The Lady and the Panda (35 page)

Harkness had craved companionship over the last months, and now with two weeks in Shanghai, she could get her fill. Even without Dan Reib, who left China for good that year, Harkness and Diana would do up the town. Sowerby showed the panda off to the gentlemen at the allmale Shanghai Club, trotting her out at the longest bar in the world, and Floyd James, who had just returned from seeing Su-Lin in the United States, brought the newest panda to the American Club, giving time to both the men's bar and the ladies' lounge.

With all the clamoring interest over the animal, Harkness lived up to a promise she had made herself—she would put the captured panda to use in helping the Chinese people. A big fund-raiser, featuring a personal appearance by Diana, was arranged. Newspapers were saturated with the plans, running both stories and ads in the days leading up to the event.

Under the sponsorship of the Rotary Club, Diana would make her debut at the Sky Terrace of the Park Hotel. Admission for the event was one dollar, and since the hotel had offered the space for free, all the proceeds could go to the Refugee Children's Hospital. From 5 to 7
P.M.
, on a day when temperatures dipped below freezing, Harkness and Sowerby presented the panda before a crowd of eight hundred. Diana alternately sprawled on the dais and drank from a bottle. The audience was packed with children who oohed and ahhed over every move, as Sowerby filled them in on everything there was to know about pandas. It was all a great success, with front-page coverage and eight hundred dollars raised.

With her pledge fulfilled, Harkness could now be on her way. This time her visit to Hankou had ensured that her getaway would be clean, and she happily allowed the
China Press
to run a large, detailed photograph of what it called “Diana's Passport.” Thinking of Smith's fiasco off Singapore, she had chosen a ship taking a more northerly route, booking herself on the
Empress of Russia,
due to depart on January 28, for Vancouver.

At 5
P.M.
on Friday, January 28, under heavy, slate-gray skies, Harkness, surrounded by Shanghai friends, was handed a huge bouquet of flowers, and then, with Diana snuggled down in a custom-made wicker basket, she left the customs jetty for the
Empress of Russia.
It went off without a hitch. Within minutes, she was safely aboard in her first-class cabin on the trans-Pacific luxury liner, which would weigh anchor in the morning.

Out on the Huangpu, the ship afforded an expansive view of Shanghai as large snowflakes began to float down in silence, coating the streets of the city known for sin in a mantle of pure white. It was “
Hsu hsueh,
” the fortunate snow, an auspicious event coming as it did just before the start of the lunar new year. It would be good for the earth, and good for the soul of the country, which would be entering the Year of the Tiger the next month. For those who believed, this snow was good
joss.

The press was certain Harkness would return to catch more pandas, but she herself was sure of nothing. A beautiful night like this was enough. It would have to be. If she had learned anything, it was to embrace beauty as it materialized. When she had come to Shanghai months ago, bombs fell on the city. How could she not feel peace and happiness now, when in the dark of night it looked as though millions of angels were descending?

T
HE RETURN TO AMERICA
was a relatively brief and unsatisfying interval in the life of Ruth Harkness. It seemed she just couldn't shake the nagging bits of bad luck that had dogged her throughout this expedition.

After she docked in Victoria, British Columbia, on February 12, 1938, her planned flights every leg of the way were delayed because of deteriorating flying conditions. Seeking refuge in New Mexico, Harkness kept her cool and her sense of humor.
LOST IN A CITY WHOSE NAME WE CAN'T EVEN SPELL
, she wired from Albuquerque before boarding the
California Limited,
bound for Chicago.

At every stop, scheduled or not, Harkness and the panda had roused gangs of newsmen and photographers. Nowhere would that be more true than in Chicago, where the ownership of two giant pandas was something to boast about. The travel delays may have even added to the anticipation when Harkness and the panda pulled in on Friday, February 18.

As the two sat tight in a parlor car at the Dearborn Street Station, an excited committee of local VIPs—“a delegation of dignitaries, radio
workers, numerous uniformed policemen, and newspaper and news reel cameramen,” according to the
Chicago Tribune
— came aboard to welcome them.

