Next day Gerald wrote to Lord Jersey, apologising (as requested) for any offence caused by his letter of 13 November, but reaffirming that he could not accept the substance of the report. Two days later Lord Jersey, a very kind, gentle man and a staunch supporter from the beginning, wrote to confirm the resignations of the trustees. ‘May I say we all still firmly believe in your ideals of conservation,’ he wrote, ‘and sincerely wish the Trust and the Zoo every success in the future. After so many years it is only with regret and sadness that we have come to this decision.’
But they had not read the small print. The Jersey lawyer who had drawn up the laws of the council had included a loophole that provided for a quorum to take over. It turned out that Jeremy Mallinson (Zoological Director), John Hartley (Trust Secretary) and Catha Weller (member of the Board of Management) were legitimate council members with a vote. A quorum was formed when some of the council members who had resigned crept back. Gerald was happy to accept the resignations of the rest. He could now replace them. He had won the day.
Looking back soon afterwards, Gerald blamed Sir Giles Guthrie for the whole affair. ‘This has been a power struggle, pure and simple,’ he wrote to a colleague in America on 14 December. ‘For several years now, one of the Trustees has felt that I was a thorn in his side, for the simple reason that as I am unpaid he cannot boss me about. This whole sorry business was because he hoped that he could back me into a corner and force me out of the way. As you can imagine, I was distressed beyond all measure at the despicable way the Council was forced into a position of resigning as a body. This whole distasteful business has at least shown me where my friends lie.’
But it was a sad business from the viewpoint of either side. Like Lord Jersey, Sir Giles Guthrie had been one of those rare creatures, a tycoon who was also a dedicated conservationist. And he had not just paid lip service to the cause. He had periodically donated £5000 to the Trust over a lengthy period, as well as his pet alligator, while his wife had contributed £1000 per annum on her own account, and a lump sum of £10,000 towards the orang utan enclosure.
The Times had picked up the story, and the Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, Dr Michael Brambell, was moved to write a letter of commiseration to Jeremy Mallinson which included a testimony to the current stature of the Jersey Zoo and Trust: ‘I think Jersey Zoo is the most exciting new venture in the field in this country, and one of the four worthwhile zoological efforts at present going in the animal collection business in the British Isles, two others being Peter Scott’s set-up and on a smaller scale Philip Wayre’s [Pheasant/Otter Trust in Norfolk].’
Looking back with the gift of hindsight, it is clear that the Trustees were probably right to propose improving the efficiency of the organisation. But they set about it in the wrong way, provoking a defensive and hostile reaction from Gerald, who went right over the top. Nearly twenty years later Lord Jersey wrote to Sir Giles Guthrie’s widow, Rhona, wondering what all the fuss had been about. ‘Looking through our Report with today’s eyes,’ he reflected, ‘it seems so very mild and to the point. I am amazed it resulted in all the kerfuffle, and amazed that practically all our recommendations have, bit by bit, been adopted.’
Gerry and Jacquie had not emerged unscathed. Jacquie was condemned to life as before, but in the process had lost a number of her Jersey friends. Gerry had emerged with his position enhanced, but there were mutterings behind closed doors that he had now kissed goodbye to any prospect of a knighthood.
Gerry wasted no time in dusting himself down. He had ambitious plans for 1973, when the tenth anniversary of the Trust would be celebrated, and he had a new council to form as soon as he could. In February he announced a new ‘all-star’ line-up. Sir William Collins, chairman of Gerald’s publishers, had agreed to join the council, along with Gerald’s celebrity chums Noël Coward and David Niven. Other new members included Lord Craigton, Vice-Chairman of the Fauna Preservation Society and Chairman of the British Council for Environmental Conservation, and Robin Rumboll, a prominent Jersey accountant and politician, who replaced Sir Giles Guthrie as financial adviser.
