The decorated soldier who kept his past as 'Bambi' a secret

Donnie Dunagan is an American soldier who fought in the Vietnam War, was wounded several times, decorated for bravery, and promoted to major.

He was also a military instructor in the Navy and had several soldiers under his tutelage or command.

During all his years in the Navy, Donnie kept a secret close to his chest, one he kept well into his retirement: a past connection to the entertainment world that he didn't want his subordinates to know about because he thought it would be a source of ridicule.

Donnie's secret is the subject of an episode of the BBC News Brasil podcast Que História , which can be heard on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer and other streaming platforms.

Donnie Dunagan was born in 1934 and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, to Irish parents who had emigrated in search of a better life.

The family faced ups and downs during the Great Depression. Shortly after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the family suffered a series of misfortunes, and Donnie found himself in foster care, as he recounted in an interview with the BBC's Life Less Ordinary .

"It was a house with a lot of orphans—there were a lot of orphans not just because of the war but also because of the economic depression. The week I turned 14, I ran away from the orphanage, went to live in a boarding house, and started supporting myself by working as a lathe operator."

When he turned 18, during the Korean War, Donnie enlisted in the Marine Corps, joining the Marine Corps. He soon became the youngest military instructor in the United States.

Donnie deployed to Vietnam three times, where he fought and was wounded several times. He earned three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for valor. He was promoted 13 times in 25 years in the Marines and retired with the rank of major. And throughout this time, he kept his secret, a past connection to the world of arts and entertainment that he didn't want his comrades to know.

"Something inside me told me not to tell. I didn't even think about it much, I was very happy with my work."

"If they only knew… I kept picturing one of the recruits in boot camp under my command going to the movies to see Disney's Bambi , and seeing my name in the credits. And him coming home and saying, 'Mom, just imagine. My commanding officer is Major Bambi. Major Bambi!'"

What do you mean, "Major Bambi"? We haven't even covered what Donnie did as a child, long before he embarked on a military career. That's when he had a short, glorious career in Hollywood.

In the 1930s, Donnie Dunagan's parents earned little and could barely afford the rent on their small apartment.

"When I was 4 years old, my mother took me one Saturday to a street corner where a tall black man, wearing a top hat and carrying a cane, was tap-dancing and dancing in the street. He looked like he was made of rubber. He danced so well that he made Fred Astaire look like a marching soldier! The people around, at least 20 or 30 of them, were applauding and throwing coins. And I, barefoot because we didn't have money for shoes, watched and tried to imitate him."

"He saw me doing it, and the second or third Saturday after that, when we came back, he asked my mom if I could do some steps there with him. Everyone around laughed, but my mom let me and off I went, barefoot, to dance with him."

"He was very patient and taught me how to do some basic steps with him. And we continued to do that over the next few Saturdays. His name was Sam and he kept teaching me."

And so, tall Sam, with his top hat and cane, and Donnie, the barefoot child, became a duo attraction in Saturday street performances. And one day, news broke that a talent show was coming to town.

"My mom was all excited and thought I should join in. First, they had to find shoes and found a pair that were a little too big. But when we lined the front with paper, they were perfect for tap dancing."

"So we went to the theater. There I learned the prize was $100. Wow! This was in 1938, when everyone worked for 20 or 25 cents an hour. I stood backstage with my mother watching the contestants. They were almost all teenagers—ballerinas, pianists, vocalists. And I was four and a half years old!"

"Then it was my turn. They put a phonograph on the stage and played the record with A Tisket, A Tasket, My Yellow Basket . I came in and danced...and I won the contest!"

A few days later, a talent scout knocked on Dunagan's door.

"He was a well-dressed, very professional man who had seen the talent show. He made some contacts in Hollywood and invited us to Los Angeles. The idea was for my parents to sign a contract for me to work as a movie actor."

"My parents could hardly believe what was happening. They accepted, and two or three days later a taxi picked us up and took us to the train station. We arrived at the huge, beautiful train station in Los Angeles. I remember my mother being absolutely thrilled…"

"We were taken to an apartment that had one bedroom, a living room, a large bathroom, and a full kitchen. I thought my mother was going to have a heart attack."

Thus, the family, who just a few weeks earlier couldn't afford to buy Donnie a shoe, suddenly found themselves beginning their new and unexpected life in the movie business of Hollywood's golden age. And soon came their first role.

"About a week after we arrived in Los Angeles, a man came to pick us up and took us to the studio to audition. I tested a few lines, and they cast me in my first film, Mother Carrie's Chickens .

In just one year, Donnie appeared in five films, including the cult classic Son of Frankenstein (1939) , with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Basil Rathbone.

At just five years old, Donnie was a movie star.

