Shana Alexander: Elephants In The Mist
Shana Alexander, pioneer girl reporter, early feminist, award-winning print and television journalist and commentator, and author of nine nonfiction books, set her wine glass on a table behind her house on a recent windy afternoon and talked amusedly about her current work-in-progress.
As the gusts blasted across the potato fields and her two miniature poodles barked to have their rubber toys thrown again and again, her jubilant laugh carried the heady mood along, whipping up a kind of supercharged high.
"My new book's called 'Haunted by Elephants,' " she said, "and that's what I am - haunted, hooked, obsessed."
Hard To Breed
The infatuation began in 1961, when, as a young writer for Life magazine living in Los Angeles with her then husband Stephen and their adopted daughter, Kathy, Ms. Alexander heard that an elephant in the Portland Zoo might be pregnant. If brought to term, the calf would be the first ever born in captivity.
"Elephants are very hard to breed, like me," said Ms. Alexander. She was drawn to the story after being subjected, as a young wife, to humiliating sessions with fertility doctors who convinced her she was incapable of having a child.
None, it seemed, had ever taken note of the singular abnormality that precluded her husband's becoming a father. "Handle this as gracefully as possible," she cautioned. "He had three balls."
Gestation
As she writes in her recent memoir, "Happy Days," a psychiatrist she consulted for depression years later was stunned: "You mean you were married to a man with three testicles, and you thought there was something the matter with you?"
"I didn't know how rare it was," she said ruefully, "and Steve probably figured that having three was slightly better than having two."
An elephant's gestation period wasn't known back in 1961, only that there would be a sudden drop in temperature when birth was imminent. The zoo vet moved into the elephant house and twice a day, for months, "removed his shirt, vaselined his arm up to the armpit, and, with a cattle thermometer tied to the end of a yardstick, lunged in true fencer fashion to take a reading."
Morgan And Buddha
After four false-alarm trips to Portland, Ms. Alexander saw Pachy born on Easter Saturday, 1962, and began saving elephant notes for an old age when she would be "too decrepit to be a foreign correspondent."
A subsequent friendship with a wild-animal importer named Morgan brought her to the top of a mountain outside Seattle, where he lived with nine elephants including Pachy's mother and father, Buddha, a big alpha male who was his favorite.
"Morgan fed and watered them, and slept outside in a kind of Barcalounger in the moonlight. He was a little crazy."
McCall's, CBS, Newsweek
When he disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Ms. Alexander decided to play Sherlock Holmes and write up her findings for Life, the proceeds to go to keeping the herd together.
A search of the area turned up something that looked like a folded deer hide lying on the dusty ground. It proved to be the squashed profile of Morgan's remains. Buddha, in musth (an Urdu word for drunk that describes a state of violent destructiveness occurring in male elephants in the rutting season), had trampled his owner to death.
Stints as a columnist ("The Feminine Eye"), editor of McCall's magazine, a radio and TV commentator for CBS News, a columnist and contributing editor at Newsweek, and a commentator on "60 Minutes," among other jobs, put the elephants on hold for a while.
The Good Animal
So did such books as "The Feminine Eye," "Shana Alexander's State-by-State Guide to Women's Legal Rights," "Talking Woman," and "Anyone's Daughter," about the Patty Hearst trial.
The rigors of a divorce, the responsibilities of raising a child, and a long, ecstatic love affair with the Irish playwright H. A. L. (Harry) Craig, filled her life as well. It wasn't until 1979, after the publication of the Hearst book, that the decks were clear and elephants shambled back into Ms. Alexander's heart.
Living in Bridgehampton at the time (she'd first come to the East End in 1971), she immersed herself in accounts of the elephant in history, mythology, and warfare, and pondered the mysteries of the beast who appears in every religion, always as the good guy, the animal that every writer from Herodotus on believes to be the most akin to man.
Research at the Southampton College library turned up old circus magazines and records describing the elephant genocide that swept the United States early in the century as owners of small traveling circuses systematically killed off all their males.
