The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  CROC OF GOLD

  The Atlantic, November 2006

  I’D JUST FILED a column for The Australian when I got the first email from Down Under—about reports of an accident involving the Crocodile Hunter. All journalists, on hearing breaking news of a famous person’s injury, assume the announcement of death will follow shortly, President Kennedy and the Princess of Wales being merely the most obvious proof of the soundness of this rule. But, in the early hours of Monday morning, Eastern time, when my editor in Sydney told me my piece was being held because Steve Irwin had been killed by the barbed tip of a stingray, I found myself re-suspending disbelief. Like a long-distance cyber version of an escapologist’s audience, I felt vaguely that it was too good an ending and therefore must be part of the act—that at any minute the hyperactive overgrown schoolboy would emerge off the Queensland coast with his trademark “Crikey!” and a souvenir barb for the trophy room at the family’s Australia Zoo.

  The Crocodile Hunter didn’t exactly laugh at death, but he was happy to play its straight man. In his FedEx commercial a few years ago, Irwin introduced us to the “Fear Snake,” “the most venomous snake in the world.” “One bite from him and it’s all over,” he began in his exuberantly emphatic semi-parodic Aussie vowels, and then let the creature sink its fangs in. “Yow! . . . Luckily we have had the anti-venom sent from America by FedEx.”

  But, as it turned out, they’d used a less reliable courier. Fatal error. “In my line of work, if you are not absolutely sure, you are absolutely dead.”

  When the stingray struck off Batt Reef, Steve Irwin was absolutely sure: he immediately yanked the barb out of his chest; he knew what had happened. But he was still absolutely dead, the first Australian to be felled by a stingray in six decades. The reaction from his compatriots fell into two camps. “It was the way he would have wanted to go,” said more than a few, though I doubt, with an eight-year-old girl and three-year-old boy, he would have wanted it quite so soon. From London, the grizzled Aussie feminist Germaine Greer shafted him with a toxic barb all her own: “The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Steve Irwin,” she gloated in The Guardian. “You can just imagine Irwin yelling: ‘Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!’ (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn’t want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God’s sake),” parenthesized Ms. Greer, deploying the novel journalistic device of correcting the dialogue she’d invented for him.

  Ms. Greer represented the views of many self-advertised conservationists in her aesthetic distaste for Irwin. By the Nineties the old head-in-the-lion’s-mouth shirt-sodden-by-the-incontinent-lemur wildlife showman was on the endangered species list, and the embodiment of the telly naturalist was the BBC’s David Attenborough. In the presence of animals, he lowers his voice to a breathy whisper, maintaining his evenly modulated hushed reverence even during a terrible outbreak of crabs—120 million of them arriving on the beach at Christmas Island for their annual spawning season. Across the shifting sands, he whispers. The little nippers have been showing up same time every year since time immemorial. Suppose he’d raised his voice. How many of the 120 million in that wall-to-wall crustacean broadloom would have flounced off in a huff? Seven? Twenty-nine? Can crabs even hear the human speaking voice? But Sir David keeps his breathy whisper even when he’s back in the BBC studio doing the voiceover.

  Irwin never cared much for this approach. “We can’t keep looking at wildlife on a long lens on a tripod,” he said. “Then there’s this voice of God telling you about the cheetah kill. After 450,000 cheetah kills, it’s not entertaining anymore.” In contrast to Attenborough, the boyishly eager Irwin bounded into the frame like Tigger, leaping after the crocs and bantering at full volume: “Crikey!” “Gorgeous! “What a beauty!”—lines that Sir David would be unlikely to deploy anywhere other than the later stages of the BBC office Christmas party. Asked by Jay Leno how he determined the sex of a croc, Irwin replied, “I put my finger in here and if it smiles it’s a girl, and if it bites me it’s a boy.” There was more than a grain of truth in the South Park episode in which the guys are lounging on the couch watching an Aussie crocodile hunter and his missus gliding down the river. “As we steer our boat down, looking for these dangerous predators. . . boy, there’s a king croc right here!” says the telly naturalist. “He must be four meters; twelve, thirteen feet long at least.” The mighty beast raises its head out of the water. “This croc has enough power in its jaws to rip my head right off. . . . I’ve got to be careful. So what I’m gonna do is sneak up on it and jam my thumb in its butthole.”

