The Lady and the Panda (3 page)

At the beginning of their courtship, they found themselves constantly tucked away in some corner, slugging back bootleg booze and lost in intense conversation. Addicted to reading, they soon began swapping books on their favorite subject—exotic travel. Their leather-bound volumes were filled with high adventure and glimpses of strange cultures. Often they contained delicate fold-out maps shaded in beautiful colors, veined with blue rivers and dappled by the shadowy wrinkles of mountain ranges. The most captivating among these atlases were the half-finished ones, those in which the dense, busy portions would end abruptly, leaving blank whole uncharted territories—regions of the world still steeped in mystery. Here were the places that had not given up their secrets to Western travelers and mapmakers. Sitting together in the haze of cigarette smoke, warmed by a glass of whiskey, their imaginations racing, Bill and Ruth always found themselves drawn to those patches of the unknown.

Bill had spent most of his short adulthood “on game trails in remote corners of the globe,” Ruth said, visiting India and China, Java, Borneo, and other islands of the Dutch East Indies. He thrived on the rough-andtumble life in the field leavened by stints of footloose merriment in exotic cities. In long letters home, and then in intimate getting-reacquainted sessions on his return, he entranced Ruth with his tales of treks abroad.

His accounts, no doubt, were as gracefully told as the sagas the couple read together. For Bill was the romantically literary type with a classical education. He had passed college-entrance examinations in Latin, Greek, French, English, and ancient history. He described himself as an author and a man of letters and was an American intellectual in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt—the brave outdoorsman, as familiar with Milton as with a “Big Medicine” .405 rifle.

He and Ruth spent weekends at his family's estate in Connecticut, and sometimes slipped off for tropical romantic getaways to places like the Virgin Islands. They drank and philosophized. “A dash of absinthe,” Ruth said, “and you analyze the hell out of everything.” They read books, walked on the beach, and poured their hearts out to each other.

And there was so much to talk about. Each of them was haunted by
a penetrating, persistent loneliness, suffering bouts of it even in a crowded room. Yet they craved solitude. To Bill and to Ruth, being alone was a complex state: the satisfaction of solitude played against a chronic sense of loneliness.

As they settled into a life together, and even after they were married, their rather elastic relationship was marked by intimacy and long periods of separation. Paradoxically, they seemed to grow closer while apart. When traveling, Bill found he could be utterly open with Ruth. In addressing her, he wrote more easily, and with greater clarity, than when scribbling in a private journal. Her intuition, her understanding of his very nature, was so complete, that just placing her name at the top of the page, he said, drew him out. He was so certain of a mystical connection between them that he never worried about how they would keep in touch despite the vagaries of international mail service and the fluid nature of his itineraries. “He had a divine faith,” Ruth explained, “that I'd somehow know how to get letters to him and strangely enough I did.”

Her responses were encyclopedic. She couldn't help “rambling”— telling him every detail of her activities and thoughts.

For Ruth, who would always feel that her family misunderstood her, there was, in this distant intimacy, a familiarity. She was accustomed to physical and emotional separations, and as Bill continued a life constantly on the campaign, his presence was a palpable part of her life.

SO ON THAT WINTRY
February afternoon when Ruth found out that Bill was dead, her emotional loss was profound. She felt in a fog—incoherent and, she would reflect later, impossible to deal with.

The friends who rallied around her quickly became concerned about a practical matter. It was clear that the widow would receive a relatively small inheritance. With Bill and his father both dead, Bill's stepmother, who had inherited about $150,000 two years before, was the keeper of the estate. Ruth would always say that money didn't matter to her, and she proved it now as her financial state changed drastically. Facing life without Bill's purse, she didn't lift a finger to fight for a scrap of it. She
was to receive about $20,000—a not-unpleasant sum in 1936, but not enough to last much more than a year for a Fifth Avenue address. It was for a young woman perhaps sufficient to live on for some time if she scrimped and lived a small life. But “small” wasn't in Ruth Harkness's vocabulary.

