To teach is to learn.
JAPANESE PROVERB
ONE OF THE FIRST of Flipper’s tricks that I worked on, and one of the most important, was what I call the bamboo jumps. It was the opening shot of Flipper’s New Adventure, and it set the tone of the whole movie. Ricou called it the “establishing shot” because it established the premise of the story.
Ricou and I were on the dirt road at Flipper’s Lake, and he was outlining the scene he wanted to get on film. “You know the story,” he said.
I nodded. We had talked about it a lot. Porter Ricks, a widower with his two sons, is embarking on a new assignment. He will be chief ranger of Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve in the Florida Keys. Their new house is on a lagoon, which opens on the ocean, where Flipper lives.
“Good,” Ricou said. “The opening shot will be through the window of the camper, across the father and two sons to the lagoon, where we can see Flipper following them in the background.” Ricou had eloquent hand gestures. With just a few flicks of his hands I knew exactly where the camper would be going, where the camera would be, and where Flipper had to be jumping in the background. He glanced at me, and I nodded. “That shot depends on Flipper jumping in the background.”
I nodded. I was wondering how he planned to do it.
“Got any ideas?”
“Me? You mean about—”
“About Flipper, yes.”
I shook my head.
Ricou crossed his arms on his chest and studied the lake for a long moment. Several gulls wheeled in tight formation above us, cocked their heads downward, and squealed. “We’ve got to get Flipper to jump ten—no, make that twelve times in a row, nice, smooth picture-perfect jumps and dives.” He illustrated a series of jackknife dives with his right hand.
I nodded.
“You want to try that this morning?”
“Me?” I pointed at myself.
He nodded.
“I want to try, sure,” I said, crossing my arms on my chest, “but I don’t think—just offhand, looking at, it objectively—well, I think I see a problem here.”
He nodded again.
“The problem,” I said, “is how to get Susie to jump twelve times in a row if she expects to be fed after every jump.”
Ricou grinned at me. “If it was easy, Ric, they wouldn’t need us.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Shouldn’t be too hard, actually. Just apply the training method I taught you.”
“Common sense?”
“Exactly.”
I studied the lake again. Susie was in the lake, watching me. It would not be hard to get Susie to jump once. With a simple signal, a rolling motion of the hand, index finger extended, Susie would jump. But then Susie would expect a fish. And I didn’t know a signal that would tell her not to expect a fish. One of the keys to Ricou’s commonsense training method was to break behavior down to its simplest element. If you looked at this trick as twelve jumps in a row, it seemed impossible. But what if you thought about twelve tricks of one jump each? I was thinking along that line when Ricou said, “Why not try bamboo poles?”
My face brightened. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
“Yeah!” I looked at the lake anew. I turned to Ricou suddenly. “What do you mean, bamboo poles?”
“If Susie had twelve bamboo poles to jump over—”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. It was fascinating to see the method at work. Besides simplicity, another key element to his method was to consider the obvious, and what was more obvious than to give Susie something to jump over? I said, “I could suspend the bamboo poles just below the surface of the water.”
“Exactly,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “Oops! They’re waiting for me.” He regarded the lake abstractly for a moment, one arm across his chest, the other with the hand and fingers cupping his chin. “Bamboo poles,” he said with a quiet smile. “Yes. That should do it nicely.”
I went out and bought a bunch of bamboo poles, cut them off in six-foot lengths, and used diving weights and monofilament lines to hold them in place just beneath the surface of the water. But the surface of the water kept changing with the tide, of course, and so I had to keep adjusting them. Anything new in Flipper’s Lake immediately became one of Susie’s playthings. When she ran off with one of them, I had to track it down and put it back. But Ricou had the right idea. I put two of the poles out at first, and the problem, as we thought it would be, was that Susie expected to be fed after each jump.
