The Lady and the Panda (10 page)

Dan Reib, an executive with the Shanghai branch of Standard Oil Company of New York, or Socony, had heard through mutual friends about Harkness's plans to launch an expedition. Ringing her up, he explained that because he had spent so many years in western China, he thought he might be of some help. He even had a few books on the subject that she might find interesting.

She was delighted. They both had other lunch plans that day—hers with Russell, in fact—but she squeezed Reib in for what was a popular practice in Shanghai: a before-noon drink.

Reib was a
taipan,
all right, a great captain of commerce, but he was
also clearly his own man. He warned Harkness on the phone that he was a “barbarian,” and would be wearing shorts in this hot weather, not giving a damn about the Bund's rigid decorum. No doubt, that alone had appeal for Harkness.

She had a caution of her own. Considering the constant barrage of headlines like MRS. HARKNESS AIDS COLLEGE, which made people very confused about her identity, she informed him that she wasn't of the Standard Oil Harknesses but just “a poor working girl who is on a madcap errand.” He responded that he wouldn't have bothered with her otherwise.

Dan Reib in Shanghai.
COURTESY JANE POLLOCK

When Reib showed up at the hotel, Harkness was swept up in the
surging momentum of his vitality. He was only about five feet nine, but there was a rare and purely American “bigness” about him in every sense, she said. Stocky, husky, and outspoken, he was a “cyclone” who radiated energy and generosity. He had black curly hair and dark, deepset eyes. His gaze was clear and level. Most of all, she said, he had a big soul, just like that of her dear friend Perkie back in the States. They had their cocktails as he told her all about the Chinese frontier. His stories of adventure were like none she had ever heard. He had spent months on end living in faraway places that no other foreigner had ever penetrated. He had even been captured, tortured, and held for ransom.

His whole life, really, had been one big adventure. Raised a rich prepschool boy off an uncle's inheritance in Texas, he had joined the circus for a time at the age of thirteen. In his midteens, he had split off during a school trip to bum around Europe for two years, quickly learning to speak like the natives wherever he went. Despite his footloose ways, he had passed the rigorous admissions exams to Cornell University, where he received a degree in engineering. His facility with languages came in handy in Shanghai, where his bosses, in an effort to get him up to speed, put him on a boat traveling the Yangtze with no fellow westerners. He returned weeks later a fluent speaker.

Here in Shanghai, he was known as a stand-up guy, fond of wearing a cowboy hat while scaring everyone off the bridle path as he charged down on his big Russian mount. He adored women and was fast with his fists if he felt their honor needed defending.

Harkness and Reib connected immediately, and their quick drink turned into two, and three, until the meeting stretched on without end, both of them standing up their “tiffin,” or lunch, dates. Before they finally parted, Reib had set plans for their next session.

The second time he came to her hotel, he brought “armfuls of maps, books, lists of things to take and many other things.” It was another incredible visit. They would meet again and again, Reib providing her friendship, guidance, and a remarkable amount of logistical support. He would purchase food and medicine for the field. He negotiated her banking and mail delivery. As an executive of Standard Oil, he authorized all
kinds of free transportation—by boat and car—for her. It was an enormous gift, since Standard Oil, like tobacco companies and the missionaries, seemed to be everywhere in China. In fact,
Fortune
magazine referred to the triumvirate as “the Gospel of the three lights: the cigarette, the kerosene lamp, and Christianity.” Reib also gave the American widow important letters of introduction to comrades all along her route. In helping her, no task was too small or too large for him. He had, she said, provided her with “everything from maps to brandy and crab meat” for what he had come to call her “experdition.”

Reib particularly loved telling Harkness stories of a little brotherhood of his, a unique band of fearless westerners spread throughout China who referred to themselves as “the Hard-Boiled Eggs.” Two of them Harkness would meet. One was the frail, elderly, and kind Sir Merrick Hewlett, who was about to retire after a long career. The other, E. A. Cavaliere, lived in Chengdu, where he served as postal commissioner for Sichuan; he would come to play a major role in Harkness's life once she was up-country.

Reib, Harkness wrote home to Perkie, “makes this China trip, just by knowing a man like that, a success if nothing else does.” With all his achievements, Reib could have been arrogant or egocentric. His stories might have been exciting but empty yarns. Instead, he always saw the deeper shadings in life and spoke poignantly of what he had learned in the East. Reib had been beset by problems but was not bitter, in fact he felt he had benefited from his experiences. He told Harkness, “One gains sometimes only through loss.”

Harkness felt humbled by him, though she was secure enough to know, she said, that “I have given him something too.” Reib liked strong women—his own mother had fought the system all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court for her rights in her divorce. He made clear his desire to see Harkness succeed. Twice he even dreamed of it—his friend returning with a giant panda.

Harkness would later describe this relationship with Reib as “a marvelous companionship while it lasted.” Far from New York, and years after having last been with her husband, she felt a luxurious contentment
with this “real man.” Together, she and Dan Reib “had found the rare and beautiful.” Despite the ardent description, Harkness characterized the relationship as platonic. “I suppose this almost sounds as if I were in love with him, which I am not in the least,” she wrote home to her pal Perkie. “I feel much the same [about Reib] as I do you without a lot of sex nonsense mixed up in it.” Of course, the funny thing was that the correspondence between Harkness and Perkins sounded passionate too—full of “darlings” and closings of “much, much love.” The connection between the adventuress and the
taipan
looked and sounded like a romance to everyone around them, especially Reib's girlfriend. He was a divorced man but involved with a British woman, who, Harkness said, was “at great pains to let me know that Dan is hers and hands off.”

