Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Gerald normally did not care for cities, but he fell in love with New York. It helped that just as he was about to begin his first lecture, at the Explorers Club, he was handed a telegram with the news that N’pongo, Jersey’s other female gorilla, had given birth to a male baby, whom Gerald immediately named Mamfe. ‘My audience must have thought I was a little bit distraught,’ he recalled of this big moment in the Trust’s breeding history. ‘But it’s not every day you hear that your gorillas have successfully given birth to two babies within weeks of one another. This marvellous news on its own would have been enough to fortify me throughout the whole tour.’

  Spirits lifted, Gerald set off on his coast-to-coast tour. Philadelphia was fine, but he did not like Chicago, where he lectured to a packed, expectant and daunting audience of two thousand, and though he adored San Francisco he hated Los Angeles. The lectures were a great test of his nerves, although his practice of drawing lightning sketches of the animals he was talking about helped. ‘If you mention an animal like a capybara,’ he was to explain, ‘you can’t expect everyone to know what you’re talking about, but if you can draw it, even if it’s only a caricature, they’ve got a much better visual impression. They love the drawings and fight for them afterwards.’ It also helped to focus the attention of American audiences on his theme of endangered species if he could connect conservation with patriotism. That emblem of the American nation, the bald eagle, he pointed out, could be gone in ten years’ time – how would they feel if they let the funny-looking bird on their dollar bills become extinct?

  His last speaking engagement on his three-month marathon was at an exclusive country club. The place was full of nouveau riche Americans, many of them women on the wrong side of middle age. ‘They were bejewelled like Christmas trees,’ Gerald recalled, ‘and tinkled like musical boxes as they walked. I felt that if I could lure one of them behind a bush and strip her of her baubles, it would probably keep the Trust solvent for several years.’

  Even Gerald was dismayed by their capacity for alcohol: ‘Dinner was preceded by two hours of solid and lavish drinking on a scale I have seldom seen equalled. A request for Scotch resulted in something the size of a small vase being thrust into your hand, containing half a pint of spirits, four ice cubes, each capable of sinking the Titanic, and a teaspoon of soda in which three or four errant bubbles were enmeshed.’ By the time dinner was served the audience was half sloshed. By the time dinner had been consumed it was half blind.

  ‘I launched into my heart-rending plea on behalf of the animals of the world,’ Gerald was to relate, ‘to an audience of quite the most unprepossessing mammals I had ever encountered.’ Against a rising babble of conversation – for none of the audience could fathom what he was talking about – he realised he was competing for attention with the woman seated next to him. Weighed down by a passable imitation of the Crown Jewels, she had passed out during his address and her head had fallen into a plate containing the remains of a large strawberry soufflé. ‘As she breathed stertorously, the strawberry souffle bubbled merrily with a loud gurgling and popping noise, reminiscent of somebody trying to suck a complex fruit sundae through a straw.’ At the end of this terrifying ordeal Gerald received donations from his audience of pie-eyed super-rich that totalled just $100.

  Gerald returned gratefully to New York for a series of radio, TV and press engagements. He was a happy to tell a few whoppers if they helped the cause. When American families came to the British Isles on vacation, he told America, there were only two things their children wanted to see – Buckingham Palace and Durrell’s zoo. It was in New York that Gerald and Tom Lovejoy worked out the formula which allowed SAFE (later renamed Wildlife Preservation Trust International – WPTI) to proceed. ‘To be more accurate,’ Gerald noted, ‘I said what it was the Jersey Trust needed and Tom hammered out the master plan of how to obtain it.’ Though its mandate was to change later, it was originally conceived to assist Americans in making donations to the work of the Trust in Jersey and overseas. The Zoological Society of Philadelphia donated office space to house the organisation’s headquarters, with Tom Lovejoy as chairman of the board and Jody Longnecker as the administrator in charge.

  So Gerald’s first great American tour ended with both of its objectives successfully achieved. Jacquie flew out to join him in New York in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Rockefellers and her birthday at the Waldorf. Then the couple sailed away, heading for France on a voyage that was to give Gerald, as Jacquie put it, ‘a complete rest after all the steam of that intensive time’.

