The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  THROUGHOUT JANUARY, HARKNESS began to worry about Baby's care. She knew that her apartment was not adequate for his needs. It was also increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing animal's hunger. “Day by day, she grew bigger and stronger,” Harkness told a reporter. “Her appetite, always healthy grew by leaps and bounds.” The eight-ounce bottle was quickly replaced by a twelve-ounce, and four feedings a day had to be supplemented, but by what? Su-Lin seemed unaware that carrots, lettuce, asparagus, or celery were anything more than toys. A single stalk of bamboo that Harkness had saved because of the giant panda-tooth marks on it became a favorite possession. Though ragged, cracked, and dry, it held some magic for the little panda, who chewed on it endlessly.

  Since this growing baby was obviously going to need solid food soon, Harkness was determined to get him into the hands of experts who could puzzle out a decent diet.

  Edward Bean at the Brookfield Zoo had treated her well, so she negotiated with him to take Su-Lin on loan until matters could be sorted out. Late in the afternoon of February 6 Harkness once again boarded the Commodore Vanderbilt, this time heading west. Her friends saw her off from Grand Central Terminal, bringing roses and violets for the bittersweet farewell. She would stay one week, making sure little Su-Lin settled in properly.

  Two days later the panda was welcomed at the zoo, where he would not be put on display for months. He was kept in the first-aid station, after zoo officials realized that the planned space in the Australian House was too hot for the woolly baby, and too frightening with the yips of the dingo dogs echoing through the halls. The director's daughter, Mary Bean, a registered nurse, would care for the baby by day; her brother, Robert Bean, the curator of mammals, took the night shift. Lloyd's of London insured the animal that Pathé News considered the most valuable in the world.

  Clearly, Harkness wasn't the only one who saw the panda as nearly human. Kept in a large room, he was given a bright green Chinese grass rug, a cradle, a playpen, and a football. Harkness was pleased to see that her Su-Lin would receive “the sort of care and attention that have gone into the upbringing of the Dionne quintuplets”—then the most famous babies in North America.

  Mary Bean would correspond with Harkness over time, providing details of Su-Lin's regimen. He would be fed on a regular schedule:

  7:30 A.M. one and a half ounces of prune or orange juice

  8:00 Seven ounces milk (Klim) with one teaspoon codliver oil

  11:45 two-thirds cup Pablum or oatmeal

  12 Noon Milk (Klim) with half teaspoon of Haliver Malt

  1:45 four ounces Gerber's vegetable soup

  4:15 Milk with H.M. (7 oz.)

  10:00 same

  Carrots, celery, lettuce, and spinach leaves were provided for chewing, and the doting nurse said Su-Lin enjoyed “a little warm water two or three times a day.”

  HARKNESS WAS ALL smiles about the transfer, but it was with a great deal of emotion that she relinquished the panda into the Beans' care. Since the morning of November 9 she had hardly let Baby out of her sight. Now he would be gone for good.

  That night, alone in her room, she woke sobbing. Tellingly, she wrote, “but for whom or what, I do not know.” She may never have been able to properly express her despair over Bill's death in her writing, but here was a glimpse of her pain. Su-Lin was Bill, his cause, the life the young couple should have had, the children they would never have. When she gave the animal away, all the other sorrows were laid bare.

  HARKNESS RETURNED to New York, eager to accomplish her objectives. She wanted to produce a book about her adventure, receive enough money to underwrite her next expedition, and get back to China and Tibet.

  Her story was big enough, and she had enough connections to the publishing world—among others, Perkie had befriended author Faith Baldwin, and Harkness's in-laws had lived near a successful literary agent—that she landed a contract with a new publishing house, Carrick & Evans, for two books: one for adults and another for children. She could start right away, using as notes the stockpile of letters she had written home to Perkie during her expedition.

  Gnawing at her at all times, though, was the impermanence of SuLin's situation. She met with various zoo officials and contacted others. All with little result. In frustration, she wondered aloud in the pages of the popular New York Herald Tribune if she should just take the panda out of the zoo to return him to his native home. “There are times,” she said, “when I feel that the best thing to do would be to take Su-Lin back to her ancestral jungle, set her free and let her live her life the way Mother Nature intended.”

