The Lady and the Panda (36 page)

Across the country hundreds of thousands of Americans mourned the animal's death. Telegrams of condolence poured in to the zoo and to Chicago newspaper offices. The
Chicago Tribune
ran a previously unpublished color photograph of Su-Lin and sold framed copies for one dollar each.
Life
magazine called Su-Lin America's favorite animal, and the
Tribune
reported that he was the most photographed. As his popularity had been stunning—with about two million people coming to the zoo just to see the panda—so too was the grief over his death. But “of her countless mourners,”
Life
noted, “none wept more bitterly than Mrs. Harkness.” Reached with the news, Harkness burst into tears. “This is terrible,” she
cried. “I never expected anything like it to happen. She was the sweetest, best natured little animal I had ever seen.” Heartbroken, Harkness said she “could not feel much worse if Su-Lin had been a child.”

The Beans assured her that everything that could have been done for Su-Lin had been done.

A distinguished panel of pathologists from both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University was assembled. The cursory postmortem revealed nothing, so an edgy Edward Bean ordered Mei-Mei to be kept in a separate area until a close examination of Su-Lin's quarters could be completed. The body of the beloved panda was sent off to the Field Museum of Natural History where a team of medical experts, led by Dr. Wilfred H. Osgood, curator of zoology, and Robert Bean could perform a thorough check.

The necropsy revealed several things. The heart was “grossly perfectly normal.” That meant that the altitude change had not harmed Su-Lin— good news to the zoo, which was keeping Mei-Mei and shopping for another panda. The lungs were a different story. Analyzed sections showed that Su-Lin had died of pneumonia.

The press was agitating for answers, but a tight-lipped Robert Bean said only, “We shall neither confirm nor deny the findings until the Chicago Zoological Society's physician can make a complete examination. Until that time no official of the park will speculate as to what caused Su-Lin's death.” In fact, it would take more than a year for the discovery that Su-Lin was a male to come to light.

EVEN IN DEATH
, the animal was valuable to naturalists, this time to those at the Field Museum. A taxidermist there made a death mask of the beloved panda, then, using glue, burlap, and plaster, took his hide to create a mounted figure in a glassed-in exhibit. The effect was one of incredible pathos as the beautiful bear's face was forever set in an expression of deep sadness, his posture upright but slumped like that of a person with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

In the meantime, the horrible news was now twisted for Harkness.
Word came from Chengdu that Smith had scored a remarkable triumph, collecting four giant pandas—three of them reported to be male cubs. Elizabeth Smith was telling the press that her husband planned to charter a plane to Hong Kong, bringing the animals west as quickly as possible. Papers everywhere carried the provocative bulletin, often combining it with stories about Su-Lin's death.
Time
magazine placed both items under the headline PANDAS GALORE. The
Chicago Tribune
said that “the bottom fell out of the baby giant panda market yesterday.” And
The New York Times
reported on his “record catch,” noting that Smith's were the only males believed to be in captivity.

It was welcome news in Chicago. “Oh boy—wonderful!” exclaimed Robert Bean. It made sense the zoo would want to acquire a male, since they thought they still had a female. A member of the Chicago Zoological Society's animal committee not only told the press that the zoo would be very interested in a purchase, he also implied that Mei-Mei might just get the boot. Francis E. Manierre mentioned that while Mei-Mei was on exhibition, the panda had not actually been purchased yet—the implication being that there was still time to drop Harkness and pick up Smith. He was accurate in his description of the panda's status. The zoo had, in fact, retained the right to refuse a female panda, since it was assumed at the time that Su-Lin was also a female. And the zoo had not yet laid out the cash for Harkness's next venture. But with Su-Lin dead, getting rid of Mei-Mei to buy a lone male would make no sense—one panda, male or female, could not reproduce. Besides, the zoo hadn't heard a thing from Smith himself.

