The Lady and the Panda (24 page)

All of it fueled a rage that would first lead him to a mental and physical collapse and later drive him to a ruthless pursuit of giant pandas that would result in the deaths of perhaps dozens of them.

HOW DIFFERENT THINGS
were for Ruth Harkness. On board the
President McKinley,
she had characteristically shaken off her lethargy to find a “second wind.” For her, that meant socializing. She made a small circle of friends with whom she involved herself in all kinds of parties and late-night pranks. Once, after the usual reverie, Harkness, in a formal white lace dress with train, busted into the galley with her drunken mates to fry chickens in the middle of the night.

She could afford to be euphoric. Far from Smith's dark cloud, she was entering the bright light of celebrity and acclaim. Even before she landed,
Time
magazine was honoring her success as “a scientific prize of first magnitude.” Like most other American publications,
Time
glorified her achievement, never even mentioning Smith.

While she was sailing, Quentin Young would find success with stunning speed, shooting two giant pandas and returning to Shanghai within a fortnight of her departure. On his arrival, he would meet up with and marry Diana Chen.

Aside from a patch of bad weather that had the American explorer trading staterooms for a few days, and despite the scratches and claw marks the robust Su-Lin was etching on her arms and neck, life was very good for Ruth Harkness. She could build her strength now, ensuring she
was both fit and composed for the moment the boat docked, bringing her face-to-face with her own fame.

IT WAS THE GREATEST
press reception San Francisco “lavished upon any celebrity since the coming of George Bernard Shaw,” according to the
Examiner.
On a crisp morning, in San Francisco Bay, Harkness, with a turbanlike cloth binding her hair and a large gold brooch at her throat, sat down to bottle-feed Su-Lin before an army of reporters, photographers, cameramen, and sound-reel technicians. They nearly swamped the
McKinley,
jostling one another for better positions. Flashbulbs popped, scribes shouted questions, cameras clicked and whirred. A wall of newshounds surrounded her, all wanting pictures, all demanding a story.

Harkness and the panda were a welcome Christmas gift to a country still on the skids. “America was like a boxer,” John Steinbeck wrote of the period, “driven to the floor by left-hand jabs for a seven count, who struggles to his feet to catch a right-hand haymaker on the point of his chin.”

Everything seemed out of balance, even nature itself. Through unprecedented drought and misuse of the land, “black blizzards,” massive dust storms, turned the midwestern and southern plains into the Dust Bowl. Millions of tons of topsoil blew away, sending two and a half million once proud “Okies” and “Arkies” and other plains folks scrambling in the largest migration in U.S. history, mostly to California, where they were often rebuffed by unwelcoming police squads—the “bum brigade,” which didn't want its public-welfare rolls to swell.

Eighty-five million people a week, on the other hand, headed for movie theaters across the country to the blissful escape that Hollywood provided. FDR and his “Brain Trust” were battling economic woes with an alphabet soup of social programs, but even he couldn't do what the studios did—make the Depression disappear, if only for ninety minutes or so. Then it was back out into the real world of cutting cardboard soles for worn-out shoes, sleeping four to a bed, and hearing the sound of
horse hooves in the middle of the night as someone avoided another month's rent with a midnight move.

Americans were hungry for stories of the little guy triumphing over adversity; they craved a drama like Ruth Harkness's. On that bright morning in San Francisco, the adventurer possessed the makings of a hero. With just a hint of movie-star glamour and a dash of high class, she was a can-do girl who had beaten the odds. She was plucky and clever and brave. Like some fairy-tale figure, she strode home, carrying in her arms a mythical, magical creature captured from a distant land.

Harkness was the darling of the media, enjoying a welcome that could not have been more boisterously positive, fevered, or widespread. “That was fame,”
The New York Times
observed of her high-profile entrance, and it would keep coming as she made her way east.

The Times
had already started lauding her achievement before she landed, saying that Harkness “would not accept discouragement nor defeat where many men had failed.” She had faced a rugged and alien terrain, with dangers at every corner, and emerged with what
The Times
described as “the rarest quadruped in the world.” It was “the most important single achievement in collecting animals in modern times,” according to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

The American public adored stories of women getting into a man's game. There were a number of dashing aviatrixes who were breaking records one after another. Beryl Markham and Jacqueline Cochran, and, of course, Amelia Earhart. The American Gertrude Caroline Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. In 1932 Hattie Caraway was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. And, now, here was Ruth Harkness, American Explorer. She would soon appear on bestdressed lists and in an ad for Quaker Oats. Her expedition was the stuff of lusty, bright-colored comic strips.

As grand as it all could be, in San Francisco Harkness found the American press much more unruly than the polite gang in Shanghai. She longed for the days when Dan Reib could “control publicity.” She bristled at some of the questions, such as how it was that she “happened” to find this creature. And she hated the presentation of the page-one
story in the
Examiner,
which did not mention Quentin Young at all, and referred in its headline to the panda capture—without intending any connection to the Smith flap—as a “kidnap.”

AFTER THE MORNING'S
media assault, then some haggling with customs over the bamboo she had brought (the dirt on the roots was washed off in compromise), Harkness, Baby, and a few of their friends from the ship battled their way over to the Saint Francis Hotel. There, railroad and airline companies vied for the high-profile opportunity of transporting the world's only captive baby giant panda. A few days later, on December 22, she pulled in to a cold, wintry Chicago aboard the
Overland Limited,
dealing with a new throng of eager reporters. At the Palmer House hotel, Harkness conferred with Edward Bean, director of Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, sometimes called the Chicago Zoological Park. Bean made his desire explicit about “the most important and valuable animal in captivity.” He wanted Su-Lin. The Associated Press reported that the Bronx Zoo, the London Zoo, and any number of circuses were in on the bidding too.

