment, the Vietnam War. Many of your contemporaries never wanted to hear another thing about the U.S. government. World War II -- that's where they used the atomic bomb. But now that generation can't get enough history. How did you get interested in the war?
Hanks: Well, I knew what time it was by what was on television. And at five, six, seven years old, it seemed as though the great stories were centered around the war. There were Westerns and stuff like that, but by and large, it was the war. This was even represented in my house. At times, I couldn't quite fathom the fact that, wait, my dad was in the war?
Now, my dad was a machinist in the Navy. He didn't even remember necessarily where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor. He had nothing nice to say about the war or the Navy. It was not a grand adventure. And yet he still carried his Navy dog tag on his key chain. And that was like 1962, so we're talking about a key chain that's maybe fifteen, eighteen years old.
My dad was a kid on a farm in Willows, Calif., as poor as poor could be, and yet this war put him on a ship and sent him to a place in the South Pacific. So he was part of this thing that I saw every night on TV or in the movies.
Think about it: For all of them, the war was this time where everything stopped dead. Everything was on hold until the war was over -- for four years. That's as long as it takes to go to college or learn a trade or start a family. You could get married, have a kid, and be divorced now in four years.
The stories from the war are larger than life and yet are absolutely plucked from our daily existence. The generation that gave birth to me was never ever the same after early December of 1941. I sometimes wondered, How can people like my dad just walk around with a little thing on his key chain now, and have that be the talisman that represents four years of his life that is locked inside a series of recollections? And by the way, my dad was a guy who did nothing other than fix hydraulic systems and refrigeration systems in the Navy.
Ambrose: Can you cite one thing that got you so deeply interested?
Hanks: I was nineteen, and I was convinced that things were harder on me than they were on anybody else in the world. I was trying to get to school on time; I was trying to have this part-time job as a bellboy at a hotel. The Vietnam War was scary, and I was having problems with a girlfriend, and I thought the burden on me was greater than it's been on any nineteen-year-old in the history of the planet.
And every day at the hotel, a guy came and picked up the dry cleaning, and every afternoon he brought it back. Then, for one week in June, some other guy came. After a week the dry-cleaning guy -- I'll call him Mike -- comes back. Mike's an older guy, in his 40s or 50s. "Hey, Mike, you take a vacation?"
He said, "No, I got together with some old friends."
"Well," I said, "where'd you go?"
"Well, I went to France."
"Really? That must have been great."
And he says, "Well, it's nice but it's not great." And in maybe a seventeen-second conversation, I pick up that Mike jumped into Normandy on D-Day. He was probably nineteen. He saw his best friends killed. And somewhere in the course of fighting, he was wounded, but only after 100 days or so of hell.
And when he left that day, I had perspective on my life that I had not had before. I'm thinking I'm having trouble getting to junior college and working part-time for cash in my pocket. Here's a guy who jumped into France and ended up sleeping in a hole, watching his best friends get killed. And on top of that he had to kill other kids like himself.
It was no longer a mythological experience I was hearing about. It was no longer Tab Hunter or Battle of the Bulge. It was Mike who picked up the dry cleaning. When he came home from the war I imagine he was just brimming with confidence, bursting with a sense of accomplishment.
But here, time has gone by, and he's making ends meet working for his own dry-cleaning company. It didn't matter that we didn't really have much in common. It was just a connection that sent me reeling.
Ambrose: I know my sense of patriotism has gone up as I get older, in part because I've gotten wiser, but partly because things have turned out so well for the world. I make my living with words, and I almost get tongue-tied trying to talk about how great this country is.
Hanks: Look, I've been able to take the way America works and turn it into something akin to winning a lottery, for crying out loud. I grew up in a land that seemed to be built not just on the second chance, but on the third chance too. My folks pioneered the marriage-dissolution laws for the state of California, it seems like to me. They were getting divorces way before it was hip. So I grew up with no stigma attached to the idea of being from a broken family.
This was just the way things were: You could throw everything in the back of your car and take off and start off over again. It was itinerant, but at the same time, it was very intimate for us as a family.
And it happened at a point in my life where in other cultures, you have to decide the direction you're going. What are you going to be? Are you going to be a machinist? For me the only issue was what do you want to do? How much passion do you have for pursuing it? Or do you want to just take some time to figure it out? Right there is a freedom that's not unique to us, but that is built into our national psyche.
Like you said, I become tongue-tied when I try to explain it.
Ambrose: Are you an optimist?
Hanks: Shamelessly so. I apologize to my friends and family because I say it all the time, but if you had told me in 1966 that I'd be an actor and make movies, I would have thought you were insane. If you told me in 1966 I'd be married and have four great kids, I could never have imagined it.
If you had told me in 1966 that there would be no Soviet Union, I would have said, "You, sir, have the imaginative powers of Walt Disney because that ain't going to happen." I look at the United States of America now, underneath the Stars and Stripes banner and all the hokey stuff that goes along with it, and despite the problems we have, and the constant strife we go through, I think we are undeniably at a better place as a country and as a people than we've ever been, and it's because of who we are. It's because of this, because this is the Promised Land that if you're lucky enough you can get to, and you can remake yourself.
My in-laws are like that. My father-in-law was tortured by the Communists, for crying out loud. And then he did everything he could to get to America. And you know what? He was nothing other than a bartender at the racetrack for 22 years. And he's got three kids, and he's retired now and he's got a nice little plot of grass. He could be the happiest man there. That's still true. We are the Promised Land for the entire world.