In training dolphins, you must overcome certain almost instinctive reactions. When you want the dolphin to jump over two poles, for example, the temptation is to hold up your hand showing two fingers, and to say “two” very distinctly, mouthing it so that there can be no doubt about what is meant. But that means nothing to a dolphin. He lives in an acoustically different world. Even assuming that the dolphin would notice your mouth, he would probably assume that it was a strangely positioned blowhole. And strangely ineffective, too, for it made sounds that to him were almost inaudibly low, like the deepest rumblings of thunder are to us.
One thing Susie always understood very clearly was whether she got a fish or not. When she jumped over one of the poles and came to me so proudly, wanting a chunk of fish, I refused and made the gesture for her to jump again.
This may sound strange, but I deliberately kept Susie confused. She already expected to be rewarded after every jump, so sometimes I did reward her, sometimes I didn’t. The result is that every time she jumped one of the bamboo poles, she glanced at me on the shore to see if she was to be rewarded or not. If not, I gave her the jump sign from shore and she jumped again and, when she came up, glanced at me. And so it went, I giving her the jump sign each time she jumped till she had jumped all twelve of them. When I caught on to how the trick could be done, we rehearsed it three times, I called in the director, and he shot it.
As it so often happened, Flipper’s variation turned out to be better than the one we originally planned. On film it looked as if Flipper was keeping up with the Ricks family by jumping along and keeping an eye on them, though in fact she was watching me and the yellow fish bucket.
The bamboo poles? Yes, they were important as markers, showing Susie where to jump. But as I realized later, I could have trained her much more simply. I could have left out the bamboo poles.
Several years later, we needed the same trick, Susie jumping a dozen times in a row and keeping an eye on the road. It took about a minute to remind her, and then she did it perfectly.
Shooting Flipper was a lot more complicated than most TV series. If you ask film directors what they want least in their scripts, they will tell you three things: animals, children, and water. The problem is that you never know for sure what any of them will do next. We had all three. So the key to shooting Flipper was flexibility, which included accepting the help of the professionals who did the show week after week. In those days, TV series were shot on film and produced by Hollywood professionals with experience in making movies. Most of the directors who shot Flipper understood the difficulties we faced. All of the directors wanted to do a good job. In Hollywood, your future is no better than your last movie. But when time is money, coming in under budget depends on clockwork precision. And when a hundred people are involved, including people with large talents and larger egos, the logistics of getting it done tend to become more important than getting it done. When the new directors came in and read the script, saw how much the story depended on subtleties they had no control over, on whether a dolphin could look “concerned but confident,” for instance, they shook their heads and asked in mock despair, “Is this going to look real?”
“A lot of things probably look impossible.” I would tell them, “but there’s never been anything in the script that Flipper couldn’t do.” And then I made sure it worked.
The most unforgettable director we had was an old-timer who had made his reputation shooting Westerns. I could tell from the way he was setting things up that he had some fundamental misconceptions. Trying to help, I suggested, “Dolphins are not like horses.”
He whirled on me and glared as if I had just said the forbidden word. In Hollywood, the rules are rather rigid about who may speak to whom. The animal trainer, for instance, never speaks to the director. The director supposedly has so much on his mind that he cannot be bothered by whatever the animal trainer might have to say. If the animal trainer must get a message to the director, he speaks to the first assistant director, who will then tell the director if he thinks the director should be told. We were not in Hollywood, but the protocol was still very strong.
The director looked on me balefully. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Dolphins work on the reward system,” I explained. “When they’ve had enough to eat, that’s a wrap.” I shrugged.
The director eyed me with a frown, and I realized that he was playing a role himself, the role of the stereotypical director. Hollywood is full of them. Bald-headed, short, and heavyset, he had a white moustache and goatee, an electric megaphone, and—of all things—a gold cigarette holder with a 100 mm filter cigarette in it. The only part of his costume missing was a pith helmet, which was probably optional. “Hmmmm,” he said as though musing to himself, “like actors, then.”
