Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Mary G. Smith THE LEAKEY FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: MARY G. SMITH

Interviews conducted by Virginia Morrell in 2003

Copyright © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Mary G. Smith dated July 11, 2003. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Mary G. Smith, “The Leakey Foundation Oral History Project: Mary G. Smith.” conducted by Virginia Morrell in 2003 Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

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Table of Contents—Mary G. Smith

Interview 1: July 11, 2003

Audio File 1 1

First meeting with Louis Leakey after introduction by National Geographic’s Melville Grosvenor— Smith’s first trip to Africa — Travel with Hugo van Lawick and Richard Leakey — Exploring photographic possibilities for National Geographic — Louis’s appreciation for intelligent women — Relationship with Mary Leakey at Olduvai — Louis’s charisma — Developing an East Africa / early-man beat at National Geographic — Funding for Leakey projects — National Geographic Society support — Apes and Jane Goodall — Aadvarks — Louis as publicist, lecturer, and scientist — Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall — Louis and women — Jane Goodall’s mother, Vanne — Smith’s career at National Geographic — Calico Hills — Louis’s critics — Melville Grosvenor — Leakey as showman and founder, with Mary, of the study of human evolution

Audio File 2 30

The dirty handkerchief — Smith’s relationships with Mary Leakey — Mary at Olduvai and National Geographic — Mary’s sense of humor — Tim White — Afarensis — Laetoli — Calico Hills — Dee Simpson — Saving Louis from himself — Mary’s and Louis’s relationship — Mary’s drinking — More about her sense of humor — The Leakey legacy — Smith’s book — Jane Goodall —The Leakeys: “The Madame Curie” of paleoanthropology

[End of Interview]

1

Interview 1: July 11, 2003 [Begin Audio File 1]

[preliminary remarks deleted]

Morell: I should say at the beginning of this—this is an interview with Mary Smith, former editor at National Geographic magazine. She was the editor with Louis and Mary Leakey and Richard Leakey and Maeve Leakey. I think the whole Leakey family. This is part of the oral history project for the Leakey Foundation and UC Berkeley Bancroft Library.

01-00:01:14 Smith: Fine.

01-00:01:17 Morell: And I’m sure that we’re cooking with gas.

01-00:01:18 Smith: Mary is now dead and lives on the island of St. Martin [chuckling].

01-00:01:23 Morell: Do you want to hear yourself?

01-00:01:23 Smith: No, I don’t have to hear me while I’m talking.

01-00:01:26 Morell: Yeah, but it’s—

01-00:01:28 Smith: Oh yes, indeed, yes, that’s me all right sounding like a Chicago truck driver. My wonderful accent! [chuckling]

01-00:01:33 Morell: [chuckling] I like your accent.

01-00:01:36 Smith: Well, good. Well, you know I realize—I think oh my God, how did I ever get a husband!

01-00:01:43 Morell: It’s like reading about Katharine Hepburn and her voice which could rise like a drill.

01-00:01:49 Smith: That’s right. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

01-00:01:50 Morell: That’s not a bad comparison. So for these interviews, where I like to start with people is how they first came into contact with the Leakeys and what was the 2

initial cause of the relationship. So—in your case, you have a nice story about how this all came about.

01-00:02:11 Smith: Yeah. The first time I had ever laid eyes on Louis Leakey—and I didn’t know who he was, Melville Bell Grosvenor, who was both the editor and the president of the National Geographic Society, brought Louis Leakey into my office. I was a young picture editor on the staff of National Geographic magazine, and this was about 1961 if I remember it accurately. And all of a sudden, Mel Grosvenor, who had been a mentor of mine and then hired me there personally when he was setting up the staff, came into the office after lunch and I was doing whatever I did, editing pictures with this funny looking panting, puffing, older man. He said to me, “This is”—and I missed the name entirely. I didn’t know who he was and I wouldn’t have known who he was until I asked later on and he said—this is Mary Griswold, as my name was then before I was married and it became Smith. Louis came over and twinkled at me and we shook hands and he said, “How old are you, my dear?” And I told him—I was then whatever I was in 1961. I was born in ’34, figure it out for yourself—and he said, “Oh, oh, that’s perfect. Absolutely perfect. You’re all the same age.” And I thought, same age, same age—who same age? Then he and Melville Grosvenor blew out of the office again and it was only later I learned that he was looking for someone to go work with Jane Goodall down at Gombe Stream in Tanzania when she first began working with chimpanzees.

At that point, well, I was a real fast learner and anything that interested my boss I was going to find out about. But—who is the man—I was told that they were people who found fossils in East Africa. I had no—I knew what a fossil was, but I knew that they came from Arizona or some place. I knew nothing about East Africa, nor did anybody else for that matter. This was just the beginning of the finding of the things that made the Leakeys famous and made, really, paleoanthropology famous and a field and everything else.

But at that moment my little world was going to become vastly broadened because Louis Leakey liked working with women. He wanted someone to go work with Jane Goodall as a photographer. Melville Grosvenor had mentioned that he had his photographic editor, “But she takes pictures too.” Louis, whom I came to know very well, indeed, over the years, thought, well, if I send this young woman off to join Jane there won’t be a problem and she won’t be a man—and so there were a lot of other complicated, not complicated but obvious after a while, things. Within a few months I was sent off to East Africa to meet with Jane Goodall to find out what she was up to. I got to know Louis very well there. I stayed at Langata at their home. I didn’t know anything. I went off to Africa armed with a copy of Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis, if I can remember all these names correctly, and also Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, and I read those two books. I don’t think I—I knew where 3

Africa was. I was educated. I learned geography in school, but I didn’t know any of those other things.

01-00:05:23 Morell: So it was your first time to Africa.

01-00:05:25 Smith: It was my absolute first time to Africa. I knew where I was going, because I wasn’t stupid, frankly, and I boned up before I went, but I didn’t know anything about the field. I knew nothing at all. And when I landed there in Nairobi, I was whatever age I was then, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, work it out, and Louis was terribly kind to me. I met Hugo van Lawick who was to become Jane’s photographer and husband later. I had Geographic money bolstering me up, and so I went on little safaris with Hugo. We went various places. I met Richard Leakey, Louis’s now famous son. We went on a safari the three of us together up in Uganda and places—

01-00:06:12 Morell: Really!

01-00:06:12 Smith: Yeah, did I never tell you that? Maybe I mentioned that, maybe I didn’t.

01-00:06:16 Morell: No, you just mentioned it.

01-00:06:17 Smith: Yeah, but we went all over the place and I was again—I throw these ages in because they matter to this extent—I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Richard was around eighteen or so. Hugo was somewhat younger than I was, I think. We were all sort of youngish, and I had the Geographic’s money. Nobody else had very much, and we went—I bought the gasoline and they bought lunch. We went to Entebbe and went to the ruins areas and we had a ball.

01-00:06:48 Morell: And that was just to—

01-00:06:50 Smith: To learn things for the Geographic article that came out later. To learn things about the—God, my memory’s a sieve now, but the discovery that Mary made up north—

01-00:07:06 Morell: In 1959?

01-00:07:07 Smith: Yeah. The 1959 discovery.

01-00:07:09 Morell: You mean Zinjanthropus. 4

01-00:07:09 Smith: No, I mean up north when there was—what was it—I can no longer remember what it was. But, at any rate, they had made their 1959 Zinjanthropus find. My real job was to find out how we could photograph what was going on over there— as a picture editor, how we could set up sending photographers. It wasn’t just for Jane Goodall, it was also to find out what we could do about photographing the Leakeys and where was Olduvai Gorge and what was that all about? And I and my photographic editor colleagues—they were not interested much in East Africa or bones in the ground or Leakey, they wanted to do stories on Germany and Korea and all kinds of stuff. So it was pretty much relegated to me, not just because Louis Leakey saw me as somebody he could send off safely to be with Jane Goodall.

Okay. My relationship with Louis. I stayed at the New Stanley Hotel, but I visited in Langata off and on.

01-00:08:09 Morell: Which was where they had their place.

01-00:08:11 Smith: Where they had their home. For a couple of days. Mary was at Olduvai Gorge working. Louis drove me down in the Land Rover, just the two of us, we drove down there. I had no idea at the time that students of anthropology would have killed to have been in my position. Science editors and writers would have killed. I had not a clue. Here was this nice old man who was nice to me. I liked him; he liked me. We got along just dandy, and I was very curious and he loved talking to people who were curious. He perceived me to be relatively intelligent, which is something he liked. He liked women anyway, and so we—.

01-00:08:48 Morell: He liked intelligent women.

01-00:08:51 Smith: Indeed he did. And I’m not going to put myself in the same boat as Jane or all the others, but there are certain resemblances there. We thought he was fascinating and off we went. We got to Olduvai Gorge. I knew vaguely that this was a place in a land where fossils were and the river had cut through. We came to camp, and I was introduced to Mary who I could tell took an instant dislike to me—I didn’t know [why]—not dislike, she wasn’t rude or anything, but she sort of sniffed. I now know—

01-00:09:24 Morell: Sized you up.

01-00:09:25 Smith: Yeah, she sized me up, thought I was—Lord, another one. Another female dragged to the camp and I wonder what this one’s supposed to do. And I said, 5

“Mrs. Leakey, I’m here to try to figure out how to make photographs, and how to do this, how to do the other.”

01-00:09:42 Morell: What was the first thing—you were here to do—

01-00:09:43 Smith: To size up how to make a photographic coverage of the project, a project, which I must point out, I knew nothing about at the time. In other words, I had to—well, as does anybody, any journalist person whether they’re in pictures or in writing, you go to a new place and you have to learn as you figure things out, as you set things up, all simultaneously. This is what I did for a living.

Mary Leakey was cordial but very cool. And I wasn’t very used to people being cool to me. I’m personable and friendly and stuff. And I thought, I wonder what the problem is here. But maybe she just doesn’t like Americans—maybe—I didn’t worry about it. I was put in a tent, to share a tent with Margaret Cropper, who later became Richard’s first wife, a very pleasant young woman. To cut through everything—I came back to my little tent one day and went inside and everything was just torn to pieces and things were thrown all over the place. That damn Sykes monkey, Simon, had been let loose in my tent. To the day she died, and I saw her shortly before she died many years later, Mary denied having done it, but I know she did because of the way she denied it. She just denied it and then she twinkled. I know she stuffed that monkey in my tent! He was famous for tearing up everybody’s belongings.

01-00:11:10 Morell: Toothpaste all over everything.

01-00:11:12 Smith: Toothpaste over everything. Towels over everything. That’s okay. That’s all right.

01-00:11:16 Morell: Didn’t—you brought the monkey to her, you said.

01-00:11:19 Smith: Yeah, I grabbed the monkey. He had a leash. He was up in the tent pole and I grabbed him by the back and came and said, “This so and so monkey got into my –” “Awwww,” she said, or something to that extent. I brought the monkey to her.

01-00:11:31 Morell: Tsk, tsk.

01-00:11:32 Smith: Yeah, tsk, tsk. Too bad, little American popsy! [laughter] But she and I warmed up, frankly, the several days I was there, warmed up to each other. I knew nothing about anthropology, paleoanthropology, or anything at all, but I 6

learned very quickly because I had to learn. And everybody who was there was very kind. Louis in particular, right off, he sat down with me, and now when I look back on it, even when I look back on it from a fairly close in perspective then, he was currying favor with the Geographic. I was a representative there. He had to have the Geographic help him, and I—we’d hit if off well. He knew if I weren’t intelligent about what he was doing, I would screw it all up. So he was busy making sure that he controlled me, but he wouldn’t be controlling something worth his while if I didn’t know anything, so he gave me a big crash course in what they were doing and stuck with me because I’m really interested in science and all that kind of thing, and I wanted to further my career too! Busy chasing on each other tails. But really.

01-00:12:45 Morell: So you learned—you had one-on-one sessions from Louis about human evolution.

01-00:12:49 Smith: Many, yeah, human evolution. I sat in the sling back chair one night, and while he put his hands behind his head, I’ll never forget it, and we looked up at the Serengeti sky and talked about God and we talked about things. And I had to idea that there was—I’m not religious now and I wasn’t religious then but I didn’t know it then, and we talked about his missionary parents and stuff and about where all this came from. He had no problems particularly about conflicts with religion, it struck me, if I remember it correctly about him.

01-00:13:20 Morell: Science and religion.

01-00:13:21 Smith: Science and religion weren’t a problem with him. And he explained then, in a couple of hours of just talking, about paleoanthropology, what he had found, where it fit, and this was long ago. This was the first stuff that was being found and nobody believed it. Some people believed it but most people didn’t. He’d been digging up things forever.

01-00:13:42 Morell: And what they didn’t believe was either the age of it or—

01-00:13:45 Smith: The age of it.

01-00:13:45 Morell: The age of it.

01-00:13:46 Smith: I think that, more than any other single thing.

01-00:13:49 Morell: Not that the fossils were fraudulent or anything. 7

01-00:13:50 Smith: No, no, no. I don’t think—perhaps you’d know this better than I do, but I don’t think he was every accused of inventing pieces of bone.

01-00:13:59 Morell: No.

01-00:13:59 Smith: I mean, I think he may have—he certainly made mistakes [chuckling]. By the time I left East Africa, he had armed me with enough stuff so that when I got back to the office, I knew more than anybody else at the National Geographic about what was going on in East Africa, and that was invaluable to the Leakeys because they had me as a conduit, willing of course, because it was part of my job, but I also retained it. So I was asked to give a little talk in front of our committee for research and exploration about what was going on in East Africa. Me, the graduate of St. Agnes Episcopal High School for Girls. [laughter] And so on and so forth, but it wasn’t too difficult to understand, then, because it wasn’t—it was infinitely complex but there weren’t all of these various specimens that had been found. There was Zinj and they were digging up a few more things.

I went out with, while I was still at Olduvai, with Mary one day, and spent a whole afternoon, or early afternoon, while she was looking at stuff I went running up to her at one point and said, “Is this a piece of skull, Mrs. Leakey?” And it was the top of a turtle that had died last week, or something. But I tried. It was nice. It was lovely. And Hugo van Lawick was there then because he was making the photographs for our story that we published in the Geographic about Zinj and about early man and a bunch of other stuff.

So the whole thing had a—it was orchestrated by the Leakeys. I learned then that Louis was an incredibly charismatic person, although that’s not a word I knew then or used about people—it was just that he was one of the most interesting people, then, that I had ever met in my life. It wasn’t just because I was unlearned about his field; it’s because he was utterly hypnotizing. And this is something that later, people who worked with Louis like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, many others, have said about him. That he just plain, made them take a deep breath, he made them feel smarter, he opened up their minds, filled it with stuff that was interesting, and he was an absolutely fascinating man.

When I came back to the Geographic, I then specialized in handling early- man things. That went on, at that point in my career in the Geographic—I went to work there in 1956 when I was just twenty-two years old, and I had no particular niche before I met Leakey at all. I worked on stories that ranged from boating in Sicily to Wisconsin, even cows in Switzerland and things. As soon as I had been to East Africa, as soon as I came back and I met members of our research committee, something went bang in my brain and I said, “This is what I want to do. I want to work with these scientists, these people who get 8

money for bugs and stars and sea urchins and everything else—and anthropology and archaeology.” They were step-children of the magazine in that the research committee gave them money to do all of this and then the title of their project would be plunked on some picture editor’s desk, “Look into this when you have time.”

01-00:17:21 Morell: Oh really?