Mei-Mei was proving to be quite an attraction even without Su-Lin. The first day the panda was exhibited, forty-two thousand people showed up—many lining up before opening time, several carrying stepladders in anticipation of the frenzy. A poll conducted in Chicago placed the panda's popularity equal to that of Chicago Cubs pitching ace Dizzy Dean. Not surprisingly, the zoo didn't go forward with the plan to throw Mei-Mei over for a Smith panda. The zoo's slight, public as it was, was only momentary, and it was clear it wanted a male in addition to MeiMei, not as a substitute.

Privately, Harkness was livid over the public disloyalty, telling friends that Brookfield had “turned cold on my contract with them after news of Ajax's captures.” She had to have felt marginalized by the very people she had come through for.

Enough had transpired for Harkness to speak up about a few things. She was no scientist, she freely admitted, but she began to realize that her basic common sense, which had resulted in successful panda captures in the first place, might just be valuable in determining the way the animals were kept.

The zoo's insistence on feeding Mei-Mei cooked vegetables seemed preposterous to her. On previous occasions she had suggested that SuLin receive cornstalks and sugarcane to chew on. Now she became much more outspoken about the issue of a proper panda menu. “I realize that since I have turned Mei Mei over to the Chicago Zoological Society, I have no jurisdiction whatsoever in the matter of her diet or her care,” Harkness wrote to Edward Bean. “Nevertheless, that does not prevent my feeling about her or my interest in her welfare.

“I am strongly convinced that she should have something—some hard substance—on which she could help to cut her teeth. In spite of what some doctors say, I should think that a million years of rough—and exceedingly rough—diet warrants continuance of same. In spite of the fact that doctors say that all vegetables should be cooked, I would like to put myself on record as disagreeing with them.” The fact was, Harkness wrote, “the very nature of pandas is to eat hard, flinty substances (I speak from first-hand experience), and I don't think Mei Mei, for her own health and well-being, should be deprived of these.” She was right, of course.

She also felt compelled to return to China, for Mei-Mei's sake. The zoo had at this point paid eighty-five hundred dollars toward her next expedition, prompting her to immediately plan “a third expedition to save Mei-Mei from loneliness.”

At a luncheon lecture she gave before New York City's Town Hall Club in April, she revealed that perhaps Quentin Young would be available for the next campaign. She was playing her cards close to the vest,
for she was already corresponding with Young, and within weeks he would be in the field on her behalf.

The Bronx Zoo, meanwhile, made headlines with news of its own baby giant panda. The animal, named Pandora, was purchased from hunters by Frank Dickinson, a professor at the West China Union University in Chengdu. After all the wrangling and bitterness between Harkness and the zoo over the price of Su-Lin, Dean Sage, who was a trustee at the New York Zoological Society, could now gloat over the fact that the panda they were getting would cost only three hundred dollars—even factoring in transportation costs. It was a bargain-basement price, and one that set Harkness's friends buzzing. Simultaneously, the zoo entered negotiations with Smith to purchase one of his animals.

Just then Quentin Young cabled Harkness with incredible news. Though there would be some confusion about it later, it appeared he had secured two pandas—one male and one female—and they were in Chengdu.

Harkness's plan for a leisurely trip via Europe, India, Burma, and Yunnan was scrapped. Now she needed wings, for she couldn't waste a moment. Her pandas were ready to go, and Smith still had not gotten a single panda out despite all the press reports. She would speed for China, taking planes the whole way. She would fly from New York to San Francisco, board a trans-Pacific Clipper to Manila, then continue on to Hong Kong and Chengdu.

Once aboard the ultramodern Pan Am Flying Clipper, high above the Pacific, she jotted a note to her friends. Even her spirits seemed to be taking flight. “Be good—you angels,” she wrote with the utter contentment that only the journey to the East could bring.

I
T WAS EARLY JUNE
. Chengdu, though warm and humid, had not entered the worst of its summer heat. From behind the great walls of what had been until recently Cavaliere's estate, the air was filled with birdsong and “the music of the wind in the bamboos.” On the open terrace of one of the grand but crumbling pavilions, Ruth Harkness, still in pajamas at lunchtime, sat comfortably, sipping hot tea, as she composed her thoughts before a typewriter. A tame goose paraded around the lush, green grounds importantly, while miracle of miracles, a mischievous young panda, her belly taut from a recent feeding, was casually sprawled nearby.