  Back on the couch, the fellows are impressed. “Holy crap!” marvels Stan, as the Aussie leaps in and grabs the croc. “Go, dude, go!” cheers Kyle.

  “This should really piss it off!” says the Aussie, raising his left thumb. “I’ve gotta be careful.” The croc yelps up in surprise and then falls back into the water. “That was quite an angry croc,” explains the hunter in the next scene. “But I managed to escape with only a few bruises and a shattered left testicle. Next week we’ll look for more of these beautiful creatures, so we can learn more about them by pissing them off immensely. Thanks for watching.”

  Bob and Lyn Irwin were a plumber and a nurse in Victoria who moved up north to the Sunshine Coast, bought four acres, and started a reptile park. Given a scrub python for his sixth birthday, Steve was more or less his TV persona by the time he was a teenager, the larky lad with the winning spiel who talked the punters through his parents’ more ferocious exhibits. A lot of small, broken-down, underfunded animal parks around the world have an Irwinesque figure on the lot, and, in 99.99 percent of cases, the shtick’s good enough to get them that far but no farther. But Irwin was the right man at the right time, just as cable TV specialty channels were taking off and just as environmentalism had sapped wildlife education of much of its fun. Irwin was always bursting with joy, and why wouldn’t he be? There are more crocs in Oz than ever before, and they’re also larger than they were.

  And he had the advantage of being Australian, which to American audiences puts you in the category of least foreign foreigner: Australia, as Ishmael says in a book about another famous hunter who came a cropper under water, is “that great America on the other side of the sphere.” Herman Melville was overstating it a bit, but if you want to make it big in America as a media outdoorsman, being Aussie isn’t a bad idea. An American croc hunter comes freighted with all kinds of baggage: is he your authentic red-state stump-toothed mountain man out of Deliverance? or some pantywaist NPR Bambi-boomer enviro-ninny like that bear guy up in Alaska trying to get in touch with his inner self until the grizzlies ripped it out of his chest for him? If you’re from Down Under, you avoid all that. Irwin hailed Australia’s (conservative) Prime Minister John Howard as “the greatest leader Australia has ever had and the greatest leader in the world.” If he’d said that about Bush, he’d have been savaged more thoroughly than by any croc, but fortunately only seven Americans have heard of Mr. Howard.

  There’s really only room for one popular Oz character in the American imagination at any one time, and Irwin took Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee persona and artfully extended it to actual crocodiles. He stayed in his uniform of khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt even when attending awards ceremonies. There were moments when he was laying on the “crikeys!” and “bonzas!” and “fair dinkums!” so thick that you vaguely suspected he might be the strine (that’s Oz talk) version of Maurice Chevalier, who enquired after the run-through of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” “Did I sound French enough?” Irwin always sounded Australian enough, happy in his role as his nation’s most internationally recognized “larrikin” and “ocker” and several other words that don’t translate terribly easily into American English. When the larrikin was interviewed by the near homophonic Larry King, the host attempted to pin down Steve on some of the argot but never progressed much beyond: “‘Bloke’ is a man?”

  You can’t put
anything over on Larry. Some of Irwin’s compatriots were a tougher sell. It must be frustrating to explain to foreigners that your modern confident multicultural nation has outgrown its corked hat/boomerang/ kangaroo caricature only to discover that the only Aussie they’ve heard of is the umpteenth variation of it. It’s true that, statistically, Australians are one of the most urbanized peoples on earth, and few have spent time in the outback, never mind wrestled crocs there. It’s also the case that Sydney has a lot more Thai restaurants than it used to, and, come to that, Muslim riots. But few national stereotypes are as appealing as Australia’s. By the time Steve Irwin’s countrymen became aware of his global success, he had more viewers in the U.S. than there are Australians in Australia.

