Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Gerald’s hotel in Mauritius was at the head of a casuarina-fringed beach of frost-white sand leading to a lagoon and the coral reef beyond. The waters of the reef were a revelation to him, a hallucinatory other world. ‘You suddenly become a hawk,’ he wrote, ‘floating and soaring over the forests, mountains and sandy deserts of this marine universe. You become like Icarus.’ This, he felt, was the ultimate paradise, and he hoped that one day soon the Mauritian government would have the sense to declare its reefs marine national parks, as Tanzania and the Seychelles had already done. On his last day he found himself swimming among a huge concourse of some two thousand leaf fish around a reef he called the ‘flower garden’:

  I swam with them for half an hour, and it was unforgettable: one moment it was like being in a forest of green leaves greeting the spring, the next like floating through bits of Mediterranean blue sky that had miraculously fallen into the sea in the shape of fish. At length, drugged and dazzled, I found a smooth coral head free from urchins and scorpion fish and sat on it in two feet of water. I took off my mask and there, in the distance, were the mountains of Mauritius humped and shouldering their way to the horizon, like uneasy limbs under a bed covering of green forest and a patchwork quilt of sugar cane. Across this were looped no less than five rainbows. I decided I liked Mauritius very much indeed.

  When Gerald returned to Jersey in May he found Jacquie packed up and gone, having taken her personal belongings and (by mutual consent) their Mercedes car. Later that month they had a final meeting.

  ‘We met again in Bournemouth,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘which was semi-neutral territory. By and large our meeting struck me as a calm and well-considered affair and Gerry struck me as being extremely well balanced within himself. I told Gerry that I didn’t want to come back to him, but he refused to accept this. He said he was sorry for the way he had behaved, and he said that if I came back he’d take me to Russia or anywhere else I wanted to go. He also insisted that I have another forty-eight hours to think about it, which I did. In the meantime I consulted a solicitor, because although Gerald had said he would divide everything equally between us, there was nothing in writing to this effect, and when Gerry realised I really wasn’t coming back he might not be so well disposed. It was from my solicitor’s office that I finally rang him and confirmed I wasn’t coming back. Gerry absolutely exploded on the phone and promised that in view of all this he was going to be as bloody and obstructive as he could.’

  Nearly four years of dispute and bitterness lay ahead. The separation was total. Jacquie never saw Gerald again, and both sides were deeply embittered by the schism. Though Gerald remained at the heart of his zoo, his life was shattered, and he was in a parlous state. As for Jacquie, she felt an exile, and carried about with her her own large burden of pain. ‘I will never forget the trauma of that time,’ she remembered with reluctance. ‘I was subjected to so much stress and vindictiveness that I was only saved from a total breakdown after I left Jersey by the loving support of close friends.’

  On 19 July 1976 Gerald wrote to Lawrence to confirm the worst: ‘Jackie [sic] has departed. It is nice of you to ask me to come and join you but I prefer to lick my wounds in private. I am going down to Grasse. If we manage to see you on the way back, we will try and arrange that there is a bull fight in Sommieres, as I think I would like to see somebody else getting beaten.’

  This plan was changed, however, and shortly afterwards Gerald, John Hartley and Denise Liddelow, a lissom young Afro-Caribbean woman who was then a secretary at the zoo, and whom he called Rainbow, set off for the South of France to stay in the white-walled, bougainvillaea-clad villa of a well-to-do couple in Cannes by the name of François and Sheila Brutsch – Sheila being a member of the wealthy American Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals family and a generous contributor to the Trust. ‘Gerald was toying at writing a book about Mauritius at the time,’ John Hartley recalled, ‘but spent most of the time eating and drinking in the restaurants and then coming back to the house to drink some more and talk about everything under the sun, sitting up on the rooftop terrace with the lights of Cannes twinkling all around, sometimes till four or five in the morning. It was really a sort of boozy R and R – but it helped.’ It gave Gerald great satisfaction, and his amour-propre a much-needed boost, to be able to saunter into the bar of the Negresco, one of the world’s most exclusive hotels, with a tall and beautiful young black woman on his arm. He was finding his way back.