Gerald’s New Year tour d’horizon was bullish. The zoo collection now comprised nearly eight hundred animals. The breeding programme was forging ahead and the scientific excellence of the establishment was now almost without peer. The animal records were among the most comprehensive of any zoo in the world, and the annual report was one of the most impressive zoological publications of its kind. The education programme, so dear to Gerald’s heart, was expanding. In the last few years over eleven thousand British and nearly a thousand French school-chidren had visited the collection, and a classroom and a full-time teacher were to be added to the Trust’s facilities. Great importance had always been attached to the landscaping and planting of the zoo grounds, and with the tireless devotion of Vi Lort-Philips (a local resident and staunch supporter of the zoo) and Lady Rhona Guthrie and the Gardening Committee the greening of Jersey Zoo had proceeded apace, with the impressive botanical collection – matching where possible the natural habitat of the animals – a worthy and sometimes even a rival complement to the zoological one. In the first month of the year alone, Gerald reported, Trust membership had gone up by over two hundred, and nine mammals and thirteen birds had been bred. A new reptile and amphibian breeding unit – the most sophisticated of its kind in the world – was going ahead with money from a Canadian Trust member, and a marmoset and tamarin breeding unit was being built with the help of a £5000 donation from a British member.
‘We hope to make this tenth anniversary year the best in the history of the Trust,’ Gerald told the press. And he was now ready to take the campaign to the world’s richest country.
TWENTY-THREE
Gerald in America
1973–1974
Though Gerald Durrell, now approaching fifty, could still be a very funny man and could still write very funny books, he had become a deadly serious player in a deadly serious game. The image he presented to the world was no longer just the product of his genes and upbringing. The fifteen often brutally tough years since he had arrived in Jersey and taken on the zoo and the Trust had moulded him into something more complex and frequently more contradictory and paradoxical than his earlier persona. From being a purely private person he had become a political animal, with all that entailed – subtler, more volatile, more desperate, not always as jovial and cuddly as his physical appearance, resembling a kind of bacchanalian Father Christmas, led his fans to expect him to be.
There was though, still a strong sense of sheer mischief in the man, and this mischievousness could be ludic or demonic, depending on his mood. David Hughes saw something of this schism in his personality:
I think he had enormous difficulty in controlling himself in a Jekyll and Hyde-ish sort of way. He could often be wickedly teasing, trying to find a person’s soft spot and put thumb pressure on it. You had to be fairly tough to stand up to it really. He did it with me. He never let me off the hook at all, so there were occasions when I came quite close to being hurt, though he wouldn’t have wanted that to happen. It was more than a game, it was more a way of controlling people. Probably he couldn’t have run the zoo and the Trust without it. It was his way of being the big male boss gorilla, the super silverback. If you’re anarchic, not in a conventional power structure, you’ve got to have something over and above normal charisma to get people to follow you, and getting behind people’s defences was one way of keeping control. That’s how his devoted staff not only remained faithful to the idea but to the man who had set that idea in their minds. In a way, too, it was his way of expressing his shyness. Because he was shy. This wasn’t observable in terms of normal shyness – he didn’t stutter or go inside himself, but he did have to compensate.
Peter Olney, Curator of Birds at London Zoo and an old friend, had watched Gerald grow in status and in stature over the years, turning into the portly, prophet-like figure he now presented to the world. But in spite of his fame and au
thority, Olney felt Gerald was still au fond the same rather diffident and modest man he had always been:
He admitted he didn’t like meeting strangers greatly, and he had to force himself to come forward. When he was talking about something that he was passionately interested in he was able to overcome this, but he hated having to go to formal things like banquets and cocktail parties, and hated giving public speeches, though once he had got to his feet he could be brilliant. He was not only shy and modest but he laboured under a sense of inadequacy as well, certainly in the early days, and especially surrounded by academic zoologists – he didn’t speak the same language, didn’t know the genetics and so on. He never really understood why he was so famous, though he quite enjoyed it, or why people took him so seriously, though he enjoyed what fame gave him. When I got to know him I regarded him not so much as a father figure but as the older brother I would like to have had, someone whose ideas I was very much in sympathy with.
