Jane Goodall Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  THE NATURALIST

  Daddy’s Machine, Nanny’s Garden

  War and a Disappearing Father

  A Child’s Peace

  Child in the Trees

  Childhood’s End

  Dream Deferred

  Dream Returned

  Africa!

  Olduvai

  Love and Other Complications

  The Menagerie

  London Interlude

  Lolui Island and the Road to Gombe

  Summer in Paradise

  David’s Gift

  Primates and Paradigms

  The Magical and the Mundane

  A Photographic Failure

  A Different Language

  THE SCIENTIST

  First Scientific Conferences

  A Photographic Success

  Intimate Encounters

  Love and Romance, Passion and Marriage

  Babies and Bananas

  A Permanent Research Center

  Photos

  Gombe from Afar

  A Peripatetic Dr. van Lawick and the Paleolithic Vulture

  Epidemic

  Grublin

  Promise and Loss

  Hugo’s Book

  Regime Changes

  Abundance, Estrangement, and Death

  Friends, Allies, and Lovers

  Things Fall Down—and Sometimes Apart

  Domesticity and Disaster

  A New Normal

  Picking Up the Pieces

  THE ACTIVIST

  Well-Being in a Cage

  Orphans, Children, and Sanctuaries

  Circumnavigations

  Messages

  Woman Leaping Forward

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2006 by Dale Peterson

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  For more information about Jane Goodall and her continuing initiatives in wildlife research, education, and conservation, contact the Jane Goodall Institute at www.janegoodall.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Peterson, Dale.

  Jane Goodall : the woman who redefined man / Dale Peterson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-395-85405-1

  ISBN-10: 0-395-85405-9

  1. Goodall, Jane, date. 2. Primatologists—England—Biography. 3. Chimpanzees—Tanzania—Gombe Stream National Park. I. Title.

  QL31.G58P47 2006

  590.92—dc22 2006006050

  eISBN 978-0-547-52579-2

  v2.1014

  For Wyn Kelley,

  for the chimpanzees,

  and in memory of Robbie and Kris

  Prologue

  SHE STEPS INTO a halo of light, places a toy stuffed monkey next to a small sheet of notes and a glass of water at the podium. Her face becomes a series of curves—arched eyebrows, finely defined cheeks—and a wave in the hair (thick, an edge of pure white turning into gray and then brown, with lurking strands of honey blond) rolls to the ponytail in back. She wears a simple blue dress with white buttons. Black turtleneck beneath. No makeup other than a little lipstick. And she opens with a greeting from the chimpanzees: noisy inhalations and hooting exhalations building in volume and climaxing into screams.

  She speaks, and her hands, fingers spread, move like flags, like signals or semaphores. She has a soft, almost musical voice modulated by an educated accent and polished enunciation. She creates a sense of deep relaxation, a natural, almost hypnotic connection with her audience.

  She describes her early love for animals, speaks of taking earthworms to bed and sneaking into the henhouse. She recollects her mother’s encouragement. She tells of her childhood reading: the journey Doctor Dolittle took to Africa, for instance, to release circus animals. She loved that bridge the monkeys made with their hands. But then she met Tarzan! And in that childhood and those childish mental images she learned what her future would be. “I vowed that I would go to Africa,” she says, “live among the animals, and write books about them.” She remembers meeting the great Louis Leakey, then going to find the chimpanzees in their forest. She recalls their names and personal stories. She refers to the hostility she first experienced at Cambridge University, where she was informed that chimpanzees do not have personalities, minds, or emotions. They should be given numbers, not names. . . .

  She is a gifted storyteller, and she organizes her lectures around anec dotes, images, and symbols that unfold, one after the other, perfectly. She rarely refers to her notes, animating her talk with gestures and spontaneous sound effects. “Let me tell you a story,” she says, “because sometimes stories are the best way to understand things.” And she sees the story while telling it: drawing characters with her hands, imitating actions, illustrating thoughts. She speaks of herself at a critical moment, looking up—and looks up. She describes charging angry male chimpanzees with arms bulked out, hair standing on end—and shakes her body in excited ferocity. She speaks of a chimp grinning in fear—and makes the grin. “Imagine we’re in a forest, and there are vines hanging down,” she says—and she raises a hand and begins tracing vines in the air.

  She is a small woman of obvious energy and courage. Against a dark and shadowy background, her face is bathed in light, her hair silvered by the light, and her voice echoes throughout the hall to an audience of several hundred or a few thousand.

  The talk ends with an appeal. Perhaps it is the story about a zoo visitor who courageously jumped into a moat to save a drowning chimp named Jojo and then later recalled, “I looked into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a man, and the expression seemed to say, ‘Won’t someone help me?’” And she asks her audience rhetorically, “Why am I traveling the world on this crazy schedule, traveling more than three hundred days in the last year? It is because I too have looked into the eyes of chimpanzees at the edge of existence, and felt those eyes say, Won’t someone help?”