He looked at the call sheet he had already made up. The call sheet is like a military plan of the day, where everything is scheduled in detail—which scenes will be shot, who is involved, where they will be shot, and when. Everybody had a copy of the script, and when the call sheet came out, they compared the two to find out if they were involved. I did this for Flipper, of course, and tried to arrange the more difficult tricks for when she would be hungrier and therefore more cooperative. A tricky shot had been set up for first thing in the morning. Normally, that was when I preferred to do the tough shots, but today was different. Susie had eaten like a pig the day before, and I knew that she was still full. I said, “Is it possible to make that shot later in the day?”
The director’s mouth got ugly. “No,” he said, shaking his gleaming head. “It’s not possible.” He was holding the call sheet, which he had rolled up into a tube. He bounced this with one hand into the palm of the other. “You’ve read this, I presume. Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The bald-headed director was probably responding to relationships one usually finds in Hollywood, relationships of time-honored self-interest. In Hollywood, animal trainers are members of the Teamsters Union. This goes back to the days when animal trainers handled horses and cattle in Westerns and, in the process, drove the stagecoaches and wagons, which qualified them for membership in the Teamsters. As such, they work by the hour, and a good deal of their thinking is in terms of extending the time it takes to get their work done.
The situation in Flipper, however, was quite different, beginning with the fact that I was not a member of the Teamsters. I was paid not hourly but by the season. I was as eager as the director to get on with the shooting. I knew that he didn’t realize that Susie had been fed twice as much as usual the day before, that she wasn’t hungry and therefore didn’t give a flying fig if we ever shot the scene. I tried to tell him. “You see—”
He waved me off, shaking his gleaming head. He squinted his eyes at me, little black dots peeking through the bushes of his eyebrows. “You want me to change my schedule? No, I’ve planned this down to the second, and you will have your beast ready to perform on cue. Understood?”
“I understand, yes, sir,” I said. “But. . .”
He glared, and I said nothing more.
“Quiet on the set,” the assistant director called out. It was precisely 10 A.M. Everybody was ready: the cameramen, the actors, the directors, and all the assorted supporting personnel, including me; I was near the actors but out of camera range, as usual. This was the moment we were all working toward. Then the director spoke to me, “Bring on the creature.”
I did.
And then, dramatically, “Roll camera, and action!”
The scene was between the father, who is on the dock in front of the Ricks home, and an officer in the Coast Guard, who has just hurriedly arrived in a Coast Guard launch. In the background, the sky is dark, the waves frothy:
COAST GUARDSMAN
(Cutting engine)
There’s a bad storm coming in. Have you heard?
FATHER
A bad storm! No, we haven’t heard a thing.
(with apprehension)
And Bud is out on the sandbar, digging for treasure!
COAST GUARDSMAN
(Close-up)
It’s getting nasty out there. We’d better get word to him. Does he have a radio?
FATHER
(Close-up)
He has one, yes, but I’ve been trying to raise him all morning. It must be on the blink.
COAST GUARDSMAN
(Medium shot)
That could be serious.
FATHER
(Close-up, face brightens)
Wait a minute! I think I’ve got an idea!
He takes out a pen and paper, writes something.
I’ll give this note to Flipper!
FLIPPER
(Wide shot, appearing between them in background)
Raising her head above water, nods head eagerly up and down.
The camera grinds away, the actors speak their lines correctly, and the camera focuses on the spot of water between the father and the Coast Guardsman.
But there is no Flipper!
“Cut!” cried the director. His fat face was like a blunt instrument aimed at me, and he didn’t look happy. “That was your cue! Why didn’t you send in the beast?”
“I tried to explain to you, sir—”
“Speak up! I can’t hear you!”
I yelled at him that I had tried to explain about dolphins not being horses. I dropped in a couple of extra “sirs” to make sure he understood there was no disrespect here, either by me or by Susie of him and his exalted position, but my voice wasn’t projecting. The director turned to his first assistant, his face contorted. “What’s he say?”
“He said that dolphins are not horses!”
The director turned on me furiously, hands on hips and his shoulders hunched forward. The assistant director had told him what I said but not how I said it.