01-00:17:22 Smith: Yeah, really, unless it was something like a Jacques Cousteau or something big and easily photographed. But the little funny things like a smelly old man in East Africa digging up pieces of bone that didn’t look like anything—who wanted to work with that? And really because of Louis, and really because of Mary, my relationship with them, my learning from them—I knew it was important. I wasn’t sure why and I didn’t have the education to fully understand it, but I knew that it mattered. The more people back in the States, back at the Geographic, the more people said to me—you did what? The more I got inspired to say—what I did was and it really matters and you’re gonna see, we’ll show you, we’ll show the world. And of course, the Geographic did. I can’t say I did it, but I was given an opportunity. I was left alone. It wasn’t snatched away from me by more senior editors or by other people who—.

01-00:18:17 Morell: Amazing, isn’t it.

01-00:18:18 Smith: It is amazing. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s really what happened. There were some times when I saw fingers coming in through the windows and I had to smash the windows shut—leave me alone. But most of the people just didn’t want to fool with it. It was—

01-00:18:32 Morell: You would think that would be—and now, of course, it’s such a sexy field.

01-00:18:39 Smith: Oh! [laughing] Very sexy! Well, enough has been found, enough bones have been found where you can clothe the bones with flesh and put eyeballs in it and speculate and make movies about cavemen, the whole bit.

01-00:18:52 Morell: Sure, yeah.

01-00:18:52 Smith: Dinosaurs eating cavemen—my favorite. And then religion got involved in it and the creationists got involved and people got to here and it became—

01-00:19:03 Morell: Controversial. 9

01-00:19:04 Smith: Very controversial and it became something that the Geographic can be very proud of being involved in, putting money in, and then of course other organizations that were appropriate organizations put money in it.

01-00:19:18 Morell: Did you realize when you went out that first year that the Leakeys really didn’t have any research money? That they hadn’t really had was—did you understand the kind of shoestring operation they were—

01-00:19:30 Smith: I don’t think I understood—yes, I understood that they didn’t have any money but I didn’t understand what that meant. They lived there, they had all these helpers running around digging up stuff, and I had no idea how much money it cost nor that their procedural things cost so much. That going off to England to try to raise funds—as Louis used to say later—it cost him more to try to raise funds than the funds he got, and he always hated holding his hat out anyway.

All those scientists would love it if you just handed them the money, told them to spend it, and shut up and went away. Well, of course, it doesn’t work that way and everybody, for every dollar they give to a scientist, somebody somewhere wants something back. Come to lunch, write a book, dedicate your book to me, talk about how wonderful I am for giving you money Mr. Scientist, and et cetera, et cetera. But no, I didn’t really understand that. There were several people on our committee for research and exploration, and notable among them was Leonard Carmichael, long dead, former head secretary of the Smithsonian who one day, he and I sat down at lunch in the Geographic cafeteria and he said in his wonderful way of talking—did you ever meet Leonard Carmichael?

01-00:20:46 Morell: I didn’t.

01-00:20:46 Smith: And he and Mel Payne were great friends.

01-00:20:48 Morell: Yes, yes.

01-00:20:50 Smith: Carmichael said [imitating his voice] “Miss Griswold, do you realize what a privilege it is for you to work with all of these scientists who are funded by our research committee?” “Well, yeah, I did, sir.” Well, he went on and on about the Leakeys and how difficult it was for the Leakeys to get money—and he was a great admirer of Mary’s—and all of these things registered in my head. There were people—you asked me whether or not I realized they worked on a shoestring. Yeah, but I had to be told. I had no way of gauging 10

that. I didn’t know how much a trowel cost or how much food cost or how much gasoline cost.

01-00:21:26 Morell: Right. So you really didn’t know the importance of your visit in terms of—

01-00:21:31 Smith: Well, importance of my visit in terms of being a representative of an organization that could put money into the Leakeys. Melville Grosvenor really, bless his heart, the world’s greatest enthusiast about things, including stuff he didn’t understand at all, just loved Louis Leakey. And it wasn’t just because he had great vision that someday that would help the Geographic be more famous. It’s because Louis was worth knowing. [chuckling] Melville Grosvenor, at his age, wasn’t interested in being much educated about fossils. He wanted other people, like Louis—he wanted other people to know about this wonderful work. And I—this interview is not about me, but apparently I responded to that and made people think, well, good, she’s enthusiastic, she’ll look after it. And that’s what I did.

01-00:22:24 Morell: And so after that first visit, and Louis had kind of guided you into just a fundamental understanding—

01-00:22:35 Smith: Yes, made me his own [chuckling].

01-00:22:35 Morell: [chuckling] Made you his own—and given you this background. Where did the relationship go from there? Then what was your, how—

01-00:22:44 Smith: Okay, well, how did we see each other?

01-00:22:45 Morell: Yeah, and how did it work.

01-00:22:47 Smith: He came to the United States on both lecture tours, money-getting tours, they were the same thing. And remember now, he was dabbling in all this other stuff—ape research, Calico Hills says she sotto voce, and all these other things. When he would show up at the Geographic, he would usually come to see me first. He would make appointments with the important people who had the purse strings, important people like Melville Grosvenor, like Dr. Melvin Payne, Leonard Carmichael, and so forth. But if he needed basic things like film, like some postage stamps, “Mary do you have any postage stamps. I don’t have any U.S. stamps with me, dear, would you have maybe enough to mail ten letters?” “Sure, Louis, here.” I mean it wasn’t my personal stuff. It was in my desk drawer. Did I have a ream of paper, he needed some paper. Did I have some envelopes. Could I call up somebody to get him something. He’d forgotten his whatever, he needed new spectacles, who could make some 11

lenses for him fast. Those kinds of things. They were sort of personal favors. He wasn’t going to march into Leonard Carmichael’s office and say, “I stepped on my glasses. Can you get them fixed?” But—he knew I wasn’t going to fix them personally but I’d get somebody to do it.

01-00:24:02 Morell: Get it done.

01-00:24:03 Smith: Oh, Jane Goodall used to come to the office and she always needed new underwear. She’d always take my secretary out to lunch and off they’d go to get underwear. It was that kind of level of thing. It was back door stuff.

01-00:24:15 Morell: It was the basics that they—

01-00:24:17 Smith: Very basic. They needed stuff that they didn’t—and some of it was stuff that they didn’t want to necessarily admit or display. Mary would do the same thing, finally, when she and I became fast friends, but that’s a little bit later on, that one.

So our relationship—there was something else too. Louis knew I was intrigued by the ape situation. First by Goodall, then when he called me about Dian Fossey. “You know, [rubbing hands], I found another one.” She’s—oh, you’ll love this one Mary, oh she’s fascinating Mary.” “Oh yeah, Louis.” I’d gotten, never exasperated with Louis, but there reached a point when I could say no to him. “Well, Mary, would you do this?” “No, Louis, I can’t do that but I can tell you how to go about it or whom to call, what to do.” Would I give this woman, “If I sent her to see you in Washington and we want to get funding for her, would you give her some film, would you get her a camera, would you do this, would you do the other?” “Probably, Louis, but I want to talk to her myself.” And I said to him, “What’s this one like?” He said, “Oh, she’s just like Jane Goodall, but she’s dark.” And I said, “Dark?” “She has dark hair.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Oh she’s going to be wonderful.” And she was, by God, she was.

01-00:25:34 Morell: When did you first meet Jane? Was it on that first trip out?

01-00:25:37 Smith: First trip I went out there, and she had done in Tanzania, she came back up to meet this representative of the Geographic.

01-00:25:44 Morell: Met her in—

01-00:25:47 Smith: I met her in Nairobi on a street corner, in the rain, a little, light rain. She had on a blue dress that tied in the back, a sort of pinafore arrangement. I think we 12

took one look at each other and decided that she wasn’t interested in me; I wasn’t much interested in her, except that I’d been told to be interested in her, and Louis was very anxious for me to see her. She met Hugo van Lawick at that point.

01-00:26:08 Morell: Is it because you were too much the same age? Or—

01-00:26:10 Smith: No, I think she wanted—she just sized me up and thought, “I don’t want this woman from Washington, DC, this American who probably is not very good at taking pictures, I want somebody better.” I think that’s what she thought. She and I have discussed that as a matter of [fact]. Yeah, and it turns out that we decided to send Hugo van Lawick. I was not a photographer; that’s why I was a picture editor. I wanted to be a photographer, but I wasn’t good enough. I was a good swimming coach, but I couldn’t swim, and that’s how that—you know, that kind of thing.

01-00:26:39 Morell: Right, right, right.

01-00:26:41 Smith: But later Jane came to my hotel room at the New Stanley. We sat and talked for a long time about what she was doing. She had to tell me. I didn’t know a monkey from Adam’s off ox. I had to be told that a chimpanzee’s an ape, not a monkey, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01-00:26:57 Morell: Did you take notes though all of these discussions? Or how did you work it.

01-00:27:00 Smith: Almost never, almost never. Yeah, I just listened.

01-00:27:02 Morell: Wow, are you sorry about that?

01-00:27:03 Smith: No. [laughter] It’d confuse me. I wrote letters and I did write memos. I wrote memos to the office. I wrote letters. A lot of the stuff was in our files. You probably read some of the stuff that was in our files. Jane and I became quite friendly. We were very friendly later on, but basically to get back to what you asked me about my continuing business with Louis, it was a matter from 1961 through his death in 1972, of doing things for him that he asked me to do, if I could do them. And some of that involved, “Mary, do you know anybody in Chicago that I could talk to who might be good for giving us money?” “Well, no, I don’t really, but I know whom to ask.” In other words, by then I was, thanks to my interest and help from Louis in becoming, really a science journalist is what I had become, an editor, I began to network all over the place, and by then, of course, I knew how famous Louis was becoming and the name began to mean something. You’d say, “I had dinner with Louis 13

Leakey last night,” people’s eyes would light up. “Oh, the guy I read about in the paper,” a layman would say, or a scientist would say, “My God, how’d you meet him?” You know, that kind of thing.

He, between the time I first met him and his death, he could be very exasperating. He would, once in a while, ask me to undertake things for him that were absolutely impossible. He once took me out, prepared dinner for me and asked me if I wouldn’t go off to East Africa and give up everything and go study aardvarks because he was interested in aardvarks. And I said, “Louis, are you out of your mind? I’d give up everything—no.” “But aardvarks, they’re wonderful creatures.”

01-00:28:57 Morell: Nobody knew anything about them!

01-00:28:59 Smith: Nobody knew anything about them. “Don’t you want to be famous?” I said, “Well, aardvarks, they’re like the opossum down south, they’re born dead on the side of the road.” [chuckling] But he wanted to control everybody; he wanted to do everything. This was pre-Biruté. He also muttered something about orangutans, but he knew better than to try to send me off to do orangutans, for God’s sake.

01-00:29:18 Morell: He wanted to make you famous, it was sort of a way of giving you something.

01-00:29:22 Smith: Well, indeed, but he also wanted to—

01-00:29:24 Morell: But he wanted to know about aardvarks.

01-00:29:25 Smith: Yeah, he wanted to know about aardvarks, it’s exactly right. It wasn’t just me, it was aardvarks. He wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, Ginny. I mean, he raised dogs, he raised guppies, he looked at the stars, he was a cryptologist. There wasn’t anything that was safe from him. He wanted to know everything. He would have been a great movie director. He wanted to know everything and then control it. He wanted to put his stamp on it. “Oh yes, I know all about raising guppies. I’m a guppy expert. I’m a Dalmatian expert.” I’m a this expert, I’m a that expert.

01-00:30:03 Morell: Did you see his guppies at the house in Langata?

01-00:30:07 Smith: Oh yes, oh yeah. 14

01-00:30:07 Morell: Was that clear to you? When you stepped into the house that this was an exceptional person.

01-00:30:12 Smith: Oh gosh yes. The house looked like a cyclone had blown through it—in a nice way. It was very clean and very disorderly, put it at the same time, because there was stuff piled up all over the place.

To try to explain Louis Leakey from my standpoint as a non-scientist but an observer of scientists and a helper of scientists journalistically, I think of all the ones, the hundreds, thousands that I knew, that he was by far the most fascinating, inspirational, charismatic, man on the stage, center stage, spotlight always on me, always on me—he demanded it without ever asking for it, really. He never said, “Put the spotlight on me.” He assumed it was going to be on him. [laughter]

His press conferences were—they were a joy to behold for someone who didn’t have to be responsible either for him or for the people who were asking the questions. I’d be on the sidelines. So at the Geographic, where they’d have a press conference at least once a year, and reporters would stand up and say, “But Dr. Leakey, last year you said,” thus and so.” I’ll never forget his putting down a very well-known science writer. He responded, he said, “Why are you worried about that? I don’t lie. I made a mistake but I don’t worry about it. Why should you worry about it? Tut, tut. Forget it!” [laughter] And there was this—just, not nice, necessarily, but it was okay.

01-00:31:50 Morell: And it was the way that he did—it frustrated his scientific colleagues to no end.

01-00:31:54 Smith: Oh to no end! Yeah, of course! While I, maybe was smirking in the background over that, it’s still not the way to handle it. It drove his scientific colleagues absolutely nuts! Why be premature Louis. His scientific colleagues, if they blew through the Geographic would sit and—most of whom didn’t speak at that point unkindly of him, but they were exasperated with him, mostly. They would say, “He’s undermining this,” or “He’s doing that or he could do this better; he could do that better.” I was charmed by the enthusiasm he whipped up for his field. That seemed to offset almost anything else from a scientific standpoint it didn’t—from a journalistic standpoint it did. Think of all the people who went into anthropology because of him. Not dozens—thousands!

01-00:32:45 Morell: Oh exactly, yeah. 15

01-00:32:45 Smith: There were thousands of people who went into it! And he—he was an inspiration.

01-00:32:54 Morell: Were you there—because you began to see him at the beginning of his relationship with the Geographic—you must have gone to some of the first talks he gave at Constitution Hall.

01-00:33:06 Smith: I went to all of them.

01-00:33:07 Morell: You did.

01-00:33:08 Smith: Every single one of them.

01-00:33:09 Morell: Can you describe one of those?

01-00:33:10 Smith: Riveting. He could take a piece of bone and leave it on the screen too long and still talk about this—and he’d get from one end of the bone into the cosmos and into religion. He steadfastly stayed away from there was this bone and there was this this and there was God. Never religion, but he painted pictures that went beyond science. They were unscientific to my way of thinking. They were inspirational.

01-00:33:43 Morell: He imbued it with science.

01-00:33:45 Smith: He made his audience understand what this little bone connoted, where it fit into our picture as well as it was known then. Now to me, paleoanthropology is only as real as the next thing that’s found that puts down everything that’s been found in the past, so what he described this year might be set aside by somebody else’s discovery next year and was, were. But his lectures were— people flocked to his lectures and they were sold out instant[tly]. Well, he was becoming very famous. He was famous in a way that people would say, “I’m going to Louis Leakey’s lecture.” And you’d say, “What is he going to talk about?” “Well, I don’t know, but he’s real famous and I want to go see him.” It was word of mouth partly, it was—science writers had found a new person to write about. If you look at the press clippings from way back then—I haven’t seen them in years—he just had become real famous and people wanted to see him.

01-00:34:40 Morell: It was almost like an overnight sensation. 16

01-00:34:41 Smith: Overnight sensation and the Geographic tied in with it and Constitution Hall lectures, all of that stuff, was all built-in publicity. People just flocked to see everything he said and did.

