The five months spent in Africa filming Hatari! could not help but have a profound impact on the cast. For Wayne it was the “savage sounds” of the animals in the dawn. For Red Buttons, the sight of Kilimanjaro made him understand why the Maasai believed that God must dwell on its summit. Hardy Krüger ended up buying both John Kingsley-Heath’s hunting car and Momella Farm, building a lodge, and living there with his family for over a dozen years. Valentin de Vargas felt that at the end they were no longer actors. “We were,” he said “animal catchers.”
As for Howard Hawks, without an actual script, without even a coherent plot, he took magnificent real-life African footage and the mostly improvised performances of actors thrust into a wild unfamiliar world of fierce beauty, big game, and thrilling pursuit and crafted a picture that for 157 minutes transported a young moviegoer to a place he knew he had to see, one day, for himself. And then what Hawks wanted was to do it all over again with the same cast, this time in India on a movie to be called Bengal Tiger. When he told the studio executives the story, they told him that was the movie he’d just made.
As quoted by McCarthy, Hawks replied, “No, not at all. That’s the film we were supposed to make.” Yet never did.
POSTSCRIPT: Of the cast and crew, both human and animal, who assembled half-a-century ago in Tanganyika to make Hatari!, only a few are, at the time of this writing, still here. The star John Wayne, director Howard Hawks, and screenwriter Leigh Brackett all died more than 30 years ago, and actors Red Buttons, Bruce Cabot, Gérard Bain, Valentin de Vargas, and Michèle Girardon have joined them. And most of the professional hunters who worked as technical advisors, guides, doubles, security, wildlife wranglers and capturers, have also passed on. The principal game handler for the movie was the legendary Willie de Beer, owner of Tanganyika Game Limited, licensed for capturing wildlife; and working for him was a young Jan Oelofse. Oelofse went on to own Jan Oelofse Hunting Safaris in Namibia and to publish his memoir Capture to Be Free, authored by his wife, Annette Oelofse. In a phone interview with Oelofse, I asked him about his career and his memories of having worked on Hatari!
I began the interview by asking Oelofse if he minded giving out his age.
Jan Oelofse: Yah, no problem. I am not so vain. My age is 77. I’ll be 78 this year [2012].
How had he come to be a part of Hatari!?
I was working for an old gentleman in Tanzania (it was Tanganyika at the time), Mr. de Beer, and Paramount wanted to do a movie, an African movie, and they came out and visited our camp. And the movie was more or less based on our lives there at the time. And since I was working for him [Willie de Beer], I was a participant in helping to work on the movie. He got the contract and, you know, I was a young man at the time, 50 years younger than I am now, and that’s how it happened.
What could he tell me about Willie de Beer?
His parents left South Africa. You know, a lot of the Afrikaans-speaking people left South Africa after the Boer War. And then early in the 1900s, his parents went up to Tanganyika when he was a small boy. And there they settled, and he started in his young days to capture game. And it was always a dream for me to go and work with animals, and Tanganyika was the mecca of wildlife at that time. And then eventually I ended up with him. He was like a father to me, actually, you know?
How did he, Oelofse, get to Tanganyika?
Yah, well I came up from Namibia, which was Southwest Africa at the time [in the mid-1950s]. And I worked a while in Zambia—I ran out of money by the time I got there. So I worked there for a few months, and then I continued up to Tanganyika.
Before we talked about Hatari!, could he tell me about his career after the movie?
Well, I left East Africa in 1964. You know, after independence, it was very difficult for us to get work permits there if you were of Western descent. So then I went back to South Africa; and I joined the fish-and-wildlife for Natal, the Natal Parks Board. And I worked for them for eight years; and then during that time I discovered and designed a technique to capture animals in the thousands, you know, and that really was the forerunner of the whole game industry in South Africa today. Previously, they couldn’t farm with game because it was difficult to obtain some, because it was very hard to capture them. With my technique, I could capture hundreds and hundreds in a day; and then it made it possible for people to buy game and stock their ranches and turn large areas over to conservation areas that were previously used for [cattle and sheep]. I [also] did a lot of movies for Mutual of Omaha, Marlin Perkins. I did a whole lot, about 20 series for him. I was quite a bit involved in movie making etc., you know in my younger days until about 20 years ago or so.