We examine our failures more than any society in the world, it seems like. And we beat ourselves up about them. But by and large, when the lights go out because there's an earthquake or the blizzard shuts down the city, suddenly you're knocking on your neighbor's door saying, "Is everything okay?" And it's almost to the point where when the lights come on, it's like, "What a shame. The lights are on, so we've got to go back to our own life." But there is a kind of spirit of pulling together.
Now, to return to the subject at hand, you go back to as little as 55 years ago, and you know what? We fought this great war with...
Ambrose: ...a segregated Army.
Hanks: ...a segregated Army. And we fought this war in which on one coast, because people were Japanese, the worst was assumed. And they were herded in and they had to live on the racetrack. Terrible...
Ambrose: It is a very powerful part of America that we are so self-critical. That didn't happen in Moscow. There is some movement in Japan in that direction now, but generally speaking, the Japanese don't want to know anything about what happened after 1931. History ends for a while there. In Japanese minds, all of a sudden, for no reason that we are ever going to ever figure out, the Americans started dropping atomic bombs on us. After that, history picks up again. I exaggerate, but not by a lot.
German scholars have been fascinated by how their grandparents could have done what they did during the war. They put a lot into scholarship, and they're examining and they're aware. But even they don't come close to the United States. We're so far ahead of everybody else on this.
Hanks: While we were making the documentary about the real men in your book Band of Brothers, an extraordinary thing would happen. The crew would arrive to interview one of the veterans, and it would almost be like a family reunion was going on. Grandkids, aunts, uncles, nieces, the whole thing: Grandpa's going to talk about something Grandpa has never talked about before.
Ambrose: Right. First of all, most of them came home thinking, I just wasted the best four years of my life. They had to get to college or whatever, and get married, get to raising kids and make a career, and they didn't want to think about the war.
Now that's changed. Eighty-five-year-old men talking about the war to seventh-grade classes -- and the kids are just fascinated by it. And the veterans love to talk. And now, they're looking back thinking, You're damn right I was there. And I did good.
It is not true, by the way, what Shakespeare says -- that old men will remember with advantages the deeds they did. They don't. Almost always, a veteran will tell me if you want to see a hero, you've got to go to the cemeteries because that's where the real heroes are.
Ambrose: Is there one thing that you learned on Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers that you didn't know about the war?
Hanks: Well, I don't think I'll ever be able to grasp the lives of these guys after they came home. It's 1950, okay? You've got a job making machine flanges someplace, or you're selling insurance. You've got a four-year-old daughter, you've got a three-year-old boy, and it's Christmas Eve and you're trying to put the electric train together underneath the tree.
You're probably making a few thousand a year, and you think you're doing great, you know? And it's the five-year anniversary of some horrible shelling -- five years exactly. How did these guys put it all behind them? It's got impact every single day of their lives.
Ambrose: Down to today.
Hanks: In the documentary one guy says, "The best thing that ever happened to me was hearing about this thing called the Airborne."
Now this is a guy who went to college. He's got grandkids. He's seen the greatest history in the duration of mankind. And what he's saying is that the best thing that ever happened to him was he got the crap kicked out of him in basic training at Toccoa, Ga., and he jumped out of airplanes and broke a leg at one point, and had to kill a bunch of fifteen-year-old kids who were on the other side. And saw horrors beyond that he doesn't like to talk about even now. But you know what? It's the best thing that ever happened to him.
Now look, I've lived a pretty glamorous life, man. I've done things that very few people get to do. I have seen the world from places that very few people get to see. And I don't know how I can ever truly grasp some of the things that I've done and experienced. But I never saw anybody get killed, and I never had to kill anybody. And I never had to put myself in any bona fide danger. But these guys are saying that the war was the best chapter of their lives -- in which it was dumb luck as well as almost herculean accomplishment to get through.
And then I go back to this concept of Christmas Eve, 1950 and a guy just trying to make sure that his kids are going to believe in Santa Claus, and I wonder, does he look out of the window at night and say, "Phew, yes, it was five years ago. Man, that was cold. I sure am glad I'm inside right now."
Ambrose: Who gives you the support to be who you are, to do the things you do?
Hanks: I'm not as nutty a guy as Eugene O'Neill was, but his wife, Carlotta Monterey, once said that Gene's going to do his thing, and I'm going to protect it so that Gene gets to do his thing. I think my wife does that. I mean, she makes sure that I don't live a life of total frivolity, but when it comes down to pursuing the things that I do, she protects me to make sure I have time and concentration.
Like right now: This is not an easy gig in the heart of the school year to be off in Chicago making another movie, but she puts her head down and says, "Okay, when will you be coming home?" Because it's the give and the take like that, I live up to all the responsibilities that I can given the work schedule. I married the right woman, you know? This is what we do. This is our life.
Band of Brothers premieres on HBO on September 9 at 9 p.m. Stephen Ambrose is the author of over 25 books, including Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869.
| By bOOn on Wednesday, August 22, 2001 - 12:15 pm: |
Hi there. I'm a Singaporean who has immensed interest in WWII stories. I've probably seen 'Saving Private Ryan' for about 12 times now (the same number for 'The Longest Day'), and had read all the reviews and comments I could find on it. As a soldier in the reserve Artillery here in Singapore, I admire greatly the valour and gallantry the Americans had shown during the War. Thanks to you guys that had helped make the world a better place to live today. Rgds.