by Peter Finn
But she could also describe the port workers at Port Sudan as “black little natives (resembling animals more than anything else).” Ugandans she found to be “terribly stupid and half-witted,” and she was equally contemptuous of the Western missionaries who converted them to Christianity.
Every expedition that followed brought similar, racially charged assessments in her diaries, no matter the location. After arriving in Baghdad in 1937, a stop before hunting in northeastern Iran, Gertie remarked on the “swarthy, dark-skinned, bandit-looking faces of the East, dressed in long white nightshirts, bare feet and Arab headgear.” Her thesaurus was a stockpile of the jejune.
4
Addis Ababa
The last stop of the Giuseppe Mazzini was Mombasa, a port city of whitewashed homes on the Indian Ocean alive with the colors and scents of mimosa, bougainvillea, pawpaw, and mango. From there, the hunting party traveled in the British governor’s private railroad coach to Nairobi, drinking iced champagne and admiring the abundant game along the tracks. Nairobi catered to wealthy adventure tourists, and under the guidance of two “white hunters,” a South African and an American, the Talbotts and Sanfords bought two trucks, two box sedans, and the food, medicine, clothing, and camping gear needed for the months-long trek into the interior. “We are all one inch ahead of a fit with excitement,” Gertie said.
Britain was the colonial power in most of East Africa, and under its game-licensing system fees were charged for animal kills, including elephants, the most expensive, though the shooting of cow elephants and small bulls was barred. Big cats such as lions and leopards were considered pests and cost nothing.
The Americans hired a large group of Africans, including individual gun bearers and “personal boys,” who acted as servants—preparing Gertie’s bath in a tin tub, putting the toothpaste on her toothbrush, unlacing her shoes, and washing her underwear. Her gun bearer, called Simba, wore “a wig of baboon hair, which gave him a savage look.”
Africa struck Gertie as a playground so full of wildlife that “no one thought there could be an end to it.” The Americans rumbled across the plains like medieval lords, their gun bearers hanging off the sides of the open trucks and looking to the horizon for game their employers could shoot—ostrich, warthogs, dik-diks, giraffes, roan, gazelles, rhinoceroses, impalas, and zebras. “I was ready with the 20-gauge shotgun to plug anything that came along,” Gertie wrote of the small game she targeted from her windowless car. She shot a cheetah and chased him into the long grass and finished him off as he snarled at her. “And then we had our usual round of press photography,” Gertie wrote, anticipating the publicity that photos of her standing over her kills would generate when she returned to the United States.
Gertie and Peggy Talbott shot zebras “to get enough skin for a summer sports coat. We shot four yesterday and we each need six.” Near Lake Natron, south of Nairobi, Gertie and Laddie killed a rhino with six shots, and the animal let out “high shrill shrieks” as it was struck. “It wasn’t as exciting as I either expected or hoped for,” Gertie confessed to her diary. “In fact, we both felt almost sorry for killing such a huge, happy beast who didn’t seem to be disturbing anybody and looked so peaceful and harmless.” She was astonished by the thickness of its skin, like “steel plating on a battleship.” She had a big strip taken off the animal’s back “to make a table top.”
The white hunters cured the heat with drafts of beer. In the evenings, they gathered around fires at their base camp, drinking whiskey and soda and passing around a bottle of quinine to prevent malaria from mosquitoes “big as moths.” The smell from baboons lurking on the nearby rocks hung in the air. For dinner, they ate what they had killed, “steak, spur fowl or cold guinea,” before retiring to the cots in their tents, where exhaustion brought deep sleep. “Nothing could wake me except the grunt of a lion or the eerie, mocking laugh of a hyena.”
