Written off as a brain-damaged child because of her autism, Temple Grandin’s remarkable way of looking at the world has brought her huge success as both an animal behaviour expert and a parenting guru. Now her life has been turned into an inspiring film

Temple on her ranch in Colorado

It is a bright but bitingly cold winter’s day in Vicksburg, rural Mississippi, deep in the heart of cattle country. In a vast conference centre beside the state’s eponymous river, Dr Temple Grandin, America’s foremost animal behaviour expert – and best-known autistic woman – is receiving a standing ovation. The 500-strong audience of psychologists, teachers, social workers and parents, gathered today for a conference about autism and Asperger’s syndrome, is on its feet to applaud the achievements of 63-year-old Temple, who has not merely overcome her autism, but used her skills to change the face of the meat industry in America. And while you may not be familiar with Temple or her work, a new TV film, starring Claire Danes in a Golden Globe-winning role as the young Temple, means you soon will be.



Today, Temple is sporting the rather masculine cowgirl style she favours – dark grey jeans and an embroidered grey shirt with a red silk neckerchief and a cow-shaped belt buckle. She is tall, slim and healthy-looking, her face make-up free. Her intensively researched lecture on helping the development of autistic children is delivered with charisma and humour, although her unusual speech pattern is somewhat staccato. But what is most remarkable, given her on-stage confidence, is the diagnosis she was given, aged three, that she was unlikely ever to speak at all.



Temple was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1947, the eldest of four siblings, and displayed many of what are now recognised as the classic early symptoms of autism – she hated to be touched, would dissolve into temper tantrums, and was, for the large part, silent. ‘When I was very young, I had no speech, attention span or eye contact at all,’ she explains. ‘I would just hum to myself and dribble sand through my hands.’ At the time, autistic children were often incorrectly diagnosed as developmentally disabled, and in Temple’s case, the expert opinion was that she was brain-damaged and should be confined to an institution to receive long-term care.

With Claire Danes at the film's launch

In the HBO-made film, which will premiere on UK television next Sunday, Temple’s mother Eustacia, played by Julia Ormond, is portrayed as a single parent, campaigning to have her daughter’s condition better understood. Eustacia did, in fact, have a husband, Richard, a real estate agent, but he did not support her struggle on Temple’s behalf. ‘My father was one of the main people who wanted to put me in an institution,’ Temple says matter-of-factly.



But Eustacia, who had married young and was two years into an English degree at Harvard when she became pregnant with Temple (she later returned to college to finish her course), was determined, sending her daughter to speech therapy and hiring a nanny to spend long hours each day playing games with her. ‘Lots of early one-on-one time is essential for children with autism,’ Temple says. ‘It stopped me from retreating into a corner of isolation and kept my brain turned in to the world.’ Her condition was not recognised as autism until later in life, but the formidable Eustacia felt sure that, with enough interaction, Temple could be trained to learn ‘normal’ behaviours.



‘My father was one of those who wanted to put me in an institution’

Temple also credits her traditional 1950s upbringing with drumming essential social skills into her. ‘I was taught real manners,’ she says, suddenly rolling her cutlery out of its napkin and flinging it across the table. ‘At five years old, I would leave it all like that,’ she says, motioning to the scattered silverware, ‘but mother would just say: “Put your napkin in your lap”. Then she would say: “Put your knife and fork like this”,’ she continues, straightening the items back into their correct spots. ‘Eventually, I would learn.’ This is a point she reiterates in her autism lectures time and again. ‘I think today’s kids get coddled too much. You shouldn’t push autistic children too far, or it can cause sensory overload, which can bring on panic attacks, but if you don’t push them a little, there’s not going to be any advancement.’



The Grandin family had sufficient funds to send Temple to private schools which gave her more individual attention than she would have received in the state system. However, ‘School was still really unpleasant for me,’ says Temple, without self-pity. ‘I was teased all the time. The only places I wasn’t teased were in riding class, the science lab and in model rocket group [the after-school hobby club set up to build model rockets, in which the technically minded Temple thrived].’ Friendships were hard-won for the teenage Temple, a nervous and awkward outsider. ‘The friendships I did build were through these shared experiences, geeking out with others who were interested in the same things,’ she says, her brain more interested, as she puts it, in ‘doing’ than ‘feeling’.



Temple and her mother at last year’s Emmy Awards party; with her horse



There’s no doubt Temple is uncommonly intelligent. ‘I think in pictures,’ is how Temple herself defines her special way of seeing the world. ‘My mind is like Google Images.’ And she isn’t exaggerating: Nancy Minshew, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted tests on Temple’s brain that showed a ‘huge trunkline going back into the primary visual cortex’. This means that like many autistic people, while Temple may lack natural verbal and emotional reactions, she is gifted with the ability to recall and perfectly re-create anything she has seen. Temple says, ‘Most people don’t think in such photo-realistic pictures. If I asked you to think about a factory, most people get a vague sort of idea in their head, whereas I see specific ones.’ This means that Temple can visualise highly detailed systems in her mind, and translate them into complex designs.



When Temple was 14, her parents divorced and her mother remarried. Temple and Eustacia had little to do with her father after that and he died in the mid-1990s, she tells me without emotion, but she got on ‘just fine’ with her stepfather, she says. Since Temple adored horses, Eustacia believed she would benefit from spending time at her new sister-in-law’s ranch in Arizona. The notion of such a trip was enormously stressful for the young Temple. ‘I was terrified of new places, people, everything,’ she says. ‘Fear is the overriding emotion in autism. Loud noises, including bells, would trigger awful panic attacks for me.’