  ‘There are times when the trail of the begging bowl is a hard one,’ Gerald was to reflect, ‘but in this case it was more than made up for by the wonderful and generous people I met in America. Over the years we have had reason to be more than grateful to our American friends, for most of our big gifts and grants have come from across the Atlantic, and without this magnificent help our progress would have been slow indeed.’

  At this point WPTI consisted of not much more than a few hundred card-index records in a shoebox, but gradually it began to grow following regular meetings round Margot Rockefeller’s dining-room table with Sophie Danforth, Emerson Duncan and other dedicated American supporters of the cause. Tom Lovejoy soon realised that to really make an impact in the States they needed a patron who was a household name. Jacquie suggested Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly Grace Kelly, one of Hollywood’s greats. ‘It seemed obvious,’ Lovejoy recalled, ‘that Her Serene Highness Princess Grace was perfect; a princess but an American. She could do enormous good. Besides, Prince Rainier had a zoo and loved gorillas.’

  An approach to Princess Grace was made through David Niven, who was a close friend of the Rainier family, and it was suggested that Gerald and Tom Lovejoy should come to see the Princess in Monaco. So in the spring of 1974 Gerald, Jacquie, Ann Peters and Peggy Peel drove down to Monaco.

  ‘As it is not every day that you are invited to the palace at Monaco,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘I felt we ought to do the thing in style. Therefore I and my female entourage were ensconced in an extremely lush hotel within note-rustling distance of the casino. The delicious cucumber soup had been delicately sipped and the waiters had, in solemn silence, placed in front of us the fresh salmon poached in champagne and cream, when Thomas Lovejoy made his appearance.’

  Lovejoy, Gerald observed, looked like the survivor of an earthquake. His suit appeared to have been slept in by seventeen tramps. His shirt was fish-belly grey. His shoes were ‘carunculated and furrowed as any chestnut, the toes standing up like flagpoles, they were shoes in which you felt might lurk any number of communicable diseases’.

  ‘Well, hi there,’ said Tom, packing his unsavoury body into a chair. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘My female entourage regarded him as if he were a toad found lurking in their soup,’ recalled Gerald. ‘“We hope you’re not going to meet Princess Grace at the palace looking like that,” they said ominously and simultaneously.’

  In due course Gerald and Tom set off up the hill to the fairytale pink palace. They were ushered into the Princess’s private office. ‘Dazzlingly beautiful and elegant,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘Princess Grace rose from behind her desk and came forward, smiling, to greet us. It was then to my horror I saw Tom wave a friendly hand at her.

  ‘Well, hi there, Grace,’ he said.

  ‘Your Serene Highness is most kind to spare us the time,’ Gerald croaked, trying to undo whatever damage had been done. ‘This is Dr Thomas Lovejoy, chairman of our American board, and my name is Durrell.’

  They sat down on a large sofa with the Princess between them and carefully explained what they were trying to do. It looked at first as though Princess Grace would turn them down. She had so many commitments, she said, so much on her plate.

  At this point Gerald played his trump card: ‘I slid on to her lap a large photograph of our newly-born baby gorilla, lying on its tummy on a white terry towel.’ The baby gorilla was his firstborn, As
sumbo, the pride of the zoo and totally adorable.

  ‘Your Serene Highness,’ said Gerald, ‘these are the sorts of animals we are trying to help.’

  The Princess studied the baby gorilla portrait rhapsodically. ‘Oh, it’s so cute,’ she cooed, her eyes misted with emotion, ‘I’ve never seen anything so cute … Now tell me, how can I help?’ She was prepared to think about it, she said. They should stay in touch.

  ‘I knew that gorilla picture would get her,’ Gerald told Tom as they jubilantly climbed into their taxi. ‘Every woman I’ve shown it to has gone nuts about it. It brings out the mummy in them.’

  But Tom didn’t agree. It wasn’t the picture, he told Gerald. It was the little piece of egg yoke on his tie.