I walked out to the end of the dock, closer to the director, cupped my mouth, and yelled again, “I’m very sorry, sir, but I have no control over Flipper when she is not hungry. When Flipper is not hungry, we’re shut down.”
Jimmy Pergola, the camera operator, cut in. “That’s what we tried to tell you.”
The director’s head was bobbing around like it was on a string. His voice wavering, he said, “Do you mean to tell me that I must wait—I must wait for an animal to get hungry?”
“That’s about the size of it, sir,” I said.
With a heavy twist to each word, he replied, “And when do you think your animal will be hungry enough to perform?”
I looked at my watch. “Around noon,” I said.
He smacked his lips. “You are the animal trainer, aren’t you?”
“Allow me to correct you, sir.” I said. “I’m the dolphin trainer.”
“And allow me to correct you, sir,” the director said with withering sarcasm. “That dolphin is the trainer. He’s got us all eating out of his hands.”
Flipper episodes were written by a number of talented people, but the most prominent, perhaps, was Andy White, who had written for Sea Hunt and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. He was in his fifties, gray-haired and soft-spoken. I had been told that he would be heading out to talk to me about dolphins, but I didn’t know when. The part of my job I enjoyed the most was telling the top people in the Flipper organization about dolphins. It was a hot summer day, and Kathy was lolling around in the water near the end of the pier where I was hanging out. I was trying to decide whether to keep sitting there or to slip into the water myself when Andy came up, waved from the shore, and headed out. I was about to stand up and shake hands, but as soon as he got to me he took off his shoes and socks, sat down, and stuck his feet in the water. “Ahhh!” he said with pleasure. “This sure beats L.A.”
I laughed. “I hear that a lot. They told me you might drop by to see the dolphins.”
He nodded. “I spend most of my time in an office, trying to imagine things like this.” He gazed around in wonder. “Just think: no smog!” He laughed. “I thought if I could see what a dolphin could really do, it might help me with plot ideas.”
“And you might be surprised,” I said, “but I might get some good ideas from you, too. Come on, let’s go.”
“Ric,” he said with a plaintive look, “could we just sit here and talk a minute? I just put my feet in the water.” He wiggled his toes.
I laughed and sat down with him, and we talked about some of the Flipper stories he had written, the ones he liked the best and the ones he was thinking about writing. We’re all in this together, he said at one point, and it can only help if we know what everyone else is thinking. I told him that I took special pride in getting Flipper to do any trick he could imagine, and that so far it had all been possible. “Not because of me, necessarily,” I said, “but sometimes, I think, in spite of me.” I hesitated, because you don’t say things closest to your heart to just anyone. “We work with dolphins all the time, and it may be,” I ventured, “that if you understood a little more about them and could get a feel for their amazing potential, you might be open to even more imaginative stories.”
His ears perked up. I told him about how quickly they caught on to the little tricks we expected of them and that many dolphin trainers, including me, had said they had the feeling that there was a lot more to dolphins than what we were making contact with, that sometimes the relationship was—I stopped and glanced sharply at him. You can’t talk to everybody like this. Most people maintain such a desperate grip on reality that they don’t dare consider the possibility of other worlds. But Andy understood the world of feelings and the world of possibilities. He realized that I wasn’t making extravagant claims about dolphins. I had no evidence for that—no acceptable evidence, anyway.
But what if—and this was my point—what if our idea of evidence was wrong? What if we should trust our feelings about some things? What if it were true, in other words, that they could read not our minds, though that’s not impossible, but our souls? That they were way ahead of us and urging us on? What evidence would count in proving any of that? I don’t remember how much of this I put into words, but Andy was silent for a long moment, then he put on his shoes and socks and said, “Let’s go. I’d like to see some of this myself.”
We walked over to the fish house. I got a bucket of fish and, walking back to the lake, I said, “I’ll show you a few things we can do.”
He grinned and said, “You said ‘we’—things ‘we’ can do.”
