by Mark Bowden
After that, Massa was for sale. Advertised as a female, Massa interested the keepers of Philadelphia’s zoo because they already owned an impressive, healthy young male named Bamboo. Gorillas had never before been successfully kept in captivity for long, much less bred, so the purchase of Massa for $6,000 five decades ago was an act of high ambition.
The Philadelphia Zoo then, more so than today, was one of the most celebrated in America, and one of the most successful. The zoo was simply one of the most famous things about Philadelphia. It was the oldest zoo in this country, and had one of the most extensive and valuable zoological collections. The zoo’s staff of experts enjoyed—as they do today—high prestige throughout the world. Imagine how embarrassed they were when they found out about Massa.
Massa’s arrival in Philadelphia was one of the hottest stories that cold winter. Local newspapers played up the story cleverly, announcing the arrival of Bamboo’s blushing bride. Newsrooms dispatched their prize feature writers for the story. The Philadelphia Record ran a formal announcement of Massa’s betrothal with all the stylistic ornament of a Main Line event. There was Massa’s five-year-old face, looking very much in childhood as it does today, the same slightly sunken cheeks and bushy jowls scowling out over a caption that read “Miss Massa.” A particularly sanguine reporter for The Bulletin recounted Massa’s introduction to “her” mate:
“She looked him over and started beating her chest, an apparent sign of complete approval. His admiring eyes took in his future Missus and he okayed her by smashing his hairy fists against his manly bosom.”
So it went. On the fateful day when keepers decided to open a passageway between the cages of the two “lovers,” Massa, who was smaller and faster than big Bamboo, slipped quickly into the groom’s cage, belted him on the chin, cuffed his ears, pulled at his hair, and then quickly retreated through the passageway—which was too narrow for Bamboo—into the safety of his own cage. This was not the way male and female gorillas were supposed to behave together. For the first time zoo officials began to entertain the dark suspicion that they had made a basic reproductive error. News like this was bound to leak out.
“GORILLA NO LADY; WEDDING IS OFF” was the headline in the next day’s Daily News, which detailed the embarrassment of zoo experts with typical populist glee.
“Actually, it wasn’t an inexcusable error,” explained Wilbur Amand, one of the current zoo directors. “It isn’t easy to tell the difference between a male and a female gorilla without taking a close look. You can’t get that close to them safely, and they’re hairy. At the time they didn’t have the squeeze cages and the knockdown drugs we use today. There was a period there even after the unsuccessful introduction of Massa and Bamboo when not everyone on the staff was in agreement that Massa wasn’t female. Mrs. Lintz felt certain he was. There were some top-level meetings where it became the topic of serious debate. At one point they even established a committee to figure out the truth.”
Eventually the truth was established, perhaps because of the committee’s efforts, and Massa settled in to the monotonous routine that has been his lot ever since. He and Bamboo barely tolerated each other in opposite cages. Their posturing and threatening entertained generations of city zoo goers. Massa was particularly fond of tormenting his rival by splashing water at him. During Bamboo’s lifetime—he died of a heart attack in 1961 at age thirty-four, then the oldest captive gorilla in the world—Massa was the lesser attraction. Bamboo was always a bigger ape, was older, and had arrived first. It took many years for Massa to live down vague public suspicions that he was something of a failure.
While Massa began his confinement at the zoo, his childhood cage mate, Buddha, was fast becoming the most famous gorilla in the world. Sold to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1937, Buddha was rechristened “Gargantua” and made the star of the circus’s extravagant promotions. Posters depicted the Brooklyn-reared ape—whom Mrs. Lintz had decided to sell after he began behaving too affectionately toward her—as a giant, snarling beast ten times the size of a man. In one lurid advertisement, Gargantua is clutching in one oversized hand a doll-sized dead African tribesman.
He was a fearsome sight. Overfeeding pushed his weight well over five hundred pounds. Owing to a grotesque facial disfigurement that happened when an irate merchant sailor threw acid on him as an infant, Gargantua’s features were frozen in an expression of awful anger. His value to the circus as an attraction ensured the best care circus money could buy. Despite this, Gargantua lived for only twelve more years after Mrs. Lintz sold him. He was less than twenty years old when he died, and had lived what was then considered a long life for a captive gorilla.
Massa, in his cage in Philadelphia, was just approaching his youthful prime. A photograph of him published in National Geographic in 1940 shows him as a broad, virile beast with full, wide features and a thick coat of black and silver.
Zoo officials point with pride to two innovations that led to the extraordinary health and longevity of their captive apes. The first was a decision to erect glass barriers between zoo goers and the primates housed in indoor cages. Tuberculosis was a major killer of apes at the zoo before the barriers went up. Animal primates also are extremely sensitive to respiratory viruses that tend to afflict humans less severely. Today, zoo workers who tend Massa and the other apes are routinely tested for the disease, and anyone who hasn’t been tested is not allowed near them. The second innovation was the introduction, in 1936, of a carefully monitored diet of fruits, vegetables, and “zoo-cake,” a healthful mixture of vegetable nutrients that was formulated by zoo researchers over years of experimentation.