[From Oelofse’s memoir, he went into the private game-capturing business in 1973, using the now well-known “Oelofse Method” to capture wildlife and supply it all over southern Africa. Eventually he purchased a ranch in Namibia for surplus wildlife, turning it into the 60,000 acre Okonjati Game Sanctuary and Mount Etjo Safari Lodge. In 1982 Oelofse was named the Safari Club International’s “Most Outstanding Hunter.”]
When did Oelofse first start work on Hatari!?
Yah, I was already working for him [de Beer] for quite a while before the movie started. And the animals were all entrusted to my care at that time, all captive animals, you know? About a year before they came or longer, I prepared already. I captured them [the animals] myself, most of them. I started training the elephant for the movie for any parts they had to play and some of the other animals, so I was involved actually quite a while with it. They [the young elephant] accepted me as a matriarch and they were like … they accepted me as a mother figure or a father, and they followed me everywhere where I’d go and you know I actually slept a lot of nights with them in the cages, initially, to make them get used to me and so on.
What were some of his jobs on the movie?
I worked with leopards and all sorts of things and you know in some of the scenes we were capturing animals and so forth. We were doubling and standing in for some of the actors. But my main thing was to let the elephant do what they [the film crew] wanted them to do, and I also had a cheetah there that I brought from Namibia. Her name was Sonia. She also appeared prominently in the movie.
Was Sonia the cheetah that came in while Elsa Martinelli was in the bath?
Right. I was lying behind the bath, and I could see … I think I am one of the few guys that saw Martinelli’s buttocks. [laughter] I lay behind the bath, and I called the cheetah in. She would only respond to me, you know; and then she walked up to Martinelli; and we put egg yolk and stuff and blood on her legs that smelled like blood to attract her, and it was supposed to be soap that she was licking off.
What other animals did you work with?
Yah, I had about 42 animals, you know, which included cheetahs, hyenas, lions, leopards, elephant, and some bird species, etc., etc.
But your main duty was the elephant?
Yah, I was involved in all the scenes. The elephant wouldn’t respond to anybody but me. And wherever you see the elephant, I was somewhere in the background or somewhere just out of screen, to control them. And when they ran down the street [in Arusha in the final scene], they were running after me in fact. And the camera was just, you know, I was just out of view for the cameras.
What was John Wayne like?
He was a very nice gentleman, and I spent a lot of time with him. And, uh, you know, off set sometimes I took him out into the veldt and we went hunting and so on and game viewing. I had good impressions of most of the stars. I can’t say bad about any of them. They were all nice people. And my only sad moment was when I had to leave all my elephant behind after we finished the shooting in Hollywood.
How did the animals get to Hollywood?
We did the movie in a couple of months in East Africa and then we moved across. I came in a plane across from Africa to Burbank Airport in Los Angeles. It took us five days with a DC 6 at that time. I was a couple of months in Hollywood. I can’t remember exactly how long
now.
Did you consider staying in Hollywood?
Yah, you know, it was a whole new world to me. But I was always yearning to go back to Africa. After I finished, I went on a tour through America and then Europe; and then I went back to East Africa again.
And the animals?
Paramount bought them from Mr. de Beer, and at that time I was just working for him. Once they finished the movie, I delivered them all to San Diego [the San Diego Zoo].
How did you feel about that?
You know it was all in day’s work to me. It is the kind of work I did and I liked to do, and it was a wonderful experience for me. It was just sad to leave them behind in the States.
[We talked about the elephant. Oelofse remembered there were five young ones he brought to Hollywood and then delivered to the San Diego Zoo; and he had long wondered what had become of them. By going on the internet, I learned that at least four, the only four recorded to have been donated by Paramount, were now all dead, and had died at relatively young ages, for elephant, none having gotten out of their 30s.]
