However, Gerald began to have second thoughts about his attire. Perhaps, after all, it was a little over the top. On 25 August he wrote again to Lee’s father:
I am glad, Hal, that you appreciated the fact that I am going to be so sartorially elegant at the coming nuptials. You might, however be relieved to know that I am having a suit made up exactly to your specifications, with one tiny addition, and that is that I am having a large heart with ‘I Love Lee’ picked out on the back in sequins – I do hope you think this is a good idea.
There was still no news about his damn divorce, he continued:
My wife signed the necessary papers in France but failed to get one of them witnessed by a Notary Public, so the whole lot had to be sent back to be re-done. Once they arrive, however, the wheels can be got into motion, but I still, I am afraid, cannot give you a firm date. Believe me, I am chattering with rage and I do sympathise with you both as I realise the sort of organisation that goes into a task like this. Rest assured that I will cable you the moment I have any news.
Lee was due to come to Jersey at the end of August en route to a lemur conference in Madagascar, at which she would be presenting a paper. Gerald would accompany her. He felt it was time to concoct another illuminated poem, the last of the current series, for they would soon be together again.
Darling, best beloved Lee,
I send this screed from me to thee:
The last I fear with drawings in it
For now I will not have a minute …
And so, my love, as you well know,
To Madagascar’s shores we’ll go.
We shall hear the Indri call,
Bouncing through the forests tall;
We shall see the Aye-Aye linger
Probing food with slender finger;
See the Ringtails walking by,
Tails like banners in the sky …
Snakes as green as any jade,
Birds of every size and shade,
Moths as big as birds are found,
And birds as small as moths abound …
I think I shall never see
A flower as lovely as a Lee;
Nor storm cloud dark that can compare
With the colour of your hair.
No sapphire sea can I descry
To match the colour of your eye.
But why d’you hold me in this thrall
So I cannot get free at all?
Why weren’t you born with purple hair?
Why weren’t you short and very fat,
With stick-out ears like any bat?
Why don’t you waddle like a goose
As though your inside bits were loose?
Why not fingers like Havanas?
Legs as bowed as two bananas?
If you had these … well …
Gerald had never before been to Madagascar, with which he and the Trust would be closely associated for years to come. He and Lee were there for ten days, then returned to Jersey for another short stay before setting off for the States, Gerry for another fund-raising tour, Lee to concentrate on her thesis for her Ph.D, which had to be completed by November.
Gerald’s lectures in America were, as always, a resounding success, and most sold out well in advance. The press gave him lengthy and serious coverage, though he always had the power to surprise, as the girl from the Chicago Sun-Times quickly discovered:
The sun was nowhere near over the yardarm but Gerald Durrell was having a bottle of beer anyway. ‘Care for one?’ he inquired, beaming cordially. ‘My mouth is like the bottom of a parrot’s cage this morning.’
Durrell, author, conservationist, appears to be the picture of a sedate, somewhat portly British gentleman. His graying hair and full beard are meticulously trimmed. He wears a faultlessly tailored suit. His manners are urbane and amiable. Only the mischief in his startlingly bright baby blue eyes, surrounded by the kind of lines that laughter makes, hint that there is a free-thinker who will jolly well order, drink and enjoy beer at 9.45 a.m. if he feels like it.
Gerald gave the reporter the lowdown on his plans – the captive breeding programmes, the Mauritius rescue project, the mini-university training centre, the plight of the world. Then he confessed what was mainly on his mind that morning. ‘As soon as his divorce is final,’ she duly noted, ‘Durrell will marry Lee McGeorge, “a delicious American girl who’s finishing her thesis in animal communication at Duke University. It’s a line of investigation we’re interested in and now that we’ve got an expert, we don’t have to pay a salary.”’
A few days later Gerald was in Philadelphia, sitting in forlorn solitude in a restaurant called The Garden. After the modernity of Chicago, the historic ambience of America’s cultured old capital turned his mind to a more classical literary form, and he dashed off a quick verse in praise of Lee, a parody of the popular Victorian doggerel-writer T.E. Brown:
The Garden
They say the garden is a lovesome thing, God Wot.