  If it was an act, it was very well done. He was forty-four but still a boyish charmer with a puppy-fat face and long hair that flipped up and down Charlie’s Angel–like through the bush. At the Australia Zoo, if his wife Terri caught him bending over to attend to an animal, she’d always give an appreciative wolf whistle. To be sure, it was something of a surprise to discover that Irwin died filming a segment for his eight-year-old daughter’s forthcoming TV series, and that Bindi already has her own line of clothing. But they handled global celebrity less creepily than most.

  I spent most of August in Australia, and the first question my children asked was: “Did you meet Steve Irwin?” Sadly, no, but they were impressed to hear I’d met folks who’d met him, like the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, whose Christmas card showed the family at the Irwins’ zoo. And up in Queensland I had the odd feeling of walking through a deserted set. I passed a weird potato-shaped mountain that seemed strangely familiar and realized I knew it from a picture with the Croc Hunter posed in front of it in his trademark crouch.

  Less than twenty-four hours had passed before the Discovery honchos announced that Animal Planet would continue to air the Crocodile Hunter shows. But will those millions of children who adored his life-affirming presence stick with him in posthumous reruns? Or will all those years of close encounters be retrospectively darkened by the very last one? However it turns out, anyone who raised young kids in the half-decade either side of the turn of the century will retain a distant memory of a crazy bloke in shorts hugging some leathery old croc or fleeing a komodo dragon. For him not to be doing it another decade or three seems a great injustice. Or, to modify a phrase, unfair dinkum.

  EVERY DOG SHOULD HAVE HIS DAY

  SteynOnline, April 2, 2014

  DORIS DAY’S FIRST public performance was in kindergarten, in the olio to a minstrel show. The olio was a sort of warm-up to the main bill, and, in the late Twenties in Cincinnati, little Doris was supposed to do a recitation which began:

  I’se goin’ down to the Cushville hop

  And there ain’t no niggie goin’ to make me stop!

  “I was in a red tutu,” she told me, “and they kept us backstage so long that I wet my pants. And, when I went on, you could see it—the red satin had turned black. I burst into tears after the second line and ran off stage. Some debut. Maybe that’s where it started.”

  “It” is her famous aversion to public appearances. In the Forties, in the half-hour before her nightclub act or live radio shows, she would spend most of her time in the toilet with, as she puts it, “one end or the other erupting.” If it’s hard for her fans to imagine Doris Day having bodily functions, it’s been even harder these last decades to imagine they’ll ever see her live on stage ever again.

  From time to time, an appearance is scheduled, but somehow the fickle finger of fate conspires to keep her with her beloved dogs in Carmel, California. Oscars producer Allan Carr thought he’d nailed her for the 1988 Awards: “We got a sitter for the dogs and she said yes!!!!” he roared in triumph. But, come the big day, she tripped over a water sprinkler and had to cancel. Que sera, sera.

  She dislikes cameras and microphones but one day back in the Nineties she was happy to talk to me on the telephone at a safe distance of three time zones and twelve state lines. To be honest, it was a bit of a relief for me, too, since I didn’t have to cozy up to all those damn pooches, with whom she’s shared her life since her third husband died in 1968. Nothing against dogs, I hasten to add, but a few years earlier an old acquaintance of mine from the BBC days, the eminent cultural critic Sir Christopher Frayling, had wanted to do a big telly re-evaluation of Doris Day as the proto-feminist, and my memory of the resulting show, after much negotiation between the parties, is that an inordinate amount of time was shots of him walking various of her canines.

  Oddly, back in the Fifties, when she had most of her hit records, she was just about the only pop star not to have a terrible dog song inflicted on her: Patti Page spent four decades trying to crawl out from under “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”; Sinatra would punch you in the kisser if you so much as mentioned “Mama Will Bark,” his canine love-duet with the big-breasted but small-voiced “personality” Dagmar; the Singing Dogs, who barked their way through “Oh! Susannah,” are more relaxed about it, but then, of course, they’re dogs. Meanwhile, Doris was having hits with songs about telephones (“Shanghai”—“I’m right around the corner in a phone booth”), trains (“Sentimental Journey”—“Counting ev’ry mile of railroad track”), stalkers (“A Guy Is a Guy”—“He followed me down the street like I knew he would”), and whips (“The Deadwood Stage”—“Whip crack away! Whip crack away! Whip crack awaaay!!!”).

