The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  Her friends had been powerful enough to button down the glowering Academia Sinica, but her success and its aftermath would bring her enemies. Overruled bureaucrats accustomed to having their way were now determined to regain face. The fastest route would be to bear down on other foreign explorers. The New York Times reported that although Harkness was getting out with the panda, it was expected that “the result will be a tightening of all the restrictions against scientific and exploring expeditions now in the field, and future expeditions will find it extremely difficult to obtain satisfactory permits or agreements.” That outcome couldn't have done much to endear Harkness to the exploring community she had just thrashed so soundly.

  But whatever crowing took place in the papers, it wasn't coming from the Harkness camp. Jittery over the roller coaster she had been on for the last several days, and not wanting to spoil the deal in any way, Harkness stopped the pipeline of information to reporters. While her journalist pals were shut out here, Harkness sent Perkie an unsigned cable telegram in Connecticut to put the lid on things there: KEEP ALL INFORMATION FROM PRESS. Shanghai's reporters were forced to piece things together by expending a little shoe leather in sleuthing around. The China Press discovered that Harkness had canceled her room at the Palace Hotel. The reporter also had heard but could not confirm that a compromise had been reached. Woo Kyatang recorded that Harkness was working in “the utmost secrecy,” making “every attempt” to “throw local newsmen off her track.”

  With all the interested players coming to Harkness headquarters, it was said that the Palace had begun to look like “a Zoologist Association Conference” rather than “a Bundside hostelry.” The staff was instructed not to reveal Harkness's whereabouts or any of her plans. Yet, on Tuesday night, a correspondent from the Shanghai Times made his way to her room. “Mrs. Harkness looked a trifle grim as she said: ‘Still uncertain,’ ” the paper reported. Harkness was being so cautious that she even had her name deleted from the McKinley's passenger list.

  IT ALL WORKED. On Wednesday, December 2, Harkness boarded the waiting steamship with Su-Lin. All her export papers were in order, and she even had a voucher that read “One dog, $20.00.”

  Harkness, who had grown fond of the pack of reporters dogging her trail, allowed them into her first-class cabin. They found Su-Lin snuggled into the cozy wicker basket, sound asleep. Harkness, on the other hand, was still in a state of high anxiety, which worsened when they were interrupted by the appearance of a customs inspector. With just fifteen minutes left before the ship was to weigh anchor, he wanted to see a permit she had already handed to another official. There were several moments of sheer panic before a telephone message from shore straightened things out.

  Just after 10:30 A.M., the express trans-Pacific liner, the President McKinley, pulled away from the lower buoys 12 and 13, heading for Kobe, Yokohama, and San Francisco, carrying, along with its passengers, the last batch of Christmas mail from Shanghai. It was a brisk, cloudy morning, and the feel of the boat thrumming its way to open sea came as bittersweet relief.

  Harkness locked Baby safely away in the cabin and ran up on deck to wave farewell to her loyal friend “Jimmy,” who had taken the last tender to see her off. She was saying goodbye too to China, where she had found a new peace. Where she had immersed herself in “the quiet, unheeded flow of Oriental life, immutable, impervious to the West, to the world, to everything but the great continuance of life.” She experienced so sharply now the pull of this land. “China is generous,” she wrote, “to those who give, she returns in brimming measure.”

  Harkness felt that her accomplishment was in keeping her precious panda alive. Su-Lin was, she said, “the only member of her clan who ever left her native haunt without being just a skin destined to be stuffed and stand in a habitat group for years in some museum hall.”

  When Harkness had first left this city in September, traveling deep into China, she had taken with her the ashes of her husband. Now, as she quit Shanghai's shores once more, she had in her arms a thriving, living creature and the bamboo that she hoped would nourish him.

  AS HARKNESS WAS catching her last glimpses of China, there was someone on shore plotting against her, the man she had, as historians put it later, “pipped at the post.” Floyd Tangier Smith would sit down with a reporter the very next day at his office in the French Concession. The biggame hunter was determined to dismantle her success, doing it with full awareness that when his accusations were printed, Harkness would be far out to sea, where she couldn't hit back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANIMAL OF THE CENTURY

  The stages in darkness

  Will light for Ruth Harkness.