In May 1973, with his forthcoming visit to the United States in mind, Gerald contracted an independent documentary film-maker by the name of David Cobham to make a short promotional film about the work and achievements of the Jersey Zoo and Trust which he could show to American audiences. The film was scripted and narrated by Gerald. On his home patch, away from the bright lights and artificial atmosphere of a television studio, he blossomed as a performer in front of the camera. ‘He was very impressive,’ Cobham recalled. ‘He did long takes to camera absolutely convincingly and without a single fluff.’
The film opened with Gerald sitting at a desk lit only by a single candle. On the desk were two fluffy baby representatives of an endangered species of African owl. ‘All over the world,’ Gerald said to camera, ‘animal life is in danger of extinction by the direct or indirect intervention of man. Over a thousand species and sub-species of animals are in danger of vanishing for ever. Here on the island of Jersey the Wildlife Preservation Trust has created a rescue operation that is quite unique. We’re a reservoir of threatened wildlife from all over the world – a sanctuary where they can live and breed in peace.’
In two and a half days flat the film was in the can. It ended as it had begun, with Gerald seated at his candle-lit desk. ‘Every year,’ he said, ‘we spend millions of pounds on man-made things, on beautiful buildings, monuments, libraries and art galleries to house books and works of art. But in a way, isn’t the animal world God’s art gallery, aren’t the animals God’s works of art? You can recreate an art gallery, but you can’t recreate an animal species once it has been destroyed, and to exterminate an animal species is as easy as snuffing out a candle.’ Gerald’s finger poised over the candle flame. As he snuffed it out, the baby owls disappeared into darkness.
Gerald’s newfound ease and fluency with the film medium was not lost on David Cobham, or on Gerald himself – or on others in the business. ‘He was rather like Peter Ustinov in some ways,’ Jacquie was to remark. ‘He had a wonderful facility for involving you when he was relating an incident, a tremendous gift for telling a story and captivating you.’
David Cobham was very struck by Jacquie’s role during his short sojourn at the zoo. ‘Gerry was enormously dependent on her,’ he recalled. ‘She drove the whole circus. She could be very forceful with people, very tough when it came to looking after Gerry’s interests. If Gerry was like the exalted subaltern at the head of the platoon, Jacquie was like the platoon sergeant, the one who really kept the troops on the march and the show on the road. I never saw any hostility between them then. In fact quite the reverse. One evening I had to double back to the flat because I’d forgotten something and I just went straight into the flat without knocking and found Gerry and Jacquie curled up in each other’s arms, cuddling on the floor with their backs against the sofa. It was a lovely image and it moved me greatly.’
Gerald spent the early part of the summer of 1973 at the Mazet. By now Beasts in my Belfry, his humorously written but seriously intentioned account of his year as a student keeper at Whipsnade, had been published, to a favourable reception from reviewers and readers alike. Dominating his thoughts, however, was his forthcoming visit to Canada and the United States. A crucial step in the furtherance of the Trust’s activities worldwide, the tour had two objectives: first, to publicise the work of the Trust and to raise funds from wealthy American supporters; and second, to develop the American arm of the Trust, known as SAFE (Save Animals from Extinction), which could continue to generate funds in situ.
Gerald viewed the visit with excitement, awe, and absolute dread. ‘Off at crack of dawn tomorrow,’ he wrote uneasily to Lawrence on 26 August, ‘and not looking forward to this bloody American trip one bit, but I hope it will be a success. I’ll be back in Jersey in mid-December so come over and be introduced to the baby gorilla.’ The baby was Assumbo, four pounds nine ounces, son of Nandi and Jambo, Jersey’s first-born gorilla, the pride of the zoo, currently being kept in an incubator and hand-fed every three hours by his human father-substitute, Jeremy Usher-Smith.