  Meanwhile the solicitors’ letters went back and forth ‘He was making a lot of silly accusations,’ Jacquie was to relate. ‘A lot of it was pique really. It was only when I threatened to go into court and talk about his nervous breakdown and various other things that he began to be more reasonable.’ Gerald didn’t quite see it that way, and wrote to Lawrence on his return from Cannes in August: ‘I fear Jackie will not return to the fold as she is suing me for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Apparently I beat her up with monotonous regularity. I was unconscious of this but she seems convinced of it.’

  Gerry resisted Jacquie’s lawyers tooth and nail. ‘Jacquie was about to subpoena a number of us for a full divorce battle,’ Jeremy Mallinson remembered. ‘It was Gerry, against his personal financial interest, who in order to protect the Trust as much as possible, came to the final divorce settlement.’ The grounds for divorce that were finally agreed in a British divorce court in the spring of 1979 were ‘irreconcilable breakdown’.

  Because Gerald was not a UK resident the court did not award Jacquie half of his estate, which she felt she was entitled to, arguing that it was she as much as Gerald who had created it. Instead she was granted an index-linked maintenance award, worth £7000 per annum at the time, which Gerald could claim as tax deductible. ‘He didn’t want to give me anything,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘and eventually he had to be ordered by the court. But in order to get a single penny I had to sign away all my rights to what we had in Jersey. However, I must say in all fairness to Gerry that though it took quite a long time to get any money out of him, and though I didn’t get anything like I should have done, he never once defaulted on my maintenance by one halfpenny, no matter what his circumstances were.’

  But the taste was bitter. Both Gerald and Jacquie in their different ways felt angry, hostile and betrayed. Gerald had for long loved Jacquie more than anyone or anything in the world. He was aghast that it had come to this, and laid the blame entirely on his former wife, on the grounds that it was she who had ended the marriage by walking out on it. For this he now found he had to pay alimony that in his view was munificent by any standards. He remained outraged. ‘I have decided to give up the house near Grasse,’ he wrote to Lawrence, ‘as it is really rather expensive and I have to watch the cash at the moment, since I am being stung a hideous amount of alimony. It is wonderful, the law being what it is, that I have to pay alimony when the break-up of the marriage was nothing to do with me.’

  Jacquie, of course, saw it differently. She had walked out because Gerald had made it impossible for her to stay. ‘That I managed to hang on for all those years never ceases to amaze me now,’ she was to reflect years later. ‘I willingly sacrificed all I ever held dear – family, career and health – for twenty-eight of the cream years of my life, in return for which I got hurtful abuse and financial neglect. I was deprived of my rightful place in the annals of the zoo and Trust and treated as if I had never existed.’

  Mutual recrimination is a characteristic of every bitter divorce, but through the gunsmoke Jacquie saw one thing plain: ‘Gerald Durrell was a flawed human being, like most human beings tend to be. But as a champion of the animal world and a pioneer of animal conservation he was one of the great men of our age, and his immense contribution to the cause is only now beginning to sink in.’

  Gerald was now approaching ground-zero. The twin components of his life were flying apart. While the zoo and Trust he had created grew ever more monumental and famous (with fifteen thousand members worldwide, two hundred thousand visitors pe
r annum, scientists of international eminence on the scientific committee, five awards for distinction from the Zoo Federation, one of the best animal record systems and annual zoological reports in the world, and the world’s first captive breeding of more than a dozen species to its credit), his personal life had collapsed and his professional life as an author seemed to be in eclipse. His books no longer received the attention or achieved the sales they had once done, and by 1975–76 his income had plummeted to little more than a third of its previous level. Gerald Durrell’s fortunes had sunk to a desperate level, and it was unclear in what way they might ever be revived.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Love Story: Prelude

  1977–1978

  Gerald Durrell always considered he had been born lucky and lived lucky. There were abysses and chasms, of course, and in recent years he had plummeted down a number of these. But he had always bounced back, and not all of these fortunate rebounds could be attributed entirely to his own unaided endeavours. His friends and colleagues often attributed his miraculous changes of fortune to ‘Durrell’s luck’, and never had this struck so unexpectedly and to such wondrous effect as it did during his fund-raising visit to North America in the spring of 1977, when it was to set in motion a chain of events that was to transform his life.

