Demon Fish (9 page)

At the same time that Lucas and others were assuring the American public that sharks could do no harm, Captain William E. Young was doing his best to convince his compatriots that they were brutal killers. Young, a native Californian who began his itinerant seagoing career in Hawaii, quickly developed a reputation in Oahu as a skilled “shark killer,” or
kane mano
. (He preferred this moniker to the first nickname he picked up in Hawaii: Sharky Bill.) The Californian stumbled on his quirky career by accident while he and his brother were hauling trash from Honolulu offshore. One day they dumped several horse carcasses in the Pacific and sparked a shark feeding frenzy: from that moment on, Young was hooked on the idea of killing sharks for fun and profit. From the outset he saw the animals’ fearsome reputation as a key element of their marketability, as when he collected $1,500 by charging local onlookers ten cents each to gaze at a tiger shark pregnant with forty-two babies that he had hauled in and refrigerated.

To attract attention I rang a dinner bell. The curious, the novelty-seekers, the idlers, the good-natured and the gullible began to collect. Without any ballyhoo outside, my first gate proved extremely rewarding. People gathered around the refrigerated fish with gaping jaws, and oohed and aahed to their (and my) complete satisfaction. Women, holding their noses, came forward cautiously; then they forgot to hold their noses and became absorbed in the spectacle.
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Young realized he could make a career out of fishing sharks, and he became a hunter for hire.

In 1934, Young published a memoir titled
Shark! Shark!
that recounts his globe-trotting search for the biggest, scariest fish he could find. Throughout it he repeatedly emphasizes sharks’ viciousness, invoking every possible cliché to describe their appearance and character:

When one sees or hears the word “shark” a powerful mental image is generated of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into the cavernous maw and stay the gnawing hunger which drives the rapacious fish relentlessly on his way; a terrible creature, in short, afraid of nothing and particularly fond of tasty human flesh. There is something particularly sinister in a shark’s appearance. The sight of his ugly triangular fin lazily cutting zigzags in the surface of the sea, and then submerging to become a hidden menace, suggests a malevolent spirit. His ogling, chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught, his brutal insensitivity to injury and pain, well merit the name of Afriet, symbol of all that is terrible and monstrous in Arabian superstition.
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Apparently, American readers at this point still needed to be convinced that these animals posed a threat. As Young travels the world finding different ways to make money from sharks, he repeatedly tells people he meets that these fish can actually kill humans. In one instance Young spears a shark whose stomach contained the remnants of a blue serge jacket and human bones, the remains of a wealthy man whose plane had crashed in the ocean. Young tells the tale of the man and his jacket frequently during his travels, sometimes offending his listeners in the process.

Young’s effort to stoke the public fear of sharks dovetailed with a new literary trend, where a group of contemporary writers were constructing an entire body of literature around hunting and fishing. As writers including Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway penned books about this American subculture, they did their best to portray sharks as brutes. Both Grey’s and Hemingway’s writing glorifies men for taking on these animals in physical contests. A few species, like the mako, earn their respect, but most are like the shovel-nosed sharks Hemingway derides in
The Old Man and the Sea
, “hateful sharks, bad smelling, scavengers as well as killers.”
⁴³

Just as Hemingway describes hand-to-hand combat in graphic detail, Grey revels in the battle he faces with a fish weighing more than a thousand pounds. In his book
An American Angler in Australia
, Grey recounts how he fought a tiger shark off Sydney as a group of onlookers watched from a nearby ship. He recognizes the fish’s beauty—“Pearl gray in color, with dark tiger stripes, a huge rounded head and wide flat back, this fish looked incredibly beautiful. I had expected a hideous beast”—but he takes pains to ascribe the worst possible motives to the animal he had lured to its death.

I had one good long look at this tiger shark while the men were erecting the tripod; and I accorded him more appalling beauty and horrible significance than all the great fish I had ever caught.

“Well, Mr. Man-eater, you will never kill any boy or girl!” I flung at him.

That was the deep and powerful emotion I felt—the justification of my act—the worthiness of it, and the pride in what it took.
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From Grey’s perspective, he had done a public service by killing an animal that could have conceivably hurt some innocent swimmer. But Grey, Hemingway, and others wrote of deliberately battling fish with the skills they had honed over a lifetime; they were not amateurs venturing into the water.

Still, it was nearly three decades after the attacks of 1916 before the United States as a whole focused once again on a massive shark strike. While both world wars featured horrific attacks on ships that exposed sailors to these ocean predators, the single worst incident stemmed from the sinking of the USS
Indianapolis
on July 30, 1945. That incident—in which 880 of the nearly 1,200-man crew died in the water, many of them devoured by sharks during the four days it took for a rescue mission to mobilize into action—ranks as the single worst loss of life at sea in the U.S. Navy’s history.

While the exact number of shark attacks during this episode is still not known, it’s clear from both survivors’ accounts and autopsies that these ocean predators played a major role in boosting the death toll: 88 of the recovered bodies had been bitten by sharks, and many of the survivors suffered damage from shark attacks as well.
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The commanding officer of the USS
Helm
, the vessel that eventually rescued the remaining 316 survivors, wrote a report that not only described the carnage the animals had caused but also documented how they continued to feed on sailors even as their colleagues sought to save them.

At that point, sharks largely receded from public view for another three decades. But when the writer Peter Benchley reminded a worldwide audience why they had reason to fear going into the water, he unwittingly did more to instill the intense fear and hatred of sharks than anyone else in the twentieth century.