  With Sinatra, we assume the songs tell us something about the man. So I was interested to know whether “Move Over, Darling” and “It’s Magic” really sum up Doris Day. “Well, I think they’re part of who I am,” she began, and a cacophony that sounded like the Singing Dogs reunion tour rent the air. “Uh-oh,” she explained, “that’s Buster Brown. He’s a cross between a German short-haired pointer and an English sheepdog. . . .”

  “About your work with André Previn. . . .” I said, struggling over the barks to stay on track.

  “He looks like a wire-haired pointer,” said Doris. Which, to be honest, I couldn’t quite see, until I realized she was still talking about Buster Brown. “And I have a beautiful shitsu called Wesley Winfield.” Most of her dozens of dogs, it seems, are mongrel strays, and she can’t understand the fuss about purebreds—although as it happens, Doris Day, née Doris Kappelhoff, is purebred Aryan (all four of her grandparents were German).

  Buster Brown, Wesley Winfield. . . Doris Day likes any alliterative appellation apart from her own. She was renamed after “Day after Day,” an old ballad from the Twenties that the Princeton Triangle Club Jazz Band recorded with freshman vocalist Jimmy Stewart:

  Just as evening follows afternoon

  I follow you round

  Just as age can’t change the sun or moon

  Our love stays sublime

  Regardless of time . . .

  Doris Kappelhoff sang it at her first club booking in Cincinnati, and it went over so well that the bandleader proposed she become “Doris Day.” She never cared for it: it was no “Buster Brown.” “Doris Day sounds phony,” she told me. “I’ve always thought that.” Many friends call her “Clara,” because (she says) she looks more like a Clara; Rock Hudson called her “Eunice”; and Bob Hope favored “JB,” short for “Jut Butt”: As he once said to me, very appreciatively, “You could play bridge on her ass,” although I don’t believe he ever did.

  JB was in her early seventies when we spoke, and looked pretty much the same as ever, eager and perky, like a short-haired pointer. Singing contemporaries like Rosemary Clooney and Margaret Whiting were still out there on the road day after day, night after night, but Doris had no desire to join them. “Maybe they need the money,” she said. “Maybe they’re not okay in that department.”

  Doris is famously okay in that department. The standard music-industry line on her is that she’s the most unappreciated female singer in the business. The second standard music-industry line on her is: if she’s that unappreciated, how come she’s
so rich? After her husband Marty Melcher’s sudden death in 1968, she discovered he’d blown through all the money. Half a decade later, a California judge awarded her damages of $22,835,646 from her business manager, and that buys a lot of dog chow.

  “Yes, but,” I said, “Sinatra’s okay in the money department. But he’s still touring. . . .”

  “Men have a need to go out and work,” she said firmly. “Women are content to be at home. We’ve got our friends to talk to, and go to the supermarket with.” Notwithstanding Chris Frayling and the other eminent scholars who hail Doris Day as a pioneer feminist icon (mainly for her refusal to surrender to Rock Hudson in those sex comedies), the star herself has a casual way of wreaking havoc with their theses. And, while I like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, if you’re looking for strong-woman stuff try the earlier movies: as Ruth Etting doing “Ten Cents a Dance” in Love Me or Leave Me, or the small-town girl who’s tougher than the feckless musician (played by Sinatra) she takes up with in Young at Heart.

  You can see why Mike Nichols wanted to cast her as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, but you can also understand why Doris figured there was nothing for her in agreeing to it. I brought up the old Groucho Marx line: “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” She insisted it wasn’t Groucho, preferring to attribute it to the musical misanthrope Oscar Levant. “That was such a stupid Levant joke,” she said, “though it’s very possible he didn’t say it, either.” Whether or not it’s a fair assessment of her screen persona, there is a truth to the line: Before she was a Hollywood virgin, there was another Doris Day, the Doris Day who wed at seventeen and was brutally beaten on the second day of her married life by a psychotic husband whose reaction to her subsequent pregnancy was to shovel some illegal pills down her throat to force her to miscarry. He failed, and her only son, Terry, grew up to become, eventually, her record producer.