Voices of Change: 8 War Babies Who Entertained America By Richard Pells Do you find yourself stopping on Taxi Driver every time you run across it while channel flipping? Or shedding a tear each time you watch The Godfather? How about singing along to “Mrs. Robinson” on the radio or adding tunes by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to playlists? If so, you owe a “thank you” to the war babies. Born between 1939 and 1945, singer/songwriters, directors, and actors from the “war baby” generation are largely responsible for reshaping American music and film after World War II. Here’s a look at how elements of American life influenced eight war-baby entertainers as they were growing up in the 1940s and 1950s: Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit in 1939. As a child, Coppola contracted polio. Confined to a bed, he created a puppet theater, a traditional form of Italian entertainment, one he reproduced in the early-20th-century segment of The Godfather: Part II. Martin Scorsese was born in 1942 in Queens. As a boy, Scorsese had severe asthma and was unable to engage in physically demanding activities. A lonesome introvert, he spent much of his childhood staring out the window of his apartment in Little Italy in
Manhattan. Scorsese’s movies captured the vibrancy and violence he saw on those streets.
another desperate, lonely young woman who hungers for fame.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were both born in 1941 and grew up in Queens. When Simon was 11 years old, he became friends with a classmate, Art Garfunkel, who lived just three blocks away. Both boys came from similar Jewish backgrounds and harbored similar musical ambitions, which their parents encouraged. Once they discovered that they appreciated each other’s voices in harmony, they started to perform as a teenage duo in the 1950s in school and before audiences, even making a recording—all before emerging in the 1960s as two of the most poetic singers of the war-baby generation.
Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Duluth, Robert De Minn. Even as a Niro was born child, in New York Zimmerman was in 1943. As a Bob Dylan and Joan Baez playing at the “March on taciturn, remote, young man, Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in August 1963. and secretive— De Niro qualities that studied would mark his method acting, which emphasized the persona as an adult. He devoted a good need for an actor to draw on his or her part of his youth to listening to blues own psychological resources and on and country music on the radio. memories and past experiences. By the late 1950s, as he embarked on It’s easy to see how his upbringing in his own singing career, Zimmerman Little Italy prepared him for his Oscarrenamed himself Bob Dylan in honor of winning role as Vito Corleone in one of his favorite writers, Dylan Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II. Thomas. Faye Dunaway was born in 1941 in Florida. She picked cotton as a child and had a difficult relationship with her father, a career soldier who had affairs with other women. These experiences inspired Dunaway to flee from her feelings of childhood alienation, escape to the big city, and become a star. They prepared her for the movie role of a lifetime in 1967, as Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde,
develop her exquisite singing voice as a way of fitting in, as half-Mexican, with her white cohorts.
Joan Baez was born in 1941 to a Mexican father and Scottish mother. Her father studied at Stanford and taught military engineers during the war. But despite his background in math and physics, he was a pacifist and refused to work on the atomic bomb. Baez became a lifelong pacifist herself. While growing up in California, Baez began experimenting with rhythm and blues on a ukulele. She also learned to
This is only a small sampling of warbaby entertainers and artists who modernized music and film in America and who crafted a cultural revolution from which we’re still reaping the benefits today. Richard Pells is the author of War Babies: The Generation That Changed America (Cultural History Press, 2014, ISBN: 978-0-99066980-7, $17.99, www.richardpells.com). Currently, he is professor of history emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin. To learn more, please visit www.richardpells.com.
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