by Vicki Croke
But as she stepped inside her comfortable West Side apartment, before she had time to hang up her coat, her “pretty little mulatto maid” and her houseguest, Margaret Freeland, confronted her with the horrible news: Bill was dead. A cable message had been relayed by telephone.
Her first reaction was stunned disbelief. It was too awful to accept. This must be some fantasy of the press—reporters were fascinated by Bill and the other men of high adventure, but in their hunger for sensational stories, they were always getting things wrong. It had to be one of those false bulletins. Surely, over the course of the afternoon, that would become clear.
So she waited, as the winter darkness descended and lamps inside the apartment were snapped on. But hours later a telegram from Secretary of State Cordell Hull made it official. The love of her life was gone.
The devastation of that loss would consume her for weeks, and haunt her always. “Do you have that tremendous necessity of needing one person,” Ruth Harkness would ask a friend in the bruised aftermath of Bill's death, “some person who understands you and trusts you completely in everything you do and you are—and ever can or will be? Someone with whom you can let down all barriers? All pretense of any kind and still be liked or loved?… That is what Bill meant to me and in return I gave him what he needed.”
Through their ten years together, few understood the singular nature of their bond. To the outside world, Ruth and Bill were opposites. But they were also as perfect a fit.
Both had arrived in Manhattan in their early twenties. It was the Jazz Age, when under the cover of darkness, whites began slipping into Harlem for the music. People spoke openly of birth control, and women were enticed by the makers of Chesterfield cigarettes to “blow some my way.” Josephine Baker had her own nightclub in Paris. Films turned talkie. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. D. H. Lawrence imagined a scandalous dalliance in Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Margaret Mead was discussing sex among young Samoans. It was the birth of Time magazine, The New Yorker, and the Milky Way bar. For young party-minded Manhattanites during Prohibition, speakeasies were all the rage. It was no surprise, then, that the worlds of two hell-raisers would eventually collide.
Handsome, short, and slender, with slicked-back straw-colored hair and light blue eyes, William Harvest Harkness, Jr., was born to privilege. The sound of his name alone declared it. He was not a member of the famous Standard Oil Harknesses. But Bill had graduated from Harvard, class of 1924; he was a rich boy whose name showed up in the society pages, the son of a successful New York City attorney, and the scion of a wealthy New York family, as the press described him. The Harknesses were powerfully connected and accustomed to doors being opened for them.
But those points alone certainly would not have been enough to attract Ruth. Bill Harkness also had grit, and smarts, and a wry take on the world. Never arrogant, he was nonetheless sure of himself, and unconcerned with proving anything to others. His singular nature defied easy definition. As one friend pointed out, Bill had “inherited the wiry toughness of his Scotch-Irish ancestry along with a lot of mysticism, anomalously mixed with hard-headed Yankee shrewdness.”
Both bookish and athletic, cynical and sensitive, Bill Harkness was a man of appealing contradictions. His complicatedness was something that Ruth would love.
In Ruth, Bill saw a novel act. She was nothing like the girls he had met at Harvard dances. With her black hair parted in the middle and pulled severely back, a penchant for the dramatic, even exotic, in her dress, and a fondness for bright red lipstick, Ruth Elizabeth McCombs stood out. She was a newly minted dress designer who possessed a rare polish and poise. Speaking with a cultured lilt, she had a deep voice and a light wit. She could fill a room with her presence, her outsized personality invariably prompting people to say that she was tall, even though she stood only five feet four. She had, according to one society watcher, “that quality which Hollywood chooses to call glamour.” Over the years, her panache would carry her through lofty circles in New York City and beyond, bringing her top-notch invitations wherever she went. She appeared the ultimate city slicker but had started life as anything but.
Born on September 21, 1900, the third of four children, she came from hardworking, frugal stock in Titusville, Pennsylvania, with American roots going back to the eighteenth century. Her father, Robert, was a carpenter, lean, fit, and kind. Her mother, Mary Anne Patterson McCombs, was a bit bulky and more than a bit stern. A stay-at-home seamstress, she was as old-fashioned as the long skirts she wore. The McCombses lived comfortably, in a big brown two-story house that was more sturdy than fancy. It symbolized the McCombs way of life: solid and straightforward. The land, blessed by a nearby creek, dotted with fragrant apple trees, and able to accommodate a small kitchen garden, had been in the family for generations. Robert had been born on the very site where the big house now stood, in a log cabin, in 1872.