All the newspapers had said what Harkness herself had probably assumed—that Su-Lin would be headed for the Bronx, where Bill's other catch—the Komodo dragons—had gone. Harkness was careful, however, not to shut the door to Chicago.
DON'T CLOSE NEGOTIATIONS WITH ANYONE
, she had cabled Perkie. She didn't know what she'd find back in New York, and once again, her instincts would prove to be valid. She made clear to Bean that she wanted Baby in a place that could care for him properly, and that she would choose the institution that would finance her next expedition. With that, Harkness and Su-Lin were on their way, that afternoon, aboard the sleek, futuristically streamlined
Commodore Vanderbilt,
hurtling toward Manhattan.

At 9:47
A.M.
, on December 23, 1936, a svelte Ruth Harkness, wearing a thick Chinese otter-fur coat, carrying her “baby girl,” and trailed by hordes of reporters, stepped up to the registration desk at New York City's Biltmore Hotel to secure a room that could accommodate her and
the wildest media frenzy yet. “All that seemed lacking,”
The New York Times
would note later, “was a ticker-tape parade and a reception at City Hall.”

Along with excited friends and relatives, Harkness had been greeted earlier at Grand Central Terminal by a wall of shouting reporters and cameramen setting off their flashes as she emerged from the train. Despite now being experienced with the media, Harkness was bewildered by the size and fury of this onslaught. The panda too grew irritated by the lights. Harkness was determined to get Su-Lin away from the railway station, which she considered too dangerously filled with babythreatening germs. It would be easier to deal with the platoon of media people in a hotel than in her own apartment, which she hadn't seen in months.

Ruth shows off Su-Lin to the United States.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

In a large room on the eighth floor of the Biltmore, Harkness called for all windows to be opened to the fresh winter air, in order to simulate “the native Tibetan climate of the panda.” “I keep the radiators off and all the windows opened, regardless of temperature,” she would say. The chain-smoker-turned-worried-mother then requested that all cigarettes be extinguished.

She settled herself and Baby onto the bed's nubby pink spread. A tray with pots of hot water to warm the formula was delivered, while a throng of “shivering newshawks” circled around her. As flashbulbs popped, she fed Su-Lin, answering questions she already “knew by heart.”

There were the basics—How did it happen? Where?—but also some comical ones like, was Su-Lin housebroken?

With Harkness's great sense of humor, they all had a few laughs. To the question of whether Su-Lin was intelligent, she responded confidently that Su-Lin was “the smartest panda that's ever been in captivity.”

At one point in her press briefings, she would be asked about being the only woman with all those Chinese men, to which she replied, “I was accepted by those men with less comment probably than a woman who rides in a smoking car from New York to Philadelphia.”

To questions about Smith's charges, she protested, “There's not a word of truth to it!”

When another reporter asked, “Why does anybody want one anyway?” Harkness said, “Oh, because it's a completely new species. We want it for scientific study.”

Would she be giving the panda to a zoo? they wanted to know. “I think we'll both wind up together in a cage in some zoo,” she responded.

During the rapid-fire questioning and all the frivolity, the baby panda bit the nipple off his bottle, or as the papers reported, “misbehaved,” right “under the guns of the press,” spilling milk onto the bed. With affection, Harkness said that Su-Lin was “a spoiled little beggar.”

The panda was so adorable that writers found it hard to do him justice. He was compared to a Scottish terrier and a teddy bear. The
New
York Herald Tribune
reporter was struck by how much like a human baby the panda seemed, as he woke, yawned, stretched, and waved his arms “in an aimless fashion.”

His eye patches were invariably called black “spectacles.” His “unearthly voice” sounded like “an off-key violin note.” The
Sun
said Su-Lin was “rare and priceless as a maharajah's jewel.”
Time
magazine called him the “Animal of the Year.” Much later, with the perspective of history, a noted zoologist would jack up the designation a hundredfold, calling Su-Lin “the most famous animal of the twentieth century.”

All the reporters were struck by the emotional bond between Harkness and this little infant. The baby panda,
The New York Times
said, “seems to have a real affection for her mistress” and “to delight in the warmth of human contact” as he sucked “greedily” on the lobe of Harkness's ear. The
Herald Tribune
wrote that Su-Lin obviously was “something more than just an animal infant to its captor.” The
Sun
reported that Harkness referred to Su-Lin “merely as ‘the child.’ ”

She would tell the press that she understood the meanings of his various yips and squawks, which, she said, indicated contentment, hunger, irritation, and fright.

During that chaotic first day in New York, several visitors arrived at the Biltmore. Charles Appleton, a friend of Harkness's, shyly presented a poem. It celebrated Harkness's capture of “what no man has caught up to now,” and predicted another race—the one for movie rights.

A few big guns of natural history came too—the famed Raymond Ditmars, curator of reptiles and mammals at the Bronx Zoo, and Donald Carter of the American Museum of Natural History. The sight of the little panda electrified them, especially Ditmars. The
Herald Tribune
reported that grinning like a boy, the august scientist said, “I just want to be able to say that I touched a live panda.”

Throughout the day, and in every meeting with the press, it was of vital importance to Harkness to credit all the Youngs. “Jack and Su-Lin Young did countless things for me,” she said, “but my biggest stroke of luck was obtaining the cooperation of Quentin. His forehand knowledge
of the conditions we were to encounter, plus his keen mind, tireless energy and thorough understanding of the people with whom we had to deal in our journeys up-country really paved the way for my success. Without Quentin Young, I should have failed.”