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On the morning of January 10, 1928, Gertie’s gun bearer spotted a large lion with a black fuzzy mane about 600 yards from their position. The animal was standing over a zebra kill with his pride—three lionesses and about six small cubs. Gertie crept through the grass until she got within 150 yards of the lion, which was standing at an angle to her. She aimed and fired, the bullet entering from rear to front. The lion ran about 50 yards before collapsing. Laddie finished him off with a .476 through the backbone. Back in camp, Gertie was carried on the shoulders of the gun bearers, and the party had champagne for dinner. “As far as I was concerned, it was a gala, red letter day,” she wrote in her diary.
“He was my first. The first of anything is exciting,” Gertie wrote. She killed several more on that trip. A picture of her posing over another slain lion, a rifle across her knee, made The New York Herald with the caption “His majesty bites the dust. This beautiful specimen came to an ignoble end when it came within range of Miss Gertrude S. Sanford’s gun, in the lion country of Tanganyika, before she left to stalk elephant in Uganda.”
Gertie, reflecting later in life, found it all too “staged, like a still from some adventure film. I was twenty four when they took that picture and the thrill of the kill was paramount. Today I wouldn’t pose like that for anything, nor would I shoot a lion.”
The expedition continued into Uganda, where Gertie killed her first elephant on February 25. She had tracked a herd for twelve miles, beginning at around 7:00 a.m.; six hours later, she found the herd by a river in the shade of two big trees. The elephants were “fanning themselves with two big ears and throwing water over themselves with their trunks.” Catching the scent of intruders, a large bull turned to run and everyone fired. “I put a shot right into his heart,” Gertie said. “We all put several more shots into him when he was down and screaming.”
It took three hours using axes and knives to sever the tusks from the head. They weighed sixty-nine and seventy-four pounds. Locals took the meat.
The expedition now turned for home, eventually heading north for Khartoum on a riverboat, where Gertie recalled that they “sat on cheetah and leopard skins, played the Victrola, rolled dice, laughed a great deal, and drank beer, sherry and cocktails before dinner.”
The trip, so long anticipated, had by the end left Gertie dissatisfied. Seeing so much game was the “greatest thrill in the world,” but escorted by white hunters, pampered by African servants, she found it all too “deluxe” and easy when she had wanted to be challenged. “We never lift a finger. Everything is done for us,” she complained. “Hunting by motorcar is not one-half as sporting as struggling over the mountains on foot as it is done in Alaska.” She resolved to come back to Africa on her own terms. “This trip solidified my desire…not [to] collect for personal trophies but for a cause—collecting for the American Museum.”
The expedition ended with a flight back to Cairo along the Nile valley in an airplane with double-decker wings and an open cockpit—past Aswan and Edfu and onto Luxor, the land lush green on either side of the river before giving way abruptly to endless desert. At Luxor, they landed for lunch, all arranged by their travel agent; printed menus offered beer, hors d’oeuvres, cold meat, salad, and peaches. Approaching Cairo, the pilot feared they might not have enough fuel and would have to make an emergency landing. Gertie and Peggy, fighting nerves, “decided to manicure our nails. When there is nothing to do, you can do something silly, and it makes you feel better.” In the end, red flares pointed out the landing strip, and they came down safely.
* * *
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That summer of 1928, Gertie traveled to England, where her father had rented Osterley Park, a large mansion and grounds in London. Visiting Oxford, she met two young Americans, Morris Legendre, a Rhodes scholar at the university, and his brother Sidney—both former football players at Princeton. The brothers, who shared “a killing sense of humor,” later visited Osterley Park for a weekend of lawn tennis, and Gertie was immediately smit
ten. With both of them.
That first encounter was fleeting because Gertie and her sister, Janie, left for the South of France at the invitation of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American couple at the center of a glittering circle that included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev, Somerset Maugham, and Harpo Marx. Also in the South of France that summer were Gertie’s friends Ellen Barry and her husband, Philip, the playwright who had made a study of Gertie for Holiday.