Though not poor, the McCombses were far from wealthy. And Titusville knew wealth—oil money, in fact. The nation's first commercially productive oil well had been drilled there, propelling a few families into an elite circle. They wintered in warm places and sent their children to private school. Their mansions were huge and ornate. But in the smalltown culture, rich mixed easily with poor, and Ruth gained an intimacy with affluence, forever finding herself both repelled by and attracted to the rarefied world of the rich.
No matter where she went in life, she would always carry with her a number of family traits. Chief among them were resolve and stoicism. The hardscrabble McCombses were people who picked themselves up and dusted themselves off. Honesty was the number-one commandment. The family strengths were timeless, but to Ruth, it could also seem that her parents were hopelessly mired in the last century.
Chafing at the crabbed environment at home, where liquor and religion were shunned in equal measure, she found refuge in books, which took her to the far corners of the world. But even the family's temporary move to nearby Erie could not relieve the claustrophobia that she had begun to experience in Titusville. It was a pensive Ruth McCombs who looked out from the city's 1918 high school yearbook. Her entry, unlike the chirpy and chummy ones of her fellow students, read, “Ruth is rather hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her you find that she has many good qualities and is a friend worth having.” If few people in northwest Pennsylvania really understood her, that was fine by Ruth. Like her older siblings, Jim and Helen, she planned to cut loose at the first possible opportunity.
After a semester at the University of Colorado and an experiment teaching English in Cuba, Ruth, with twenty-five dollars as her war chest, headed north to New York City.
Raven-haired and slim, Ruth Elizabeth McCombs was twenty-three years old when she first remade herself. Powdered and dressed up, she took on Manhattan, finding a job in fashion, where she could design and sew dresses for a population that bought up all the Paris knockoffs Seventh Avenue could produce. She took to her new life like a natural— utterly at ease at the center of a party, rarely seen without a smoke in one hand and a highball in the other. She became as quintessential a flapper as Clara Bow, one of the brassy, fun-loving girls in shimmering cocktail dresses who were, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “impudent” and “hard-berled,” who flouted convention and danced with abandon. Ruth said there were only two things in the world she hated: going to bed at night and getting up in the morning.
She might have been in great demand, but it wasn't because she was pretty (she always said her face was not her fortune, and that it took an expensive photographer to bring out her best). She was so striking, though, that when she walked into a room, men noticed, and Bill Harkness was no exception.
Ruth Harkness could fill a room with her presence. LOTTE JACOBI/COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
It didn't matter that she came from working folks in a small town, and he from big-city upper crusters. It meant nothing that she “had to work like the devil for a bare living,” and that he maintained his comfort without a thought to employment. He was intrig
ued.
Together, they knew how to enjoy themselves, to kick up their heels at naughty, high-toned soirées and low-down speakeasies alike. During the postwar era of sexual freedom, the two bohemians became a full-fledged couple. They were as good as married, without the traditional, stodgy sanctity of a wedding. Neither was a prude, and both loved physical pleasure. Ruth even joked about scandalous notions like being spanked on “a bare derriere.”
Bill Harkness, Ruth said, “spent most of his life on game trails in remote corners of the globe.” COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
At the beginning of their courtship, they found themselves constantly tucked away in some corner, slugging back bootleg booze and lost in intense conversation. Addicted to reading, they soon began swapping books on their favorite subject—exotic travel. Their leather-bound volumes were filled with high adventure and glimpses of strange cultures. Often they contained delicate fold-out maps shaded in beautiful colors, veined with blue rivers and dappled by the shadowy wrinkles of mountain ranges. The most captivating among these atlases were the half-finished ones, those in which the dense, busy portions would end abruptly, leaving blank whole uncharted territories—regions of the world still steeped in mystery. Here were the places that had not given up their secrets to Western travelers and mapmakers. Sitting together in the haze of cigarette smoke, warmed by a glass of whiskey, their imaginations racing, Bill and Ruth always found themselves drawn to those patches of the unknown.