‘It was important to see what the cattle could see, so I could address what made them anxious’

As it happened, the ranch was to be a turning point for Temple. Not only did she thrive on looking after her aunt’s horses, but she also began to feel a special bond with the cattle, in whose company she felt more peaceful than she did with people. She discovered that the cattle were, like her, similarly unsettled by unexpected sounds and motions, but that pressure, from the squeeze chute they passed through on their way to be vaccinated, would calm them down. Fascinated by the chute, Temple persuaded her aunt to allow her to try it out herself. The result was a dramatic soothing of Temple’s nerves – without the uncomfortable human contact of a hug. The scientifically minded Temple set about constructing her own makeshift ‘squeeze machine’. She would clamber inside and, lying on her front in its cannon-sized chamber, would pull a cord that applied pressure from panels on either side, calming her over-active nervous system.



High school may have been hard, but Temple persisted and a degree in psychology at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire followed. ‘Living in a shared room in a dorm was the hardest part,’ she says. ‘The movie shows my squeeze machine being thrown away because my room-mate objected to it. It was actually put in storage but there were plenty of people who didn’t like it.’



In graduate school at Arizona State University, Temple finally found her voice, researching animal behaviour and working in the feed yards of the livestock industry as part of her postgraduate research. She began to sense that – like her – cattle and other animals relied on visual clues to navigate their world. ‘Animals are sensory thinkers. They think in pictures too, in smells and in sounds.’



Temple’s affinity with cattle meant she tried to see things from their perspective – literally. ‘Out on the feed yards in Arizona, I got down in the chutes to see what the cattle were seeing,’ she recalls. ‘I remember the cattle were afraid of a puddle, a chain hanging down, a person walking by. It was important to see what the cattle see, so

I could address what made them anxious.’ With her unique perspective, Temple started to write highly rated articles for livestock magazines.



Claire Danes playing Temple in the film

The cattle industry of the Midwest in the 1970s, however, was not an easy place for a young woman to succeed. She faced extreme sexism and bullying, and on one occasion, her car was covered in bloody bull’s testicles. ‘Lots of the cowboys wanted me off the site because they said their wives didn’t like me being there,’ she says. ‘But because of my autism, I didn’t pick up on that social stuff. I didn’t notice their dislike of me, I just wanted to work on the squeeze chute. So long as I could do that, I was happy.’



Temple began to design what she could already see in her mind – better ways of channelling cattle through to disinfectant vats and for vaccinations without them becoming alarmed. Next, she turned her attention to slaughterhouses, designing more humane systems of slaughtering cattle. Incredibly, today, more than half the cattle in the US and Canada are handled in facilities designed by Temple. She also has the ear of big business, working as a consultant for McDonald’s, designing and implementing their animal welfare programmes.



Somehow, between transforming America’s livestock industry, becoming a spokeswoman for autism and teaching PhD students at Colorado State University, Dr Temple Grandin has also written ten books, on both animal and human behaviour. Her countrywide schedule of lectures – on cattle, as well as autism – is punishing. She is gracious to the long line of parents who seek her out at the conference to sign copies of her book, giving each one specific nuggets of advice. One mother tells her that she makes her autistic son take out the rubbish each day, to give him a responsible role within the family. ‘Get him to walk the neighbour’s dog so he has to interact with other people outside of your family,’ Temple advises.



To observe her dealing so calmly with what could be an overwhelming situation for anyone, let alone someone with autism, is impressive. She credits prescription drugs with helping her manage panic attacks these days. ‘The anxiety has worsened as I’ve got older,’ she says, ‘but a little dab of Prozac has worked wonders for me.’



She still finds it easiest to form friendships through shared experiences, she says. ‘Some of the best friends I’ve ever made have been guys I’ve worked with on construction sites.’ But sexual relationships do not figure highly on her list of interests. ‘I’m a total geek, and I’m celibate,’ she says simply.



Temple, who lives modestly and alone in Colorado, is still close to her three younger siblings and to Eustacia, who, now 83 and living in New York, is still going strong. And she acknowledges that, without her mother’s persistence, her fate might have been very different. ‘Mother could see I was progressing, so she always kept pushing me forward,’ she says. ‘Julia Ormond gave mother her Emmy award [for best supporting actress], and mother keeps it on her desk,’ she tells me, conspiratorially. ‘The two of them have become quite good friends.’



Temple is delighted with the on-screen story of her life. ‘I thought the film came out just great – I really did,’ she says, with pride. ‘Claire is such a great actress and, on film, she really is me as a teenager. I gave her a bunch of ancient videos of me, and she had an iPod which she recorded my voice on.’ The resulting likeness to Temple’s own speech patterns and even her walk is incredible.



When Danes won the Golden Globe award in January this year, she dedicated it to Temple, who was in the audience, being hugged by the director, Mick Jackson. It was a twofold achievement, marking Temple’s own increased comfort with human contact as much as the film’s success. These days, she no longer has to rely on her beloved squeeze machine to provide calming pressure. ‘It broke two years ago, and I haven’t got round to fixing it,’ she admits. ‘But I’m more into hugging people these days anyway.’

Temple Grandin will be shown on Sky Atlantic HD and Sky Atlantic at 9pm next Sunday