The poet Archibald MacLeish said the Murphys were “masters in the art of living” and became a sort of “nexus with everything that was going on.” Mornings that summer were marked by dry sherry and sweet biscuits on the beach, followed by swimming, picnics, tennis, and croquet. “Life was carefree, uncomplicated and fun,” but Gertie also wanted to see more of the Legendre brothers and arranged to have them hired as lifeguards at the Hotel du Cap, immortalized by Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night, his novel that drew on the life of the Murphys.
Gertie brushed up against this bohemian set of artists and their patrons but was never a part of it. Away from her expeditions, she could be firmly conventional, preferring a rigid social hierarchy and norms of behavior dictated by tradition and class. And like any outsider on the edge of an exclusive party, she resented the spectacle on the Riviera: Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald were bad drunks. Maugham was a complainer and not very likable. Zelda was sweet but distant. Harpo, at least, was amusing; he played his harp in the back of Gertie’s Renault convertible, always the first to join in the silliness.
“As far as company is concerned, I’ve had the good fortune to have known far greater men,” Gertie harrumphed. “I never thought of myself as belonging to any special milieu that summer.”
She only had eyes for the Legendre brothers.
After arriving in Antibes, Morris Legendre had a local carpenter make a kind of wooden water ski that he called a “free board.” The brothers, sometimes with Gertie on their shoulders, rode the waves in the harbor with ropes attached to a small motorboat. One evening at a party, someone dared Gertie to ride the free board in her evening clothes. She took off her white satin high heels, and with Morris on another board beside her they circled the harbor twice before Gertie let go of the rope and glided ashore “bone dry and slightly incredulous” that she had pulled it off. Vanity Fair recorded the moment, describing her as “a rebel finding in the strange mutinous craft with which she rides the night waters a more magic carpet than her grandpa’s looms turned out in Amsterdam.”
Maugham, unimpressed, called them “crazy show-offs.”
The summer ended with Gertie still infatuated with both brothers and unable to choose between them. “I have always enjoyed the company of men, and Morris and Sidney Legendre were the most attractive men that I have ever met,” she said. That fall, she invited the brothers to travel with her on her second safari in Africa—clearly intending to capture one or the other as a husband.
“There was some question about whether it was going to be Morris or Sidney,” Gertie’s daughter later recalled with some bemusement.
Her plan for the expedition was to kill and mount a group of giant mountain nyalas—known as Queen of Sheba’s antelope—that would be staged among a series of planned dioramas in the new Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The existence of the animal had not been recorded by Western scientists until 1908. The museum said such a permanent exhibition—along with a perfectly represented backdrop of the landscape where the antelope lived—would cost $30,000. That was separate from the expense of the expedition to East Africa. Gertie’s father gave her the money.
The public flocked to see these dioramas, which drew observers into the close study of a three-dimensional depiction of a slice of Africa and its animals—a combination of taxidermy, painting, and flora. They were designed “to bring a vision of the world to those who otherwise can never see it,” said Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s president when Gertie pursued the nyalas.
Hunting in exotic locales to acquire specimens for the museums being built and expanded with the country’s bourgeoning industrial wealth was becoming more and more popular with rich Americans, who were lauded by The New York Times as people with the “indomitable will of true explorers.” In 1930, the American Museum of Natural History had thirty expeditions in the field, many of them headed by amateur explorers accompanied by museum scientists. In Gertie’s case, T. D. Carter, assistant curator of mammals at the museum, was along to oversee the skinning and preservation of specimens for the nyala diorama. Unflappable, with a sense of fun, he was also “the gyroscope that kept our tempers on an even keel,” according to Gertie.
The journey was previewed by The New York Times, which reported, “Many dangers face the members of the expedition. Outside of Addis Abeba, the capital, on the wild highlands and on the frontiers, the real authority is exercised by feudal lords. These hereditary chieftains…and their wild followers are dangers to be faced by the Sanford-Legendre expedition in addition to the constant perils of the jungles.”
In late 1928—after rendezvousing with Morris and Sidney at the Ritz bar—the party left for Marseille and embarked on a seventeen-day boat trip to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa.