“I just talk that way,” I said. “I meant Kathy and I, of course. Or maybe I should say just Kathy. Or do I mean just Flipper?”
Andy laughed. “I understand, Ric. Or I think I do.”
We went back to Flipper’s Lake and out onto the floating dock, and there Kathy and I went through practically every trick we knew. It was like the Top Deck Show, but Kathy did it all herself It was a one-dolphin three-ring circus, with Kathy jumping, diving, flipping and flopping, tossing balls in the air, and playing catch with both Andy and me. Above us were fifteen or twenty seagulls gliding around in various orbits and squealing like pigs. I noticed one especially high that was poised for dive-bombing. I tossed a chunk of fish in his path, and he came screaming through, caught it in his mouth, and swooped up again into the sky. Andy got a hallelujah look on his face. “That’s amazing,” he said. “The seagulls, you feed them, too?”
“To keep ’em around, sure.”
“Beautiful,” Andy White said.
“They add something.”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “Atmosphere.” He was beaming at me. “That’s the kind of thing I was looking for.”
“Here’s something else for you,” I said. I gave the signal for a tailwalk to Kathy. This signal is a broad movement like a baseball pitcher hauling off to throw the ball. When Kathy sees that, she rears up out of the water as high as she can, all except her tail, which she beats furiously like an outboard motor. Then, still beating her tail, she leans backward. But instead of falling down, she travels across the water on her tail. The tailwalk is one of the dolphin’s most truly amazing tricks. Many of the dolphin’s tricks are variations of what they do in nature. But not the tailwalk. To do that, dolphins have to work at it, building up the muscles in their tails. Like any other athletes, they must condition themselves and practice.
“Amazing,” Andy said.
“Watch this,” I said. Kathy came back, and I gave her another signal, both of my hands about head high, palms out, and she did the taildance, a variation of the tailwalk. Instead of traveling backward, Kathy rose up out of the water, beating her tail as she did before, but this time she stayed in one place.
“Incredible,” Andy said. “How do you do that?”
“The only difference in teaching the two tricks,” I said, “is where I toss the fish. In the taildance, I toss it to where she is; in the tailwalk, I toss it slightly over her head. When she comes up on her tail, she’s really just trying to reach the fish I throw.”
Andy cocked his head and got an impish expression. “Could she do that wearing a hula skirt?”
It had never been done before, but if I could get her to wear the hula skirt, it would be simple. “Sure,” I said. “Want me to work on it?”
“How long would it take you?”
“Not long.”
Actually, it took only a few minutes, if you don’t count the time it took me to get things ready far Kathy. Here’s how I did it:
First, I got an old automobile inner tube. In my office, I had dozens of things like that, dolphin playthings like floating toys, beach balls, wind-up fish, and anything they might want to amuse themselves with. I kept them busy playing all the time so that they wouldn’t become bored. Bored dolphins tend to get sick. My only concern, like that of any parent, was to make sure I didn’t give them anything with a sharp point or so small that they might swallow it. I had an open-ended expense account for items like this, and I was forever buying toys and writing Flipper’s name on them. What happened to all these things? Souvenir hunters. I didn’t mind when they walked off with them. It was the best advertising we had. I got the inner tube and taped the valve so that Kathy wouldn’t scratch herself on it. I was on the end of the dock with my bucket of fish. I held one of the chunks of fish a little above the inner tube, and Kathy, a very bright girl, got the idea immediately. She poked her snout up through the inner tube and got the fish.
RIC: Good! She’s catching on fast. Must be hungry.
KATHY: Hey! Pretty good! I put my snout in the inner tube and the Fish-guy gave me a fish. Is this another one of his games? And if so, I wonder if it will work again. (She tries it.)
RIC: She’s catching on very fast! Good, I’ll give her another one to keep her interest up.
KATHY: Eureka! This is like a money machine. I poke my head through the inner tube and the Fish-guy gives me a fish. Now the question is, how long, oh Lord, how long will this go on?
