Gorillas in the Mist (2 page)

Although the Prices seemed wealthy, Dian did not receive much financial assistance from them when she entered the adult world. In the main, she supported herself after she completed high school. In 1949, while at Marin Junior College taking a business course, which she despised, she worked as a clerk at the White House Department Store. As a university undergraduate she spent holidays and weekends doing clerical and laboratory jobs, and she once had a job as a machine operator in a factory.

One of the few bright episodes in her early life was learning to ride. The rapport she had with horses won her a place at a dude ranch in Montana during the summer of her twenty-first year; but she lost this— “the best job I’d ever had” —when she
contracted chicken pox. A young man who knew her at the ranch remembered her as being “completely wrapped up in animals—the horses, dogs, a pet coyote, anything that walked or flew. She liked people well enough, but didn’t seem to rely on them as much as the rest of us do.”

Rejecting Richard Price’s decision that she seek a career in business, Dian began setting her own course and in 1950 enrolled as a preveterinary medical student at the University of California campus in Davis. She was determined to share her life with animals; but although she did extremely well in such studies as writing and art, botany and zoology, she had no affinity for the “hard” sciences. To her enormous disappointment she failed her second year, brought down by chemistry and physics, which she simply could not master.

Undaunted, she decided to work with damaged children. She transferred to San Jose State College, graduating in 1954 with a degree in occupational therapy. During the succeeding nine months she interned in several hospitals. She dealt with tuberculosis patients in one of these, an experience that left an indelible impression on her.

The job she chose after graduation was about as far removed from California as she could get and still remain in the United States. Except for brief, ritual visits with the Prices, she never returned to the scene of her birth and early years.

The new focus of her life, Korsair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, was a rambling half-timbered old building, exactly to her liking.

It’s a Shriners’ hospital and I’m surprised they hired me without Shriner pull. I’m to be the director of the occupational therapy department, which makes me feel quite inadequate. My assist ant is a fifty-year-old woman, and that makes me feel a little like a louse, but everyone is relaxed and friendly. The children come direct from the backwoods. They are brought out of the hills by truck, jeep, even on horseback. I’m excited because within the
next month I am going in with the doctors on one of their “collecting” trips. We may even go to the area where four sheriffs have been shot in the last three years. These children have a variety of physical and emotional disabilities and are lost in this world of ours. All are much younger than their years and are like wild animals penned up with no hope of escape. They need a tremendous amount of care and kindness to make them feel life is worth living.

Although she had lived in a big city most of her life, Dian hated urban constraint, so her first concern after settling in at Korsair was to find a place to live, well beyond Louisville’s city limits. Eventually she rented a dilapidated cottage on a sprawling, century-old farm called Glenmary.

The owners encouraged her to pitch in with the seasonal farm chores, and she was able to put her knowledge of veterinary medicine to constructive use. She was in her element.

Never have I seen any place as beautiful as this is now in autumn. At Glenmary the creeks are full of the golden, red, green, and brown leaves from the forests. The pastures are still vivid green and are framed by trees that you would swear were on fire. When I wake up in the morning, I just run to the windows all over the house and am blinded by the beauty. Quite often I’ll see a raccoon or possum scurrying by, or else the ninety head of Angus cattle will be taking their morning meal off my backyard. When I come home from work, I have to take about twenty minutes to feed the multitude of barn cats and the big white shepherd dog from over the hill who stops by for a handout, along with our own farm dogs, Mitzi, Shep, and Brownie, who have adopted me as one of their own.

A warm friendship developed between Dian and Mary White Henry, secretary to the chief administrator at the Korsair Children’s Hospital. Mary White was the daughter of a well-known Louisville heart specialist and she introduced Dian to Louisville society.

Now in her twenties, she was not conventionally beautiful, but a number of the men she met found her attractive. She was exceptionally tall and slender with gleaming dark hair, intense and searching eyes, strong features, and a coltish grace. Some of the city’s most prominent men courted her, yet none of them appealed to her. More to her liking was Franz Forrester, a shock-headed young Rhodesian whom she also met through her friendship with the Henry family.