I am actually sad to know that they died. I thought I might, you know, since elephant normally grow quite old—there was probably something wrong with their diet or whatever that they died so early. I would have loved to have made acquaintance with them again after 50 years, but now it’s too late. My God, they probably missed me. Yah, what a shame.
I mentioned that the oldest female, Hatari, had a calf, which could still be alive.
She certainly wouldn’t know me [laughing].
I thanked Jan Oelofse for having taken the time to let me interview him.
Yah, nice talking to you; and I’m looking forward to seeing you next year again.
Jan Oelofse died a few months after this interview, one of the last links to Hatari!.
Old No. 7
The 2000s …
THE MERITS OF mefloquine as a recreational drug go sorely uncommented upon. As I lay tucked asleep, the malaria prophylactic produced phantasmagoric, labyrinthine, radioactive scenarios—Salvador Dali directed by David Cronenberg—without my having to be surrounded by an auditorium full of Dead Heads. As safe and sound as my hallucinatory sleep might be, it was often disturbed (in a physical sense) by roars, or rumbles and screams. That wasn’t the mefloquine’s fault.
Remembering where I was, I sat in the dark under the mosquito netting and swung my legs out of the bed—pausing, if it occurred to me, to peer around for the silhouettes of scorpions before setting my feet down. Lifting the net, I crossed to the tent flap and stepped into the cool August night air where bats swooped past my face.
Sometimes, I heard the distant roar of the lion that ended the dream. More frequently, though, from the Songo River flats below camp, the scream came again, and under the Southern Cross I saw the moon-washed elephant bumping one another as they all tried to crowd around the salt lick. These cows and calves, the “Songo Bitches,” expressing their extreme displeasure at being jostled by one another, were not park or wildlife-preserve elephant. They were members of a healthy wild population of legally hunted elephant—a thing far different from the semi-narcoleptic attractions found at Africa’s finer game lodges. These elephant were much too wide awake ever to permit one of those zebra vans to drive up to them. Either they would vanish into the brush, like ectoplasm dissolving at the end of a séance, before the van ever got anywhere near; or they would let it get near, then “stuffing try to kill” the van and all its occupants, as Zimbabwean PH Rory Muil put it.
Where my tent was pitched, and where I hunted with Rory, was in a million-acre hunting concession spread across the Tonga tribe’s Binga Communal Lands up from the Kariba Lake shore in northwestern Zimbabwe. The place was called Songo Camp, and the elephant were the almost-nightly entertainment. Some nights they might be accompanied by the bellowing of Cape buffalo; but by morning they, and the buff, would be gone from sight; and I would have to go looking for them, the buffalo in particular.
If mefloquine gave me bizarre but relatively harmless dreams, it was nyati, the buffalo, who produced another sort of delirium—one that carried a serious threat of addiction, as I knew too well. Not everyone necessarily gets hooked on nyati. In terms of side effects, the first hit is usually free. A hunter may get “lucky” and stumble onto a bull in open terrain and make a practically anticlimactic one-shot kill, and wonder what all the fuss is about. Another hunter, after chasing snorting, stampeding buffalo around in the bush for days, may be so unnerved by the experience that he will happily make his first buffalo hunt his only buffalo hunt, and from then on stick to less distressing game, like grizzly bear. It is only after a person deliberately hunts Cape buffalo a second time, or a third, that he makes a crossing to being something, and someone, distinctly different from whatever he was before.
Once over the line, it is a fact that such people will hunt buffalo whenever they are in Africa and there are buffalo to hunt. Robert Ruark quoted his (then) youthful PH Harry Selby: “You will always hunt buff. It’s a disease. You’ve killed a lion and you don’t care whether you take another. But you will hunt buff until you are dead, because there is something about them that makes intelligent people into complete idiots. Like me.”