  When the article hit, the public reacted. Letters poured in begging Harkness not to take Su-Lin away. In Chicago, zoo-goers were clamoring to see the famous captive, who was still being kept off exhibit until Harkness and the zoo could come to terms.

  What else could Brookfield do? It quickly brokered a deal with Harkness in order to keep its star attraction—an animal that had managed to mesmerize the public before even being displayed. It would pay Harkness $8,750, for her next expedition. Not quite what she had been looking for, but enough. She was so mad to get back to that life of adventure, she figured that somehow she'd make do on the small investment. The book contract would help buttress her finances. Most of all, she now felt she knew how to live in China cheaply. She had learned “that to travel simply was to know and enjoy a country and its people.”

  So, in mid-April, Harkness returned to Chicago to close the deal and have a much longed-for visit with Baby. On the way west, she was anxious about the sting she would feel if Su-Lin did not remember her.

  Her fears were groundless. As soon as Su-Lin saw her, the now thirtyone-pound panda lumbered into her arms, nuzzling her hair just like in old times. It was more than satisfying to see how much he had grown. The reunion, of course, would have to be followed by another separation, which was hard to face. Even as the rowdy panda clawed and bit her, Harkness could only hug him tighter.

  That day, April 20, the public adoration of Su-Lin began. He went on display for the first time, for only two hours a day in the available space in the monkey house. The zoo was overrun by eager fans. Tens of thousands of them came in the first few days; 325,000 in the first three months. In that short period alone, Su-Lin drew 87,000 more spectators than would that year's five World Series games played in New York. Over time the panda even entertained such celebrities as Shirley Temple, Helen Keller, and Sophie Tucker.

  The Bronx Zoo, which had so haughtily rejected Su-Lin, saw what was happening and began making quiet inquiries about the animal— How was his health? What effect was he having on attendance? They must have felt sorry for themselves when they learned that Su-Lin was healthy, eating solid food, and quite effortlessly had become the most popular animal in the country.

  BACK IN SHANGHAI that spring, Gerald Russell, fresh from months in the field, and Floyd Tangier Smith, broken and confined to the hospital, arranged a reunion. With Harkness's success, Smith's collapse, and Russell's tales from up-country, there was much to discuss.

  Looking skeletal in loose bedclothes, the old man was quite a sight to the young adventurer. Bitterness had eaten Smith to the bone, bringing his weight down to just 118 pounds. Even more alarming was his behavior. Russell found that he “juxtaposed various ideas and events with phantasy,” and his mind “was at times clouded.”

  Smith had been in a complete tailspin in the wake of Harkness's departure from Shanghai. As she traveled farther and farther away from him, her image loomed ever larger in his fevered mind. Just before Christmas he had turned to his wife, saying, “Do you know, I think I am slowly dying.” He told her that he could see no way out of his “present condition.”

  Though able to pull himself together for the holiday, just two days later he was thrown back into utter despair.

  He was broke, “financially embarrassed,” his wife said. And his nerves had “all gone phut.” Smith confided to his sister that he was “feeling all broken up in nerves.” In
this state, he had been “ready to lay down and pass up everything without a hope or interest in the future.” Instead of continued life, he would write her much later, he had been facing “a possible blotting out altogether.” From winter into spring, battling physical ailments, including pleurisy and an infected throat, as well as psychological demons, Smith fell apart, experiencing, as he said, a real “knock down.”

  What both he and Elizabeth continued to focus on through it all was Ruth Harkness. She was a treacherous woman who had played a “dirty trick.” Tracking details of her progress from press accounts—amounts offered for the panda, books she might write, plans to return to China— they thought all her ideas were “crazy.”

  Closer to home, word was getting back to Smith that Harkness had been privately critical of him to certain people in the city. As if it hadn't been humiliating enough for him, he began to hear from friends “slanderous statements” made by Harkness while she had been in Shanghai. These rumors only served to stoke his vendetta. After this Smith said, “I could no longer ignore the fact that she had been making a complete ‘sucker’ out of me and had been crooked through and through from start to finish.”