Her friends were distraught over the inequity of the distribution. And they saw that the apartment, the maid, the expensive portrait photographers, the luxury Ruth Harkness had been enjoying, would all go. In no time, she would be in the same pickle as everyone else living through the Depression.

She left it to her dearest friend, Hazel Perkins, an industrious and ambitious woman raising two boys alone, to negotiate and sometimes spar with Bill's stepmother to retrieve some of his personal effects from the family home—furniture, books, and his mother's jewelry.

Security wasn't Harkness's passion; in fact, it would be the last thing she would spend time dwelling on now. Over many chilly days and nights, she was drinking through teary-eyed reveries. In those sad, quiet hours she might even have heard echoes of a jaunty, bittersweet rendition of “Vilia,” the signature aria from
The Merry Widow,
about a forest nymph who falls in love with a mortal man. Bill used to absentmindedly whistle the tune, which now could serve as a melancholy anthem for the couple.

Already in the numbed ache of those days, though, she had an inkling of what she wanted to do, and the twenty grand would be just the ticket. The rage of emotion that welled up inside her was being marshaled into conviction, a resolve that was probably too outrageous to say aloud. She decided that she wouldn't leave Bill's mission incomplete— she would pick it up and carry it to victory. After all, she reasoned, exploration was in her blood as much as it had been in his. She had spoiled for the voyages into the unknown just as Bill had. And at this point, who knew what the future would hold, so why live a modest life when she could have herself “one grand adventure”? She had the money, the purpose, and, with her husband's death, something else, something surprising.
As she sent instructions for Bill's body to be cremated, her own freedom began to emerge from his ashes.

Like a swimmer who dives to the bottom of a pool and pushes off, it was often from the position of lowest circumstance that Ruth would rebound with enormous energy. Now she'd need it. For her to enter Bill's realm would be considered heresy.

Bill Harkness's background and exploits had placed him among an elite group of the time—wealthy lads with a taste for adventure, a cocktail shaker in one hand and a pistol in the other, as comfortable in black tie as they were in field khaki. Teddy Roosevelt's sons Theodore and Kermit described their brethren as the “brown lean men who drift quietly into New York” making plans to launch great expeditions, trekking “to lonely places where food is scant” and “danger a constant bedfellow.”

It was a time in which seekers in science didn't need advanced degrees or rigorous course work. Bill and others like him were amateur zoologists of fine breeding, with solid Ivy League educations, who enjoyed the privileges of good standing with the heads of natural history museums and zoos. Funding was effortless—they either underwrote their own expeditions or used their status to hustle sponsors, always in the most gentlemanly way.

Handsome, articulate, well-educated daredevils, they made great copy, and the market for their wares was phenomenal. The cavernous, echoing halls of museums of natural history were still in search of new exhibit specimens, while the zoos that had sprung up across the United States were on the prowl for anything new or unique. In Bill and Ruth's young lifetimes several large mammals had just been described for the first time, including the mountain gorilla and the velvet-coated cousin to the giraffe, the okapi.

Zoos were seeking more than just the novel; they were also desperate to maintain their collections of better-known animals, which in some cases suffered very high mortality rates. In 1931, gorillas were as scarce and perishable as wild orchids. The Bronx Zoo assured visitors that “the agents of the New York Zoological Society are constantly on the watch
for an opportunity to procure and send hither a good specimen of this wonderful creature.” But it also warned that the viewing opportunity might be short. “Whenever one arrives all persons interested are advised to see it
immediately,
— before it dies of sullenness, lack of exercise, and indigestion,” the guide read.

Demand for animals was strong enough that the dashing boys of high adventure would never fill a fraction of the orders. There was work enough for an army, but a definite caste system was established. Bill's crowd was at the top; below them were many other men from all walks of life, driven by every impulse imaginable: scholarly inclinations, a love of wildlife, greed, or a hunger for fame.