Even as I watched those elephant like white hills in the moonlight below the camp, I was thinking about the six Cape buffalo I had killed in 28 years—because that was how many buffalo there had been for me to hunt in 28 years. (One, a Nile buffalo up in the Central African Republic, had been more a matter of my counting coup after a PH and his hunter had wounded the bull and we tracked it and found it waiting for us, gathering itself for a charge; but I counted it all the same.) I was back again in Zimbabwe after many years, in the hardly best of times for the country, for the sole purpose of hunting buffalo some more. I had, in short, a buffalo on my back; and after six of them, served neat, the only possible cure for my jones was a shot of Old No. 7.
I don’t know if it requires a special darkness or a heart of clear radiance to be drawn to the hunting of Cape buffalo. The only thing I do know is that it is unlike all the other hunting of all the other game I have given chase to in Africa. The glamour species such as sable, kudu, and nyala can regularly be spotted from a vehicle and stalked. Lion and leopard are almost invariably baited into rifle range. The pursuit of giant eland, or bongo, can be grueling to the point of heartbreak; but only the bongo, reportedly, has even a slight tendency toward aggressive behavior if confronted. Black rhino, though no longer hunted (except at astronomical expense and the most complicated permitting process), are belligerent by disposition, but are also intractable innocents. White rhino are similarly heedless and exceedingly docile. Elephant are five times the size of buffalo, arguably smarter, and hunting them is never anything less than a long, hard, throat-tightened slog. Their charge is nearly always bluff, though, and a bullet through a flared ear—no more to an elephant than a piercing to a teenaged girl—can turn them.
Buffalo seldom charge unless made to, but they never bluff. Their sight and hearing, while not acute, are far from poor (having few “natural” enemies, they haven’t had to evolve those senses to the level of the smaller prey species); their sense of smell is astounding; and all their senses are wired into a large brain and a redoubtable, decidedly uncowlike intellect. You have to hunt them on foot, you have to get close, you have to use a heavy rifle, and you have to shoot straight the first time.
Among Cape buffalo, the dagga boys are the most unadulterated form of the buffalo drug. Dagga boys behave as if they belong to the Skull & Bones society of the wallows. Either bullies or grandees, they lay claim to the mudholes by seeming divine right; and their attitude toward much of the rest of the world, including humans, is about on par. That, and all of the above, is what makes them so interesting.
If you hunt dagga boys, you want a PH you can rely on, first, not to take you (too) unnecessarily into harm’s way, but, second, to be there to lend an assist if a “situation” needs sorting out. Until you
really learn how a PH will react during a buffalo incident, you look to external signs for a clue. It might be his eyes—if he meets yours directly—or his posture or how much rubbish he may or may not talk. Or you can look at his wrists.
There are PHs who collect all variety of native good-luck string, copper, elephant-hair, ivory, or rhino-cartilage bracelets (the last only on an old-timer, a mzee, these days—one PH who hunted into his eighties affected such a hoop for a time as a young man, till he found that it rubbed uncomfortably on the backs of others in intimate liaisons). The suspicion arises that bedizened PHs may just fancy themselves Maasai morani (who tend to wear wooden bracelets that look an awful lot like the black-rubber drive belts off vacuum cleaners), bent on proving, or hiding, something. As a rule: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter; and likewise, the more rattly the bangles, the more dubious the competence of the PH. Rory, who resembled a shopworn version of the actor Patrick Stewart, wore a Timex, with a cloth strap.
This seemed to matter when we found ourselves trailing a dagga boy whose track showed he was dragging a right hind hoof. He had likely been caught in a poacher’s wire snare and pulled free—no mean feat, considering that the snares were generally constructed from double strands of 12½-gauge high-tensile fence wire. (Three days prior to my arrival in camp, a poacher and several of his associates went down to the Sengwa, the area’s main river, in order to spear a buffalo who had tangled a snare around his head and horns and had the poor manners not to strangle himself to death. As the spearmen approached what they took to be a harmless, neck-roped buffalo, the bull was filled with a surge of adrenaline and snapped the snare—with a breaking strength twice his bodyweight—and proceeded to butt, gore, and stamp the poacher into the ground while the poacher’s cohort fled. Then the buffalo walked off, still wearing his crown of wire.)
Augusts in Africa Page 23