  The talk had the ring of truth to it—that Harkness said she had been paying him a salary, and that she found his work “unsatisfactory.” In fact, she did believe he was still operating on Bill's money, and almost from the start Harkness had suspected Smith was not up to the task. The irony was that all the time Smith had been so dismissive of Harkness's abilities, he had never considered that she might just be measuring his competence too. “She knew about as much about my work in China as I would know about designing ladies' dresses in New York,” he sputtered.

  Although many years later Russell would assert, unbelievably, to “know of no ill-feeling between Ruth and Floyd,” it is highly unlikely the two men didn't go over it all in great detail that day in the hospital. After all, it was Smith's obsession at the time. Further, Russell said that he had met one of the many hunters who would claim over time to have sold Harkness the panda. It is almost certain he would have shared with Smith this news, which would have been so welcome.

  But Russell had another significant tale to recount from his adventure, a shameful story that even made it into the pages of The China Journal. While in “Wassu country,” near the Tibetan border, Russell had come across a farmer who was in possession of a quite tame juvenile giant panda. The young animal was so docile that it was free to roam the farm on its own. He was apparently in good health, being fed a diet of grass as well as a variety of vegetables. It was a moment of enormous good fortune for the adventurer. To procure another live panda would have been a great feat. “But,” the Journal wrote, “Mr. Russell is reported to have considered it better to shoot the animal and bring it out of the country as a skin-specimen.” Transporting voracious giant pandas out of the country with enough bamboo to keep them alive was always the great concern of those who hoped to bring them west. It was enough to daunt Russell. So, it appears that, quite cold-bloodedly, the great hunter walked right up to this tethered, trusting creature and pulled the trigger, or at least ordered that it be done for him. With a single bullet, a hard-tomanage animal would become a transportable pelt.

  As for Smith, sometime in March he began to experience what he would describe as a “miraculous recovery.” It would, in reality, be a long road. By the end of April he was only well enough to “sit up indoors,” occasionally going for rides with his wife. His appetite had returned—he was as hungry as a wolf—he told his sister, and he hoped to put on several pounds. To his great relief, there was, he said, “no sign of any return of the distressing mental affliction I had up to the beginning of March and that was worse than all the purely physical ills I can imagine combined.”

  One of the most important elements in his recuperation was financial. From America, his sister bailed him out, for which he was extremely grateful. Through this influx of cash, he could foresee the possibility of “wealth for the future.” He would no longer consider “running away under fire”; instead he was “all for fighting it out.” He was once again the optimist—the man who, Harkness had said, was always certain that his fortune was just around the corner.

  Harkness and Smith were now set on another collision course: the very same week that she was pocketing her expedition check from Brook-field, Smith was laying his plans to get back into the field to prove himself. If the competition between the two had been keen before, now it was on fire.

  THE RACE TO snare the next live panda was not just for these two rivals. Others still wanted a chance. Captain Brocklehurst, for one, whose name was already on the short list of panda killers, was just returning emptyhanded to Shanghai from the interior. Several missionaries were in the game too. Perfectly situated for the task in western China, they would act as agents for Western zoos.

  In New York, Harkness was wildly busy. Even with an expedition to plan, she was blazing through writing her books, The Lady and the Panda and The Baby Giant Panda. With financial backing in hand from Brookfield, she could end The Lady and the Panda with what to her was the most pleasing thought imaginable: “I shall return to China,” she wrote, “to the country that gave me so much of its kindness, its friendliness, its hospitality; to the country whose generosity allowed a blundering foreigner to leave with a baby Giant Panda.”