01-00:34:54 Morell: You were young enough that you probably didn’t realize that he was on this— that he was on A Star is Born trajectory.

01-00:35:00 Smith: Probably not. It seemed to me, natural. I don’t know why I say that except that people who were famous at the time, to me, were like movie stars. You don’t really stop and think about when you first heard of them. There they are sitting—my God, it’s Warren Beatty! You know that kind of thing. You don’t stop then and think about it, you just know that they’re well known.

01-00:35:24 Morell: Right, right. And so as the relationship went along, did you go back to Kenya, back to Olduvai Gorge ever again?

01-00:35:33 Smith: Never, no.

01-00:35:34 Morell: One visit.

01-00:35:34 Smith: That one visit. But that took care of everything I ever needed about—as I said, when I came back to the Geographic I had been there. Nobody else had been. Then the research committee got itself up and went off and met everybody and went to Olduvai, went to Tanzania, went to Gombe Stream, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I never went back until years later, years later. In fact, in 1995, early in ’95, but I worked so much with people who were in East Africa and looked at so many photographs of what was done there—I kept in close contact and I was told what was going on and by then I’d established a relationship with Jane Goodall. She’d established one with the Geographic, and I was her editor there too.

01-00:36:23 Morell: And what did you see as, say the relationship between someone like Louis and Jane or Louis and Dian? That this man was finding these women and sending them out. Were there discussions about that they weren’t trained as scientists?

01-00:36:40 Smith: Sure.

01-00:36:40 Morell: What was the discussion like in the Geographic? What was the reaction to Louis’s— 17

01-00:36:44 Smith: Well, at the Geographic—remember, we weren’t scientists at the Geographic. Nobody was, except the members of the research committee. There were some very good scientists on the research committee. In fact, most everybody there had scientific credentials. But among the Geographic people, we probably only got yet another woman to go look at stuff, winked at each other, and let it go at that without being mean about it at all.

Jane was very attractive, young, had been his secretary at the then Coryndon Museum. And he spoke so highly of Jane and the work that she was going to do. Now remember, she hadn’t done it yet. She was just down there trying to do it. And of course Vanne went down there—Vanne her mother. And then we assigned Hugo to be on it. Either they had just met before Jane and I met or he met her when I met her. It was all at the same time. It was all during that same period.

That Louis picked out Jane was an absolutely brilliant thing, of course. And Jane, to this day, the last time I talked with Jane we talked about Louis—this is many, many years later, forty years later—she was indebted to him for everything that he did for her and his inspiration, basically. I’d say that all of us, and I’ll include myself in that bunch because he inspired me too, that’s why I did what I did, I guess. Dian dearly loved him. Dian made some few—I don’t know how much you want to know about this—Dian made a few claims about her relationship with Louis that I never knew whether they were true or not, but they were close friends, okay, put it that way. It’s not—so what. [chuckling] How much do you want to know about this, because Jane and I have talked about it. Well, you can do anything you want to with it.

01-00:38:39 Morell: You can—well, any—because also the other thing is that these transcriptions, when you see them, if there’s a section that you don’t want released for fifty years, a hundred years, you can say so. So the idea is for people to speak freely and to, so I would encourage—

01-00:38:56 Smith: Yeah, okay, well, I’m not trying to—

01-00:38:58 Morell: It is an issue in Louis’s life, and certainly I investigated it a certain amount because—I think you were one of the first people who told me that there was this longstanding rumor about Jane Goodall being Louis’s daughter.

01-00:39:13 Smith: Yeah, which is—

01-00:39:14 Morell: And those only come about because someone has had affairs. 18

01-00:39:17 Smith: Someone—exactly, precisely. And, no, she wasn’t Louis’s daughter. I mean she just wasn’t Louis’s—

01-00:39:22 Morell: She looks like her dad.

01-00:39:23 Smith: No, she looks too much like her father. Vanne has said the same—anyway, we know that. But I asked Jane, oh, eight or nine, six, seven, eight, nine years ago. We were talking about Dian and I said, “You know, Louis made a lunge at almost all the women that he worked with.” And Jane said, “I know. But I was always able to stay out of his way.” And I said, “Well, you know Dian claimed they had an affair.” I said, “Do you think they did?” And Jane said, “Oh I think so. But I don’t know so.” I said, “Well, I don’t know so either.” And we laughed. It was an affectionate kind of exchange between Jane and me about Dian, but then Dian made a run at anything that moved and some things that didn’t. Dian was a woman of colossal appetite for everything, and so I don’t know.

Biruté and her husband, her then-husband, went off, as you know, to East Africa and went to Camp Leakey. She named hers Camp Leakey. She went to Olduvai and I think Mary disliked her probably. Your question had to do with what did people think about his putting women on these assignments—well, they were available. He liked women. They were available. Why were they available? A lot of the men scientists at that time were busy off getting their PhD or they had a family or they had too much moxie to want to go off and look at monkeys or whatever.

01-00:40:55 Morell: And indefinitely.

01-00:40:56 Smith: Indefinitely, yeah, that was the thing that he extracted from these people— from Jane and everybody else is, “You may be out there, my dear, for the rest of your life. I hope you will be.” And I think the women he worked with saw that as not daunting. Men would have collapsed because it meant they would not have a career. At that time neither Jane nor Dian nor Biruté had their degree—I think Biruté had more of a—

01-00:41:19 Morell: She had, yes, she did.

01-00:41:21 Smith: She had her degree then.

01-00:41:21 Morell: Yeah, at least an undergrad one. 19

01-00:41:24 Smith: They were delighted to do it, and of course Jane took to the chimpanzee business just like a duck to water. Setting up everything she did was exactly what she wanted to do, and that it involved chimpanzees took care of the animal lover side of her which she’d always had. I think Louis’s attitude toward all those women, and there were others that are not so famous, was almost avuncular in some ways, it was a fatherly feeling in some ways, it was a—boy, what a man am I, in other ways. He had always been a—

01-00:42:04 Morell: The peacock.

01-00:42:05 Smith: The peacock. Exactly. And the women he worked with knew how to flatter him, and why should it be beneath you to flatter somebody? It’s just one more thing that you do with people and part of your relationship was give and take with him, but he picked them out, I think, because he perceived that those women were caring, that they were brave, that they were smart—above all things, smart. He did not deal with dumb people. I never saw either Leakey, Mary or Louis, in a situation where they tried to mentor somebody who was dumb. Maybe that’s not politically correct to refer to people as dumb or smart. Well, I’m sorry, but people are dumb or smart.

01-00:42:51 Morell: There is, yeah—

01-00:42:52 Smith: Yeah, there is that.

01-00:42:54 Morell: There is an IQ, so—.

01-00:42:54 Smith: Yeah, there is indeed. I never saw anybody that he dealt with that it wasn’t— had a lot of potential, whether they were ultimately naughty or not was beside the point. That’s, I think, why he dealt with women. He liked Jane an awful lot and he knew Vanne too. There was that too.

01-00:43:15 Morell: No he sort of was adopted, I think, by the Goodall family in a lot of ways as his relationship with Mary, his wife, deteriorated.

01-00:43:25 Smith: Indeed, and I think that in Mary’s book, I’ve said this to you before, I think that in her book it’s handled in a very good way—I think she just—about Vanne.

01-00:43:36 Morell: Yes, acknowledgement. 20

01-00:43:37 Smith: Yeah, about Vanne providing things that I could no longer provide to Louis, and I thought that was very graceful, very British way of putting it. Those things were myriad. There were all kinds of things. An extraordinary woman, Vanne. Did you know Vanne?

01-00:43:51 Morell: No, I tried to meet her when I did my book Ancestral Passions, but she said that because the book was about the family she wouldn’t give an—

01-00:44:01 Smith: Oh, okay.

01-00:44:03 Morell: And she wasn’t a member—she really didn’t know the family.

01-00:44:06 Smith: I’m sorry—she probably, Jane may have, I don’t know this but Jane may have said, “Why don’t you just stay away from that.”

01-00:44:13 Morell: Yeah, I have no idea. It was Vanne, and then there was a woman who’d worked—Vanne and Louis had written a book or two together and there was a woman who’d worked as a secretary with them, and neither of them would participate. It was because—well, the book is really about the family and we don’t know the family.

01-00:44:32 Smith: I’m sorry about that, because Vanne’s extraordinary.

01-00:44:35 Morell: I was too because I had heard so many wonderful things about Vanne. Meave Leakey especially just was so—just thought she was a great woman.

01-00:44:43 Smith: Oh, she was a humdinger. A little bitty woman, a little ankle biter. She was feisty as all get out. She was terrific. She’d call—maybe I’m repeating myself, but that’s what you want me to do, and this isn’t about—well, yes it is in a way—

01-00:44:58 Morell: Oh it is, it is about—

01-00:44:59 Smith: Vanne called me up one day about Jane at my office and my secretary said, “It’s Jane Goodall’s mother.” I picked up and she said, “Mary, I’m after Jane to do another article for the Geographic and I can’t get her to do it—and you should be going after it! What kind of editor are you? It’s been ten years since you—.” I’m sitting there, I say, “Okay, now, well fine, then Jane has to—.” She said, “No, no. I’m appealing to you. I can’t get Jane to listen. You get her to listen. And how are you doing?” “Well, I’m fine, Vanne.” “We’ll be, I 21

hope, in town, in six months or something.” I hung up and I thought, now that’s something. A phone call from England by Jane Goodall’s mother saying, “I can’t get her to do anything. You get her to do something!”

01-00:45:36 Morell: Yeah, you do your job.

01-00:45:37 Smith: You do your job! That’s what she’d want. Exactly, so the next time I saw Jane I said, “Your mom’s after me.” “Oh mother.” I said, “Now, hey, she’s right.” I said, “She’s right. Let’s do another article.” And that’s where that ten years after article came from which I thought was—

01-00:45:54 Morell: Right, right. It was a wonderful—

01-00:45:54 Smith: —the best of all she had done, with the black and white pictures and the color pictures.

01-00:45:58 Morell: And people loved it.

01-00:45:59 Smith: Oh yeah, exactly.

01-00:46:00 Morell: Updating what was going on, because otherwise it’s sort of like—remember there was a woman who used to study the chimps.

01-00:46:05 Smith: Yeah, the blonde gal. But Vanne was extraordinary, and her relationship with Louis—I don’t know. I don’t really know about that at all but that they were terribly fond of each other.

01-00:46:16 Morell: Supportive.

01-00:46:18 Smith: Very supportive, yeah. Exactly the right word.

01-00:46:21 Morell: When you saw him there in the Geographic when he would come for his annual visit, he was there to give the lecture and to get additional funding and usually he had some new discovery to announce or to show to the research committee.

01-00:46:36 Smith: Always. 22

01-00:46:37 Morell: Were you involved—were you on those committee meetings? Did you see his show and tells?

01-00:46:43 Smith: Yes. I saw most of his show and tell things, because while the research committee at the Geographic, composed of all kinds of famous people, renowned people—most of those meetings were closed but various staff members were asked to attend them. After I was promoted to a senior assistant editor, and this was after Louis died, and I headed my own little mini department, which was as senior assistant editor of research grant projects, I was then—there was a department of the magazine, National Geographic magazine, to handle those things for the research committee. I then permanently attended every meeting, went on their trips with them when they went places.

At the time before Louis died, I had not yet achieved that particular level, but because I was involved with him I was asked to attend those meetings, mostly in case he needed something. So that I could—maybe I said to Leonard Carmichael, “Hey, Leakey is going to present something. I’d sure love to be there in case he says something we should know.” And he’d say, “Oh sure, come on in. Sit over there on the couch,” or something. So it was that kind of thing.

Louis would frequently, [chuckling], Louis would frequently—when he was presenting he was, oh you should have seen him at this long table with these eminent scientists sitting there and this legerdemain that he’d do with his P.T. Barnum stuff. I mean he’d take out of his pocket, he’d take and unfold a dirty handkerchief, [imitating Leakey], “Now this is going to revolutionize—.” Once in a great while he would turn, and this is where he was so good, he’d say, “Now as I was saying to Mary Griswold here,” he’d say, pointing to me—I know now because I learned from him how to do that kind of thing— what he was doing was making sure that his helper person on the magazine was recognized by all these scientists. He was very clever about that.

01-00:48:39 Morell: He brought you, you were—

01-00:48:42 Smith: Brought me, exactly, and it cast luster on me, so that if he asked me to do something, if he called me up and said, “Would you go talk to George [E.] Watson, the ornithologist?” George Watson then knew who I was, you see? Louis was a genius at doing it. It wasn’t just a payback for me. It didn’t help put dollars in my paycheck, it made me more acceptable to them and eventually—

01-00:49:04 Morell: It lifted your status. 23

01-00:49:05 Smith: Very much so, and that’s why one day I went to the powers that be, who were then only one level above me and said, “Hey, this should be a department. I want to run it.” “All right, Mary,” they said. By then the network I had among scientists was so labyrinthine and so complex—and I kept it that way—that nobody else could or would touch it. When I left—the department is still there but it’s different. It’s just different.

01-00:49:34 Morell: Right, things change.

01-00:49:35 Smith: I was a great believer in introducing those scientists to each other and I still greatly believe in that, [the value of] of getting an anthropologist to meet an archaeologist, to talk to an astronomer who says to me, “Hey, they’re going to name this star, who’s the old man in East Africa—what was that thing we found? We might want to append the name of his find on this star because—.” And I knew them all. I had the telephone numbers; I could give them each other’s number and say call each other, talk. They were great about it, because scientists, as you know better than I do, are very shy in a lot of ways. They’re both colossal egos in their own fields and shy about other people’s fields. If they don’t know it, they don’t want anybody to know they don’t know it. And I think they all have an inferiority complex about a lot of things, too. Yeah, I bet you do too. Not inferiority complex, but—they’re cautious, very cautious about—

01-00:50:34 Morell: About things they don’t know.

01-00:50:35 Smith: About things they don’t know. They’re afraid somebody’s making fun of them. Maybe that’s why they learned so much, because somebody made fun of them once and they thought, by God, I’m going to learn everything there is to know about termites. I’ll fix you! [chuckling] Things like that, but—

01-00:50:54 Morell: So those show and tells where he’d open this handkerchief and show something and it was going to revolutionize the field of human evolution, how did the people around the table react? What was the—

01-00:51:06 Smith: Okay. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating, because you remember that the members of the Geographic’s research committee, then and now, each was from a different field. You had physics and astronomy and ornithology, [et cetera]. All the hard sciences. None of the soft sciences. There was always a lot of good natured here he goes again elbowing—“Leakey will have something. He always manages to make a find.” Well, of course, any smart person does that who’s seeking funding, has something new to throw to the masses, throw to the people. 24

Louis was too clever, too able to put on a show, too good at ripostes for anybody to take him on. I never heard anyone on the research committee meetings that I attended ever say to him, “Well, Dr. Leakey, are you really sure that you—.” First of all, they didn’t have the knowledge, they were afraid he’d make a fool out of them himself, they were afraid they’d make a—I sense that now—a fool out of themselves in front of their colleagues. They simply didn’t know what he knew because he was inventing what he had. Not making it up, but it was happening before their eyes. And so they had no—I think the instinct was, “Oh God, he’s after us for money again. Has he really done what he’s done?” And by then there were enough detractors and enough critics. Remember, the research committee didn’t give out funding, just hand it out for the asking.

01-00:52:42 Morell: No, you had to apply.