  For the first few weeks of late April and early May Gerald was in the United States treading what he called the trail of the begging bowl. He did not enjoy it, but it was the most effective thing he could do for the cause, and it gave him an opportunity to spread the word. ‘Species Extinction is Like Killing Ourselves: Durrell’, ran a typical headline in a newspaper in Aiken, South Carolina, which reported his apocalyptic message on its front page: ‘As a cumulative effect, the extinction of species is going to be our own death. We’re committing suicide, it’s as simple as that … Man is a thinking pest who is pretending to play God, a dangerous thing to do. Man has made such a muck of the world that pretty soon nothing will tick.’

  From Aiken it was but a step to Duke University at Durham in the neighbouring state of North Carolina, which was famous for having the largest collection of lemurs outside Madagascar, and for its breeding successes and the studies it was carrying out. Before leaving Jersey, Gerald had heard that Duke’s lemur collection was to be disbanded for lack of funds, and he was anxious to offer a home to one or possibly two species at Jersey Zoo before the animals were dispersed beyond recall. He flew to Durham, where he was met by Margot Rockefeller, whose daughter Caroline was an undergraduate at the university, then taken round the lemur collection by a gaggle of professors on a red-carpet tour. ‘For the next three hours I was in my element,’ Gerald recalled, ‘peering at cage after cage of beautiful animals.’ At lunch the conversation was confined entirely to lemurs. So was the rest of the afternoon. By the time they staggered back to their motel Gerald and Margot were exhausted. Their respite was brief, however. Back at Duke the professors had laid on a dinner party for them. More lemur talk. More polysyllabic words. Gerald was to write:

  With the aid of a bottle of Scotch, we tried to get into the party spirit. Fortunately, everyone was on their third drink. All the professors had brought their wives and they talked polysyllabically as well. I was gazing round the room desperately, searching for a nook or a cranny to secrete myself in, when my glance fell upon a young woman who was sitting on what used to be called a pouf, nursing her drink and looking remarkably attractive. I glanced at her hands which were ringless. I glanced around to see whether any muscular young man was exuding a proprietary air and there was none. One of the delightful things about America is that you can introduce yourself to complete strangers without having them faint with horror. So I drifted across to the girl.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said, ‘I’m Gerald Durrell.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m Lee McGeorge.’

  Lee McGeorge was a beautiful, twenty-seven-year-old zoology graduate from Memphis, Tennessee, who had recently spent two years in Madagascar studying the ecology and social behaviour of lemurs and the vocal communication of Malagasy mammals and birds in the wild. Back at Duke she was working as an instructor in the zoology department, and in her spare time working on her Madagascar results and starting her Ph.D dissertation. While in Madagascar she had holed up for a time in a mission station at Fort Dauphin in the south, and in the library there she had first come across several books by Gerald Durrell, including My Family and Other Animals. Lying on her pallet at night in her attic room she read these books by the light of a paraffin lamp, while her pet baby fruit bat, which could not yet fly, fluttered around in circles, wings and elbows clunking on the bare wooden floor. She had enjoyed the books, but never thought she was likely to meet their author, so she was greatly surprised when her professor at Duke had rung her and asked if she’d like to go to dinner with Gerald Durrell.