Shanghai thrived on secrets and gossip. “The speed with which rumor spread in Shanghai bordered on telepathy,” author Vicki Baum noted.
New Yorker
writer Emily Hahn concurred: “Shanghai gossip was fuller, richer, and less truthful than any I had ever before encountered.” In her relationship with Reib, Harkness found out how true this was. “The most intimate pieces of knowledge are common property,” she said. But it didn't matter. “I am becoming reconciled to being thought a little mad,” she reported, “and perhaps not quite nice.” She was determined, she told Perkie, to be “callous to people's curiosity about me.” And, boy, she wrote, were they ever curious.

IN SEPTEMBER, HARKNESS
worked the days through with Young, met with Reib at any hour, then shared sukiyaki dinners with Russell, who was still quietly on board. By now, nightlife had lost its appeal for her. “I shall be glad to get out of Shanghai,” she wrote home. “It is rather uninteresting for a place that is supposed to be so wicked and gay, etc. etc. Perhaps it is, but I assure you I can think of nothing that interests me less than night clubs and that sort of thing. And serious drinking certainly has no charm either.” There was so much to do that some nights, back in her room, she was too exhausted to sleep.

One of her biggest tasks was sifting through the enormous amount of equipment Bill Harkness had amassed. In the lingering summer heat of early September, Harkness and Quentin Young headed to the French Quarter, where Bill had rented a garage for storage. They stood before the building, pulling open its huge creaking doors, releasing the terrible musty odor of long-stored equipment to sun and air.

What they found inside was stunning. It looked like provisions for a well-heeled army. The sheer bulk of the boxes, bundles, bales, and trunks was staggering. Bill was to have enjoyed a proper gentleman's expedition with enough porters to heave every imaginable supply, including hammocks, folding stoves, nine saddles, and 336 pairs of thick wool socks. There was, she said, “an armoury of guns”: rifles, shotguns, pistols, and bayonets. There was clothing, medicine, surgical equipment, and food. And everything came in multiples.

Quentin Young packing for the expedition.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Harkness and Young got started, prying off lids and investigating each container. Harkness found here the intersection of two great passions—adventure and fashion. Among the supplies were the makings of her own expedition wear. Beyond the great piles of clothing for Bill's gargantuan companions, there were the things he had stowed for himself, which were small enough to be cut down and refashioned to suit a woman. Ruth Harkness knew that her favorite tailor, Ziang Tai, was up to that task, with a “Yes, missy, can do.” Here she put her hands on woolen long johns, jodhpurs, slacks, and shirts, every one of them belonging to the man she missed so much. She wrapped herself in a nicely broken-in tweed jacket that despite the miasma inside the garage must have retained just a little of Bill's essence.

Having taken over his mission, she would now literally be walking in his shoes. She plucked out the smallest pair of hobnailed boots, each with two and a half pounds of hardware in it, to be shrunk by a resourceful Chinese shoemaker.

The expedition seemed so seductively real and precious that Harkness feared it would be taken from her. She found herself gripped by a strange anxiety and experienced a recurring nightmare, in which she had been transported to the United States and was trying desperately to get back to China, “the country,” she wrote, “that even then began to have untold fascination for me.” She knew the fear was groundless—everything was falling into place.

In this land nearly obsessed with courting good luck, she somehow understood that fate rode with her. It had become apparent when Quentin Young signed on. There was an almost divine alchemy between the two that kept putting them at the right place at the right time. “When Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition,” Harkness would say, “the obstacles that had surrounded me began to disappear. In fact, the Chinese Wall of ‘It-Can't-Be-Dones’ crumpled like the walls of Jericho.”

There was some irony in this, since no self-respecting Western expedition force would have put either Harkness or Young in command. Without her money, they wouldn't have taken Harkness on in any capacity. She had, of course, her sex going against her, and a lack of experience. Young was not so green, but he was Chinese, and barely past his teens. They were both so far outside the elite inner circle of wealthy wellknown adventurers that their “much hooted-at expedition,” in the words of
The New York Times,
wasn't even worthy of the kind of interest these gentlemen took in one another's business.

Between Harkness and Young, though, respect grew during the long days of collaboration. Harkness was touched that Young sought her opinion on all expedition matters, including things she had no knowledge of, such as what types of traps they might set. For his part, Young, accustomed to the bigotry of foreigners, was surprised by Harkness's utter lack of it. She hardly saw Young as “other.” In fact, his slouchy stride and shy expression reminded her of her beloved brother, Jim. She found in him “an innate dignity” the likes of which she had never witnessed before.

The quiet explorer worked out a Chinese name for Harkness, as was the custom, revealing something of how he perceived her. “My name in Chinese means ‘silky dew,’ all of which is pretty fancy,” Harkness wrote home. “Quentin says I must have a title as well. He is thinking up one. Now I wonder if I will be Lady Silky Dew or just plain Duchess. I think myself it should be Heavenly Princess Silky Dew etc etc.” She got a kick out of Young's image of her, but she must have thought Reib's more accurate. He too had conjured a Chinese name for her: Ha Gansi (at the time spelled out as “Ha Kan Sse”), which translated as “laughing with courageous thoughts.” It was Reib's version of her Chinese name that she had printed up on cards. The characters were lovely, she thought, particularly the last, which was represented by a field of rice with a heart below it. “To cultivate your rice field with your heart is to think,” it was explained to her.