01-00:52:44 Smith: You had to apply, you had to have your worst enemies write things about you, and if you didn’t suggest your worst enemy as an expert, they’d send it to your worst enemy and good, good for them. So by then Louis was—and the Calico Hills thing was very damaging to him to an extent.

01-00:53:04 Morell: This is the Calico Hills Early Man Site in America, in California.

01-00:53:08 Smith: In America, in California. Yeah, I’m sorry about that.

01-00:53:09 Morell: No, that’s okay, just so—

01-00:53:11 Smith: And that is only because he pushed it too hard, too far, too a lot of things, and that was what Mary was terribly worried about. But to answer your question—the research committee was usually mesmerized by him whether they wanted to be or not. I know that even the most famous of the scientists sitting at that table went home that night and said to their wife or their children or their mistress or whomever—“Hey, Leakey was there again today and man is that guy something.” Or whatever the equivalent way they would have of saying that. You couldn’t help but do it. He put on such an incredible show, even in the last couple of years when he was so ill and wheezing along.

01-00:53:53 Morell: He would make people believe even with this scrap of a fossil.

01-00:53:56 Smith: He made them afraid not to believe. He really made them think, “I’ll make a fool out of myself if I try to tell him that that’s the limb bone of a dolphin. Of course, that’s another story! [chuckling] He was mesmerizing, he was hypnotic, he was a marvelous teacher. I think an awful lot of people who were 25

not afraid of that kind of person saw through the showmanship right directly and instantly to the knowledge and the inspiration, and the showmanship made you grin if you had any sense. You’d sit there and think, Louis, my God you did it again! You’ve done it again. You fixed it. You’ve made us all believers whether we believe it or not.

I never thought—and here’s where I should tread lightly because I’m not a scientist. I never thought he did any harm to his field, Ginny. I think that the good that he did, the inspiration that occurred because of him—he inspired so many people to go into that field—and really good people. How can that be bad? And I’m not a sycophant; he had feet of clay. We all do. But my God, he was towering in his beliefs about—he wanted one thing: he wanted to know everything and he wanted to impart all of that knowledge to everybody else in the world. And that’s all he wanted to do! [chuckling] And then he died. [laughter] And he didn’t want to die when he knew everything, but it caught up with him finally and he died at a very young age, you know, all things considered.

01-00:55:53 Morell: He did, yes. He was. Sixty-five.

01-00:55:56 Smith: He really did, he really did.

01-00:55:58 Morell: When you talk about the critics or detractors, how did you see that developing? Initially he and Melvin Payne were very good friends.

01-00:56:09 Smith: Very good friends.

01-00:56:10 Morell: You once talked a little bit about their relationship. Maybe you could talk about that first a little bit, how they saw eye to eye, or Louis recognized something about—

01-00:56:22 Smith: They liked each other, Melvin Payne and Melville Grosvenor. Now, both of them. He and Melville Grosvenor were super enthusiasts.

01-00:56:29 Morell: That’s Melville Grosvenor.

01-00:56:29 Smith: No, but Melvin Payne too, also. Melvin Payne was the secretary of the society and then later chairman of our research committee. Melvin Payne, Dr. Melvin M. Payne was the firm hand on the financial tiller of the Geographic. He’s the one who would say to Melville Bell Grosvenor, “You cannot have a million dollars to build a solar wind sailboat and go off to the moon—it won’t work.” 26

01-00:56:55 Morell: [laughter] Bring him back down.

01-00:56:57 Smith: Yeah, bring him back down. Both men in their own way were terribly, terribly helpful to Louis because they both saw what Louis was. We can’t—we—I haven’t been there in years, but the Geographic got a tremendous boost in its reputation out of helping Louis Leakey—no doubt about it—and the rest of the Leakey family.

But Melville Grosvenor was a marvelous enthusiast. It was as though he was sharing his train set with Louis Leakey. The two of them would come in and put on their caps and make the things go around the track. They liked each other; they really liked each other. And what they liked about each other was their bullish enthusiasm for everything. Melville Grosvenor used to say to me—why was he good to me? He knew my father very well. That’s how come I got hired. Now let me just make my disclaimer right there, here and now. But that’s beside the point.

But it did give me an insight into how Grosvenor felt about Louis Leakey. He would say, “Isn’t he a wonderful man? Isn’t he just great?” And I’d say, “You bet. You say so, sir, you bet he is.” But I was having personal experience that he was great too, and we could talk about how wondrous he was. Melville Grosvenor was not—he was educated at the naval academy, but he was not an intellectual man, and he was super enthusiastic, average, maybe a little above average intelligence, but a man who was a lot like Louis in that he wanted everybody to know everything. And that’s what they saw in each other.

Of course, the fact that he was president of the National Geographic Society didn’t hurt his relationship with Louis. Louis was always looking around with radar for the people who had the money, which is where Melvin Payne came in, and while Melvin Payne was a practical man, he too saw how Louis was doing what he was doing. I think that’s what all of us who really came under Leakey’s spell saw, was how he went about doing what he did and that what he was doing was good, not bad. That we might not have understood the scientific importance to the degree that other scientists did, which allowed them, incidentally, to be his detractors too—. We weren’t good at detracting from what he was doing because we didn’t—I never had the knowledge.

01-00:59:26 Morell: No, you had to trust him.

01-00:59:28 Smith: Trust him, and I listened to other people who would say—you know them too—say, “Oh, he shouldn’t have done this, he shouldn’t have done that, he should have done this.” Well, okay, all right, go tell him. I’m not going to. If you feel that way, you tell him. 27

But it occurs to me that in what I’ve said, I’m now getting tired of hearing my own voice, not tired, but just tired of hearing my voice—that I sound as though I was absolutely so bowled over by him that I saw nothing wrong with him. Well, there was a lot wrong with him. If you consider wrong, or a character flaw, being the center of your own universe— and I don’t consider that a character flaw. If you think that somebody who is basically egocentric, which he certainly was, who is self-centered, he certainly was, but if you’re self-centered and kind and sharing at the same time, hell, that’s the way life ought to be! That’s what a great teacher is and that’s what he was. He was a tremendously wonderful purveyor of his enthusiasms to other people whom he deemed worthy. He would not have been good teaching a class of 500 people. He had audiences of 5,000, and that was easy because that was one night. But he never taught a class in his life for a year, every day. He wouldn’t have been good at that.

01-01:00:52 Morell: No, he wouldn’t have.

01-01:00:53 Smith: He would not have, although he would have singled out all the pretty gals to go off and study aardvarks and things, or great horned owls, or God knows what all—his current interest. But a terrific guy.

01-01:01:05 Morell: What about your—I want to do a couple of things: I want to talk a little bit more about his critics and then bring Mary into this, and then we can go on to Calico Hills. But when did you first start to hear suggestions that maybe everything that Louis was coming in with wasn’t, or his interpretations—

01-01:01:28 Smith: Hadn’t been properly studied before he said what it was?

01-01:01:30 Morell: Is that what they were? Okay.

01-01:01:32 Smith: Yeah, that’s what it boiled down to.

01-01:01:34 Morell: That was the main criticism?

01-01:01:35 Smith: Some of it I think had to do with science reporters from the, let’s say the New York Times, Washington Post, so on and so forth, who after all have to have something interesting to say in their columns, who are smart guys who know about the fields that they’re writing about, began to question him about—“But Dr. Leakey, are you sure?” It was Boyce Rensberger he said that wonderful thing to who was a science writer for the Washington Post, was a science [writer], I don’t know if he still is. “Well, Mr. Rensberger, why are you worried?” 28

01-01:02:09 Morell: Oh, I see, okay.

01-01:02:11 Smith: Well, yeah, yeah. “Why are you so concerned about that? I’m not. Don’t worry about it. Tut tut.” [laughter] It was kind of beautiful, I thought.

01-01:02:18 Morell: He said the same thing to Michael Day. Day showed him, he’d bought one of Louis’s books and he thought he would really like it, have the grand man please sign my book, “Oh, my dear [boy] why are you reading that, that’s all history.” Like that. That was Louis’s own book.

01-01:02:34 Smith: [laughing] Okay. Exactly. Right. Beautiful, lovely. It showed—it’s not that he wasn’t concerned, but he looked forward, not backward. Period. That’s what he did. You know, Ginny, it’s awful hard to tell when people are being critical of other people whether they’re jealous, whether they’re afraid, whether they’re truly knowledgeable, whether they’re truly knowledgeable and the person that they’re being critical of deserves to be found out. It’s hard to say. His critics—I was always on his side, knee-jerk reaction without, I think, thinking he was invincible at all. He could make mistakes like anybody else, I felt sure because I didn’t have the scientific background to be able to confront him, nor would I. Why would I have had any reason to do it.

01-01:03:26 Morell: {Unintelligible}position.

01-01:03:27 Smith: No, no, no, no. I know that. But the people who started being critical were the folks who recalled what he said last year or the year before, or they had listened to other scientists who were jealous or—jealous, envious, those words are too strong. Other people who felt if they went to the same place and discovered the same things, they’d do a better job than he did.

Louis was—sloppy—dare I say that? Sure I dare say it. He was sloppy. Mary did the meticulous work on things. Louis was the showman. He was the front man; he was the, “Come into the tent and let me show you the tibia.” That kind of thing, [in the voice of a circus barker] “I’ve got this tibia here folks, this magic tibia from which money is going to pour.” But how can you fault that? You have to do it to get the dough. There’s no other way to do it.

I’m the wrong person, really, to ask about his detractors, because some of his worst, his most outspoken detractors, are some of the most famous people in the field. The little ones don’t count; the little guys that sit around at the college tables and say, “Oh, that old guy.” I mean, hell, you’re not going to amount to anything, buddy, so forget it. But some of the bigger detractors were probably right. If they said, “Louis Leakey doesn’t handle what he’s doing properly, scientifically.” Probably they were right but it was so offset by 29

his inspirational work that I couldn’t see that it mattered, but then I’m talking like a journalist and a friend of his.

01-01:05:12 Morell: I think also mixed into this, though, is just the history of the kind of myth that went with the man and with his life in general, which is the thirty years at Olduvai Gorge and the finding what they’d always—

01-01:05:24 Smith: Exactly, sure, they were there forever before anything happened.

01-01:05:27 Morell: Yeah, exactly, and so all of this hard work and you realize, well, he has to have known something to prove himself right.

01-01:05:34 Smith: Of course.

01-01:05:35 Morell: And so you hear these detractors and you think, well, they probably are jealous.

01-01:05:41 Smith: I’ve always thought it was jealousy. I always thought it was just kind of silly. Okay, so go on and put it in its proper provenance. You do it if he won’t, or Mary will take care of it. Somebody will take care of it. It’s not going to be destroyed.

01-01:05:53 Morell: But in spite of what had been found in Africa at that time, with the material in South Africa, I don’t think that Africa was really recognized as the home of human evolution until the discovery of the Leakeys.

01-01:06:07 Smith: My dear you’ve got to remember something. You’re sufficiently younger than I am, but you still should remember that there wasn’t any such thing as human evolution as a recognized science by anybody outside a couple of scientists up until what—Zinj was found? There were people rolling around in Africa finding things that they claimed age for, but it wasn’t a recognized field. I mean, it was a recognized field but nobody knew about it, and there was no such thing as human evolution, really. I mean think of how—

01-01:06:44 Morell: I think you’re right, you’re right, yeah.

01-01:06:45 Smith: In the fifties, think of—Darwin wasn’t that far back about evolution of anything, really and truly. 30

01-01:06:51 Morell: And then we had, then the wonderful thing, of course, about the Zinj find was that they could put a date on it.

01-01:06:57 Smith: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, yes, that is—they could positively date it instead of hoping that they’d dated it correctly and then having, whether it was other scientists or religionists or whatever come along and say, it’s impossible, the world is only 5,000, whatever Bishop [James] Ussher said. And that’s that. Okay, okay. But no, the Leakeys set all of that on its tailfeathers by finding Zinj. From that point on it just marched forward and look at everything that’s been found.

01-01:07:28 Morell: Yeah, that really is remarkable. I’m going to stop here and write this to the disk.

01-01:07:35 Smith: Are we going on too long?

01-01:07:35 Morell: No, no. And then we’ll put a new disk in.

01-01:07:34 Smith: Oh okay.

01-01:07:38 Morell: But I just want to change this one.

[Begin Audio File 2]

02-00:00:01 Morell: Okay, this is—

02-00:00:02 Smith: Are we off and running again?

02-00:00:04 Morell: Yeah, we’re going. This is the second disk with Mary Smith. So we were talking a little bit about—

02-00:00:09 Smith: Louis’s dirty handkerchief! [laughter]

02-00:00:10 Morell: Yeah, Louis’s dirty handkerchief, and you were saying that beforehand—

02-00:00:13 Smith: Well, just to add—beforehand, he’d sometimes come, he’d come to the illustrations department floor [recording volume is suddenly diminished] where I worked officially for the magazine as a magazine editor to use the bathroom so that he wouldn’t run into any of the top editors or the research 31

committee people in the men’s room on the ninth floor, which is where all the research committee and everybody else was at that time. He didn’t want to run into, he didn’t want anybody asking him what he was going to say because many times he didn’t know. Of course, as a great showman is, he knew what he had and he knew what he had to convey but he didn’t know what he was going to say until he opened his mouth and said it. He was marvelous with that ability. He was so good on his feet and such a wonderful ad-libber. He could have been a stand-up comic, he thought so quickly and so fast about stuff. But he’d wheeze into my office and clump down on the chair and he’d say, “Yeah, I’m going to talk.” I’d say, “I know, I’m going to be there. Hey, it’s in twenty minutes buddy, you’d better get ready.” And I’d say, “What kind of rabbit are you going to pull out of the hat this time?”

02-00:01:16 Morell: You would actually say that to him?

02-00:01:17 Smith: Oh absolutely.

02-00:01:18 Morell: He would like that.

02-00:01:19 Smith: Oh absolutely! Oh, no, no. We talked like that.

02-00:01:21 Morell: I’m sure he liked that directness.

02-00:01:23 Smith: [imitating Leakey] “Let me show you these.” And he’d get it out of his pocket.

02-00:01:26 Morell: Reach in his pocket?

02-00:01:27 Smith: Yeah, reach in his pocket and he’d say—and I’d say, “Well, what is it?” And he’d say, “Well, you’ll hear. You’ll hear. I’m going to say. But this is going to revolutionize everything.” He’d put it back in his pocket and he’d go wheezing out of the office again, and I would say to my secretary Neva, I’d say to her—well, here goes the dog and pony show once again.

I was always terribly proud of him. I had no business being like that, but I was very proud to be his friend. It’s great to bask in the aura of someone else, which I did momentarily. There was that. I also helped him. He helped me. He was funny. He was funny. He and I made each other laugh. He had many friends who he’d make them laugh and they’d make him laugh. I made no, pulled no, made no bones about his legerdemain. I would say that to him. What magic—have you got your silk top hat on today, Louis? He was awfully good about that. He understood. And he knew that people—he recognized 32

when people liked him. He knew instantly. You know people like that. They just know instinctively when they’re liked and they won’t be betrayed. And that’s how he behaved. We had a lot of fun with that kind of thing.

02-00:02:45 Morell: And how did your relationship with Mary develop during this period? Because you had said to me that even though she put the monkey in your tent and everything, when you left Olduvai Gorge you really liked her.

02-00:02:58 Smith: Yeah, I really did.