  Lee McGeorge had never met a famous person before. ‘He lived up to his star billing,’ she recalled. ‘He was quite dapperly dressed. He wasn’t wearing a sober dark suit like the rest of the men. He was much more flamboyant and with his flowing white hair and beard he looked quite dramatic. But he had total and absolute charisma, an aura of energy, which set him apart as someone special. The room was full of silverback professors, but he was a silverback who was different: he wasn’t an academic, there was a freshness about him, he was doing something exciting and interesting. His Englishness probably had something to do with it. I’d been to England twice before. London was the first place I’d been to abroad. Then I went to a big conference in Cambridge and I just adored being in Cambridge and going punting and so forth. So I was totally taken aback when a brand new Englishman with this terrific charisma walked through the door in Durham, North Carolina, and came up and started talking to me. I was only there as a token student who happened to have done something exotic that was faintly in the same line of business as his.’

  As Lee began to talk, Gerald stared at her in stupefaction. ‘If she had told me that her father was a full-blooded Indian chief and her mother a Martian, I could not have been more astonished,’ he was to relate. ‘Animal communication in all its forms happened to be a subject in which I was deeply interested. I gazed at her. That she was undeniably attractive was one thing, but to be attractive and studying animal communication lifted her almost into the realm of being a goddess.’

  ‘The fact that he paid so much interest in me was overwhelming,’ Lee recalled. ‘It was flattering. No one had flattered me in that way before. It was clear that Gerry was romantically interested and this also was very flattering. I mean, boyfriends in those days didn’t flatter you much. But I was too star-struck to respond in that kind of way – and anyway I had a boyfriend I was becoming very involved with.’

  For the next two hours the fifty-two-year-old Englishman and twenty-seven-year-old American woman debated animal communication – and practised it themselves. When the whole crowd drove off to a restaurant in town, Gerald and Lee continued their discussion in her car, full of dog hairs and dead leaves. Lee’s car was leading the way, ‘followed by a sort of funeral cortège of professors and their wives’, but she and Gerald talked so much that they got lost and didn’t reach the restaurant till ten, the rest of the party still following, ‘going round and round in circles like Japanese waltzing mice’. They talked unendingly over dinner till two in the morning, when Lee drove Gerald back to his motel.

  ‘Next morning,’ Gerald recalled, with a little difficulty, ‘I awoke and discovered that the slightest movement of my head spelt agony. Lying quite still I thought about Lee. Had it, I wondered, been an alcoholic haze that made me think her so intelligent? Beautiful, yes, but intelligent? I put in a call to Dr Alison Jolly, the doyenne of Madagascar studies and the winsome ways of lemurs.

  ‘“Tell me, Alison, do you know a girl called Lee McGeorge?”

  ‘“Why, yes,” she said, “Duke University.”

  ‘“Well, what do you think of her?” I asked, and waited with bated breath.

 
; ‘“Well, she’s quite one of the brightest students in the animal behaviour field that I’ve come across for many a year.”’

  Without more ado he picked up the phone and rang Lee. He wanted to say hello again, he said, and tell her how much he’d enjoyed meeting her. He was going to be on the move now, so couldn’t meet up – but he’d be back. A few days later he wrote her a letter – the first of many.

  Dear Lee,

  Apologies once again. However when you reach my age you have to move with a certain speed to accomplish anything. You were so ravishing, refreshing and intelligent that you seduced me. So, while apologising, may I still say this: should it ever happen (God forbid) that your love life comes unstuck and you think a trip to Europe to stay with me would not be too repulsive, write or phone me. You are one of the most beautiful and intelligent girls I have met in a long time and the sort of person I need. I don’t just mean for obvious reasons, but I have a hell of a lot I want to do and places I want to go to and I need an assistant.

  Gerald’s aim was to impress. He might no longer be youthful, lissom or handsome, but he led an enviably exotic and romantic life, and enjoyed an exalted status in several spheres. He would be in the States for a few more days, he told Lee, and would be back in the middle of May to receive an honorary doctorate.

  Then I return to my zoo in Jersey, and go down to my house in the South of France until early September when I come back to Jersey for Princess Grace of Monaco to open our new vet complex. After this I go to Mauritius to lie face downwards on a reef for the winter. I wish I was young and beautiful then you might consider doing all these things with me. Never mind. After Mauritius I hope to go to Assam in the Spring and then Peru and Madagascar. So you see I mean it when I say I am busy.