Harkness and the panda arrive in Chicago.

When the contingent was ready, they posed on the train's rear platform behind a railing that carried the
California Limited
logo. Before the assembled crowd, Harkness, in her leopard-skin coat, gave zoo director Edward Bean a kiss on the cheek as she juggled microphones, panda
baby, and a big wreath of flowers sporting a satin ribbon that read
FROM SU-LIN TO MY NEW PLAYMATE
. The president of the board of county commissioners made a speech for radio.

During the course of the media event, the panda popped Harkness on the nose hard enough that she had to retire to her drawing room for a moment. Harkness told the press, “Su-Lin did scratch me up when I brought her back, but she was gentle and demure compared to this little hoyden. I'm a mass of bruises and scratches.”

Su-Lin and Mei-Mei meet at the Brookfield Zoo.

The reporters asked her how she could have succeeded twice where so many others had failed. “I'm part Indian,” she told them, “one thirtysecond American Indian.” That bound her to the Chinese, and the people of the mountains, she explained. “That's why I can get pandas.”

The group was soon whisked away in an open-air car, accompanied
by a police escort, to the Brookfield Zoo. The newsreels covered every second of it, while two national radio broadcasts set up for the panda's arrival.

At Brookfield, Harkness shed her sophisticated ensemble, slipping into zoo-issue striped overalls and wool workman's jacket. Appearing with staff members before a rapt crowd of children, the little twenty-fourpound panda cub and the 126-pound Su-Lin were introduced. At first, Su-Lin ignored the new arrival, and Edward Bean, walking over to herd the big panda toward the smaller one held by Harkness, grumbled, “Look at your baby sister, you mutt.” In closer proximity, Su-Lin batted at the little panda, and when keeper Sam Parratt intervened, he got a swat too. Harkness dabbed at his scratched face with a handkerchief.

Finally, the throng got what it was waiting for when Su-Lin delicately touched noses with the little panda in a moment captured on Universal Newsreel footage. Harkness, concerned about both pandas, could be seen on film smiling at them and saying, “Oh! Oh!” each time they made contact. Su-Lin, known to those who cared for him as such a gentle animal—even standing on hind legs to listen to Mary Bean's baby talk— once again proved himself.

By now Diana, who had been named after Quentin Young's wife, was being called Mei-Mei, or “little sister,” a nickname that would eventually win out entirely.

Taking a suite at the Stevens Hotel, overlooking Lake Michigan, Harkness spent a few days in Chicago to settle the panda in and meet with officials. Zoo life seemed to agree with the littlest panda, and Harkness found him “in the pink of condition—seemingly happy and contented.” Su-Lin was too. In light of his continuing good health, Brookfield decided to cancel a five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy it had out on him.

Mei-Mei's status was still a bit up in the air. Harkness owned him, and purchasing the animal who was thought to be another female would be up to the committee and board members from the zoo, which had not met yet.

It apparently was a foregone conclusion to Harkness. When she
swept into New York on Saturday, booking herself into the Algonquin Hotel and toting a two-foot-tall stuffed panda toy that she described as “a grand bedfellow,” she told
The New York Times
with certainty that the zoo would be sponsoring her next endeavor. The paper reported that “despite the natural obstacles of war, illness and economic reverses experienced by exploration in war-torn territory,” the panda hunter was planning to return to the Tibetan border for a male by the middle of summer. She felt duty-bound to provide a breeding pair of the animals because she was concerned about preserving the species in captivity. After this trip, she revealed, she would not go after pandas anymore.

The loneliness of the last trip, and the behavior of zealous trappers desperate to yank these animals from the wild, was profoundly shaking Harkness's thoughts about her own future. She was no animal dealer, she told a reporter, and she would not persist in this work. If she was successful on this upcoming trek, she would put an end to her career in exploration, though not her life in China. She was vague about what exactly she would be doing, knowing only that she must return east, to the land she so loved.