02-00:02:59 Morell: You weren’t so sure that she liked you, but you liked—

02-00:03:01 Smith: Absolutely. But I liked her. She had this, always this brusque, brisk, shy in a way, manner of speaking to you. If you talked directly to her, she always had an answer to things. I tried very hard to ingratiate myself. I didn’t want Dr. Leakey’s wife to think I was awful. She said—what did she say to me once— [chuckling, dog barking in the background] Oh, I know what she said. The first day that I was there, before I got the monkey in the tent, I was dying of thirst and they had this propane-run refrigerator, or whatever it was, or generator-run—I don’t remember. This is a long time ago, yeah, and she said, “Would you like something to drink?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “Go over to the refrigerator. There’s some lemon squash in the refrigerator. Pour yourself a glass.” And I went and got it out, and one of these things I said to her—and I didn’t know that lemon squash is a British—

02-00:03:59 Morell: It’s a concentrate.

02-00:03:59 Smith: Got it? It’s concentrated. You pour water in it. I poured myself a good glass of it and I took a taste of it and I said, “Boy, this is strong.” She said, “Yes, I know.” I said, “Well, what is lemon squash?” She said, “It’s a squashed lemon.” And I thought—okay, lady. I said, “Well, what do I do with it. “Oh, put some water in it or something.” She turned back to whatever she was doing. And I thought, okay, you’re doing me, you’re doing me, but I’m going to be nice. [laughter] It’s squashed lemon, of course, idiot. And we had—it went like that for a little while, and I don’t blame her one little bit.

But the few days later when I left, she was cordial, she was nice. When I left I said, again I said, “Mrs. Leakey, you put the monkey in my tent.” “I did not.” And I said, “Well, okay, okay,” I said, “Okay, but I’ve had a lovely time here and it’s been nice meeting you. I hope we see each other.” “Oh yes, I hope we see each other again.” But she had thought a good deal by then. I don’t know why. I can’t claim it’s the power of my outstanding personality, but I— 33

02-00:05:13 Morell: Because you—.

02-00:05:13 Smith: I wasn’t sure about it when—

02-00:05:14 Morell: I’m sure it’s because you worked; you were there and you were working.

02-00:05:20 Smith: Oh I worked like crazy!

02-00:05:21 Morell: She—that was the one thing—if you were a worker—

02-00:05:26 Smith: Yeah, I was.

02-00:05:27 Morell: You always went up in Mary’s books. That’s why she thought I was okay.

02-00:05:30 Smith: Well, I worked like—exactly, exactly—same reasons, I’m sure. And I wasn’t, I think—

02-00:05:36 Morell: And if you didn’t whinge.

02-00:05:38 Smith: Yeah, exactly, and I didn’t and I wasn’t—I may have been hanging on every word Louis said, but I wasn’t hanging on Louis, and there’s a hell of a difference in all of that and neither would you have done that, either. You would have been as mesmerized as I was.

02-00:05:52 Morell: Oh I’m sure, I think that’s really true.

02-00:05:54 Smith: You’re a journalist, but you wouldn’t have hung all over him. It just was not your way nor was it mine. But after that, Mary began coming—she’d been to the Geographic with him over the Zinj business, and then she began coming, not with him but on her own most of the time. She’d come there. She was too shy to give her own lectures, and I don’t recall her ever giving a lecture. Am I wrong about that? You’d remember that.

02-00:06:22 Morell: Not until after Louis died.

02-00:06:23 Smith: Until after he died, that’s right, in ’72. 34

02-00:06:26 Morell: After that then she made herself do it. It was an ordeal for her and then she began that she actually sort of liked it.

02-00:06:34 Smith: That’s right. Of course she gave lectures after he was dead. She would sit on this—I saw her once on the stage with him giving a lecture but she didn’t speak. She wouldn’t speak at all.

02-00:06:47 Morell: She was too shy.

02-00:06:49 Smith: She too began, and this is hazy in my memory as to how it came about, but I have mental pictures of her sitting in my office asking me to do—“Melville Grosvenor told me, Mary, that you could find out for me, or get a book for me, or you knew whom to call, or would you do this.” They tended to give the scientist people off to me to do things like—to help them do stuff or to expedite things. And I did with her. I liked her a whole heap, and she had this wonderful sense of humor.

02-00:07:26 Morell: She did, yeah.

02-00:07:27 Smith: It’s hard to describe her sense of humor but it was by God, by gosh sort of sense of humor and—

02-00:07:33 Morell: It was a dry, I think that’s what you said.

02-00:07:37 Smith: It’s sort of dry, very dry, and very witty, and very with it. She was up on current events. It always startled me.

02-00:07:42 Morell: Very. I’ll always remember this young—I’m trying to remember; it was an anthropologist that—she was a young, beautiful girl and Louis had sent her off to study the Pokot people.

02-00:07:57 Smith: Oh Elizabeth, not Mulholland, a name from right here in Los Angeles— Moll—damn it. I knew her very well and her husband.

02-00:08:11 Morell: She said to me—Roberts was the guy that she married—

02-00:08:14 Smith: Yeah, she married him. 35

02-00:08:16 Morell: Right. She told me this story about how Mary had—she needed to make a telephone call to Louis, Elizabeth did—

02-00:08:26 Smith: Elizabeth, oh how can I forget it.

02-00:08:29 Morell: Yeah, I’m doing the same thing.

02-00:08:31 Smith: Blonde and beautiful. Rich family.

02-00:08:33 Morell: And so she called the house, the house there in Langata, and Mary answered the telephone and so she said she wondered how, she needed to call Louis and did she have a telephone number—and how did Mary put it, she said, “Yes you can call him but I doubt if he’ll hear you. [pause] He’s in England.” [laughter]

02-00:09:05 Smith: Beautiful, yes.

02-00:09:05 Morell: It was that kind of—

02-00:09:06 Smith: Beautiful, yes, lovely, lovely. Oh come on, what’s Elizabeth’s name? Her family’s here in L.A., or was—

02-00:09:13 Morell: I’m looking under the m’s,

02-00:09:14 Smith: Well, it may not be m. Elizabeth and Roberts—what was Roberts’s first name?

02-00:09:20 Morell: Willy Roberts is her husband. Was it Willy Roberts?

02-00:09:23 Smith: No. Something Roberts. Big strapping fellow.

02-00:09:26 Morell: Handsome fellow.

02-00:09:30 Smith: Elizabeth—

02-00:09:30 Morell: Myerhoff. 36

02-00:09:30 Smith: Myerhoff! Myerhoff! Elizabeth Myerhoff, you betcha, you betcha.

02-00:09:35 Morell: But I loved that story; I thought it was one of the best demonstrations—and it was kind of like your squashed lemon

02-00:09:42 Smith: Yeah, I mean.

02-00:09:43 Morell: She wants that precision.

02-00:09:44 Smith: Yeah, exactly. What’s lemon squash? It’s squashed lemons! What else could it possibly be? Chalk one up to—I admired her enormously, she didn’t—

02-00:09:56 Morell: When did you begin to fall to—no, it was a little bit before—

02-00:10:00 Smith: Not long after that. I think when she started coming to the Geographic, and when you asked me how did it fall—probably, I made no threats. I wanted to help and I was very interested in their work. It’s not all me—it’s the Geographic. Remember, don’t forget—the Geographic—I had a yellow border on me, so I don’t flatter myself I think it was just me. I also represented, not that I would have ever said, “I don’t like them. She was not nice to me. Don’t give them any money.”

02-00:10:33 Morell: Of course not.

02-00:10:35 Smith: You don’t do that, but I could have. They didn’t know that for sure, and it probably wouldn’t have taken anyway, but gradually, we just plain liked each other. The same reason that you and she liked each other. She liked me ultimately, and I liked her a whole heap and she knew it. She knew that I liked Richard, and the fact that I liked Tim White I didn’t throw in her face a lot. But she knew that I, and to this day I know Tim and once in a while he and I email each other about stuff. Do you know him at all?

02-00:11:12 Morell: A little bit

02-00:11:12 Smith: Well, you know him well, don’t you?

02-00:11:13 Morell: Not real well, but I know him and my niece was one of his star students and is now working on her PhD. 37

02-00:11:20 Smith: Well, he’s—I like Tim. He’s a little loony or something, and he just—when he hates, he hates so hard that it makes him crazy, I think.

02-00:11:34 Morell: Yes, it does. It does.

02-00:11:35 Smith: Don’t you think?

02-00:11:35 Morell: Oh yeah, I think so.

02-00:11:37 Smith: Really and truly.

02-00:11:38 Morell: And his search for the truth is a little disturbing.

02-00:11:41 Smith: Ah, exactly. It’s disturbing. Gee whiz, why does he feel that way, one thinks. And I’ve been out of the field forever.

02-00:11:50 Morell: Yeah, I keep thinking if he wasn’t in science, he would be in religion. That’s—

02-00:11:55 Smith: Check. Couldn’t agree more. I could not agree more. Exactly. He’s a—

02-00:12:00 Morell: Believer.

02-00:12:01 Smith: He’s a fundamentalist believer, and it happens to be in his field, paleo—

02-00:12:07 Morell: He’s in science.

02-00:12:07 Smith: Yeah, in science. But I always had a, nice of me, but a warm feeling toward Mary because while she was anything—she was strong and vulnerable at the same time. I think very vulnerable. She always—there’s a certain kind of woman; my mother is like that. I can’t say Mary Leakey reminded me of my mother, but my mother was always—was a southern belle from Kentucky who was made out of stainless steel, but she was also—she could get her feelings hurt easily. I always felt that Mary could get her feelings hurt but she would never let you know, and I’m very susceptible to people like that. I always feel as though I want to make sure they aren’t—

02-00:12:51 Morell: Hurt. 38

02-00:12:52 Smith: Hurt and on my turf—you know, no reason to hurt them here, and she just tickled me. So I did a lot of, tried to help her do a lot of things. I attended her press conferences. I was at the famous unscientific press conference.

02-00:13:09 Morell: Tell about that one. That’s a little bit ahead of what I want to do, but let’s go ahead.

02-00:13:12 Smith: Okay, well, whatever you—just that at that thing where—

02-00:13:17 Morell: This is a press conference, this was after Louis had died and it was after Australopithecus afarensis had been named, it was—

02-00:13:27 Smith: Afarensis, and after it was named and this fell into the footprints and her Laetoli footprint business and afarensis was named, and I may get screwed up on my facts here, but she was asked by one of the reporters at this packed press conference—

02-00:13:43 Morell: And this was—she was announcing the footprints.

02-00:13:44 Smith: She was announcing the footprints, exactly. And she was asked about Johanson’s find and the naming, Johanson—you get me straight on this, now. Johanson—she named her own footprints.

02-00:13:57 Morell: Well, they weren’t anything.

02-00:14:00 Smith: They weren’t anything, and Johanson named—

02-00:14:02 Morell: No, she had fossils from Laetoli—

02-00:14:05 Smith: Yeah.

02-00:14:05 Morell: That they took as the type specimen and used them as the type specimen for naming afarensis. They didn’t use Lucy, which is what you think they would have done, they used the material from Tanzania—

02-00:14:18 Smith: From Laetoli, yeah.

02-00:14:19 Morell: Because it made the species as a whole older because she had the age. 39

02-00:14:24 Smith: Right. She had the age from the footprints, from the lava.

02-00:14:26 Morell: No, not the footprints, she had the age on the fossils.

02-00:14:29 Smith: The fossils because of the volcanic tuff that they were found in.

02-00:14:31 Morell: Because of the tuff—no, just because they were in older material than the fossils from Ethiopia.

02-00:14:37 Smith: Okay.

02-00:14:37 Morell: The Ethiopian fossils were younger, and I think by using her fossils—

02-00:14:45 Smith: It made it old—indeed.

02-00:14:45 Morell: It made it about half-a-million years older.

02-00:14:46 Smith: So it made their—their naming, their named creatures—

02-00:14:50 Morell: It gave them the oldest human in the world.

02-00:14:51 Smith: Right, and she was asked what did she think about this. I remember very distinctly since there was a long, long pause, because anybody knowledgeable in the audience was [sharp intake of breath] waiting to see what she said. And she said she thought it was very unscientific.

02-00:15:04 Morell: Kiss of death.

02-00:15:06 Smith: In that clipped little tone. Kiss of death. [imitating Mary] “Very unscientific,” she said and changed the subject, which she couldn’t have done. The sword fell and I thought, mmmfff, I thought— But the people who were in the field really, really, everybody went [sharp intake of breath] and the people who didn’t know anything about it wondered what was going on. But that’s what happened at that press conference, and I know you know because you must have read articles and everything else about it.

02-00:15:36 Morell: Sure. 40

02-00:15:37 Smith: But she—she, I know she felt—she never told me this straight up, but I know she felt betrayed and undercut and why did they do that to her. That’s when Tim White started saying that everything she did was sloppy and nothing she ever did was right, and I knew that wasn’t correct.

02-00:15:57 Morell: Yeah, they started changing.

02-00:15:58 Smith: They sure did and it’s a shame because he helped her on the Laetoli footprint trail article that we published. If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t have published that. He came to my office—

02-00:16:11 Morell: That’s interesting.

02-00:16:12 Smith: And went over all of the photographs, helped me—he was there a week. I’d never met him before. He was just a young squirt then. I don’t know how old he is now, but in his fifties somewhere, middle fifties probably. This is a long time ago. He had been working with her—what, two seasons, something like that and he came—Mary was never easy to work with in the collection of photographs or anything. She was very much given to saying, “I trust you. You do this, you do that.” Though there were times when you didn’t know what you were doing! You had to ask her. And Tim came and helped us put all those pictures together. He made suggestions that were excellent. He helped the writer on the article—I think it was either Howard La Fay or Peter [T.] White went over there— Howard La Fay, I think, went over and ghost wrote that for her. Maybe it was Peter White. I’ve forgotten who did the ghost writing, and Tim came and worked with us and it would never have been published without him because we couldn’t make heads or tails out of these photographs and things that were sent in and stuff that they had photographed.

02-00:17:12 Morell: Interesting.

02-00:17:13 Smith: Yeah, he did a—and I’ve always been indebted to him for that and he knows it. I’ve told him. And I also—he and I have kept up, usually, a contact in the sense that I’ll see something about him in the papers and I’ll send him a note saying, “Hey, I see they haven’t locked you up yet,” or something like that and he’ll say, “Yeah, no, they haven’t caught me yet.” He—only once I said to him—personally to him I said, “Hey, you’re awful tough on Mary.” “Well, she deserves somebody to be tough on her. She didn’t go about this in the right way. Her methods were unscientific.” And I just never brought it up again to him, because it didn’t make any sense to me. It just didn’t make any sense. Next. 41

02-00:18:03 Morell: Let’s go back—you got to this point—I don’t know exactly how far into Louis’s time at the Geographic he—it must have been the mid-sixties that he began to work with Dee Simpson, an archaeologist at Calico Hills Early Man Site here in California. He came to the Geographic and told the Geographic about it? How did you start to hear about it? And then I know that Mary discussed it with you too.

02-00:18:36 Smith: She did indeed. He came. He said that what was being found in California was terribly significant. Now—I’m shaky on my science about that so I won’t tell you what you already know that’s better than what I know. But the Geographic then was so beguiled by him with the early man finds in East Africa that nobody doubted that everything he was saying was correct. But he gave a talk trying to get money for Dee Simpson and—incidentally, I’ll ask you something there in a minute—but when he started to say he saw fossils sticking out of the sides of cliffs from a car ride he took along—people began to exchange glances. I remember his saying that, “Why, there are so many important fossils, I saw fossils sticking out of where there were cuts for roads,” he said.