It was not unusual—and still isn’t—for gorillas in captivity to reach six hundred pounds or more because of over- and improper feeding. With obesity come the usual medical complications of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Many captive gorillas die of heart attacks. Massa’s peak weight of three hundred and fifty pounds, which was quite impressive, was much more in keeping with the size of wild gorillas. He has grown, matured, and aged under skillfully controlled circumstances.
These achievements took place over many years of prosperity at the Philadelphia Zoo. Every year for thirty-five years after Massa arrived, zoo attendance increased. Revenues at the turnstiles and the refreshment and souvenir counters account for 70 percent of the zoo’s operating budget (the rest comes from city government and private donations). It was an unqualified success story in the era before the dominance of TV, the entertainment industry, and professional sports. On warm sunny weekends, the zoo was the place to go.
“All that changed rather suddenly in 1970,” said Thomas Gilmore, who has been the zoo’s business director since 1978. “The zoo had its first major downturn of attendance that year. Everyone was stunned. The decreases continued year after year for the rest of that decade. In the first few years they were content to identify the problem as too many rainy weekends—one bad weekend and you can lose a hundred thousand dollars—but as the trend continued over a few more years it was clear that bad weather wasn’t the only factor…. Finally the board of directors sat down and decided to take a closer look at what was happening.”
What they found, Gilmore said, is that zoo attendance is unavoidably linked with children. By the mid-sixties, the last members of the baby boom generation were leaving childhood behind, and were taking fewer and fewer trips to see Massa and his friends at the zoo. At the same time, competition had intensified for Philadelphians’ leisure money. The zoo was competing with the Phillies and the Eagles, with theme parks like Great Adventure and amusement parks like the one in Hershey. Tradition-minded zoo managers, accustomed as they were to effortless popularity, were simply not meeting the challenge.
In order to meet deficits each year that attendance slipped, administrators began dipping into the zoo’s building construction and maintenance fund, which meant that the zoo stopped building and changing. Instead, it had begun to fall apart, to took like a place wher
e people used to spend weekends.
“They stopped maintaining the facility,” Gilmore said. “Their vehicles were old, their buildings were falling down. What happened was that the zoo began to look old and run down. And the zoo wasn’t marketing itself well. In the long run those things just start to hurt you worse.”
By 1977, Ronald Ruether, then the zoo president, told the City Council that unless Philadelphia gave an additional $250,000 the zoo would close during the winter months. Closing down the zoo was even less of a solution than a threat. Animals must be fed and cared for, buildings must be heated and grounds maintained whether the zoo is selling tickets or not. Closing the zoo would just mean its main source of revenue would be gone. Ruether himself was gone before the end of the year.
The zoo was being hurt at a deeper level, too. The average person in current times knows a whole lot more about wildlife and the world than his grandparents did in 1935. Television and film have exposed millions to the thrill of a cheetah on a dead run or the sudden strike of a venomous viper. By comparison, seeing the same animals displayed in a cage had become a flat, static experience. The zoo seemed sad, in a way it had never been before. It looked and felt like an anachronism.
Age had begun to take its toll on Massa, too, as he entered his fifth decade. By mid-1969 he was already the oldest gorilla in captivity, and he was starting to look it. The winter before, he had contracted a bad case of sinusitis, and he couldn’t seem to shake it. Finally, after months of his discharging large amounts of mucus through his wide, flat nose, there appeared inside the flared left nostril a large, pink polyplike growth. Massa had developed a serious problem that demanded drastic action.
In April of that year Massa underwent surgery. Canvas was draped over the bars of his outside cage to shield the operation from public view. The old ape was slipped a cup of orange juice laced with a drug called Sernylan. At first, his natural gorilla suspicion prevailed, but Massa was coaxed to drink it by an appeal to his notorious sweet tooth. With a green Life Saver floating in the cup, the offer was too good to refuse. Massa downed the mixture and was soon groggy. A supplementary dose administered through a needle at the end of a long bamboo pole knocked him out completely. He lay in helpless, unconscious repose for an hour and a half as the vets doctored him, cleaning his sinuses with antibiotics, and altering slightly the inner structure of his nose to improve drainage. Afterward, the 300-pound sleeper was carried on a canvas stretcher back into his indoor cage.
“He remained in a stuporous state throughout the night,” wrote Kevin Fox, a zoo researcher who participated in the unusual procedure. “He would occasionally rise to his feet, stagger about his cage briefly, and then collapse in the straw that padded his cage floor. Several times when he arose he appeared to be wrestling with demons and flailed out angrily at those imagined enemies.”
Massa recovered fully within several days. He underwent another operation several months later because during the first procedure the vets had noticed that many of his teeth were beginning to rot away. Tooth ailments are potentially deadly to apes because of their acute sensitivity to sinus and respiratory infections. So in July, veterinarian Wilbur Amand extracted seventeen of Massa’s teeth, including one of his giant canines. Ever since, the set of Massa’s jaw and mouth has had the decided look of a senior citizen’s.