  The captor of Su Lin, the fair.

  ONCE OUT ON THE OPEN SEAS, Ruth Harkness and the panda slept for what seemed like days. They were tucked away in their well-appointed cabin as the fatigue Harkness had been staving off through two wild weeks in Shanghai came crashing down. Because the explorer had kept her name off the passenger list, and now avoided the dining room by ordering meals delivered right to the door, it was easy at first for her to stay secluded. Since most on board were unaware of her presence, or that of Su-Lin, Harkness could take some time to regain her strength.

  As she dozed aboard the McKinley, Floyd Tangier Smith, back in Shanghai, was striking, and striking hard, slapping Harkness's name back on the front pages yet again, this time under unsettling headlines: MRS. HARKNESS GOT HIS PANDA EXPLORER ‘AJAX’ SMITH CHARGES, blared the China Press version.

  Smith claimed to a reporter from the China Press that his own hunters in Chaopo were about to capture Su-Lin when the panda's location was leaked to Harkness, who “went straight to the nest,” snatching his prize.

  It was a rich packet of gossip for the rumor-addicted town, but one that would prove rather unsatisfying. While Harkness's report of events would remain steadfast, Smith would begin a bizarre pattern of contradictions and embellishments. By revising his story with abandon, he would make it difficult or even impossible to believe anything he said.

  After the revelations of the morning papers, the afternoon editions were, as one said itself, carrying a “slightly different version” of the story line. The following day, the picture changed once again, when Smith wrote a long letter to the editor of the North China Daily News, saying he had been widely misquoted. Later there would be even more renditions as varied as they were feverishly detailed. These would be among the first public signs that Smith was coming mentally unraveled over the fact that this woman, a dilettante, a dress designer, a laughable explorer, had done what he had been attempting to do for at least fifteen years.

  Smith told reporters that without his knowledge his hunters had been monitoring a pregnant giant panda for a long time and had been aware that she gave birth. As they were waiting for the baby panda to be weaned before bundling him off to Smith, Harkness abducted him. Smith did not address how the hunters knew the panda was pregnant, and why they had waited so long to inform him. He said nothing of the improbability of men repeatedly visiting such a shy and sensitive animal without her feeling compelled to relocate.

  No matter, because the facts would all change shortly. By the next day, in his letter to the editor, Smith professed that he had actually known of the panda for a long time. He wrote that when Harkness left Shanghai on her expedition, he received word from his hunters “that a giant panda had been ‘marked down’ and asking if I wanted it for double the price I had previously offered.” It was a startling claim that he seems to have made only once.

  In a dense eight-page letter written in the fall of 1937 and meant to set every detail straight, he would change things yet again. This time, he would say Su-Lin was brought to his “compradore,” or business agent, in Chaopo, and that Harkness bought the panda there.

  At the same time he would also write a magazine article in England asserting the impossible—that he had been in the Chaopo area just days before Harkness was.

  His accusations wer
e lobbed at every inch of Harkness's story, starting with the route she took. Smith told the reporter from the China Press when he launched his initial attack that Harkness had deceived him about the way she traveled. But right afterward, and for the most part forever onward, he would write that she had, in fact, told him the truth about her journey.

  Somehow, with no recognition of the contradiction in his argument, even when he was giving her credit for “very frankly” telling him the truth of her trajectory, and verifying her story in this regard, he would say that her account of having traveled ten days north of Chengdu was “impossible.” Not only did Harkness's tally for distance and time make perfect sense, it was verified by the Sage expedition, which also traveled from Chengdu to Chaopo in the same amount of time, making stops, as did Harkness, for several days in places like Wenchuan.

  Smith could have been caught in other lies too, if anyone had been paying close attention to his statements. He once denied having ever said that Harkness stole his panda. Yet he did write that any money she received for the panda was “so much hard cash transferred directly out of my pocket and into her hand-bag.” He said that she was “morally, if not legally, a thief.”

  Simultaneously, Smith struggled to promote a high-minded, magnanimous public image of himself. He had wanted to give Harkness a “sporting chance to succeed,” after their tenuous and never-cemented partnership dissolved, he said, so he continued to provide invaluable strategic advice, giving “her every ‘tip’ that I could as to the best localities and the best methods to be followed to help her get a panda ‘on her own.’”