02-00:19:25 Morell: Oh my goodness.

02-00:19:26 Smith: Yeah, I remember his saying that, and later I said to him, “How could you identify—.” He said, “Well, the fossils are there. They’re bound to be important fossils. Among the other fossils, my dear, we’ll find them.” And what I was going to ask you—I never did figure his relationship with Dee Simpson out. Did you ever figure it out?

02-00:19:43 Morell: I think that it was just one of these—he did have relationships with—I don’t know if this was a physical, intimate one—

02-00:19:53 Smith: It’s not as gossipy a question as it sounds like.

02-00:19:55 Morell: Yeah, I don’t think that it was that.

02-00:19:57 Smith: I don’t think so either, I think it was—.

02-00:19:59 Morell: I think that in this case, that Louis wanted to be like his younger self, and he wanted to overturn the consensus here in North America.

02-00:20:08 Smith: Exactly, exactly—I think he— 42

02-00:20:10 Morell: And Dee gave him the opportunity and she was another woman in the mold of women he liked to work with, which is—

02-00:20:16 Smith: Exactly.

02-00:20:16 Morell: She was smart. She was doing the work. She was going to make him look good.

02-00:20:20 Smith: I think that’s exactly what it was too. That was my sense of it—

02-00:20:25 Morell: And he wanted to be the young guy who overturned everything once again and have the thrill of all the adulation and the applause that came from that.

02-00:20:33 Smith: By then it was 1967—

02-00:20:35 Morell: It was in the mid-sixties, yeah.

02-00:20:37 Smith: Or somewhere in there. Mary talked to me about that and—there are times, you know I’ve worked on a lot of different stuff, not just the Leakeys, there were dozens and dozens of other projects, and when the Leakeys blew in I had to quick think back about what it was I was supposed to know and fake a lot of it, to a degree, until they said what it was I needed to remember. I remember asking Mary about it and she froze. I remember her aspect. “That’s something that Louis is doing and I’m not involved.” Okay, I thought, well, stay—don’t go there, Mary.” But I did—

02-00:21:10 Morell: You mean Mary, yourself.

02-00:21:11 Smith: Mary, myself—don’t go there, Mary Smith, Mary Griswold. I pursued it, of course, and I said, “Well, it isn’t what they say it is?” Or something along those lines. She said, “I’m very worried about Louis being involved in that. I’m worried he’s going to hurt our science. He shouldn’t be involved.” She didn’t say to me that she was going to say this to the members of the research committee. Some of whom—she stayed at Mel Payne’s house, you know, she became—

02-00:21:41 Morell: Really good friends of theirs. 43

02-00:21:42 Smith: With Ethel Payne who was a very good friend of mine. Ethel is still alive and should be. Ethel said to me somewhere along the line, “Did you know Mary is so worried about Louis’s involvement with that woman in California?” See that’s how it would translate. And I said, “Well, apparently so.” I said, “I don’t know enough about it, Ethel, to say.” “Well, she’s talked to Melvin Payne, Melvin Payne about it and,” Mel died in—whenever he died, I can’t remember now, it’s in the notes somewhere.

02-00:22:15 Morell: It was while I was doing research for the book, so sometime in the eighties.

02-00:22:19 Smith: It would be in the eighties, so it was long after that, yeah, right. Well, of course it was, because Ethel and Mel and I went to Africa together and sat and looked at an eclipse in 1973. Ethel, not knowing what she was saying to me, because I was a social friend of hers, that how worried Mary was and that she’d spoken to Melvin about it, and so I thought—well, I’ll put the kibosh on getting funds. Now here—this is really out of school but it ought to be in these notes about Louis Leakey.

02-00:22:53 Morell: Right, yeah, they should, yeah.

02-00:22:54 Smith: Somebody put the brakes on his getting money for Calico Hills, because he got some and some and then he didn’t get any more.

02-00:23:03 Morell: That’s right.

02-00:23:03 Smith: And I’ve forgotten who gave him the next layer of money, and then the whole thing just [pfft] disappeared. It just dried up and vanished.

02-00:23:12 Morell: It just dried up. Well, it was especially after they had a conference. I think it was in ’67 they had that Calico Hills conference, and he was going to prove to the experts once and for all. Instead it was a really embarrassing conference where Clark Howell told me nobody wanted to look at anybody, everybody was looking at the floor—

02-00:23:30 Smith: Exactly.

02-00:23:30 Morell: Because they didn’t want to embarrass, he said, “We were all friends and we didn’t want to be there for the embarrassment of shaming Louis.” No one wanted to come out and— 44

02-00:23:39 Smith: And she was there, Dee Simpson was—

02-00:23:40 Morell: No, Dee was there, but not Mary.

02-00:23:41 Smith: No, no, no, I meant Dee Simpson was there. I remember she was rather plain—okay, let me think about what she looked like. Bless her heart. I didn’t know her at all. I’d only met her once or twice, but she was rather a plain, pleasant-looking woman and she’d overdressed for the occasion. She had on a little hat and purse and gloves and the whole works. She was trying to—-

02-00:23:59 Morell: Oh no.

02-00:24:01 Smith: She should have come in dressed like—

02-00:24:03 Morell: The professional she was?

02-00:24:04 Smith: You or me right now. And I just remember thinking, oh dear. Not that anybody else noticed, but she just—

02-00:24:10 Morell: But people would notice that. They might not comment on it, but in a way you would—

02-00:24:15 Smith: Yeah, indeed. She looked like she was about ready to go to church.

02-00:24:17 Morell: Church, that’s what it sounds like, oh dear.

02-00:24:18 Smith: Exactly, and then I never heard about her or saw her again. Louis, of course, characteristically, Louis stopped mentioning it.

02-00:24:26 Morell: Dick Hay said that too about him, that that was his technique. When Dick was trying to show him something at Olduvai that Louis thought was one way and Dick knew it was the other, and so Dick went out to dig a trench to try to show Louis this and Mary said—and it was an exasperated exchange between two men, and Mary said at the end—“Dick, can you fill in your trench?” But that meant that—and Louis never brought the subject up again. It was like— you had to bury the trench. 45

02-00:24:57 Smith: Exactly, yeah, well, it was the “Tut-tut, dear boy, don’t worry about it, I won’t.” It fell into that category. And I’d say that—this was in the ’66-’67, around in there, and Louis died in ’72 and his health was going. His health really was getting quite bad and he was walking on sticks and you could hear wheezing down the hallway from a long distance away as—yeah, you could. And I’d hear it and I’d think, uh-oh, here comes Louis Leakey. Now that’s not an uh-oh, I’m going to hide, it’s an uh-oh there goes—

02-00:25:28 Morell: The day.

02-00:25:28 Smith: There goes the day. [laughter] Bless his heart.

02-00:25:32 Morell: Didn’t Mary say to you, at one point—I think maybe this is all during the same period where the magazine was actually thinking about doing a story about Calico Hills, and you said she asked you to save Louis, to save him from himself?

02-00:25:47 Smith: Exactly. And it’s not that I had forgotten it, but I am now in my dotage and I have to dredge these things. Yes, she did. She sat down with me, and this was later when I brought it up again to her and she said, “I understand.” I was not the picture editor doing Calico Hills. It was under my supervision, “Here you do this.” I’ve forgotten who the photographer was or anything else or if we’d even started on it, but Mary said to me, “You must not let the magazine publish that. It’s going to make a fool out of Louis. It won’t work.” Yeah— her words exactly. She said, “It’ll make a fool out of him and hurt his reputation. It mustn’t be published, Mary. You fix it.”

Well, I think I either knew then or found out very soon after that that it was fixing itself, that it wasn’t going to ever materialize. To a degree, the Geographic then would make picture coverages or even send a writer on something they knew was not going to work out if the person wasn’t famous enough kind of thing. And I think that’s what we were doing, but no, she did say that to me, that we mustn’t do that, “It mustn’t be done.” You know how she did things, bless her heart.

Their relationship [pause]—their relationship. You know more about that than I do because you know the family, in a lot of ways, more intimately than I do. But it was estranged, but not estranged in the usual sense of the word. They lived apart because he was one place and she was another, but not on purpose. Is that being estranged if you happen to live in two different places but you have reasons? I don’t know.

02-00:27:27 Morell: Well, she would when he needed her— 46

02-00:27:30 Smith: When he needed her—yeah.

02-00:27:30 Morell: She would be there.

02-00:27:32 Smith: Absolutely, absolutely. And she had her own—

02-00:27:36 Morell: And there was a devotion there.

02-00:27:37 Smith: Absolutely!

02-00:27:39 Morell: And I talked to Richard about it. We both—

02-00:27:41 Smith: Yeah, what did he say?

02-00:27:41 Morell: Well, we both—I said it seemed to me that whatever that initial attraction was, and the fact that they turned over their lives for each other, they had some bond there.

02-00:27:52 Smith: Oh yes. No question, no question about it whatsoever, but she—Mary—how do I put—okay, I will put this on the record too because I probably have before. Mary did some serious professional drinking late in the day and late in her life. And when—I know a bit about alcoholism, and I would never claim to—I would never say, I don’t dare say that anybody is an alcoholic unless I see them lying in the gutter in front of my house ten days in a row, but Mary had her own fit of her own mind, and I think she—

02-00:28:31 Morell: That’s a way to put it.

02-00:28:32 Smith: —took a lot of comfort in her own thoughts and her own time and how much she drank—this is—I’m getting into—not dangerous water here, it’s dangerous water for anybody to talk about—but she comforted herself—she didn’t need anybody else at certain periods of time in her day, let’s put it that way. And I think it probably was—she did her work. Nobody could ever accuse Mary of not working hard. She worked all the time, but she did drink. You know that and I know that.

02-00:29:00 Morell: Yes, everybody knows that. 47

02-00:29:00 Smith: Everybody knows that and an awful lot of people drink. I don’t drink because I did all my share of it by the time I was fifty, and so I quit. I did mine and so I don’t drink anymore. So it’s very difficult to make that comment about anybody else, except that it figures, damn it! It’s one of the reasons why people can be alone and by themselves. I think that it figured there. I never saw her ever with too much to drink ever under any circumstances, but I know she drank and so do we all know it. And so that is part of the tradition. You can either cut that out, leave it, or do whatever you want to. I don’t think I’m betraying her by saying it.

02-00:29:40 Morell: No, no. Peter Jones, who loved her dearly—

02-00:29:42 Smith: Yes, dearly.

02-00:29:43 Morell: He said to me, and it was an interesting comment because he worked with her for seven years there in sort of a right-hand way, day in, day out. He said, at the time, he said, “I was too young. I was nineteen, twenty. He said, I didn’t always understand why she didn’t remember things that we’d agreed on at dinner, and the next day she would have no recollection of it. It was just something I knew about her, and I would have to find a way to say, “Well, Mary, as we talked about the other day, we’re going to do x.” And he said, now I know, because I had a wife who was an alcoholic, but Mary—

02-00:30:15 Smith: Oh did he—awww.

02-00:30:17 Morell: Mary was an alcoholic.

02-00:30:19 Smith: Exactly. That’s right.

[section deleted in editing]

02-00:30:24 Smith: It’s a disease, damn it. It really is.

02-00:30:34 Morell: Yeah, it is, and so, it was such an interesting perspective, having talked to him twenty years ago and then now and where he is now and he can look back. He said also he used to get exasperated with her because she’d say, x, y, or z— this can happen or that can’t happen, and he would think, well, how does she know that? And he said, well, now I know it was because she was experienced. That was the voice of experience! [laughing] 48

02-00:31:00 Smith: Exactly, exactly! Well, I toss that in because I would be, it would be derelict of me not to say that because it figures in a lot of—it really figures, damn it. And for the people who don’t understand about addictions of one kind or another, whatever they are—

02-00:31:17 Morell: And hand in hand with that went this kind of paranoia where someone would come and stay at the camp for a while and they would say something and then she would fixate on that and start to spin on it and turn it in—what do you think, Peter, did you think they meant this—or did—

02-00:31:32 Smith: Oh it was paranoid, yes.

02-00:31:32 Morell: Spinning these fantasies about what people out there were doing because she was all alone there at Olduvai Gorge, and you could fantasize all kinds of things. So I thought your comment about her own theater of the mind—.

02-00:31:45 Smith: Oh she did, you dwell in there and it’s entertaining up to a point and not beyond and then—

02-00:31:51 Morell: It gets scary.

02-00:31:51 Smith: It gets terrifying after that. But she—stop and think of her whole history— when she was born, where she was born. She was a very accomplished artist, and then to be swept off her feet by that old reprobate—he wasn’t old then— an attractive, handsome, romantic—

02-00:32:07 Morell: Dashing.

02-00:32:08 Smith: Dashing—

02-00:32:09 Morell: Gosh, it must have been something.

02-00:32:10 Smith: It must have been something! [laughter] It must have been a romance and a half, as a matter of fact.

02-00:32:14 Morell: Really, I think so. 49

02-00:32:16 Smith: And the whole life and then that period in Kenya—the whole thing and then the war coming and all of the attendant stuff there. What a fascinating, fascinating life she had. But she—a couple of things about Mary—you know and I’m sure your recordings are full of all kinds of observations about Mary. I mostly—she and I became friends where we were useful and helpful to each other. We were kind to each other and where—I loved to play little, tiny practical jokes on her because she liked them.

02-00:32:55 Morell: I could see her liking that.

02-00:32:57 Smith: Did I ever tell you about the time she was being interviewed by some famous news chick in Washington of a television interview, and they had everything all—[chuckling] it was, when—there was an installation made in our Explorers Hall of something to do with the Leakeys. I’ve forgotten what it was, but this is long after Louis had died. I retired there in ’94, so it was probably in ’89, something of the sort. There had been a research committee luncheon and at two o’clock in the afternoon there was supposed to be a press meeting with this news chick. I’ve forgotten who it was and I shouldn’t say that, but it was a genuine bouffanted news chick, well known. God, it could have been what’s her name who’s now on CNN who’s—Judy Woodruff; I think it was Judy Woodruff, who’s okay, okay, so I take back the chick part— the news journalist.

At any rate, Mary and I were in the ladies room washing up after lunch and she said, “Now what do I have to do?” I said, “Well, you’re having these television people, and they’re waiting for you in the small conference room.” “Oh, I don’t want to do…” I said, “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. You talk about whatever you were talking about.” And at that moment, one of the secretaries came into the bathroom and she on what was then popular—these deely-bobbers. Do you remember these? It was a metal thing that fitted over your head and they were like—

02-00:34:22 Morell: Antennas.

02-00:34:23 Smith: Antennae—they bobbled back and forth, and Mary was fascinated, absolutely fascinated. “What is that?” And I said, “Well, they’re called deely-bobbers.” “I’d love to have something like that.” And I knew the secretary—and you know what’s going to happen here, don’t you. I said to the secretary whom I knew well, I said, “Hey, gimme.” She said, “Well, I—.” I said, ‘Have you met Dr. Leakey?” And I said, “Let me have your deely-bobbers; you’ll get them back.” I put them on Mary’s head; we combed her hair carefully. In we went to the, I let her in and—if it was Judy Woodruff, whoever it was, I said, “And here’s Dr. Leakey.” 50

02-00:34:59 Morell: With her deely-bobbers!