Peter Benchley’s home lies just a few blocks away from the main drag in Princeton, New Jersey, a precious university town where even fast-food and coffee outfits must post their names in faux-British wrought-iron lettering above their doors. A beautiful gray manse with white columns, the late writer’s house most closely resembles the eating clubs in town where F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Princeton luminaries used to socialize.

The third floor of the house truly captures the reach of Benchley’s work. Pasted to the walls are a series of letters—some handwritten, some typed—from Benchley’s fans. The paper has yellowed, and cracked in some places, and some of the ink has faded. But the intensity of the missives—along with that of the black-and-white and color photographs of nubile young women who wrote the author of
Jaws
in the hopes of scoring a date—remains unchanged. One woman writes that she’s heard Benchley has a “freaky fetish” for not wearing anything below the belt during his television appearances, adding she and her girlfriends think it would be “really groovy” if they could all meet up sometime. Another admirer simply asks, “What is God’s last name?” (Wendy Benchley explains drily, “That’s from one of the schizophrenics.”) Even the movie star Burt Reynolds gets into the act, writing to Benchley on demure gray stationery with a New York City letterhead, “Now that I’m unemployed and have lots of time, why don’t we get together for some drinks.”

Benchley didn’t start his writing career with the intention of producing a terrifying cult 1970s classic. The son of the author Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of the humorist Robert Benchley, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, Peter struck a deal with his father during his teenage years that he could write during the summers and collect the same salary he would have if he had done more mundane chores such as mowing grass or working in a restaurant. He didn’t need to show anyone what he produced, but he had to write.

When he started writing his first book, Benchley decided to draw upon the time he had spent in Nantucket—he had gone fishing there with his father, and had met Wendy there while sitting in a restaurant puffing on a Lucky Strike cigarette—to provide an eerie and compelling look at how small-town life is transformed when a man-eating shark starts preying on summer beachgoers. Nowadays the word “jaws” immediately brings to mind the ominous yet catchy John Williams musical score that accompanied the 1975 movie (DA-duh-DA-duh, DA-duh-DA-duh), but Benchley’s book is more cerebral than that. Benchley described the shark in its most primordial state, with a scientific accuracy that holds up more than thirty years later.

Published in 1974,
Jaws
was an instant success. It rocketed up the best-seller lists, where it stayed for nearly a year. It didn’t just sell on America’s East and West coasts: it sold in landlocked countries like Tibet. Fidel Castro read it and raved about it, saying it offered a compelling critique of U.S. capitalism. The New York publisher sent giant packets of fan letters to the Benchleys’ New Jersey home; eventually the couple tired of reading them and simply asked the publisher to stop.

Hoping to capitalize on this phenomenon, a young Hollywood director, Steven Spielberg, decided to make a movie based on the book, and when Benchley’s agent called to say it would make it onto the big screen, the author was elated. Wendy Benchley, however, felt differently: “He was thrilled and I cried, and I figured my life was ruined.”

The film didn’t ruin the Benchleys’ lives, but it did change their everyday existence. Released in the summer, a traditionally dead time for theater releases, it became the first movie to gross $100 million at the box office. (Ultimately, it grossed $450 million worldwide.) It created what Americans now think of as the inevitable annual summer blockbuster, before
Star Wars
or
Raiders of the Lost Ark
made it to the screen. It made the cover of
Time
magazine, spawned three movie sequels, a video game, and two unofficial musicals. (A producer has approached Wendy Benchley about creating a Broadway musical based on
Jaws
, but she seems even more skeptical about that than she did about her husband’s initial book idea.)

Everyone involved in
Jaws
knew that it would come to define them. Benchley joked before his 2006 death that no matter what else he did in life, “When I die, the music that will be played at my funeral will be ‘DA-duh-DA-duh, DA-duh-DA-duh.’ ” (He was right: it played at the start of his New York City memorial service.) Roy Scheider, who portrayed the police chief Martin Brody in the movie, felt exactly the same way: one of his obituaries noted that he once confessed before his February 10, 2008, death that he feared the role “will be on my tombstone.”
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Benchley’s book is both more sophisticated—it explores the sharp class divisions that help define summer vacation towns—and less frightening than the movie that stemmed from it. The film’s terrifying nature stems, in part, from what amounted to a technical glitch in the course of making the movie: mechanical problems with the movie’s fake shark (nicknamed Bruce) prevented the filmmakers from showing it too often.
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As Wendy Benchley recalls, “They had all these days where the shark didn’t work, weeks, months. They had to fill in.” But that made
Jaws
all the more terrifying. It’s the unseen, rather than the seen, that scares us the most.

For all its nuance, the book still includes a heavy dose of vengeance. At one point Brody and Matt Hooper, a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, get in an argument about whether it’s rational to, in Hooper’s words, “get out a contract on him,” and it becomes clear that the shark’s demise is inextricably linked with the town’s survival.

Brody was growing angry—an anger born out of frustration and humiliation. He knew Hooper was right, but he felt that right and wrong were irrelevant to the situation. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives. Most of all, Brody needed it dead, for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him.
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One of the striking things about the shark in
Jaws
is that, like the one that launched the 1916 attacks off the Jersey shore, it kills several people within a matter of days. By definition, this makes the fish a mass murderer and suggests a sort of conscious strategy on the shark’s part that doesn’t exist in real life.

Jaws
highlighted the obvious: anytime a person enters the ocean, he or she is vulnerable to a shark bite. The fact that these attacks were rare did nothing to calm the public’s nerves; it was their unpredictable nature that mattered. People were scared, and there was little scientists or statisticians could do to ease their fears.