Bill had spent most of his short adulthood “on game trails in remote corners of the globe,” Ruth said, visiting India and China, Java, Borneo, and other islands of the Dutch East Indies. He thrived on the rough-andtumble life in the field leavened by stints of footloose merriment in exotic cities. In long letters home, and then in intimate getting-reacquainted sessions on his return, he entranced Ruth with his tales of treks abroad.
His accounts, no doubt, were as gracefully told as the sagas the couple read together. For Bill was the romantically literary type with a classical education. He had passed college-entrance examinations in Latin, Greek, French, English, and ancient history. He described himself as an author and a man of letters and was an American intellectual in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt—the brave outdoorsman, as familiar with Milton as with a “Big Medicine” .405 rifle.
He and Ruth spent weekends at his family's estate in Connecticut, and sometimes slipped off for tropical romantic getaways to places like the Virgin Islands. They drank and philosophized. “A dash of absinthe,” Ruth said, “and you analyze the hell out of everything.” They read books, walked on the beach, and poured their hearts out to each other.
And there was so much to talk about. Each of them was haunted by a penetrating, persistent loneliness, suffering bouts of it even in a crowded room. Yet they craved solitude. To Bill and to Ruth, being alone was a complex state: the satisfaction of solitude played against a chronic sense of loneliness.
As they settled into a life together, and even after they were married, their rather elastic relationship was marked by intimacy and long periods of separation. Paradoxically, they seemed to grow closer while apart. When traveling, Bill found he could be utterly open with Ruth. In addressing her, he wrote more easily, and with greater clarity, than when scribbling in a private journal. Her intuition, her understanding of his very nature, was so complete, that just placing her name at the top of the page, he said, drew him out. He was so certain of a mystical connection between them that he never worried about how they would keep in touch despite the vagaries of international mail service and the fluid nature of his itineraries. “He had a divine faith,” Ruth explained, “that I'd somehow know how to get letters to him and strangely enough I did.”
Her responses were encyclopedic. She couldn't help “rambling”— telling him every detail of her activities and thoughts.
For Ruth, who would always feel that her family misunderstood her, there was, in this distant intimacy, a familiarity. She was accustomed to physical and emotional separations, and as Bill continued a life constantly on the campaign, his presence was a palpable part of her life.
SO ON THAT WINTRY February afternoon when Ruth found out that Bill was dead, her emotional loss was profound. She felt in a fog—incoherent and, she would reflect later, impossible to deal with.
The friends who rallied around her quickly became concerned about a practical matter. It was clear that the widow would receive a relatively small inheritance. With Bill and his father both dead, Bill's stepmother, who had inherited about $150,000 two years before, was the keeper of the estate. Ruth would always say that money didn't matter to her, and she proved it now as her financial state changed drastically. Facing life without Bill's purse, she didn't lift a finger to fight for a scrap of it. She was to receive about $20,000—a not-unpleasant sum in 1936, but not enough to last much more than a year for a Fifth Avenue address. It was for a young woman perhaps sufficient to live on for some time if she scrimped and lived a small life. But “small” wasn't in Ruth Harkness's vocabulary.
Her friends were distraught over the inequity of the distribution. And they saw that the apartment, the maid, the expensive portrait photographers, the luxury Ruth Harkness had been enjoying, would all go. In no time, she would be in the same pickle as everyone else living through the Depression.
She left it to her dearest friend, Hazel Perkins, an industrious and ambitious woman raising two boys alone, to negotiate and sometimes spar with Bill's stepmother to retrieve some of his personal effects from the family home—furniture, books, and his mother's jewelry.
Security wasn't Harkness's passion; in fact, it would be the last thing she would spend time dwelling on now. Over many chilly days and nights, she was drinking through teary-eyed reveries. In those sad, quiet hours she might even have heard echoes of a jaunty, bittersweet rendition of “Vilia,” the signature aria from The Merry Widow, about a forest nymph who falls in love with a mortal man. Bill used to absentmindedly whistle the tune, which now could serve as a melancholy anthem for the couple.