Franz was the youngest son in a displaced Austrian family who owned extensive agricultural and business interests in Africa. Called Pookie by his intimates, he came as close to evoking a serious response from Dian as any man she had so far met—though that was not very close.

He’s from Southern Rhodesia and he’s a dream, but younger than I am, the son of an Austrian count claiming imperial blood. He has all these great plans for us, but I really don’t think I can afford the time.

Dian might have slipped away from Franz Forrester as she had done from previous admirers, but he was persistent beyond all others.

Letters, letters, letters from New York, London, Ireland, Paris, Rome, and South Africa. The ladies in the local post office are beside themselves. Now Pookie is back in town from New York and sets the sky as the limit for fun and frolic in Louisville. Not long ago he sent me a “pouf”-phew! It’s a footstool, I guess. The top is certainly right off a zebra’s back. It’s not bad except that it looks like a tumor rising out of my vicuna floor rug. The dogs attacked it on sight, but now the smell has so permeated the house, I guess they think it belongs.

Dian met an even more impressive man through Mary White. As a favor to Mary, one day she drove to a monastery called Gethsemane, two hours from Louisville, to pick up a writer who had been on retreat. While there, Dian encountered a vibrant Irish priest with sparkling blue eyes, contagious
enthusiasm, and a considerable interest in the mundane.

I can’t believe it. This Trappist monk, Father Raymond, who wrote the best-selling book
The Man Who Got Even with God
, obviously has a liking for me. Last Sunday Mary White called to say he was coming to Louisville and wanted to see me. Well, that was about the most rewarding experience in my life. Talking to him is like sitting on top of a live volcano. You’re constantly exploding one idea on top of another. You leave his presence, and thoughts, like lava, continue pouring over you for days. I’m not going holy holy, but this was an experience of a lifetime. He is quite a man!

He must have been. Less than a month later, in a letter to her mother, Dian noted as a casual aside that she had converted to Catholicism. Although it proved to be a transient conversion, it horrified the family.

Kitty Price was inconsolable. “I can’t stop crying long enough to reason it out,” she sobbed into the telephone the night she heard the awful news. “I can’t believe you would take such a serious step without considering us.”

Kitty and Richard Price had not even begun to suspect what Dian was capable of doing with her own life.

While Dian developed an intimate relationship with Father Raymond, Franz Forrester remained in hot pursuit and even offered to pay her way to Africa, on a one-way trip.

Dian was already intrigued by Africa. In 1957 she had met a traveler just back from that far country, a dashing reporter on the Louisville
Courier Journal
, whose excitement about his trip had been contagious. She was in love with the world he described and perhaps a little in love with him.

The thought of being where the animals haven’t all been driven into little corners attracts me so much. If he goes back to Africa, as he hopes, I’ll be right behind him!

Then the journalist moved to Florida and dropped out of Dian’s life. But the dream of Africa remained.

In 1960 Mary White made an African safari, and Dian’s dormant desire was rekindled. In one of the most painful decisions of her life she turned down Mary’s invitation to go along. The truth was she could not pay her way. However, she made up her mind she would find the funds to make a safari on her own in the not-too-distant future. “I am saving every penny for Africa,” she wrote her mother soon after Mary’s departure, perhaps in the faint hope that the Prices would offer some assistance.

Despite its attraction, she would not accept Franz Forrester’s offer. Marriage to him as the price of getting to Africa was not acceptable. She would go under her own steam or not at all. She began accumulating literature on safaris, but was appalled by the costs. Still, she was determined to reach Africa before 1963 ended.

By June of that year she had made tentative arrangements to hire the services of a Nairobi safari guide and was desperately trying to raise the requisite five thousand dollars. She pleaded with the Prices to back a bank loan; and although they initially agreed, they withdrew the offer on the grounds that the venture was both rash and dangerous. Eventually she mortgaged her income from the hospital for the next three years to a loan company at the usurious interest rate of twenty-four percent.