  After the partnership was “quite amicably terminated,” Smith said, Harkness had agreed to his fiat that she steer clear of “any part of the territory in which my trained organization was carrying on operations.” It was a demand he had made of no other panda hunter.

  The bottom line, as Smith's wife, Elizabeth, put it, was that “Mrs. Harkness has bagged the prize Floyd had set his heart on getting.” Years before, Smith had predicted to his beloved sister Ruth that she would “very probably be the first white woman to set eyes on this curious creature,” the giant panda.

  Underlying much of his fury was the fact that Harkness had found her success with a strategy that he had been certain would fail. Now he was the one left empty-handed, sputtering, and telling the press what he still wanted to believe himself: “the only way to catch animals is to move slowly,” he said. “One must spend time in training people to set traps, and then to watch these traps. It takes months and years.”

  He held tight to his belief in the face of evidence against it: either he had been wrong all this time about how to catch a panda, or Harkness had swindled him. He chose the latter. He had staked everything—his finances, his life's work, his reputation—on its being so. He couldn't believe that what he saw as Harkness's haste and naïveté could possibly have yielded the most sought-after animal on the planet, the thing he wanted most in the world. It just wasn't fair. The giant panda belonged to him. By rights, it should be his.

  In his agony, he would grant Harkness nothing. Her achievement was meaningless, he wrote. “Any ten year old school girl with the necessary money could have done as much.” Later on, he would go even further in his interpretation of events, claiming publicly to have had a hand in capturing Su-Lin.

  Counting against Harkness was the fact that her camera did not record the actual capture of Su-Lin. The lapse, which she said was due to a length of broken film stuck in the shutter, was unfortunate. But had she truly been a cheat perpetrating a hoax, it would have been easy to stage the moment of discovery. She could have put the newly purchased baby panda into the hollow of any big tree and snapped away.

  And then there were the “eyewitnesses.” A handful of people would step forward over time to claim they had seen Harkness purchase the panda. She had allegedly simultaneously bought the panda in Chaopo, in Chengdu, and in Guanxian. The stories always conflicted with one another, and in a way helped her cause by canceling one another out. Often the witnesses were anonymous. The easiest to dismiss would be those who said Harkness never left Chengdu, that she had bought the tiny panda right there in the city, for there is proof—in pictures and letters—that she was in the field. Others claimed to be the actual hunters who sold the animal to her out in the wilds. No evidence existed that Harkness had done anything but what she said. Yet the notion occasionally floated from the start—that Quentin Young had paid off the hunters, staging the discovery without her knowledge—would be impossible to disprove, and would remain a question forever after.

  Over the coming weeks, Smith's mental anguish would prove to be clinical. He was “terribly cut up,” his wife said, her own indignation egging him on, as she obsessed with him over events, writing her own wrathful letters.

  By the magic of the wireless, the news of Smith's charges hit The New York Times on the same day it was reported in the Shanghai papers. A small story just a few paragraphs long, it was soon forgotten. The few American papers that mentioned the trouble gave no details. On the rare occasions she was asked about it, Harkness would simply say the accusations were “perfectly ridiculous.”

  Without Harkness present to defend herself in the early stories in the Shanghai papers, though, Smith's accusations went unchallenged except by reporters' own skepticism. “Whether the baby panda that Mrs. William Harkness is now taking to America was a planted panda, a bought-andpaid-for panda, an escaped panda, a stolen panda or a genuine discovered panda was agitating local exploring circles,” the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury reported.

  Very soon, no less a person than Arthur de Carle Sowerby would stand in for Harkness, talking to the press, writing letters to the editor, and landing several body blows to Smith's claims.

  Smith would be reeling anyway. Within a short time of Harkness's departure, he was a shattered man in complete breakdown. Although his thinking would be muddled, he was always clear on one point: Ruth Harkness was the enemy. “I knew her at last for a Judas, Annanias and Munchausen all rolled into one,” he would write.

  Smith's humiliation was compounded by the predicament he found himself in. He was stuck fast in Shanghai, unable to scrape together, from any source, the funding needed to get back in the field and prove himself.

  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.