Bill Donaldson is the same age as Massa. When he left his job as city manager of Cincinnati to assume the presidency of Philadelphia’s zoo three years ago, he inherited an institution in a bad state of decline. With his white beard and snowy hair, he is, in the words of one of his women staff assistants, “the kind of person who attracts attention when he walks into a crowded room, a real Alpha-plus male”—zoo talk for the dominant male in a primate social group—“if you know what I mean.”
Working for twenty years as manager of a large city bureaucracy would tend to deeply imbue stoicism even in a person with no natural inclination for it. Donaldson seems to have been that way all his life. While taking the zoo job meant accepting a considerable professional challenge, Donaldson’s approach to the new position was almost childlike. “How many forty-eight-year-old men get a chance to run away and join the circus?” he asked in an interview at the time. His style is relaxed and easy; in the midst of a detailed discussion of the zoo’s financial status he will stand suddenly and cross the room to his bookshelf to reverently take down a small glass aquarium in order to show off one of his pet salamanders, displaying the motionless, slimy little yellow-spotted creature with all the wide-eyed wonder of a ten-year-old who’s just scooped it out of a creek.
“We recognized Bill as an able administrator who was used to working with city governments, who understood how to get things done,” said Samuel H. Ballum, chairman of the zoo’s board of directors. “He is also an adroit person in dealing with people.”
And animals. Donaldson likes to visit the zoo at night, after it is closed to the public. Then he can walk around in silent communion with his own urban slice of the natural world. Massa is one of his favorites. Donaldson prides himself on being one of the few people who are really close to the great old ape.
“He has the most extraordinary eyes,” Donaldson said. “You get the feeling he would tell you so much if he could. You know, Eric Berg—the artist who did that magnificent sculpture of Massa out in front of the Monkey House—he is quoted as saying that Massa seemed to him like a Zen monk. I get that feeling.”
When he arrived in 1979 Donaldson waded directly into the zoo’s miasmic financial straits. He laid off sixteen employees—“eight from union ranks and eight from management,” he said. Admission prices were raised on a sliding scale that would permit economy-minded zoo goers to pay considerably less at off-peak times, but would capitalize on those sunny Saturdays and Sundays that always draw good crowds. He instituted an energy-saving program and began advertising and promoting the zoo aggressively. Attendance has gone from 990,000 in 1979 to 1.1 million in each of the last two years. Since Donaldson arrived, the zoo has paid back all the money it took from the building funds during the previous decade. It’s currently operating slightly under its 1982 budget.
Donaldson praises his staff for these accomplishments, while it seems that every man and woman he employs credits him. Clearly, something is working right these days at the zoo. Perhaps the best thing is the change in attitude. Stories from the zoo are no longer problem stories, though the zoo certainly still faces problems. There is a feeling at the zoo that zoos themselves are not a thing of the past, as it might have seemed during the lean years of the seventies. With its new master plan for an almost total redesign of the facilities, with its $12 million fund-raising effort successfully under way, the oldest zoo in America is positively fired up.
“When I got here this place needed a philosophy,” Donaldson said, relaxing with a pipe on the couch in his office at the zoo administration building. Out the window traffic hurried past on Girard Avenue.
“Early zoos were motivated primarily by two things: first, learning the physiology of animals, and, second, the least noble aspect, the desire to come and look at the funny animals. Some of the older zoos in this country took a lead from the circus and made it a matter of policy that all animals had to perform in some way. Showtime! Lions and tigers jumping through flaming hoops! They had this German guy at the St. Louis Zoo who insisted that every animal at the zoo do something; he wanted them all to pay their own way. To its credit, I think, the Philadelphia Zoo has always been a more serious place. Right from the start there were rules against using the collection for research or performances. I thought the zoo needed to redefine itself, to get a clearer picture of what they are trying to accomplish here.”
To help do that, Donaldson hired Mary Scott Cebul, a Yale-educated ethologist. Cebul is one of very few young Ph.D.’s around to go directly from such prestigious training into zoo work. She mentions her graduate school colleagues one by one—this one is in the Philippines, this one is in South America or Africa.
Cebul is in the wilds of Philadelphia.
“Donaldson talks about how hard it was as city manager in Cincinnati to get academics involved in actually working on the urban problems they studied,” she said, “get them to talk the same language as the people who were out there dealing with the issues day after day. Here you would have academics with all this insight into the causes of urban crime, and a police chief dealing with the effects of it every day. How do you get these people to work together?”
Cebul doesn’t finish the thought, but clearly she’s the academic Donaldson has lured into this real-world fray. Going straight to work in a zoo, a place most wildlife scientists regard as a sort of abomination, as at best a necessary abomination, was a step that took courage—but one with a bit more practical appeal for a young woman with a husband and an infant. Cebul still isn’t all that certain she took the right step. Her green eyes turn away for a moment at the question. “Maybe they’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe zoos are an abomination. I don’t know.” But, as she sees it, zoos are definitely there, they can serve a vitally important conservationist role, and she’s been given a chance to remold one of the best ones around.
After nearly a year of interviewing zoo staff members, of studying problems and mulling over solutions, Cebul wrote a philosophy for the Philadelphia Zoo. It forms an ideological basis for all planning—which she is now coordinating. The philosophy defines the zoo’s lofty, conservationist mission, and spells out what kind of zoo it can and cannot be.