Already in the numbed ache of those days, though, she had an inkling of what she wanted to do, and the twenty grand would be just the ticket. The rage of emotion that welled up inside her was being marshaled into conviction, a resolve that was probably too outrageous to say aloud. She decided that she wouldn't leave Bill's mission incomplete— she would pick it up and carry it to victory. After all, she reasoned, exploration was in her blood as much as it had been in his. She had spoiled for the voyages into the unknown just as Bill had. And at this point, who knew what the future would hold, so why live a modest life when she could have herself “one grand adventure”? She had the money, the purpose, and, with her husband's death, something else, something surprising. As she sent instructions for Bill's body to be cremated, her own freedom began to emerge from his ashes.
Like a swimmer who dives to the bottom of a pool and pushes off, it was often from the position of lowest circumstance that Ruth would rebound with enormous energy. Now she'd need it. For her to enter Bill's realm would be considered heresy.
Bill Harkness's background and exploits had placed him among an elite group of the time—wealthy lads with a taste for adventure, a cocktail shaker in one hand and a pistol in the other, as comfortable in black tie as they were in field khaki. Teddy Roosevelt's sons Theodore and Kermit described their brethren as the “brown lean men who drift quietly into New York” making plans to launch great expeditions, trekking “to lonely places where food is scant” and “danger a constant bedfellow.”
It was a time in which seekers in science didn't need advanced degrees or rigorous course work. Bill and others like him were amateur zoologists of fine breeding, with solid Ivy League educations, who enjoyed the privileges of good standing with the heads of natural history museums and zoos. Funding was effortless—they either underwrote their own expeditions or used their status to hustle sponsors, always in the most gentlemanly way.
Handsome, articulate, well-educated daredevils, they
made great copy, and the market for their wares was phenomenal. The cavernous, echoing halls of museums of natural history were still in search of new exhibit specimens, while the zoos that had sprung up across the United States were on the prowl for anything new or unique. In Bill and Ruth's young lifetimes several large mammals had just been described for the first time, including the mountain gorilla and the velvet-coated cousin to the giraffe, the okapi.
Zoos were seeking more than just the novel; they were also desperate to maintain their collections of better-known animals, which in some cases suffered very high mortality rates. In 1931, gorillas were as scarce and perishable as wild orchids. The Bronx Zoo assured visitors that “the agents of the New York Zoological Society are constantly on the watch for an opportunity to procure and send hither a good specimen of this wonderful creature.” But it also warned that the viewing opportunity might be short. “Whenever one arrives all persons interested are advised to see it immediately,— before it dies of sullenness, lack of exercise, and indigestion,” the guide read.
Demand for animals was strong enough that the dashing boys of high adventure would never fill a fraction of the orders. There was work enough for an army, but a definite caste system was established. Bill's crowd was at the top; below them were many other men from all walks of life, driven by every impulse imaginable: scholarly inclinations, a love of wildlife, greed, or a hunger for fame.
If in Ruth's zeal to join Bill on his treks, she had noted the presence of those few women who were in the game, there couldn't be a more obvious example than Osa Johnson. Flying zebra-striped and giraffe-spotted his-and-hers Sikorsky amphibious planes, Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled Americans with the movies they produced of exotic people and animals around the world. By filming naked “savages” and charging rhinos, and in exploring places rarely penetrated by westerners, the Johnsons were able to command $100,000 speaking tours. In the dark times of the Great Depression, the American public couldn't get enough of their derring-do. There were documentary films made for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, popular big-screen movies such as Simba and Baboona, and later, Osa's bestselling books, including I Married Adventure. Audiences and readers thrilled at the couple's stories of cannibals and cobras. In various scenes, Osa could be seen playing “Aloha” on the ukulele for a “cannibal king” or riding a zebra. Diminutive though she was, she once managed to pose carrying a full-grown Pygmy woman in her arms.