The Lady and the Panda (40 page)

She was falling into a forlorn mood, writing in reflection: “Sometimes an intense sense of the deep and ultimate loneliness of every human being suddenly grips me, and I am sad.”

Since Bill's death, she had spent her life, she said, “wandering the lonely world. Searching sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Often it seems to me that I have lost my destiny and am hunting to find it again.”

Perhaps, deep inside, she knew she never would. For those who have experienced a fleeting moment of “illumination,” her favorite mystic had written, there could be an awful aftermath in its wake. “This feeling exists only for a moment,” wrote the author, under the name Yogi Ramacharaka, “and leaves one at first in agony of regret over what he has seen and lost.” This “is the song of the Soul, which once heard is never forgotten.”

By the time Harkness returned home in January 1942, she was physically broken. Admitted to the hospital almost on arrival, she was prepared—eager at times—to shed this body, this life, without a backward glance. Within months,
Pangoan Diary
was published, receiving positive, if not rave, reviews. Over the next three years, Harkness would wander around, to Mexico and New Mexico, then back to New York.

Her health had not rebounded and never would, while her drinking had only intensified. The deterioration would begin to show in some of her magazine writing. She sold a few strange articles to
True,
a men's magazine whose stories were sometimes literary and very often lurid.
One, on her history of panda hunting, was full of inaccuracies, even reporting that Quentin Young had given her Su-Lin in a provision basket. From these perplexing pieces, the wild explorer settled into a tamer venture, making a small living writing two ten-part series for the very civilized
Gourmet
magazine. Focusing on recipes and often high farce, Harkness wrote “Saludos” on life in Peru, beginning in 1944, and “Mexican Mornings,” from her time in Tamazunchale, in the east-central state of San Luis Potosí, starting in February 1947.

The two series are similar—often to a discomfiting degree. Anecdotes, sayings, even characters first presented in “Saludos” were at times transplanted to Mexico for a barely veiled retelling in the second series. Bending reality was part of keeping the wolf from the door, for though the Depression was over for the country, Harkness's own financial position was more precarious than ever.

On the Fourth of July, 1946, the out-of-work explorer found refuge with an old friend who had been married to Hendrik Willem van Loon, the best-selling and award-winning author who had died two years before. Chunky and strong, with close-cropped gray hair, Helen “Jimmie” Criswell van Loon had possession of a big, handsome, three-story Dutch colonial, Nieuw Veere, which overlooked a beautiful cove in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The van Loons had known everyone in politics and publishing, and Nieuw Veere had in its prime hosted a long parade of celebrities. Even President Roosevelt was counted as a friend.

Jimmie ran a cheery household that included a Swiss couple, William and Elsie Spiess, working as chauffeur/handyman and housekeeper, and their teenage daughter, Sieglinde. As soon as Harkness moved in, she felt very much a part of the Nieuw Veere family.

Young “Sig,” now Linda Spiess Ash, idolized Harkness, recalling decades later how the former explorer could, even then in her brokendown state, still dress with panache, lighting up a room just by entering it. Harkness took Sig under her wing, telling her stories and making presents of the little souvenirs she still had among her ever-dwindling personal possessions.

Nieuw Veere held the promise of a comfortable and intellectually stimulating life. Harkness was given as her bedroom Hendrik's great handsome study, with its cases painted Chinese red and filled with books. During quiet days at home, she could collaborate with Jimmie, a Bryn Mawr graduate who had earned a reputation as a fine editor, having labored over her husband's works for years. Ready to pitch in for the cause, she often typed up Harkness's various manuscripts.

Problems, however, crept into the country idyll. Harkness, beset by medical problems, made frequent visits to the doctor and dentist. Sometimes, as recorded in Jimmie's diary, the former explorer would spend entire days in bed “feeling lousy.” Through it all, Harkness's writing stalled out. Night after night she was, as she had once put it, drinking for oblivion. The problem was extreme, casting a shadow over the household and only compounding her increasingly awkward predicament of not being able to scrape together the funds to cover her rent.

When the tension inevitably reached a critical point, Harkness was asked to leave. In the face of the devastating banishment, on Saturday, May 3, 1947, she attempted suicide, falling unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills. While she spent the following day in bed, immobile, her belongings were packed for her, and on Monday, when she was on her feet, she moved out as ordered. Harkness ended up in the famously bohemian Chelsea Hotel in New York, a luxury she likely could not afford.

On Friday, July 18, 1947, just weeks after her suicide attempt, Harkness traveled alone to Pittsburgh. At almost midnight on this warm and humid evening, with thunderstorms rippling across the region, she checked in to the William Penn Hotel.

Trouble may have come as early as that very night, for all day Saturday the service maid was unable to enter the room. In alarm, she notified assistant manager James Greer. When by midnight Harkness had not responded to repeated telephone calls, Greer used his master key to enter her room.

The bedcovers had been pulled down, and Harkness's nightgown had been laid out. A half-empty bottle of wine stood on the dresser.
Everything was quiet. Greer walked toward the bathroom, where, in a partially filled tub, her head above the water, lay the lifeless body of Ruth Harkness.

An emergency call was placed, and police officers and a coroner were summoned in Sunday's early darkness. They investigated the scene, noting that the deceased had been smoking in the bath. In the opinion of medical authorities, Harkness had been dead “a number of hours,” though the date and time of her death would be listed as the moment of discovery—12:20
A.M.
, July 20, 1947.

The officers searched her luggage, finding copies of
The Lady and the Panda
and the address of her next of kin, her sister, Harriet Fay, in Titusville.

