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The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Constantine Croke

Random House $202

In 1936, a plucky American socialite, Ruth Harkness, journeyed  2,400km into China's interior with an audacious plan: to capture and bring to the US a living giant panda.

More accustomed to nursing highballs at soirees than hiking through Sichuan forests, Harkness succeeded, ahead of numerous veteran and celebrated male explorers, among them her recently deceased husband, William Harvest Harkness. A wealthy sportsman, Harkness had  died in Shanghai while planning an expedition into panda country.

The explorer's widow came into a small inheritance, but instead of using the funds to snag a second man (as any other  young widow of the day would have done), Harkness decided to complete her husband's mission. She went to China, organised a bare-bones expedition into Sichuan, and, against all odds, returned to the US with the first panda to set paws on western soil.

Overnight, the glamorous Harkness and her  one-year-old charge - named Su-Lin but called  'Baby' by Harkness - became celebrities. Journalists followed her and Su-Lin everywhere, the Quaker Oats cereal company created a comic strip based on her adventures and the famous came calling. Holding Su-Lin on his lap in Harkness' New York hotel room, sportsman Theodore Roosevelt Jnr, who had shot a panda eight years earlier, was so won over by the woolly creature that when asked if he would like to see Su-Lin stuffed and mounted for his collection, he said: 'I would as soon think of mounting my own son as I would this baby.'

Pandas,  the wildlife preservation movement's most charming ambassadors, get plenty of attention in this absorbing book, but it's the  widow who truly fascinates. Ruth McCombs grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, but made her way to New York at the first opportunity. Her instinctive style landed her a job designing Paris knock-offs for the era's Jazz Age flappers and, soon enough, the small-town girl had herself become the quintessential urban sophisticate, a sassy, wise-cracking free spirit 'utterly at ease at the centre of a party, rarely seen without a smoke in one hand and a cocktail in

the other'.

She and William Harkness, a Harvard-educated 'gentleman explorer', wed at the end of a decade-long relationship. The Pennsylvania girl and romantic adventurer considered one another soulmates, sharing the same wanderlust, intolerance of convention and mystical leanings. Vicki Constantine Croke came across a 'treasure trove' of Harkness' letters, which create such a rich and sympathetic portrait of her subject that one comes to think of Harkness as an intimate friend.

Harkness' life was not easy. With Quentin Young, the Chinese-American guide who led her into panda territory and helped her capture Su-Lin, she had a passionate but unresolved

affair, and her subsequent trips into Sichuan were fraught

with obstacles.

Contrary to the general belief, Harkness was not an heiress and was always scrambling for funds. Her greatest handicap, at least in the eyes of the almost exclusively male areas of exploration and zoology, was her gender. Despite her achievements, the museums, zoos and clubs that held sway in her field never extended her the recognition they did to less acclaimed explorers. She was the first woman invited to a dinner by the prestigious all-male Explorers Club, but Su-Lin, not Harkness, was guest of honour.

In her idealistic views on the purposes of animal capture - to encourage procreation of the species - and how they should be treated - gently and humanely - she was also at odds with male competitors. Harkness' success in bringing Su-Lin and a second panda to Chicago's Brookfield Zoo led to other zoos coveting their own pandas. This triggered an  increase in pandas being killed by hunters or because of inadequate care while in captivity.

The tragic repercussions of her well-intended exploits were not lost upon Harkness. During her third, and last, trip to Sichuan, she confined dispiritedly to a friend: 'Somehow, I think this sort of thing is over for me.' At the end of the expedition, as Croke describes in one of the book's most eloquent moments, Harkness took the last panda she had captured back to exactly the spot where it had been found and watched as it headed  for the bamboo thickets 'without a backward glance'. That particular panda, Harkness had written, 'gets herself in the damnedest situations. She is utterly fearless - nonchalant and doesn't give a damn about anything.'

The same, Croke points out, might have been said about her intrepid, temporary caretaker.



The Lady and the Panda