  Later in the summer there was a second meeting in Monaco. This time Gerald and Tom Lovejoy were joined by Jacquie and Jeremy Mallinson at a small informal lunch by the pool in the palace garden. Prince Rainier was swimming in the pool when they arrived. The Princess was wearing dark glasses and moved her head carefully. Last night, she said, there had been the big Red Cross Ball, and she had a hangover. She asked them what they would like to drink. Jeremy Mallinson said he’d rather like a lager, and watched in fascination as the Princess plunged her arm into the heart of the sub-tropical shrubbery and brought out an ice-cold bottle from a fridge concealed in a bush.

  ‘Princess Grace was still frankly rather reluctant to take on animal charity,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘as her main interest lay in human problems. However, after Gerry had given her a basic outline, with additions from Lovejoy and Jeremy, Rainier threw his support behind our request, for he was a very keen animal man, and had his own zoo. Princess Grace felt that it should be Rainier and not her who should head the US end, but we all – Rainier included – pointed out that it was her name that Americans would respond to.’

  Later word came through, via the palace private office, that Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco had graciously agreed to serve as the American Trust’s patron. So now both Trusts, on both sides of the Atlantic, had princesses as their champions.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Two Very Lost People’

  1975–1976

  The new year of 1975 began as it was to end for Gerald – in catastrophe. In the run-up to Christmas he had cheerfully fired off a clutch of invitation cards illustrated with his own pen-and-ink cartoons to his closest friends:

  This is to invite you to my half-a-hundred party. On 7th January 1975 I will have achieved my half century. As this rarely happens twice in a lifetime I am celebrating the occasion with a select band of favourite friends. If you will grace this orgy by appearing, please let me know so that the chef may be cosseted, oysters ordered, champagne chilled, and the red carpet renovated. Make landfall on the 6th (in case of fog) and plan to leave on the 8th. I look forward to you.

  But it was not to be. Five days before his birthday Gerald’s health crashed again and Jacquie had to send out telegrams telling the guests that the celebrations had been cancelled. Pneumonia was diagnosed, and it was March before Gerald was truly on the mend. ‘For seven weeks I have been bedridden,’ he complained, ‘coughing forlornly, like a heroine in a Victorian novel – only slightly more hairy and with a better prose style.’

  Two events brightened the early part of the year. The first was the publication of his second story book for children, The Talking Parcel. The second was the arrival of another film star at the zoo, this time in the shape of James Stewart, an actor whom Gerald greatly admired. Stewart came to Jersey in May to open the Nocturnal House, the safe breeding area for some of the lemurs and the zoo’s collection of hutias, which had been funded by the American end of the organisation. He had a great interest in conservation and was keen to meet Gerald, and as he was in London, starring in the stage version of Harvey, Fleur Cowles, a wealthy American patron of the arts who had rallied to Gerald’s cause at the time of the palace revolution, had little difficulty in persuading him to come over to perform the opening ceremony.

  ‘Stewart was unassumingly himself,’ Gerald recorded, ‘tall, gangling, a gentle smile on his face, walking with a slight cowboy slouch, drawling sentences in his lovely husky voice.’ After lunch Stewart opened the hutia complex with characteristic charm, explaining that had loved hoot ears ever since he had first set eyes on them, which was five minutes ago. Ordeal over, Gerald and Jacquie led the party off for a tour of the zoo. Stewart and his wife and daughter (who worked with Diane Fossey and the gorillas in Rwanda) were enchanted to be introduced to the baby gorillas, who in the warm summery weather were let out on the lawn in front of the manor, where they picked the flowers and played with a wooden rocking horse, their favourite toy. Later the group moved on to the house of a friend and neighbour of Gerald and Jacquie, where they all repaired to the drawing-room after dinner. There was a piano in the room, as Stewart, who seemed to be suffering from something resembling jetlag (though the flight over had taken less than an hour), slowly perceived.

  ‘Gee, it’s a piana,’ he said.

  ‘Jimmy, no,’ said his wife Gloria, warningly.

  ‘Yes, sir, a piana, a kinda little baby piana.’

  ‘Jimmy, you’re not to,’ said Gloria.

  ‘A little toon …’ said Stewart musingly, a fanatical gleam in his eye. ‘A toon – what’s that toon I like?’

