The Costco Connection - December 2014

Running track in high school. Zamperini in flight gear.

PHOTOS THIS PAGE COURTESY OF LOUIS ZAMPERINI

Home from the war.

26 ;e Costco Connection DECEMBER 2014

He and two other survivors drifted for 47 days (one lost his life during that time), rations running out quickly. Zamperini captured circling sharks and birds for food. They found land, but were picked up by a Japanese patrol boat. He would see the inside of more than one prison camp on different islands and in Japan. He was beaten and tortured, and barely survived. At one point, his family received notification of his death. But Zamperini was a survivor.

He returned from the war a hero, but posttraumatic stress disorder, not an official diagnosis at that time, left him angry and embittered. His goal was to return to Japan, find his most venal torturer—a Japanese officer nicknamed “the Bird”—and kill him.

Zamperini met and married a beautiful young woman named Cynthia Applewhite. The torment of his war experiences caused him to drink and explode in fits of rage. In a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, and to save her husband, Cynthia convinced him to attend a local crusade, led by a charismatic young minister named Billy Graham. Something clicked. Zamperini became a born-again Christian, and his life immediately turned around. He gave up drinking, and the rage dissolved. He forgave his tormenters, even traveling to Japan to personally deliver his forgiveness. Sadly, the Bird refused to meet with him.

Zamperini, who was a Costco member, spent the rest of his life sharing his incredible story, helping others at every opportunity.

Cynthia Zamperini-Garris, Louie’s daughter, calls him “a complicated person.”

“He would stop anywhere and help anybody out,” she tells The Connection. “He rescued neighbors’ animals from disaster. Even into his 90s, if he saw a bee that had run out of steam in the middle of the street, he would get it, bring it inside, give it his miracle Karo syrup and water treatment, and wait until it got enough energy to fly on its way. He loved

UNBROKEN JOURNEY

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25

to help troubled people, especially youth. He was very funny, had a marvelous sense of humor, a very quick wit. He kept us laughing all the time.”

Bringing the story to the public
While the preceding summary of
Zamperini’s life cannot do it justice, others
who heard the story saw the need to convey
its complete scope and depth to a wider audi-
ence. He wrote two books, with two different
writers, and sold the rights to his story to
Universal in 1957 to be made into a movie
starring Tony Curtis. The film never material-
ized, and the story faded from the public eye.

In 1998, as Nagano, Japan, was preparing to host the Olympic Games, CBS aired a documentary on Zamperini’s story, as he was invited to run with the Olympic torch. Producer Matt Baer and many others were inspired by that documentary.

“I had seen that and thought, ‘I cannot believe that this story has never been told for film,’ ” says Costco member Baer. “But fortunately for me, it hadn’t.”

Baer wasn’t the only producer interested in the story. Zamperini-Garris and her husband, filmmaker Mick Garris, helped Louie get an agent. They met with several producers, ultimately deciding on Baer.

Baer commissioned a script based on Zamperini’s memoir, Devil at My Heels (not available at Costco), but he could not get the financing or the necessary talent to make the film. Some felt the story lacked authenticity. Sure, it was a great yarn, but it lacked verification. It was just one man’s story.

Finding the facts

Validation was on its way, courtesy of a young writer named Laura Hillenbrand. She was working on her first book, Seabiscuit, which would go on to become a best-seller and a movie. A meticulous researcher, Hillenbrand

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The Zamperini family: (back) Cynthia, Louie; (front) Cynthia and Luke.

In our digital editions Click here to see the trailer for Unbroken. (See page 11 for details.)

bought old newspapers to get a sense of context.

“I had a clipping on Seabiscuit winning a big race, and I flipped it over, and on the exact opposite, the back of the page, was a story on this young running phenomenon named Louis Zamperini,” she recalls in a phone interview from her home on the East Coast. “It was prior to the war, but his story was already really interesting to me. I wrote down his name, and later learned something of what had happened to him in the war. I thought, ‘When I get [Seabiscuit] done, I’m gonna try to find this guy, if he’s still around.’ ”

In 2002, Laura Hillenbrand wrote Zamperini a letter, introducing herself, telling him about Seabiscuit and expressing her interest in telling his story.

“When I said, ‘I’d really like to tell your story,’ he said, ‘I’ve done this,’ ” Hillenbrand recalls. “I talked to him about the difference between biography and autobiography. As a biographer. as opposed to autobiography, I could look at his whole life from the point of view of others, and I could put him in the context, and basically tell the story of the whole Pacific war through the eyes of one guy. He was interested in that, and he said, ‘Go right ahead. I’m happy to work with you.’ ”

It was not an easy undertaking for Hillenbrand, who battles chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating disorder, but, over the course of the next seven years, she and Zamperini spoke by phone about 75 times, often for two to three hours. Those conversations became starting points for her, leading off on different trails. “I worked every single day. I never stopped,” says Hillenbrand. “I didn’t want to stop. It was such a pleasure; I loved it.”