"They shot them, fed them poison peanuts and cyanide-laced potatoes, bow-and-arrowed and electrocuted them," Ms. Alexander said. "The elephants would go into musth and charge the bleachers, killing innocent children and nuns. On the road there were only stakes and chains, no iron bars to restrain them."
Just as she was settling into it, her research screeched to a halt on March 11, 1980.
"Very Much A Lady"
"I know it was the 11th, because on the night of March 10, Jean Harris killed Dr. Tarnower, and I came home on the 11th, put my groceries away, fed the dog, made my martini, turned on the TV, and took out my needlepoint. Suddenly I heard that the headmistress of the Madeira School was being held on a murder charge because she had shot a guy I used to know - not well, but well enough not to like very much."
"I looked up. Here's a woman getting out of a lawyer's car - he has a trenchcoat and a cigar, so he has to be a lawyer. I see her foot first, and on that foot is a Ferragamo shoe that is my shoe. Then out comes a woman about my age and height who looks like she's just been to my hairdresser, and the lawyer says to the photographers, 'Listen, fellows, you don't understand my client . . . she's very much a lady.' "
"I stood up all alone in my kitchen and said to the TV screen, 'Maybe they don't understand her, buddy, but I do.' I got in my car the next day, drove to Scarsdale, and told him I'd be writing a book about this whether he liked it or not, with his help or without it."
"He told me, as lawyers will, to put it in a letter."
Assignment Tanzania
"Very Much a Lady: The Untold Story of Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower" was published to much acclaim in 1983. It was followed two years later by "The Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album," a best-seller later made into a TV mini-series starring Lee Remick.
In 1985 came another elephant alert: a call from The National Geographic articles editor who had assumed, from her Life pieces, that Ms. Alexander was a wildlife person, and was summoning her to Tanzania.
"The editor told me to go immediately to Abercrombie and Fitch and buy safari clothes, then come to their office for the necessary shots and Tanzanian shekels, or whatever," said Ms. Alexander. "When I got to Africa I was to rent a plane and fly over the Serengeti to get a general idea, then hire the best available white hunter as a guide."
National Geographic
"I told them this sounded like something Peter Matthiessen had just turned down - and it was. Peter [who lives in Sagaponack] urged me to drop everything and go, and Maria [his wife] lent me her bush stuff."
"A brave Japanese photographer had taken the pictures; my job was to write a tone poem to go with them."
The piece ended up as the cover article, and was recently included in an anthology of National Geographic's best writing, along with a work by Joseph Conrad.
Ms. Alexander went on to write two more books about people caught up in trials, "Dangerous Games: The Pizza Connection," and "When She Was Bad: The Story of Bess, Nancy, Hortense and Sukhreet."
"Happy Days"
"Then, finally, it all ended with 'Happy Days,' " she said of her 1995 autobiography subtitled "My Mother, My Father, My Sister and Me." "It was a succes d'estime, to quote my father. In other words, a flop."
Actually a fascinating remembrance of her parents -Milton Ager, the Tin Pan Alley composer of such songs as "Ain't She Sweet?" and "Happy Days Are Here Again," and the dauntingly chic Cecilia Ager, a Variety columnist, Hollywood screenwriter, and lethal Manhattan film critic - "Happy Days" chronicles their bewildering private eccentricities and glittering public lives.
It also describes the author's rather quixotic quest for love and acceptance after a lonely childhood (one of her happiest memories is of tangoing with her mother's manicurist), and documents her subsequent career and private life with striking honesty.
"So now it's back to the elephant book," Ms. Alexander said. She'd bounced around publishers, she said, but the editor she loved was Robert Loomis at Random House, who lives in Sag Harbor.
Full Circle
"Don't you remember, Shana?" he said when she called. "Before you rushed off to do Jean Harris I offered you a contract for your elephant book, which you never signed."
"I'd completely forgotten! Now I'm back in the arms of Bob and Random," she said, quite blissfully.
There may also be a play in her future, the veteran observer of courtroom dramas concluded.
"I've never been able to fantasize, or make anything up, but I think I can do a play."