Wine, drink, gin, sin, beer in a pot
But my Garden is a lonesome thing, God Wot.
For here I know just what I’ve not got.
How can you in the Garden have a spree
When I am sitting here and lacking Lee?
By now there was considerable alarm at the tortuous progress of Gerald’s divorce. This was ironic, because in the first year or two after Jacquie had walked out it had been Gerald who had proved the obstructive and dilatory one of the two, ignoring all advice to settle round a table, and even failing to turn up to court hearings. Now he was desperately anxious to get the divorce out of the way and to fix a date for the wedding as soon as possible. On 1 October Lee wrote to Catha Weller in Jersey about the stand-off:
Gerry is very depressed about it all, and seems to think that in some way it will harm his and my relationship – that I’ll be bored waiting around a year or so as his mistress. Well … I couldn’t get bored in a thousand years of his company, and why would I want to leave when we’ve got so much to do together that it will take three or more lifetimes! I’ve told him all this, but he is still depressed and afraid. If you have the opportunity, would you reassure him about me? … reassure him wholeheartedly …
This whole new Jacquie thing has upset me considerably, Catha – but not about the delay in the marriage – rather about how it’s affecting Gerry. I wish there was something I or you or somebody could do or say to make him feel better about it.
By 3 October Gerald was in the Pennsylvanian town of Intercourse, a name which he found irresistible, and which caused him to pen a few more jealousy-provoking stanzas to keep Lee on her toes.
As I have not yet got my divorce
(A thing that I am desperate for, of course)
And as you are not here with all your charms,
I’ve had to find my fun in other arms …
This action may annoy you dear, of course,
This intercourse I’ve had in Intercourse,
But can’t you, darling, thank the Heavens above
For giving me one Mennonite of Love?
Before returning to Jersey, Gerald took Lee with him on a short visit to Canada, where she ceremonially fed the killer whale in the Vancouver Aquarium – her second official duty as the lady at Gerald’s side. Then by way of a break the couple set off on a train ride through the Rockies from Vancouver to Calgary, Lee working away at her thesis as the train rattled along.
Back in Jersey Gerald occupied himself with the ever-pressing burden of Trust and zoo business and his own career as a writer. When the pressure of Lee’s Ph.D thesis began to grind her down and bow her spirit, he wrote her a long letter on several rolls of paper illuminated like an ancient papyrus, intended to raise her confidence and cheer her on with words of encouragement and visions of good times ahead.
He was longing to show her Mauritius, he said – the surreally-shaped mountains, the green chequerboard sugarcane fields, the cool mountain forests and the gorges and the waterfalls falling thousands of
feet like fine ropes of silk. And then the reefs – the Crockery Shop, where the coral looked like stacked dishes of brandy snaps, and the Stags’ Graveyard and The Garden, shallow, sunlit and brilliant.