  ‘Please, Jimmy, don’t play the piano,’ said Gloria desperately.

  ‘Oh, I know … “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” … Yes, siree.’

  ‘Jimmy seated himself at the piano,’ Gerald was to write:

  He lifted the lid and the baby grand grinned at him like a crocodile. We were immediately apprised of two facts. The first was that James Stewart was tone deaf and the other was that he could not play the piano. In addition, he had forgotten all the lyrics except the basic one of the title. He played all the wrong notes and sang out of tune. In his husky, croaking voice he sang the title of the song over and over again, going back to the beginning when he thought he had left something out. It was excruciatingly funny, but you did not dare laugh as he was taking such pride in his performance. In the end, he exterminated ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’ to his satisfaction, and turned to us, happy in his achievement.

  ‘Would anyone like to hear some other toons,’ he enquired.

  ‘Jimmy, we must go,’ said Gloria.

  And go they did.

  Another great name of the movies who passed through around this time was Katharine Hepburn, who was staying with the Durrells’ near neighbour Bill Rose, a film writer with hits like Genevieve to his credit. Hepburn often went for walks around the zoo grounds, during the course of which she struck up an acquaintance with Shep Mallet, the Curator of Birds. When Mallet mentioned this to Gerald, who was an ardent admirer of Hepburn, he asked Mallet to let him know when she came again. ‘A few days later,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘John brought her up to the Manor together with her secretary. Gerry was over the moon to meet her. She was charming and totally relaxed and Gerry thoroughly enjoyed her visit. Before she left she agreed to sign our visitors’ book, and when her secretary hesitated to do this as well, Hepburn said: “Go ahead, but sign real small.”’

  Gerald still hankered to get back into the film or television medium. It seemed his ambition was doomed to be frustrated when David Cobham’s planned BBC Television version of The Donkey Rustlers, starring David Niven and Peter Bull, was abandoned when Greek co-production funding fell apart a week before shooting was due to start on Corfu. Another of Cobham’s projects was more promising, however. In the previous year he had commissioned Henry Williamson to write a screen adaptation of his classic novel Tarka the Otter. When the ageing Williamson became too ill to complete the job, he recommended that Gerald Durrell take over. When Gerald heard of this he said to Cobham: ‘If you don’t let me write it, I’ll kill you.’ So in 1975 Cobham came to Jersey with Bill Travers, who with his wife Virginia McKenna had produced and starred in such box-office hits as Born Free and Ring of Bright Water, to discuss t
he possibility of Gerald adapting Tarka for the big screen.

  ‘Although we didn’t take to Travers at all,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘because for a start he was a dedicated anti-zoo man, Gerry agreed to try and tackle this filmically difficult book. It wasn’t an easy time for him – he had a lot on his mind – and it took him a while to work out an angle, but eventually he came up with an idea and the script was written.’ In fact what Gerald wrote was a hundred-page treatment on which David Cobham based the finished screenplay. Eventually the film was made to great acclaim, with Gerald and Cobham sharing the screenwriting credit and Peter Ustinov speaking the part of the narrator.

  Even more promising was Gerald’s burgeoning association with a dynamic young Canadian television executive by the name of W. Paterson Ferns, a director of a production company called Nielsen Ferns Productions, whose wife, a Durrell fan from childhood, was to become the first unpaid Executive Director of Wildlife Preservation Trust Canada. In April 1973 Ferns’ business partner Richard Nielsen had visited the Mazet to ask Gerald if he would be interested in doing a television documentary for their new company. ‘Gerry’s response was that he was not interested in doing a documentary,’ Ferns was to relate, ‘as he had done many documentaries for the BBC. What he was interested in doing was a television series.’ When Nielsen returned from France, therefore, he gave Ferns the responsibility of putting together a series with Gerald. ‘The idea we presented to Gerry,’ Pat Ferns recalled, ‘was to use his forthcoming book The Stationary Ark—which he described as his first “serious” book – as a basis for a series that could be shot in his zoo on Jersey. Gerry’s strengths as a presenter were obvious. He was a great storyteller, and his capacity to relate the telling anecdote made him compelling TV fare.’