One fine day, his mother received a call that would change her life forever.

"I was in the kitchen with my mother. The phone rang, my mother answered, and on the other end of the line was a guy we didn't know, Walt Disney.

"My mother, all politeness, heard Mr. Disney inviting her to visit his new studios. They wanted me to serve as the face model for a character in a feature film called Bambi ."

Bambi would be the fifth animated feature film from Walt Disney Studios. Based on an Austrian novel, it's a now-well-known story of a little deer, from his birth, his childhood with several friends from the animal world, the loss of his mother, killed by hunters, his maturation, and the many lessons he learns along the way to starting his own family.

Interestingly, Donnie's agent was against the idea of ​​him working for a cartoon, even for Walt Disney, who by that time was already a considerable force in Hollywood.

"My mother called her agent saying she had received the offer from Walt Disney. He, who was dressed like a 1930s movie gangster, immediately came to our house and started telling my mother that we couldn't accept it because it was just a bad cartoon, that it would ruin my career, blah, blah, blah, blah..."

"I was 6 years old, I already read newspapers at that time, I was reasonably literate. And I had seen people being fired by the big studios, I knew how it was done. We were sitting in the living room, my mother saying 'let's let Donnie do the cartoon, he'll have fun' and the agent saying he shouldn't do it... So I just fired him. I said: 'You're fired, get out of here!'"

Without an agent, Donnie began working at Disney Studios. Initially, he was hired as a model. The idea was that Bambi would be more relatable to the public if his expressions were modeled on those of a child.

"I would sit on a stool in front of a semicircle of men I called the 'pencil men.' Then one of them would say, 'Now, Donnie, look to the left, and hold it.' And they would ask me to make all sorts of facial expressions."

"One day, one of the pencil men told me to make an expression like I'd just encountered something really unpleasant, something bad. Another man asked if my mother had given me anything to eat or medicine that I hated, and I said yes, that I'd taken a spoonful of something called castor oil, which was awful! This man then said, 'What would it be like to take two spoonfuls of castor oil?' Then I made a face like, 'Ugh,' and they said, 'Hold it!'"

"And this face I made appears in the movie when Bambi meets the little deer Faline for the first time. She says 'hello to Bambi,' and he shyly refuses to respond. He walks away from her, trips, and falls into a puddle surrounded by bushes, and when she gives him a surprise kiss, saying 'hello Bambi!', he makes the castor oil face!"

Several months and many posing for the pencil men later, Donnie was also hired to voice Bambi. And after three years of production, the film premiered in 1942 at the iconic Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

"There was a huge crowd. The street was all lit up, the theater was completely packed. People loved the movie. The children in the theater related to that baby deer as if they were in the forest themselves. And to this day, the scene where Bambi's mother is shot is very powerful. Imagine back then. I saw mothers putting their hands over their children's eyes in that scene."

Although the film was a success, it would be Donnie's last because, in December 1941, the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was bombed by Japanese forces allied with Germany, pushing the United States into World War II.

It was a pivotal moment for Walt Disney, who halted studio production and devoted his filmmaking expertise to the war effort, producing military training films and patriotic propaganda cartoons for the U.S. government.

The movie offers dried up, Donnie's family, through a series of misfortunes that Donnie preferred not to reveal, disintegrated and he ended up in the orphanage we mentioned at the beginning of this report.

Throughout his military career and even in retirement, he kept his Hollywood history a secret, even from his wife, Dana. Until the day she opened a trunk stored in the garage.

"I was out in the garden, mowing the lawn, and Dana was tidying up the garage. All of a sudden, I heard her yelling, 'What is that?' When I walked into the garage, she was pulling out these photographs, autographs, tons of fan mail. She was really upset that I never told her about this. She didn't really talk to me for a week. But she got over the shock and disappointment and agreed to keep this past a secret."

But in 2004, the secret came out and "Major Bambi" was finally unmasked.

"This really nice lady, a World War II widow, was visiting us. And for some reason, Dana had a picture of Bambi on one of the tables. And this lady asked my wife about the picture, and Dana told her that I had been in Walt Disney's Bambi . She said, 'What??'"

"This lady told some people, someone told the local press, and a newspaper called us, asking a lot of questions. We sent some photos and they put us on the front page of the newspaper. From there, the story circulated around the country. And one day Disney called, inviting us to visit the studios in Burbank, California, and to participate in some events. And from then on, everything people asked of me, I gave."

Since Donnie was rediscovered as the voice of Bambi, he has embraced his status as a Hollywood legend. He receives messages from all over the world, from longtime fans to children watching the film for the first time. Today, instead of feeling ashamed or apprehensive about this past, it's quite the opposite: he feels immense pride in being part of cinematic history.