  She could close her eyes, serenely imagining her return—“Again there were visions of blue seas, high mountains and the beauty of far lonely country,” she wrote as she contemplated recapturing the joy of her first quest. But Tibetan Buddhism would have cautioned her that everything changes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BOMBS RAIN FROM THE HEAVENS

  RUTH HARKNESS ENTERED a sweltering, seething Shanghai on Wednesday, August 11, 1937. Under thick cloud and dense heat, the combustible city was filled with the threat of war. Harkness knew of the danger ahead even as her ship, the Dollar luxury liner SS President Hoover, rounded the sharp left turn of the Huangpu River, plowing toward the banks of the International Settlement. A fellow passenger, a young Chinese army general named Lea Tsing Yao, had warned her about the escalating rage between China and Japan, painting an unsettling picture of the great tumult building in the city. He told her that in these dicey days, she would never get her ammunition through customs on her own. So she was grateful one humid night when he offered to go down to the airless baggage room with her to put his name on her trunk of matériel.

  Now, crowded up on deck, the Hoover passengers witnessed a distressing validation of all they had heard: staring down the shipping traffic, and glowering within sight of the Palace Hotel, was the big, graceless Japanese flagship Idzumo. It had backup too—a fleet of twenty Japanese destroyers and light cruisers that had made its way to Shanghai on this very day.

  Yet all around these ships of war were the comforting, familiar scenes of Harkness's beloved Shanghai—beautiful, tattered-sail junks bobbing on the chocolate waves, the skyline of the Bund, and the parade of humanity along the shore's walkway. As her ship drew in to the S&H Pootung Wharf, there was another heartening sight in store for her. Her steadfast friend Dan Reib was waiting, having planted himself among the throngs gathered dockside.

  As soon as the two Americans connected in the middle of the chaos, Reib bundled Harkness up and whisked her away. In the short distance from the quay to the Palace, Reib could outline the city's dire predicament. Japan and China were amassing troops around Shanghai, the Japanese making a great show that day of unloading piles of ammunition while bringing ashore troops in full marching kit. Outside the International Settlement, sandbag-and-barbed-wire barricades were being erected and trenches dug. The excuse for the brinkmanship was an incident the month before outside Beijing, at the eight-hundred-year-old Marco Polo Bridge, with its thirty arches and its rows of carved marble lions. During Japanese night maneuvers there, right after Chinese soldiers fired some shells, a Japanese soldier had gone missing. Though he would later turn up safe and happy
in a brothel, it didn't matter; the two sides were spoiling for a fight anyway. The clash that resulted is considered to be the first battle of World War II.

  Now Chiang Kai-shek had moved his elite German-trained divisions to the periphery of Shanghai, where they would outnumber the Japanese ten to one. It looked to observers as though he was at last serious about facing the Japanese, something many of his countrymen had been impatient to see happen. Just that past December one of his own generals kidnapped him for a time in an effort to induce him to drop the civil war and link forces with the Communists against the intruders. But Chiang had continued to believe that others would combat the Japanese. By deflecting the action toward a treaty port filled with foreigners and, just as important, foreign investments, he may have been hoping to precipitate just such an engagement.

  Overall, war strategists such as General Stilwell couldn't be very optimistic about what was to come. China had “numbers, hate and a big country,” the military attaché wrote, but not “leaders, morale, cohesion, munitions nor coordinated training.” No one knew what was going to happen, though the buildup of men and guns on both sides was no bluff.

  There was a lot for a new arrival to take in. As Harkness settled into her quarters in the sturdy old Palace, she had a little time to herself before Reib would pick her up for lunch. She dashed a note home to friends, writing half in longhand, the rest on her typewriter. She scrawled “China again” with some of the old sweeping satisfaction across the top. But the body of the letter was sober: “I have an idea that this trip will present even more difficulties in some ways than the first one.”

  HER LANDING MADE manifest that this was a complicated homecoming, the trouble in the city acting as a harbinger of the strife that would mark this journey. Still, neither Harkness nor the tawdry old city was deflated easily. At the hotel two cases of twelve-year-old Scotch aged in wood were delivered, compliments of Reib. It was apparent from the social invitations stacked up and waiting that it was party time. Her old pals were hovering like incoming planes at a crowded airfield: It was Reib for lunch, then Fritz Hardenbrooke for her first night's dinner. The next day, Arthur de Carle Sowerby and his wife had planned a tea in her honor at their home on Lucerne Road.