A slow train to Addis Ababa followed—and eventually dinner with the emperor Haile Selassie. Gertie found the Abyssinians “the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. They were tall and elegant looking, with sharp chiseled features…They weren’t like anything I’d expected. The men wore white jodhpurs with a white cloak and they carried long spears.” The emperor gave Gertie a silver mule from the royal stable with a silver bit, red embroidered reins, and a hand-stitched green velvet saddle. She gave him a white polar bear skin.
Many of the supplies, including the tents and a portable toilet, had been shipped in advance from David Abercrombie’s store in Manhattan to Djibouti. It took nearly a month to hire all the trackers, skinners, and cooks before they headed to the Ethiopian highlands. It was a hard expedition. Smallpox broke out, forcing the party to burn some tents and blankets, and some of the young Africans came down with malaria, as did Carter, the museum scientist.
Gertie never got ill, on that or any other trip.
“This couldn’t be a more perfect life,” she decided. “One exercises all day, sleeps well at night. The weather is perfect. We have a lot of fun—a lot of laughs, and it’s all delightful, so different. So much more fun than being in a crowded city or a hot stuffy restaurant. When we eat a cold partridge in our fingers it tastes better than any fancy partridge cooked at Larue or any other swell place.” She celebrated her birthday that March with a bottle of champagne cooled with a damp cloth and ate a cake Morris made with Aunt Jemima pancake flour and apricot jam. They had run out of cigarettes but instead smoked green Abyssinian tobacco bought at a local market.
Museum officials back in the United States were thrilled with reports from the field. “I am looking forward to seeing the specimens here in New York,” wrote Harold E. Anthony, curator in the Department of Mammalogy, “for I imagine from the measurements you sent back that you have several unusually fine bulls…Since the region where you are working is completely unrepresented in the Museum collections, everything that you bring back will be desirable.”
Sidney, having lost a coin toss and nursing an infected finger, returned to Addis Ababa with the first of the nyala specimens, separating him from the hunting party for a month. His absence focused Gertie’s mind. Morris was the bigger personality, but Gertie missed Sidney’s humor “and the thoughtful quality he had about himself, some unknown side of him that he protected. Maybe it was that vulnerable quality that is so attractive to women, especially in strong men. Maybe that is all it was. But Sidney was also gentle and not afraid of his gentleness.”
Back in Addis, Gertie and Sidney were able to spend some time alon
e as they stayed behind in the residence of the Italian ambassador while Morris and Carter went north to do some more collecting. “I suppose we started to know then,” Gertie said of this interlude in Addis, though there are hints in a letter written during World War II that she had all along favored Sidney and the two kept it a secret during the expedition.
After leaving Ethiopia, Gertie and Sidney traveled to the South of France and rented the Villa Les Cèdres, a mansion with stables, an Olympic-sized pool, and a botanical garden on the peninsula of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat near Nice. The romance deepened. “We knew that we were in love,” Gertie said. Sidney proposed.
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Carter told The New York Times on August 10, 1929, that the expedition had collected 300 mammals and 120 birds, as well as insects and reptile specimens. Eleven nyalas were killed for the diorama at the museum, including four shot by Gertie. A live cheetah was brought back for the Bronx Zoo.
Gertie held her own meeting with the press a couple of days later. The Brooklyn Eagle wrote that she received reporters “curled up like a nymph in the luxurious drawing room of her home near Central Park and 5th Avenue. She described the trip in crisp, vivid phrases, while she smoked an exotically scented cigarette. She was dressed in jungle green silk that stood in contrast to her dark, suntanned complexion, red lips and straight black hair, like the verdure of the jungles she had just left.”
Sidney and Gertie were married the following month, on September 17, 1929, at Manhattan’s St. James’ Church, which was decorated with white dahlias and Australian fern. The bride, carrying a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley, wore “a gown of cream-colored satin with a close-fitting bodice and long tight sleeves,” The New York Times reported.