If in Ruth's zeal to join Bill on his treks, she had noted the presence of those few women who were in the game, there couldn't be a more obvious example than Osa Johnson. Flying zebra-striped and giraffe-spotted his-and-hers Sikorsky amphibious planes, Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled Americans with the movies they produced of exotic people and animals around the world. By filming naked “savages” and charging rhinos, and in exploring places rarely penetrated by westerners, the Johnsons were able to command $100,000 speaking tours. In the dark times of the Great Depression, the American public couldn't get enough of their derring-do. There were documentary films made for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, popular big-screen movies such as
Simba
and
Baboona,
and later, Osa's bestselling books, including
I Married Adventure.
Audiences and readers thrilled at the couple's stories of cannibals and cobras. In various scenes, Osa could be seen playing “Aloha” on the ukulele for a “cannibal king” or riding a zebra. Diminutive though she was, she once managed to pose carrying a full-grown Pygmy woman in her arms.

The Johnsons' keenest competition came from Frank “Bring 'Em Back Alive” Buck. In his own crowd-pleasing books and films, he battled maneating tigers and venomous snakes. He was suave and dashing and was always able on film to emerge from seething jungles with his khakis still sharply creased.

Out of sight of the movie cameras and far below these high-toned
characters were countless collectors working without advance pay and lacking formal association with any large institution. They were truly in the trenches, sweating it out in the tropics, freezing on snowy massifs, and always hoping for a big windfall. They often traveled on the cheap, trying to peddle whatever they had.

In newspaper stories, these exploits were portrayed as thrilling— crowded with bloodthirsty natives, marked by hidden peril at every turn. Rarely in the recounting was the casual cruelty of the actual captures related in detail.

Adult elephants often had their Achilles tendons slashed in order to let hunters collect the babies. If done correctly, the bleed-out would be painless, the men claimed. Distressed captive baby giraffes would often just crumple and die, despite the whole herds of goats employed to supply milk. Baboons would be tied, muzzled, and nearly mummified in cloth. Zebras might be whipped to exhaustion.

Over the course of his career, Buck boasted that he had delivered 39 elephants, 60 tigers, 62 leopards, 52 orangutans, 5,000 monkeys, 40 kangaroos and wallabies, 40 bears, and 100 snakes—in all, 10,000 mammals and 100,000 birds. The numbers that died along the way were incalculable, with the loss viewed not in moral or ethical terms but as a monetary issue. “If enough specimens die en route, the collector finds himself ‘in the soup,’ ” Buck wrote.

While unaware of these horrible practices, Ruth certainly had been versed in the game's colorful cast of characters. And in 1933 one player had come knocking. Well over six feet tall, with a receding hairline and a devilish goatee, Lawrence T. K. Griswold was an old Harvard chum of Bill's, who pitched a proposal that would change the course of both Bill and Ruth's lives. He had an expedition in mind as he traveled to New York searching for a partner who had not only the backbone and temperament for such arduous travel but also the cash to float it.

Since Bill was the obvious first choice, Griswold went looking in the speakeasy district of New York at a little joint called Emilio's. As it turned out, he found Bill, who “was fortunately furnished with enough money
to do whatever he wanted within reasonable bounds,” idle at the moment and eager to go. And with Bill “in,” it was easy to recruit the rest of the party.

Ruth Harkness wasn't impressed with Larry Griswold; she thought he was a bit of a sponger and a pretentious one at that. She also may not have cared for the way he took Bill away for such long periods on adventures that excluded her. She wanted to jump into the action herself. Alone, maybe Bill would have capitulated, but the team of Bill and Larry wouldn't budge: it was boys only.

The first Harkness-Griswold expedition targeted the Indonesian island of Komodo. They were in search of the biggest lizard on the planet, the elusive Komodo dragon, which had been introduced to the world in a scientific paper the decade before, and was one of the most soughtafter creatures in existence. Weighing up to three hundred pounds, the Komodo has huge, curved, serrated teeth, perfect for tearing flesh. Great head and neck muscles and a jaw hinged for extra-wide opening aid the animals in bolting massive amounts of meat. The modern-day dinosaur would be a provocative prize.

Through the campaign, Bill and Larry depended on each other, confident enough in their own fortitude to always find humor in the face of mortal danger. Gaining success with their particular style of careless rich-boy swashbuckling, the team came away from the island in possession of several fine live specimens. But in Shanghai, on the way home, there were more high jinks to come.