02-00:35:02 Smith: Deely-bobbers! I said, “Well, see you later, Mary.” And I left her with her deely-bobbers. Later I said, “What happened?” She said, “Well, they made me take them off.” [laughter] But it was one of the greatest moments of my life. I just liked doing it and Mary liked it too, she thought it was okay.

02-00:35:22 Morell: She could ham it up.

02-00:35:23 Smith: She hammed it up, and of course they took them off and they had this nice little thing. I later saw it on television, now that I think about it, and I still can’t remember who the news-hen was, but it probably was Judy Woodruff. It was a good interview. But I just liked the whole idea of walking down this long hallway with people looking at Mary Leakey. Because she normally— with her blue missionary skirt and her white blouse—you don’t think of her—

02-00:35:44 Smith: Oh yeah, you’d never think of her that way. No, she liked it just fine. I don’t wonder if I ever got them back to their rightful owner, I don’t remember.

The other thing about Mary, and I will tell you this again—I mentioned it on the telephone the other day and I think it’s maybe a cap to our relationship. I retired from the National Geographic at the age of fifty-nine in 1994 on April Fool’s Day, but before I did that, sometime in January or February, National Geographic asked me if I would lead one of the National Geographic safari groups to East Africa. We went to the usual—looked at the things that run on the plains. I could talk knowledgeably because I’d cribbed it out of every story I’d ever worked on or everything I’d ever heard. I did know a lot, by then, about aardvarks and everything else. It was maybe fifteen couples, not that many probably, maybe twenty people altogether, wealthy, who go on one of these things. It was run by Ker & Downey or one of those outfits.

We landed in Nairobi; they drove us out and I had fun being a safari leader— drove us out to Windsor Golf [Hotel] and Country Club. Bob Campbell was with us on the safari. He came along on part of it. I called up Mary in Langata and said, “Mary, I wrote you a note. I’m here. Come have lunch with me. Can you come over here?” She said, “Well, I’ll drive over.” I said, “We’ll send— I’ll get a car.” She said, “No, no, no, I’ll drive over myself.”

I was having meetings with the members of the paying—big-time money they were spending to go on this Geographic thing, so I had to really act as though I knew what I was doing. And I remember saying to this group who were being oriented—“I’m going to be having lunch with Dr. Mary Leakey, but you will all be on your own for the next couple of hours.” Well, somebody came in and said, “Dr. Leakey is here.” Of course everybody at the hotel knew 51

her, and I could see as I left the room—this is important—as I left the room I saw all these important moneyed heads pop out around the door to get a glimpse of her.

Now I could have trotted her in and made her go through a dog and pony show. This is my friend—yes, my friend Mary Leakey. I’m not about to do that. Bob Campbell and I, Mary Leakey—Bob had been waiting out in the hallway for me to get through with this orientation thing and Mary was out there. Bless her; she died just a few years later. She, by then, was reduced in stature. She was smaller and tinier.

02-00:38:24 Morell: A little frail.

02-00:38:25 Smith: A little frail and she came—I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, and she came, stood up, and I came over and we hugged. I could see all these heads looking around the corner of the thing. And I said, “Mary, I’m so glad to see you.” I practically had tears in my eyes, which isn’t like me. But I really was fond of her and Campbell was standing there ramrod straight. I said, “How are you, and it’s so delightful to see you.” And she said, “Yes, well, tell me, tell me, Mary,” she said, looking up at me which is odd because I’m not very tall, and she said, “why are you here?” And I said, “Well, I’m leading a safari for the National Geographic Society.” She said, “But you’re retired.” I said, “Well, I’m retired, but they asked me.” She said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, my how the mighty have fallen.”

And I just, I just—Campbell tried to contain himself, I burst out laughing, and she didn’t say a word; she just tossed her nose in the air. But she was absolutely—I was trying to wing it, you see, I was trying to say, “Well, yes, in retirement I’m so important.” She nailed me—they just wanted to get somebody cheap to lead their goddamn safari, and she saw through it like that! [chuckling] We had a delightful lunch, yeah, it was lovely. I was so glad to see her. And when we got through she got in her little car and put-put-putted back home and I never saw her again. I sent her a Christmas card and stuff and that was it, and then one day she died. She died, in whenever it was, ’95- [9]6.

02-00:39:53 Morell: ’96? I think yeah, ’96.

02-00:39:55 Smith: Yeah, ’95-’96. Richard—and they burned her up in the back yard.

02-00:40:00 Morell: Yeah.

02-00:40:00 Smith: Remember? 52

02-00:40:01 Morell: The cremation ceremony in the back yard.

02-00:40:03 Smith: Right in the damn back yard.

02-00:40:04 Morell: Yeah, he talked to his Indian friends ahead of time to learn about the things you had to do. You had to tie the body—

02-00:40:08 Smith: Yeah, to make it stay lit!

02-00:40:10 Morell: Well, that, and you also had to tie the body together so it wouldn’t sit up.

02-00:40:13 Smith: Yeah, exactly, which they do occasionally.

02-00:40:17 Morell: They will do, apparently.

02-00:40:18 Smith: They do do it as a matter of fact. No, and—what an incredible woman. Which Leakey, of the two Leakeys—we haven’t even gotten into their children nor do we need to. Which one was the most incredible? Well, you’re right, they supported each other. They were a class act, not necessarily always on the same stage, but they knew about each other’s work. They were the most remarkable couple I’ve ever known in my entire life. No question about it.

They inspired people for generations, and a hundred years from now will their names be known? You bet. For two reasons—what they did was genuine; the other thing is they’re legendary, and you don’t toss a legend aside either in a textbook or in a journalistic article or anything else. They, someday, will be— well, they’re legendary now, and I think their names will always be there. They’re not going to be disproved. How could they be? All anthropology, being what it is, it builds on what was done yesterday. You can’t say they were wrong exactly—well, all in all—what do you think? What’s your opinion about a hundred years from now?

02-00:41:33 Morell: A hundred years from now?

02-00:41:34 Smith: Yeah, assuming we’re still all here and there are books to be read.

02-00:41:38 Morell: Yeah, Richard said something to me which—I think it’s fair, and even though he’s a Leakey I believe that he’s probably right about this. He said he thought that in most fields of science that ultimately you end up with one name being associated with it—Darwin with evolution, Edison with electricity, Sagan 53

with astronomy. He said he would suspect that the name Leakey, a hundred years from now is the name—

02-00:42:05 Smith: Couldn’t agree more. I agree 100 percent. He’s absolutely right, absolutely right. The one name that will be associated with it—and the Leakey name, no matter which Leakey you’re talking about—some Leakey somewhere sometime, absolutely. Well, they took the thing and turned it into a science. It really officially became an honest-to-God, worthwhile science, even though it was worthwhile already, nobody knew about it and they made something of it.

02-00:42:34 Morell: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. Clark Howell said that too. He said that really, he felt that Louis was the first paleoanthropologist.

02-00:42:41 Smith: I think so.

02-00:42:42 Morell: And he just did all these things with the expertise that you were talking about, all of the different things that he embodied or made himself an expert in are the things now that people go off and specialize in in order to become a paleoanthropologist, and Louis did that.

02-00:42:55 Smith: No question about it. Are you yourself being interviewed for this project?

02-00:43:02 Morell: [chuckling] No, I haven’t been, actually.

02-00:43:04 Smith: Well, that sounds silly, but—

02-00:43:05 Morell: That’s an interesting idea, though.

02-00:43:06 Smith: I absolutely think that would be derelict for you not to be—you should be interviewed.

02-00:43:11 Morell: I’ll suggest that to Bob.

02-00:43:12 Smith: Tell him I said so. Tell him I’m a journalist, so that I—it’d be crazy not to ask you questions, but you’d have to have somebody do it—what person should do it?

02-00:43:24 Morell: Yeah, that’s an interesting idea. 54

02-00:43:26 Smith: What person should—could you—this sounds silly, but could you interview yourself?

02-00:43:30 Morell: Interview myself? I’m not sure.

02-00:43:32 Smith: Is that possible? Because you—

02-00:43:35 Morell: I guess in a way I feel like the answer to that is well, I wrote the book!

02-00:43:39 Smith: Well, so what, unless you want to read—is there some way that you could read marked excerpts, marked by you from your book.

02-00:43:47 Morell: That’s a possibility.

02-00:43:49 Smith: Do that. Go through your own book, mark excerpts—for people who will never read your book.

02-00:43:53 Morell: Right. That’s a really good idea.

02-00:43:56 Smith: You know what everybody else has said, so you don’t have to be repetitious, but there are things that people have said to you that you’ve quoted or things that you’ve surmised.

02-00:44:05 Morell: That you come to—that you realize as you summarize a person or—.

02-00:44:08 Smith: It would be a great void if you didn’t do it. It would be a great gap in the whole works, because you’re not—look how long you’ve followed them.

02-00:44:16 Morell: I know.

02-00:44:16 Smith: You haven’t—it’s not just you did seashells one year and the Leakeys the next and dogs the next. I mean that. Don’t just flatter me by saying, “Gosh Mary, that’s a good idea.” It is a good idea. It would be crazy for you yourself not to, at the very end of it say—and here are some further thoughts. Here are some footnotes, things that I gleaned from my work over the years, and say where they came from. Say, in my book I was lucky enough to get this quote from so and so, or I think this—give yourself credit. 55

02-00:44:49 Morell: Right, right, exactly.

02-00:44:49 Smith: Give yourself credit. Your book is excellent. I haven’t read it in a while. I read it when—but it is excellent. I don’t know how many copies were printed or how many were sold. It didn’t sell as many as it should have, I’m sure. But that’s always—

02-00:44:59 Morell: Well that’s always the way. But it’s still in print.

02-00:45:01 Smith: Oh I know it is.

02-00:45:02 Morell: The amazing thing to me is that it’s—and it inspires people. I get letters from people or I hear about people who’ve gone into paleoanthropology because they read my book.

02-00:45:10 Smith: Did Jane read it?

02-00:45:11 Morell: Yes, she did.

02-00:45:12 Smith: I know she read—

02-00:45:12 Morell: Yeah, and she said it was too personal, or that parts of it were.

02-00:45:19 Smith: Oh that’s right, you said she said it was too—well, she’s crazy! No, it’s not too—how the hell do you write about somebody without making it personal.

02-00:45:25 Morell: Well, you have to.

02-00:45:26 Smith: You mean she thought it should have just been scientific? Or what?

02-00:45:29 Morell: I don’t know. She just said there was a lot of—did she even say it was too personal? She said you put a lot of—

02-00:45:36 Smith: Personal stuff.

02-00:45:38 Morell: Personal things in it, didn’t you? 56

02-00:45:40 Smith: Well, that’s—

02-00:45:40 Morell: Which is like saying it was too personal.

02-00:45:42 Smith: Well, of course you did. You want the book to sell.

02-00:45:45 Morell: Well, that, and also you want it to be a real person.

02-00:45:48 Smith: You don’t want it to be dull either.

02-00:45:49 Morell: And you want it to be—when people read about it, you want them to feel like you’re reading about someone who was a real person. Louis to me, as remarkable and wonderful of a man, he was a real person too, and he had all the things that we all desire that we all have. And so, if that’s being too personal—but that’s human.

02-00:46:13 Smith: Well sure, he’s a human being, and one thing that that does too is to let other people know they are human and they could be like him if they could figure out how to be as smart as he is or as hard working or as—I don’t know what—tricky? He was tricky. There’s no question about it. You know, I’ve probably said, either by inference or out loud—I’ve probably said some things about Jane Goodall that make you understand. I think you do understand because you’re very insightful about this stuff, how I feel about her. I do not—I like Jane on all levels, but I really do see through the part of Jane that’s see-throughable.

02-00:46:51 Morell: Sure, sure.

02-00:46:52 Smith: I really do, and so do you. And I think you see the same thing I do. It’s the St. Jane syndrome.

02-00:46:58 Morell: It’s the St. Jane.

02-00:46:58 Smith: And I—applause, applause, got to have it! How can you be a saint otherwise?

02-00:47:04 Morell: Well, and she’s such an inspiration. That’s the thing that you just—you back away from all the rest because of what she can do— 57

02-00:47:11 Smith: When I’m at a cocktail party and I don’t know anybody and I feel like they don’t understand how wonderful I am, all I have to say is, “I used to work with Jane—I was head of her institute.” And by God! [Ahhhhhh!] People just go bananas! And I’m always, to this day, amazed—why should I be amazed. Too many times I’ve sat and listened to her give a talk as I’ve told you before. I told you about my sister’s giving of a luncheon out here. Did I ever tell you about Claire’s [Claire Griswold Pollack]—My sister Claire was married for fifty years to movie director Sydney Pollack.

02-00:47:40 Morell: Tell—

02-00:47:40 Smith: About Jane? Oh I’ve got to tell you this—this is not—are you recording still?

02-00:47:45 Morell: Yeah, we are.

02-00:47:46 Smith: It’s all right. It’s all right with me. Maybe twenty years ago when I was head of the Jane Goodall Institute, Claire—sister Claire said to me, “You know, I’d love to meet Jane Goodall someday.” I was sitting at Claire’s kitchen table and I said, “Sure!” And she said, “You know, I could set up a luncheon for her out here. I understand she’s going to be giving a talk,” wherever it was. And I said, “Well, I could come out and it would be a good fundraising opportunity.” She said, “Why don’t I put a luncheon at Michael’s?” It was then a famous restaurant over in Santa Monica. She said, “I’ll have to put it up on the second floor. I’ll ask Streisand and I’ll ask Michael Eisner’s wife and I’ll ask all these people—Jane Fonda,” then newly-married to Ted Turner Jane Fonda who had just gotten married and everything else. I said, “Well, thanks Claire, that’s nice. You don’t have to do it.” She said, “No, I’d like to do it. Maybe I could help out a little bit.” And so she gathered up all of the powerful producer women. It was a women’s luncheon, on purpose—or if they were movie stars, movie this, that, or the other.

Jane blew into town and I introduced her to Claire and we all met at Michael’s and oh—this was a funny thing that happened. The last person to arrive at the luncheon, coming up the steps—this was right after Fonda had married Turner, had gotten her great success with her exercise things and enhanced her boobs, done a lot of stuff. My sister whom you’ve now met, who’s not young and who’s gotten quite sick—but Claire took me by the elbow and said, “I want you to meet Jane,” and I said—this is Jane Fonda—and I said, “Oh, great! I love meeting celebrities.” She had on a flat gaucho hat with fringe and an open sort of gaucho bodice type—and just as I reached out to grab her hand to say, well, hello, how nice to meet you—Claire said in my ear, “Notice the new boobs.” And—you try to meet somebody! [laughter] Delightful to meet 58

you, Mrs. Boobs. And I said to Claire, “Don’t you ever do that to me.” “What?” “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Anyway, I digress.

We had this luncheon. There were luncheon tables for four and there were probably forty people—really top drawer, either married to, or trophy wife of, or producer, director, whatever. And at the end of luncheon when dessert was served, Jane stood up in this sun-filled upper—

02-00:50:21 Morell: This is Jane Goodall.