  She is a celebrity, a hero, an icon, and her lectures can be evangelistic experiences characterized by rapt attention, spontaneous tears, standing ovations—the works—with, at the end, an enthusiastic mobbing. After the lecture, members of the fundraising institute funnel the excited audience toward the membership and memento sales and the vast stacks of books—copies of almost everything she has ever written. People buy, and then they expect an autograph and, if possible, an exchange of words. As the long line of supplicants creeps forward, her personal assistant organizes: answers questions and, holding open a book to the right page, leans down to communicate special requests. The assistant, standing, gives the impression of being always cheerful. The woman, seated, seems ever patient. She signs and smiles and chats and signs again for as long as it takes—an hour, two, or three.

  People approach, lean in closely, act as if they already know her. And she, always perfectly at ease, serene, listens quietly, responds appropriately. “I was on a flight to Arusha,” someone says, “and you were there in business class. I talked to you. It was March 2.” “Oh, yes,” she says, not mentioning the fact that she has flown three or four dozen times since then.

  A round-faced young woman with an upturned nose and an open smile says, “I’ve been working with endangered species.” The woman nods affirmatively,
with interest.

  An older man approaches: “Sometime, if you have a moment after all this, I would like to tell you two stories about my own experiences with chimpanzees. I think you will be interested.”

  A pair of teenage girls: “We’re doing a collection of women’s first period stories, and we’d be honored if you would contribute.”

  Someone else (in tears): “You’re my hero. You inspired me to join the Peace Corps.”

  And: “May the universe bless your work.”

  “Thank you,” someone else says, pulling up a freshly autographed book. “This is one of the most memorable moments of my life.”

  The line feels endless. The woman listens patiently to everyone.

  A young girl with braces on her teeth: “When I was in sixth grade, I had to do a research project. I did it on chimpanzees. And you!”

  Another (in tears): “Thank you for everything. I’m just one of your greatest fans.”

  And: “I just wanted to say, I dressed up as you for Halloween.”

  The wise woman of silvered hair and serene mien smiles, responds, and handles the books. She writes: Follow your dreams and Remember what my mum said—“Never give up!” And then, in a neat, plain script, she signs her name: Jane Goodall.

  PART I

  THE NATURALIST

  1

  Daddy’s Machine, Nanny’s Garden

  1930–1939

  MORTIMER HERBERT MORRIS-GOODALL was a member of the prosperous middle class, a status his family had acquired during the previous century as a result of initiative, industry, luck, and playing cards.

  According to family tradition, some ancient Goodall experienced a more than passing association with the gallows, as either a hangman or hanged man; but the family’s more reliable record starts with the birth of Charles Goodall, on December 4, 1785, in the town of Northampton. By the early 1820s, Charles had finished his printer’s apprenticeship in London and struck out on his own as a small-scale manufacturer of playing cards and message cards. Business was good, and he moved into progressively larger premises until he built a factory at 24 Great College Street. By this time the concern was known as Charles Goodall & Son.

  After Charles’s death, in 1851, his sons, Jonathan and Josiah, began expanding operations, building more factory space, purchasing new highspeed color presses, and diversifying their line to include almanacs, ball programs, calendars, Christmas greeting cards, menu cards, memorial cards, New Year’s and Valentine and visiting cards—and playing cards. The company trademark consisted of the name Goodall split in half, stacked four letters over three, and placed inside a heart:

  By 1913, Charles Goodall & Son was printing, packaging, and selling over 2 million packs of playing cards a year, roughly three times the production of all other manufacturers combined, and by 1915 sales had reached 2.2 million. The two Goodall brothers now running the company, Charles’s grandsons, together took three quarters of the net profits, while a third brother, Reginald—the youngest—having been given no responsibility for running the company whatsoever, was forced to remain content with the final quarter of net profits.

  Reginald may have been a prodigal son, and after he married Elizabeth Morris, against the family’s wishes, he proceeded to give all their children a hyphenated last name—Morris-Goodall—as if to make a point. He made the point five times before falling off a horse at the Folkestone Race Course in Kent and landing on his head, producing a cerebral blood clot that, on May 3, 1916, proved fatal.

  Mortimer Herbert was nine years old at the time of his father’s death, and in the years following that unhappy moment the family moved a number of times, eventually settling down when his mother married again. Her new husband, the imposing Major Norman Nutt, DSO (who was said to have led a charge during the Great War by standing on top of a rolling tank and waving his sword), or Nutty, as Mortimer called him, managed the Folkestone Race Course. As an astonishing perquisite of the job, Major Nutt and his family were allowed to move into an ancient manor house built inside the ruins of an even more ancient castle owned by the Folkestone track. By then, however, Mortimer was off to Repton, a public school in Lancashire, where he proved an indifferent scholar. After Repton, he studied engineering and eventually took a job with Callender’s Cable and Construction. Callender’s had contracts for laying telephone cables all over England, and Mortimer would go around with a test phone to see that the cables were joined up correctly. “That was very interesting,” he once recalled, “and it involved traveling and driving the test van, which was right up my street: I love driving.”

  Driving was his life’s dominating passion. His mother taught him to drive when he was fourteen years old, and by his late teens he had bought his first car, a sporty four-cylinder H.E. (made by Herbert Engineering), which in 1930 he traded for a most magical machine.