As well as affirming his love and devotion, Gerald had various exciting bits of news to impart. An American wanted to make a TV series based on his life (‘leaving out all the sexy bits’). The plans for the new training complex at the zoo were splendid, and with a bit of luck it should be up and running by next August, so he’d have to start thinking about who would open it. ‘Perhaps the President of the United States?’ he suggested to Lee. ‘He will, as you know, be so proud of your thesis.’ He left the really impressive news till last:
We are really getting some wonderful breeding results now, exceeding my wildest dreams. I have just been down to the reptile house: we now have a further sixteen Gunther’s Gecko eggs to hatch and another eight Telfair’s Skink eggs as well. We are now in the happy position of almost being knee deep in both species. In fact, with eighty five babies of the Jamaican Boas all flourishing we are knee deep in that particular species. We have now (with the help of Bob Martin’s new method) sexed all but one of the Round Island Boas: we have two males and one adult female. So next year we will mix the biggest male with her and hope for the best. You see, so little is known about the damn things; it’s not even recorded if they give birth to live young or lay eggs. Also nobody knows how many they have at a time. If they carry on like the Jamaicans we will be able to re-populate Round Island in a year or two. Talking of the Jamaican Boas, we now have so many Boas and Hutias we could do a re-population job if we could find the right place, so I must see if there is a rich American or European who owns an off-shore island where they could let us do a controlled try-out at re-introduction. If we could do this together with the Bare-faced Ibis release in Switzerland we would have something solid to start boasting about. The mind boggles when one begins to think about our potential in this field, for in a couple of years we should have enough of both the Fruit Bats and the Pink Pigeons to be able to start thinking in terms of an attempt to put some back in the wild …
It is such a comfort to see a dream come true, sweetie, you have simply no idea how satisfying it is. Wait until we have been on a trip together, caught stuff and brought it back and settled it in well and then bred it and you will see what I mean. It’s such a wonderful feeling of achievement. It more than makes up for all the frustration and hard work that are part of the whole thing. But it requires a hell of a lot of patience …
In November 1978 Lee finally finished her Ph.D dissertation on animal communication – ‘Circumvention of Noise in the Communication Channel by the Structure and Timing of the Calls of Forest Animals’ – and submitted it to the examiners for their judgement. On the twenty-second of the month, the day it was confirmed she had been awarded her doctorate, after a three-hour grilling by eight professors (with Gerald waiting nervously in an outside office), she and Gerald flew to Jersey, where she spent her first Christmas away from home with Gerald and his brother Lawrence, now living alone at Sommières. ‘I spent Christmas in Jersey at my brother’s zoo,’ Lawrence, no zoologist, reported to Henry Miller; ‘lots of snow of course, but the sound track was pure tropical, which was surrealist. Lions roaring in the night and the sudden screech of wild birds at dawn or the hugh hugh hugh of chimps. It is a strange island really, claustrophobic in some ways.’
Gerald and Lee had planned to spend the New Year in Fleur Cowles’ castle in Spain. Fleur Cowles was a talented, personable and extremely wealthy American woman of many parts – author, painter, publisher, editor, philanthropist, society hostess and friend of the great and the famous. She and her husband Tom had become great friends of Gerald when she lent a hand and became a Trustee after the palace revolution in 1973. Before their visit Fleur had rung Gerald and told him: ‘Now, as you’re getting married I’m going to put you in separate rooms, otherwise the servants will talk.’ To which Gerald replied: ‘Well, in that case we’re not coming.’
Fleur Cowles gave way, and on 27 December the couple flew out to Madrid on their way to the beautiful castle near Trujillo on the freezing meseta – built by the Romans, restored by the Moors, last occupied by Napoleon’s army, then restored again by Fleur and Tom, who had built a wonderful Moorish garden and a beautiful cloister connecting the two surviving Moorish towers. Castles in Spain, a manor house in Jersey, train rides through the Rockies – Lee’s life had begun to take off as Gerald had promised it would. But there was a lot more to come, as she was to recall:
That spring we were travelling in Central America and the Caribbean – Costa Rica, Panama, Antigua, Montserrat, and then Gerry’s divorce came through and we got back to Memphis ten days before the wedding having done the usual thing and left my mother to handle absolutely everything. Gerry invited everyone over – sister Margaret, and Jeremy Mallinson and his wife, John Hartley and his wife, Sam and Catha Weller, David Hughes, Peter Grose and his wife, and all the WPTI people in America. Everyone was around for all of three or four days and there were a lot of parties. Margot Rockefeller’s local Rockefeller relatives threw a big barbecue round their swimming pool, I had a couple of parties, my friends had parties, my mother’s friends had parties, even Gerry had a party. In America it’s the custom for the bridegroom to give what they call the ‘rehearsal dinner’. If you’re married in a church the rehearsal dinner follows the wedding rehearsal the day before the actual wedding. But it didn’t work out exactly that way because the Church I was brought up in, which was the Episcopalian Church, the American equivalent of the Church of England, wouldn’t allow us to get married in it. The minister I’d grown up with said, ‘Mr Durrell has been divorced, so we can’t marry you.’ I didn’t particularly mind, even though I’d been to chapel virtually every day there for most of my early life, but Mother was very angry. Anyway, we decided to get married in our back garden, and for his rehearsal dinner Gerry decided to hire a Mississippi paddle steamer and throw a party for all the wedding guests as we steamed down the Mississippi river. I wore my pre-Civil War-style Southern Belle dress – hooped skirts and crinolines and stuff – and Gerry had a stripy blazer, a straw boater, a big bow tie and what he called ‘co-respondent’s shoes’ he’d borrowed from my father. There was a band on board and champagne galore all the way down the river and Jeremy Mallinson as best man gave the rehearsal dinner speech, except that what with the noise of the engines and Jeremy’s funny English accent no one could understand a word he said. It didn’t matter though, we all gave him a big hand, and the champagne corks popped and the band continued to play … There was a beautiful sunset over the Mississippi that evening. It was wonderful …
Gerry was up very early the next morning, wedding day, Thursday, 24 May 1979. It was raining at first but it cleared up later. It was late spring in Memphis now and the dogwoods were out in our garden, and the azaleas were out, and a lot of flowers were showing through. It was such a beautiful wedding. Gerry as the groom was banished upstairs before the final moment, which was the usual custom, so my brother went up with a six-pack of beer to keep him company. At five-thirty that afternoon, as we came out of the house into the garden to get married, a flautist and a harpist were playing Pachelbel’s Canon, and after a bit the music was taken over by an old black man called Mose who played a whole lot of things on the piano. We were married on the lawn in front of a small grove of dogwood trees under the open sky by a judge who was my mother’s and father’s close friend, and then there was a big cake to cut and telegrams to read out and dancing on the grass. Then I went and changed into my going-away dress and we had rice thrown over us and then we drove away to a hotel near the airport because we had an early flight to England next morning. We had promised Peter Bull we’d be along to his Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a charity do at Longleat, so we went straight there from the airport and snuck into the marquee and Peter was standing up front with the Marquess of Bath and when he caught sight of us he said, ‘Oh, oh … I’
m going to blub … oh, oh …’ And so Gerry and I were man and wife at last. And we were going to live happily for as long as ever after turned out to be.
The wedding stayed long in the memory of all who had been present. After Gerry and Lee had gone there was a feeling of sadness and emptiness in Memphis. ‘Y’all was the toast of the town,’ Lee’s sister Harriet, fondly known as Hat, wrote to the newlyweds. ‘Mother got a little teary-eyed when y’all left. Daddy even relit the candles for your good luck. I sho’ gonna miss you Miss Scarlett, but I know Mr Rhett will take fine care of you.’
For Lee, the marriage marked the beginning of a great adventure at the side of a remarkable man doing remarkable things. For Gerald it was to prove a kind of miraculous resurrection, with many implications for his life and work and the future of the Jersey Trust – all of them, without exception, wholly good.
PART FOUR
Back on the Road
TWENTY-SEVEN
A Zoo with a View
1979–1980
For both Gerald and Lee, life had been transformed, though in different ways. For Gerald, marriage to Lee meant that his life had not simply undergone a metamorphosis, it had experienced a salvation. His close friend and colleague Jeremy Mallinson was in no doubt: ‘Lee was undoubtedly Gerry’s saviour. I think he probably would have died long before his time if it hadn’t been for the inspiration Lee gave him. He had been in hell, and if that had gone on I think he would have died of a kind of slow suicide. But now his whole dream was life with Lee.’ As Peter Olney put it: ‘Lee was Gerry’s resurrection – just as Gerry was Lee’s apotheosis.’ In Olney’s view, Gerald was very lucky to have found Lee: ‘She had a wonderful influence on the last part of his life, and prolonged it by at least ten years.’
Gerald Durrell Page 62