02-00:50:21 Smith: Jane Goodall, yeah. Everybody sitting there. Jane Goodall stood up, put her hands on the back of the chair and talked for about ten minutes. And people were openly sobbing! The goddamndest thing I ever saw. I’d seen it before; I’d seen it in private groups; I’d seen it with 5,000 people, but to sit there and—I’d only met a few of these people. They know my sister well. She and I were not sobbing exactly, and I wasn’t—but to see Jane talking simply and humbly about the things—Jane was and she was—Roots & Shoots was starting then, These women—they were reaching for money and checkbooks and stuff, and foisting checks on me. “Here. Take this for Jane!” But they were weeping and wailing and blowing noses!

I tell you this because of the incredible ability she had for reading a room— where does that come from? Being a canny actress. I admire Jane tremendously. Her ability—that she can do that is what allowed her to work for decades in the jungles, in the forest, with chimpanzees, and it allows her to go on and go to heads of state and get money from them and get airplanes and get this and get concessions and everything else. A truly remarkable, remarkable human being, and that I have said what I’ve said with a wink and a nod only has to do with Jane’s coming to my office at the Geographic every so often and saying, “Mary, I’ve told so and so that we’ll give them ten thousand dollars for cages for this.” “Where are you going to get the money, Jane?” “I don’t know. You find out. You’ll find it, Mary.” “Hey, where am I going to find—.” “You’ll find it somewhere, you’ll find it!” You know, fairies at the bottom of the garden, and it always worked. But—I hope you were able to work something out with her, but I guess you won’t, will you? Or—

02-00:52:15 Morell: Oh no, I think she will.

02-00:52:17 Smith: You think she will?

02-00:52:18 Morell: Well, they’re talking that she’ll be in this country in September and it’s just a matter of the timing. 59

02-00:52:26 Smith: Well, I—okay, well, I probably shouldn’t have said—she has never said she doesn’t like you, okay, but you would scare her, I think, a little bit, she might—a little.

02-00:52:36 Morell: Well, it’s about Louis, so—

02-00:52:38 Smith: Oh I know, I know exactly, but I mean it’s—if she thought that it was too personal, she might think that you’re going to be too personal with her.

02-00:52:45 Morell: That’s another—yes, but I don’t want to be—in these interviews we don’t have to go there. So that’s what I would tell her.

02-00:52:52 Smith: Okay, all right, at any rate—that was just this little thing about this luncheon, but I’ve never forgotten it because it was remarkable! She did this sort of gaze around this room of forty women who were very powerful for whatever reason and she just reduced them to—

02-00:53:09 Morell: To tears.

02-00:53:07 Smith: To tears. Genuine, honest to God. And people saying to Claire and to me, “Ohhh, oh I’ve known that she was wonderful but I had no idea she was so grand.”

02-00:53:19 Morell: She has that way of connecting with people that Louis did. You know, where you feel that she is talking directly to you.

02-00:53:26 Smith: Talking directly to you—I saw her at Lisner Auditorium in Washington once. She had just blown into town. She was supposed to give a talk there to George Washington University students and others at Lisner. I saw her backstage. In fact, she had dinner with me before we went backstage. She was dead, absolutely knocked out tired. She could hardly move. And I said, “Jane, are you sick?” She said, “No, I’ll be all right. I’ll be fine.” She got on that stage and within thirty seconds she was electric, turned on, eyes flashing, audience reduced to whatever that audience had to be reduced to. She talked for an hour and a half, showed pictures, and how she—

02-00:54:07 Morell: Did what she had to do.

02-00:54:07 Smith: Yeah, she did what—and it was unique, I mean for them. They were— 60

02-00:54:11 Morell: Yeah, exactly, she was—

02-00:54:13 Smith: Afterwards she signed autographs and people would bring her—“Would you sign this book.” “Oh, and what is your name exactly?” “Oh, I think you’re wonderful, Dr. Goodall. I want to be just like you.” “Well, you know, read my books and I’d love to hear from you. It’s easy to write to me. Write in care of my publisher.” And she does answer, the letters that are decent Jane answers them all. Well, at any rate—

02-00:54:36 Morell: If we just—I want to—

02-00:54:37 Smith: I didn’t mean to digress there.

02-00:54:38 Morell: No, no, that doesn’t matter. I love it all. [chuckling] I’m trying—but for the purposes of this project—from your vantage point of having been the editor on all these stories about early humans and then you oversaw the production of that one issue which was devoted to human evolution—you had told me [a dog is barking in background] and maybe it was one of the times that you were with Louis at Olduvai, maybe it was the first time where he asked you to promise him that you would do—tell us a little bit about that, how you saw the development of the field and the Leakeys place in it from your vantage.

02-00:55:22 Smith: Yeah. You’re reminding me of a conversation—part of the—and I don’t remember the circumstances at Olduvai, but I was there for—it was probably a little less than a week with the Leakeys, and then I drove back to Nairobi with Louis, which again, paleoanthropologists drooled to be able to do that. I didn’t understand that it was so important, which is probably just as well, because it allowed me to prattle on saying, “What’s that, what’s that?” “That’s an aardvark run over by the side of the road.”

02-00:55:48 Morell: This was your very first visit, the ’62 visit.

02-00:55:51 Smith: Yeah, exactly. And Louis—it probably was when we were sitting out in the sling back camp chairs and looking at the sky—when he got to talking about—we discussed religion a bit then, just religious views and so on and so forth, but he told me that his field—I probably said something beguiling, like “Gosh, I don’t know anything about your field.” And I think—I remember his saying, “Well, nobody does. This find is new. What we’re doing is new, but it will become famous.” He was very sure that they would—well, they were already becoming famous, and he asked me, he said, “It’s for the Geographic to promote knowledge of what we’re doing here of our forebears or our predecessors.” I didn’t know we had predecessors or forbears. I have Irish 61

ancestors, and he said, “It would be wonderful if you would be interested in our work and if you would urge the Geographic magazine to publish all of this.” [dog continues barking in the background] And of course that was a heady thing to say to me because I was a fairly junior editor at the time. I promised faithfully sir, I would undertake to help as much as I could. I was probably flattered. I don’t remember what my reaction was. It would have seemed like a good idea to me! And I think I’ve always felt that way.

I’ll tell you what, it didn’t take very long after that, Ginny, it didn’t take long for me to look with some disdain on people who feigned no interest in anthropology, our forebears, fossil ancestors, anything of this sort. Anybody who is not interested in that, I think, is just crazy! I mean frankly. I’m absolutely sure of it. You have to be interested in that. It’s like not wanting to look at a rainbow or not wanting to look at the stars. What do you mean you’ve seen it before; you aren’t going to look again.

That’s what Louis was talking about. It was much as—he wanted people to feel the same wonder he felt, as much as to have the same knowledge he had—but it was the wonder first. He felt the world was a wondrous place and everybody else should feel that way too. That’s what he really passed on to the people who—his disciples.

02-00:58:10 Morell: Yeah, he did. That—Elizabeth, help me with her last name.

02-00:58:15 Smith: Meyerhoff.

02-00:58:16 Morell: Meyerhoff. She said it beautifully to me about how Louis—even as an old man could laugh at a joke like a kid and swoon over the beauty of a rose.

02-00:58:29 Smith: Oh yes! Yes, that’s very well put. He could indeed, and Biruté—when you talk to her, you’re going to see her when—in August?

02-00:58:37 Morell: In August, yeah.

02-00:58:37 Smith: She’ll say the same thing to you—assuming that Biruté is—Biruté is—when did you last see her?

02-00:58:43 Morell: Oh, it has been ten years.

02-00:58:45 Smith: She’s different. 62

02-00:58:47 Morell: Changed.

02-00:58:48 Smith: Changed. Yeah, she’s changed, but she’s okay. She’s quite desperate about getting money and saving the orangutans—they’re probably all going to go one of these days. The Indonesians are chopping down all their trees and selling them to the Japanese.

02-00:59:02 Morell: As we did.

02-00:59:02 Smith: Yeah, exactly.

02-00:59:04 Morell: So when you look back at the field, all the articles that you edited and saw the field develop and change, how would you fit the Leakeys into that?

02-00:59:17 Smith: The whole thing?

02-00:59:17 Morell: Yeah, the context that—you worked on some of the first stories to the end of your career where you put that human evolution issue together, that special one—that was 1985, I think?

02-00:59:32 Smith: Yeah, it was, indeed, yeah.

02-00:59:32 Morell: Which wasn’t the end of your career, but—

02-00:59:33 Smith: No, no, but that was sort of the peak of what I was doing with paleoanthropology.

They were the most important people in the field because they began it! They were the Henry Fords of the paleoanthropology field. They made the finds, and they were able to talk about the finds in a way that inspired other people to continue after them. Suppose they had been—paint 0, 1, 2, 3 on the piece of bone, and yes, it’s important, published it scientifically, and they put it on the shelf and that was sort of the end of it. Without Louis’s showmanship, and without the Geographic being shoved into it by Louis, people wouldn’t have been inspired to get into the field. Let’s face it—Don Johanson probably might not have become a paleoanthropologist. He’ll never admit it, but he—

02-01:00:20 Morell: No, it’s true, he said that in Lucy[‘s Child], you know. 63

02-01:00:22 Smith: Okay, yeah, okay.

02-01:00:23 Morell: He was inspired by the Leakeys.

02-01:00:24 Smith: Well, I mean, there’s a—

02-01:00:26 Morell: They actually helped him get his first grants.

02-01:00:28 Smith: Oh I know they did—no, I know they did.

02-01:00:30 Morell: Not that you would ever know that.

02-01:00:30 Smith: Not that you would ever know it and not that they’ll ever claim credit for it.

02-01:00:33 Morell: No, they would claim credit for it.

02-01:00:34 Smith: Yeah, they’d claim credit for it, indeed. [laughing] Misplaced as it was!

02-01:00:40 Morell: If he did the gentlemanly thing and acknowledged them, maybe that’s true.

02-01:00:44 Smith: Yeah, I know, I know—those two guys.

02-01:00:48 Morell: It’s funny.

02-01:00:49 Smith: No, but they’re the most important because they’re the pioneers. They’re the George Washingtons of the field. They’re the Madame Marie Curie of the field. They built the platform on which everybody else is putting the ladders.

02-01:01:08 Morell: That’s a nice way to put it.

02-01:01:08 Smith: Well, I mean, they were the most important at that time, and their legend is— they’re legendary. It’s going to outlive everybody else. I agree with you and agree with Richard 100 percent that it will be the Leakeys’ field.

02-01:01:23 Morell: The Leakeys, yeah. 64

02-01:01:24 Smith: Sure. And their importance is undeniable. It isn’t just scientific, it’s what they were able to do to the popular—to the popular audience to get people who still don’t know what anthropology means, but to be inspired to know, to get them to realize that we lived a long time ago, all of us, every one of us, a long, long time ago. And you know—I think I told you that I produced an article shortly before I retired on the fiftieth anniversary of the finding the Lascaux Caves. Do you know that? Of those paintings in Lascaux.

02-01:02:03 Morell: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

02-01:02:04 Smith: And that—that’s directly, that directly comes from the Leakeys also. I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate those much later paintings, I think they’re 17,000 years old, or whatever, if it hadn’t been for the Leakeys. I would have gone in there and just said, “Oh gosh these are pretty and they’re old.” Yeah, they’re old. But to—

02-01:02:22 Morell: You had a context.

02-01:02:24 Smith: A context, indeed, and so they’ve cut across everything. They’re an inspiration and well worth doing what the Leakey Foundation is doing for them.

02-01:02:35 Morell: Any other—we’ve talked a long time.

02-01:02:39 Smith: I know we have. We’re using up their little—

02-01:02:42 Morell: Oh that, we’ve have lots of those. But is there anything, any other thoughts or memories? We can do some more if you want to take a break and—.

02-01:02:52 Smith: No, I think we probably. You probably—what I’m basically is anecdotal stuff, and—

02-01:03:00 Morell: No, but you see—

02-01:03:01 Smith: But I saw it firsthand.

02-01:03:02 Morell: Yes, this is the thing, you’re seeing it over a long period of time, and from the position of someone who’s taking what they did and putting it out there for the people, the future audience. 65

02-01:03:12 Smith: Right, Louis set, made the field something that was terribly important, not that it wasn’t important, but he put a name on it and he put a stage for it to build on. He put many, many people in the field from the Goodalls and the Birutés and the Fosseys and a lot of other folks, inspired people—Johanson, and people that he’d never heard of got into the field because of him. Mary supported their work—support’s the wrong word. Mary turned their work into something that was—it was legitimate to begin with but she made it official.

02-01:03:51 Morell: That’s a good way of putting it.

02-01:03:54 Smith: Between the two of them, they hammered out the field and it will last forever.

02-01:03:59 Morell: And by making it official what you mean is that she oversaw the excavation and did the meticulous excavation.

02-01:04:05 Smith: Did the meticulous stuff so that nobody could—I don’t think anybody ever did say anything—did they? Anybody say that something that she did, except for Tim White totally did—she was never questioned about her statements or her writings, was she? On anything important?

02-01:04:21 Morell: No, well, the only thing that people would question might be some of her interpretations such as the circle at the DK site—that that might not be a —

02-01:04:30 Smith: A living—living floor.

02-01:04:31 Morell: The area for a living floor, a shelter of some sort. But that’s a matter of interpretation. What they can’t fault her for is that the documentation of the material at the site, so that you can go back and question whether there was a living floor there or—

02-01:04:48 Smith: Right, well, you can study it some more.

02-01:04:49 Morell: You can study it some more because of her meticulous mapping.

02-01:04:52 Smith: Right, indeed.

02-01:04:53 Morell: That no one questions. And people can go back and I’ve heard—various archaeologists have said that—that you can take the material and you can go 66

back and really recreate her excavations because they were done so—her mapping was so meticulous.

02-01:05:08 Smith: Okay. No, I think I’ve said all I have to say that I feel will be useful to you. I do urge you to interview yourself or have somebody interview—I really mean it.

02-01:05:17 Morell: Well, in a way, they’ve actually sent me a list of questions for a newsletter— it’s not quite what you’re talking about but it’s made me think a little bit along those lines.

02-01:05:26 Smith: I think it’s awfully important. You’re the synthesizer of all this stuff, you putting it together. If you go back through the original interview you had with me so long ago—if you see anything in there that you feel would add to this, bring it into it. Is that a no-no?

02-01:05:44 Morell: Okay, yes it’s, no—

02-01:05:46 Smith: Because it’s just quoting me.

02-01:05:47 Morell: I think it would be fine. They had asked me at the Bancroft Library what I was going to do with my earlier material and I said, “Well, you know—.”

02-01:05:55 Smith: I can see what you’re getting at—you have another book or something of the sort.

02-01:06:00 Morell: It could be, you know.

02-01:06:01 Smith: Don’t give it up! [laughter] No, no. I understand very well!

02-01:06:06 Morell: I promised it to Richard, certainly.

02-01:06:07 Smith: Okay, fine. But if you see anything, one or two or five things, if you read anything that you want to put into here, do it.

02-01:06:14 Morell: Yes, I will.

02-01:06:15 Smith: Just say the old bat—her memory has failed. Have you seen Finding Nemo? Did I ask you that? 67

02-01:06:21 Morell: I haven’t seen it yet, but you said it was wonderful.

02-01:06:22 Smith: Oh go see it! You’ve got to see it because of the fish with the short-term memory loss! That you’ve got to see. It’s a great film. Okay.

02-01:06:34 Morell: And also because they’ve just discovered a wonderful thing about clown fish.

02-01:06:35 Smith: Yes.

02-01:06:36 Morell: They change their sex.

02-01:06:37 Smith: Oh that’s right. That’s right.

[End of Interview]