Her family was outraged by the size and nature of the debt she had incurred. Even her maternal aunt and uncle, Flossie and Bert Chapin, who had sometimes helped her financially during her university days, were scandalized. “It’s madness,” they told her. “If you had any sense, you’d call the whole thing off!”

Dian held adamantly to her course but tried to soothe her relatives by assuring them she would recoup the money by writing about her experiences and selling photographs and even motion pictures.

She read everything about Africa she could find. She was particularly impressed by American zoologist George Schaller’s book,
The Year of the Gorilla
, in which he described his pioneering
study of the rare mountain gorillas in the Belgian Congo. The subject offered such exciting journalistic possibilities that Dian decided to extend her safari from four to six weeks in order to visit the Virunga volcanoes in central Africa, the home of the mountain gorilla.

During the preparations for her journey she had continued her correspondence with Franz Forrester and had agreed to visit his family estate. “I have my riding attire all cleaned and ready, for riding is a big thing at Pookie’s home,” she told her mother. She also packed hiking boots and an army surplus poncho, together with a box of purloined Howard Johnson sugar cubes and American Airlines soap bars to hand out to the natives.

Dian had suffered from allergies all her life and was worried about how much they might trouble her in Africa. “About three Saturdays ago I ate a tiny, insignificant plum,” she wrote home, “just to test if my allergies were under control. Well, within an hour my eyes swelled shut, I had a temperature of 102°, I threw up, and my throat swelled shut. I was really frightened.” She was also subject to debilitating asthma attacks and was a frequent victim of pneumonia. Just after graduation from college she saw an X-ray of her lungs, which were so scarred that she described the photos as looking like a street map of Los Angeles superimposed on a street map of New York. An essential part of Dian’s safari luggage consisted of a medicine chest weighing forty-four pounds.

She had her immunization shots.

I have been on the Camille list again due to all the inoculations. They seem to be giving me the diseases instead of preventing them. I feel like a character out of an Ernest Hemingway novel, what with the fever-delirium-chills-recovery sequence.

A month before her scheduled departure for Africa she contracted pneumonia again. She made the best of it. “Except for the expense,” she told her mother, “this is the best going-away present, since now I can have a week off from work just to rest!”

Her itinerary included Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, the Belgian Congo, and Southern Rhodesia. She departed September 26, 1963, with high expectations—and sixty pounds of excess luggage. During the descent into Cairo, where her plane would refuel for the long leap south to Nairobi, she became feverish and nauseated. The next thirty-six hours were a blur: crowds and noise, hot-water bottles, and half-digested meals in seedy hotels. But the symptoms vanished as mysteriously as they had occurred, and three days later she was traveling on a bus from Nairobi to Treetops, the elite up-country lodge of the Mount Kenya Safari Club, where she was to meet her white hunter guide. Pending his arrival, there were other fascinating Africans to meet.

Bristly warthogs and baboons everywhere. Buffalo, then rhino, but too dark to photograph. Sykes monkey, Colobus monkey, crested cranes …

Exhaustion felled her the day after her arrival at the luxurious lodge, and she slept until seven in the evening. Then she freshened up, dressed, and put her long black hair up in a French roll. Striving to appear sophisticated, she added earrings and a flashy ring her mother had given her.

With the hope that she looked glamorous enough for the posh surroundings, she swept out onto the patio where she was met by actor William Holden, owner of Treetops. He invited her to his table for dinner, together with a Texas oil tycoon, a millionaire big game hunter from Scotland, and two white hunters. Her eyes grew luminous with excitement as she listened to these “old hands” talk, but she herself said little. “These people really know the Africa I’ve so far only dreamed about.”

Two nights later John Alexander, her own mail-order white hunter, arrived at Treetops with two other clients in tow. He was so preoccupied with them that he hardly gave Dian a second glance. She had imagined a close association with an epic African hero—and her Great White, as she came to call him, was too busy to talk to her until the next day. She went to bed
sick with dysentery and disappointment, but woke early in the morning and got gamely into her safari clothes, ready to go when her guide arrived. As the hours passed and he did not appear, she was virtually in tears—of rage.