Harkness's relative youth, coupled with the strange circumstances of her death, led authorities initially to suspect foul play, but the autopsy, performed by T. R. Helmbold of the Allegheny County morgue, reported “acute alcoholic gastro-enteritis” as the cause.

It is unclear just what happened in that anonymous room, where, as the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reported, “in the luxury of a hotel bathtubful of tepid water, death came obscurely…to a woman who had spent a life of high adventure.”

She was cremated on July 21, and her ashes were buried on July 24 at the Union Cemetery, which bordered the McCombs family property. The simple services, arranged by the Tracy Home of Funerals, cost $248. The family, who could not afford a headstone, paid the debt off in three installments.

QUENTIN YOUNG
would not learn of Harkness's death until 1962. He was widowed and living in Indonesia at the time. The news, he would write to Harkness's sister years later, came as “a heavy loss” to him.

Unlike his resilient brother Jack, who would attain the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army, ending a long career with two Silver Stars and three Bronzes, and who could thrive no matter what came his way, Quentin Young was, according to his biographer, Michael Kiefer, “melancholy, a
black hole of misfortune, sucking bad luck into the void from every corner of the universe.” The common Chinese expression
chi ku,
“to eat bitterness,” seems only too aptly to fit the aged adventurer.

After some exploring stints, Young had lived in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, where he, his wife, Diana, and their daughter, Jenny, survived the Japanese occupation. Over the coming years, he would sometimes say that he had worked as a spy. He and Diana, who soon added a son to their family, struggled through years of political turmoil. In 1960 Diana died of cancer, and six years later Young married a fellow employee at the bank in Indonesia, moving with her to Taiwan in 1968. There he began to work for RCA and became a Jehovah's Witness.

Ruth Harkness in Shanghai,
1937. Despite her continued sorrow in not being able to return to China later in life, she carried herself with panache.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Meanwhile, Jack retired in Missouri, having finished off his military career with stints in Korea and Vietnam. He had been so absorbed by his globe-hopping work that his daughters would claim they saw more of
him in Movietone newsreels than they did at home. He remarried, and, belatedly, family members would discover that he had fathered a son, Jack junior, in Hong Kong.

Kiefer would write that the Young brothers “were forever secretive, glossing over details as they edited their words, mistrusting even each other, and I was never certain at what point the embellishments, if any, became indistinguishable from the truth—even in their own minds.”

In 1974 Jack arranged for Quentin to move to the United States. Just before leaving Taiwan, Young began a correspondence with Ruth Harkness's surviving sister, Harriet McCombs Fay Anderson, that would continue for years. He told Anderson that he had lost almost everything— pictures, field notes, even the wedding ring Harkness had given him—so he asked for and received photographs and archival material Harkness's family had kept, for a book he said he was working on. From his home in St. Louis, his letters to Anderson were full of high hope that the book project would become a movie deal. In fact, he told Anderson he was moving to California in order to be closer to the production company. Ruth Harkness's sister was pulled into the dealings, selling the film and television rights to Harkness's book
The Lady and the Panda
for ten thousand dollars to the producer with whom Quentin Young was associated.

In December 1983—a crucial time for Quentin Young, as he had seen his dreams of a Hollywood biopic recede again and again—an article about Harkness's expedition appeared in
Smithsonian
magazine. Young complained in a letter to the editor that the story had diminished his role in the affair. He not only presented himself as the single most important person in the mission; he dismissed entirely Harkness's contribution. “In fact,” he wrote to the editor, “all that entourage and the Western woman were an encumbrance.” Reading the letter, Harkness's sister was stunned.

As time went on without Quentin Young's projects panning out, his blighted feelings about everything appear even to have poisoned his memories of Ruth Harkness. In his first letter to Anderson, in 1974, when he was looking for historical material from her, he had written, “Your sister was such a fine woman and I could never forget those limited
days I spent with her in panda country.” Over the course of years of interviews with journalist Kiefer, starting in 1988, however, Quentin Young would portray Harkness in a much darker light.

The rising tide of Young's unhappiness soon swamped family members and even Kiefer, who through writing several articles and the 2002 book,
Chasing the Panda,
had developed a friendship with the elderly man. The two would be estranged before the work was published. Unwilling to discuss his past, Young has turned away journalists, including this author, and filmmakers who have contacted him. At this writing, Quentin Young is ninety years old and still living with his wife, Swan, in California.

His older brother, Jack, who continued to live his life with high energy and intrigue, worked on his memoirs until his death in St. Louis at the age of eighty-nine in 2000. At ninety-two, Su-Lin, Jack's first wife and the woman immortalized by Harkness's giant panda, now resides in California. Working for the Social Security Administration in New York and California, she raised three daughters on her own. When I met the still-exuberant and kind Su-Lin in 2001, it was, so many decades after the fact, quite clear why Ruth Harkness chose to name the panda after her.

DURING OUR EASTERN
travels in 2002, it felt as though a curtain on Harkness's world had truly parted for our group. Milton was right, time is a thief. But like a crass and harried burglar, it often steals what doesn't matter, leaving behind what is most precious. That is what we discovered in China. For here we could still find what deeply moved one American explorer: the grand, sweeping beauty of the land, the spell of the magnificent giant panda, and, perhaps most of all, the warmth and wisdom of the Chinese people.

No smile ever went unreturned, Harkness had written of her interactions. And this was the truest signpost we would encounter. We may have been seeking old buildings, but it was always the smiling faces of
these rural people—who helped us find what we were looking for, or told us of their history—that lingered in our minds.