  Aston Martin was started around the time of the Great War as a manufacturer of racecars, producing during the 1920s fewer than a dozen of their superb automobiles per year, on average; the company then began producing sports and touring cars and in the early 1930s picked up production, turning out some 210 cars between 1930 and 1932. But an Aston Martin was still a rare—and very beautiful—object when Mortimer first set eyes on a gleaming white three-seater International on display at the Brooklands Motors showroom at 110 Great Portland Street in London. “It looked so beautiful I was determined to have it,” he later recalled, and so when the crankshaft on his H.E. broke, he sold the vehicle, borrowed against his inheritance, and bought the Aston. As he drove the gleaming machine out of the showroom, he thought to pause and ask the fellow who had just sold it to him where the factory was, and thus he learned that Aston Martin assembled cars in a London suburb not far from the showroom.

  He found the factory, known as “the Works”: four huge brick buildings, each one inadequately heated by four small coal stoves, with the racecars under development at the end of one building, their frames strategically situated to avoid damage from rain coming through broken skylights. He walked onto the shop floor and began asking people for the boss. Someone said, “There he is,” and so Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall met the chainsmoking, Italian-born engineer and racer Augustus Cesare Bertelli.

  Mortimer said that he had just bought an Aston Martin International and wanted to race it. Bertelli said that if Mortimer really wanted to drive competitively, his car would require some very significant modifications. Meanwhile, Bertelli advised, it was important to start out by driving in reliability trials rather than serious timed races, so that Mortimer could learn how to handle the car under pressure.

  During 1930 and into 1931, Mortimer drove his International in reliability trials as well as a few timed races, eventually achieving credible results in the long-distance runs from London to Land’s End and from London to Edinburgh. The International, tuned for regular driving, could reach top speeds of around 80 miles per hour, not particularly fast for competition cars of that era, but its excellent handling and good brakes meant it could run at a high average speed under challenging conditions. So Mortimer did well, and by the middle of 1931 he believed he was ready to drive a real racecar.

  Aston Martin was now trying to make money selling first-rate sports and touring cars, but the company continued to promote its name with an official race team, which by the early 1930s was concentrating on the most challenging and glamorous race of all, the twenty-four-hour Le Mans Grand Prix d’Endurance. Compared to the other cars running in the Le Mans Endurance—the Mercedes, Alfa-Romeos, Bugattis, Talbots, and so on—the Aston Martin racer was a lightweight understatement, but it was also nimble and reliable.

  In 1931, Bertelli transferred Aston Martin’s seventh Le Mans racer (identified as LM7) to Mortimer. European motor racing during this classic period expressed a certain nationalistic spirit, with racecars for each nation painted one color to simplify the problem of national identification. French cars were blue, Italian red, German white, and British green. Mortimer’s LM7, therefore, wa
s colored a sweet olive green. It had cut-out doors and wire wheels, an external exhaust pipe emerging with an elegant swoop on the passenger’s side, a long louvered hood kept in place with bolts and a wraparound leather strap, front motorcycle-style fenders anchored to the brake plates and turning in concert with the front wheels, a tiny glass windscreen, big rock-screened headlamps mounted on short poles, and an aerodynamically tapered rear end. Soon after he took possession, Mortimer thoughtfully lined the passenger’s side of the cockpit with green baize.

  Mortimer kept his job at Callender’s, and he lived in London, sharing rooms in a Queensgate boarding house with Byron Godfrey Plantagenet Cary, a schoolmate from his Repton days. Their rooms happened to be on one of the lower floors, near the stairs. And, as the two young men noticed, late every afternoon the same stunningly attractive young woman would walk past their open door on the way to her bed-sitter, two floors up. Their door was left open on purpose, of course, and the pair would stand half out in the hall and talk to each other casually around the same time every evening in order to observe the young woman returning home from work.

  Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, or Vanne, possessed a striking combination of fine arches and curves in the face, a warm and confident smile, high bright cheeks, and a firm jaw. A certain young man once told her, “Your hair is liked burnished chestnut.” Another young man commented on her eyes: “What do you think you are, a green-eyed goddess?” Vanne had come to London in the late 1920s from her family home in Bournemouth, first to acquire secretarial skills at the Pittman Secretarial College, near Russell Square, and then to practice them for the impresario Charles B. Cochran.

  Cocky, as he was called, had a small office at the top of 49 Old Bond Street and during the early 1930s was at the height of his career as a show business entrepreneur, creating and producing plays, musicals, and dance revues. Vanne’s duties included answering the telephone (“Regent 1241”), typing up letters and documents, and taking dictation. By her own account, she was “absolutely useless” at shorthand and typing, but Cocky, who was famously fond of dachshunds and beautiful young women, may not have examined her secretarial skills very closely. At any rate, she remembered him as an agreeable, generous, and dynamic boss, and “famous actors and actresses, Noël Coward and people like that, used to sit on the arm of my chair and help me with my shorthand.” Another benefit of working at 49 Old Bond Street was free admission to most of the major theatrical events in London.