In taking stock of her life, she realized there was something she had to face up to. Harkness had always been a two-fisted drinker, able to keep pace with the hollow-legged sophisticates of the day. After the endless nights of corn wine up-country and cocktail marathons in Shanghai, she had decided to dry out aboard the
Empress of Russia.
Now she was keeping company with her hard-drinking brother, Jim, in New York, while being pampered by the Algonquin staff. She had no book project to occupy her, and was still pursued by the demons that had haunted her in the mountains of the borderlands.

Booze was getting the best of her. Once, she invited Hazel Perkins from Connecticut for a visit, then went on an all-consuming bender for the entire stay. Perkie was no teetotaler, but Harkness had gone too far. That Tuesday, when the explorer came back to a sober, if throbbing, consciousness, her guest was gone, and she was repentant.

She asked for a chance to make up for her behavior, pledging to stop
drinking again. “Jimmy and I went on the wagon and I haven't had a drink since,” she wrote. “As a matter of fact I had been on most of the time since I left Shanghai with periods of falling off, but I'm on again now.”

Her patient friend Perkie forgave her, returning to New York while Harkness had moved into an apartment for a very brief stay. As a host, Harkness toed the line, making up a clean bed, mixing her guest's favorite rye and ginger ale, and even serving duck—the simple things that blind drunk she had been unable to do. The two women could now indulge in a heart-to-heart, something Harkness was in need of.

She managed to hide the melancholy from a public that still couldn't get enough of her. In March she made famed Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper's column, along with Dolores Del Rio, Kitty Carlisle, and Ginger Rogers, when she was named one of America's best-dressed women by the Fashion Academy in Rockefeller Center.

The New York Times
ran a splashy photo spread of her expedition in its “Rotogravure Picture Section” with the headline
LONE WOMAN EXPLORER ON THE TRAIL OF THE PANDA, RAREST OF QUADRUPEDS
. Alongside several exotic photos of Harkness in the field, a block of text chronicled her adventures “into a mountainous wilderness seldom penetrated by white men.”

She gave lectures on her expeditions, one of the most memorable coming at the end of March when she shared the podium, before a crowd of four hundred, with Sinclair Lewis, the distinguished American novelist, for a book-and-author luncheon held at the Essex House by the American Booksellers Association. The next day, her book for children,
The Baby Giant Panda,
which would be praised by
The Washington Post
as “a touching yarn,” was published.

HARKNESS WAS SKATING
along in this rather undemanding life when, on Friday, April 1, news came that would send her staggering—Su-Lin was dead.

The illness appeared to have begun the previous Monday when the
night watchman noted on his report that the panda, who normally had a robust appetite, refused to eat his 5:45
A.M.
breakfast. Curator Robert Bean assessed the animal that morning and detected some slight frothing at his lips, and some reluctance or inability to open his mouth. Suspecting distemper, he called in two veterinarians. The first, Dr. Kuehn, examined Su-Lin thoroughly, including inspection of his mouth, ruling out distemper. The veterinarian was not alarmed, thinking that the foaming would subside by evening. Su-Lin was able to consume milk and cereal over the course of the day. But at nine that night his condition took a turn for the worse—more frothing, and his jaw had become rigid. The Beans—Edward, Robert, and Mary—and keeper George Speidel conducted their own physical. Mary Bean found a two-and-a-half-inch-long piece of twig lodged at the base Su-Lin's tongue, which was removed. It had not been there on earlier examinations, but a rumor would leak out later that the splinter of wood had done Su-Lin in. That evening through the next day, the panda continued to refuse food, taking only some milk and water. His health deteriorated to the point that on Wednesday he had to be fed through a tube. Distraught zoo officials vainly placed an oxygen tent around the gravely ill animal. On Friday the Beans, Sam Parratt—as one of Su-Lin's devoted keepers—and the zoo veterinarian were with the panda when he died at 1:17
P.M.
“She was so sweet in her illness,” Edward Bean would say of Su-Lin, “that it was pitiful. Up to the last three hours it was impossible to impress the doctors that she was really so sick.”