Harkness was like a satisfied cat luxuriating in a pool of sunlight. Once again immersed in the East, she felt good and strong and sure of herself. Though Quentin Young had left early the previous morning to go up-country, they had just spent several days together.

She could take a sip of that good pale tea, then sit back, listening to the cadences of Chinese life buzzing in the busy city around her. “Outside the high walls are the never ending street cries,” she typed, “rickshaw
bells, crying babies, street hawkers, calls and creaking wheel barrows.” From the theater across the street came occasional bursts from cymbals and drums. She was back in the ancient frontier city, savoring the world that she loved so much and craved so terribly when away from it. She reveled in “a certain peace” in this place of delicate Asian charm.

China was still in great turmoil, though the worst of it hadn't reached this far west. The generalissimo had just taken the drastic step of blowing up the dikes of the Yellow River near the railroad junction at Chengchow in north-central China. The flooding did stall the Japanese, but at a huge cost, destroying four thousand villages, displacing two million people, and killing untold numbers of peasants.

Harkness had arrived at the beginning of June. Quentin Young— whom she had not seen or spoken directly to in months—was waiting. He had promised her in a cable that he had a male and a female panda, and though the story was confused in various reports, it appears the little male died in an accident.

There was a mountain for the two to hash out between them now that they were reunited, and experiencing an extended privacy for the first time since their romantic interlude in the fall of 1936. So much had changed, yet here they were with each other again.

They made a comfortable camp of one of the old buildings at Cavaliere's, living more outside than in, eating wonderful meals that Wang cooked for them on a rear balcony. Together they cared for a baby panda. All of it reminiscent of the life they had shared in the wilds two years before.

Now that Cavaliere was gone—apparently back to Italy as the drumbeats of political upheaval grew louder—there was a new administrator in residence. He was the “high and mighty officialdom type,” Harkness said, granting them only squatter's rights. It was better than staying with the missionaries, Harkness thought, so they denned in the abandoned buildings.

The emotions that had swept over Harkness in the first expedition had either changed or matured. They were just as deep, but now she seemed fond of Young without the urgency of lust or love. Her letters
home during this time carried a strong, centered tone—serene with a sensual trace of world-weariness. Harkness wasn't past her prime; she was settling into it. She certainly had not finished with romance. What she wanted, she told her friend Anne Pierce, was “the sort of companionship that every normal woman craves. I think what I really want more than anything else just now is to fall deeply in love and be married.” That companionship would not be with Quentin Young. It wasn't the difference in their races that would stop her—she had never played by society's rules. But she did possess a code of personal integrity that would have made it unlikely for her to carry on an affair with the handsome hunter. As a widow in the wilds of Tibet two years ago, she might have eagerly bedded a college boy who was tied to a youthful school courtship. A married man was another story.

Bill had been her one true love. He would figure in her thoughts, dreams, and writing for the rest of her life. When Harkness had slipped her wedding band into Young's hand that night in Chengdu, perhaps she had simply hoped to pass along a little of the amazing happiness she had experienced.

Quentin Young's heart was another story. Whether it was their accommodation, his emotions, the fact that he had betrayed Diana Chen with this woman, or some craving in his own life, his feelings for Harkness remained impassioned and confused. Years later, he would speak about her with a jealous intensity. He still bristled when recounting an incident in which Harkness visited his parents with a male companion. He would never speak of her with emotional distance.

When word came through that there might be another panda available from the hunters up in the mountains, Young began to indulge in the oscillating tender-then-remote routine that had by now become familiar. After days shared so closely with the spirited American widow, he rose in darkness, leaving before the sun came up, while she remained in the pavilion with Wang and the panda, who by now had been named Mei-Ling, in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Harkness had originally intended to stay in Chengdu only long enough to gather up the pair of pandas Young had secured. She thought she would be on her way home within a week or two. Now she would remain in the city at least until Young's return.