Gerald was never altogether comfortable in America. He was a confirmed Old Worlder, perfectly at ease in an oriental bazaar, an Arab kasbah, a Greek country taverna, an African hut. But while the Americans spoke more or less the same language as he did, collectively they seemed to him to come from another planet. The pace, the drive, the pressure, the glitz, the noise, the way of life and way of thinking of American big cities terrified him, but also mesmerised him. America was the big time. America had money – lots of it. And Americans could fix things – lots of things. He had no alternative. Everyone at the Trust was counting on him. Besides, the Americans had the best and longest animal conservation record in the West. It was the Americans who had first taken up the challenge of a beleaguered environment and who had first set aside great swathes of their country as national parks. Above all it was the Americans who decades ago had pioneered the breeding of an endangered species, in the form of the American buffalo.
On 27 August 1973 Gerald set off in trepidation. He did not like flying, preferring to see the world at ground or sea level, so he crossed the Atlantic on the SS France. Jacquie did not accompany him, though she planned to join him in New York at the end of the trip. Instead he sailed with a couple of old friends he had first met on a trip to Corfu – Peter Waller, who for some years had been Assistant Administrator at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Steve Eckard, a Princeton man and a teacher, who with Waller had founded the American School in London. These two were to be the key and linchpin of the tour, Gerald’s fixers and minders, booking hotels and buying train tickets, leaving Gerald free to concentrate on the task in hand – lecturing about the Jersey Trust and persuading rich Americans to part with their money.
Waller and Eckard’s countless friends included many of the rich and famous, and they selflessly used these contacts to help Gerald in his ceaseless quest for support and funds. Eckard was a long-time friend of Margot Rockefeller, wife of a scion of the great American family, having taught her to ride when she was young, and by great good fortune – a classic example of ‘Durrell’s luck’ – she happened to be on board the SS France, along with her husband Godfrey and their two children. Within a few hours they had all met up, and were soon working their way through Godfrey’s inexhaustible supply of whisky in the Rockefeller suite. By the time the ship was nosing past the Statue of Liberty the Rockefellers were among Gerald’s best and closest American friends. They were poor Rockefellers, Gerald was told – relatively speaking, that is. Nevertheless they were to play a crucial part in his life and work in future years, and to be a critical connection in the evolution of American involvement in the Trust.
On 5 September, after a convivial but sometimes storm-tossed crossing, Gerald and his companions disembarked in a smoggy, heatwave New York. During his first few days in the Big Apple he fortuitously encountered someone else who was to prove a critical figure in his American plans. He had been shopping in Macy’s in Fifth Avenue and had just emerged when his young fem
ale companion Martha Reeves, who had set up the tour and helped set up SAFE, uttered a piercing squeak. ‘Look,’ she cried. ‘It’s Tom Lovejoy.’
Dr Thomas E. Lovejoy was a Yale-educated environmentalist and tropical biologist in his early thirties. At this time he was based at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Like many zoologists and conservationists of his generation, his commitment to conservation had been nurtured in part by his reading of Gerald Durrell’s early books when he was a schoolboy. Gerald later recounted their first meeting: ‘I saw a slight young man dancing down the sidewalk towards us, tousled dark hair, dark eyes with a humorous glint in them, a handsome face with an endearing grin. I liked him at once and felt that he liked me.’ Tom Lovejoy, too, vividly recalled that chance near-collision: ‘I was steaming full tilt like a New Yorker up Fifth Avenue, and almost ran up on the back of Gerry’s heels. “You must be Gerald Durrell,” I said (careful to avoid the American mispronunciation Doo-rell), and he turned, fixed me with those blue eyes, and we both knew in an instant, in a form of love at first sight, that the other was a true believer, in that conservation and zoos represent callings to which there are none more noble.’ It was a partnership and bond, Lovejoy was to say, which endured to the very end.
Though this first encounter happened by chance, the two men were not unacquainted, for Gerald had been in touch with Lovejoy by letter about his American plans. ‘We dragged him off to a nearby hostelry,’ Gerald recorded, ‘and filled him with beer while I told him what I was trying to do in America. He listened quietly and gave me some excellent advice, and promised to see me when I returned from my trip so that we could discuss how best to set up the Trust in America.’
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