RIC: This is easier than I thought it would be. I was afraid at first she might shy off putting her snout in the inner tube. But if she was afraid of the inner tube, she’s over it now. Look at her, poking her head up through the inner tube! I’ll feed her again just to let her know that I approve. And now look! She’s doing it twice as fast! But that’s not really what I wanted. I want her to come on through. (She sticks her head through and gets nothing.)
KATHY: Now what?
RIC: If I hold the fish just a little higher above her head, maybe she’ll get the idea.
KATHY: Maybe if I wiggle my head a little coming through, that’ll start things up again. (Kathy sticks her snout through the inner tube and wiggles her head.)
RIC: That was odd, wiggling her head like that. Wonder if she’s getting tired. Come on, Kathy, don’t give up. Here’s the fish. Come and get it.
KATHY: What’s he doing, anyway, holding the fish so far away? Does he think I’ll do anything for a piece of fish? So, OK, I’ll see if this is what it’s all about. (Desperately seeking the fish formula, she now sticks her head a little farther through the inner tube.)
RIC: Aha! Good! Here’s two chunks of fish for you.
KATHY: Aha! I think I’ve got the Fish-guy figured out. (Kathy sticks her head all the way through, and Ric tosses three fish chunks.)
KATHY: Ah! The magic button! Now watch me get the whole bucket! (Kathy puts her whole head and pectoral fins through the inner tube till it catches on her dorsal fin in back.)
RIC: What a piece of luck! (He tosses her three fish chunks again.)
KATHY: The jackpot! He’s a little cheap, but, let’s face it, he’s all I’ve got.
By this time, Kathy was ready for the tailwalk while wearing the inner tube. When she came up the next time, virtually wearing the inner tube, I gave her the sign for the tailwalk, which she already knew how to do. When she saw the hand signal, she knew what she would have to do for the chunk of fish, so up she went, her tail beating the water to a froth, and then back she went, walking on her tail while wearing the big, black inner tube.
At the end of the tailwalk, Kathy usually splashed into the water, but wearing the inner tube, when she fell back, she bounced back to her tail again. I laughed. I always tried to be open with Kathy and the other dolphins. If I felt something, I expressed it. I wanted them to know how things were going. The worst thing that can happen to a dolphin is to perform and not know whether it’s any good or not. Like anyone else, they need approval, which means chunks of fish, but it’s more than that. Especially in this alien environment, they need constant feedback. I always tried to be with them and to let them know where they stood. When Kathy bounced back to her tail, I laughed to show her that it was funny, sure, but also that I loved her and that she was OK. “Don’t be alarmed,” my laughter said. She shrugged herself back out of the inner tube and came racing over to me, and I showered her with fish chunks.
The inner tube was too fat to be used with a hula skirt, but it was good as a training tool. I called the prop room and got a plastic hula-hoop, cut out a section, and put it back together so that it was about forty-five inches around, just large enough for Kathy to wiggle into. The prop department also had several hula skirts. I put one of them on the hula hoop and left it in the water with Kathy so that she could get used to it. She nosed around it a little, making sure it was OK, then with the offer of a chunk of fish, I got her to come up through the hula hoop with the hula skirt attached just as she had with the inner tube.
She came up through the hula hoop, got her flippers over it, and was wearing the hula skirt, then I gave her the tailwalking sign and back she went, laughing as she always did, which is exactly what Andy White wanted.
That trick appeared in “Flipper Joins the Circus,” which was the story of how Flipper and the Ricks boys put on a circus in the neighborhood to raise money for a worthy cause.
We followed the same principle in “300 Feet Below.” The story, originally written by executive producer Ivan Tors himself, is about a doctor sailing in the Keys who happens to fall over the side, where he is attacked by a shark. Bleeding profusely, the doctor manages to crawl back into the sailboat, where he radios the Coast Guard for help. He manages to apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but he’s already lost a lot of blood. On the radio, he reports that he needs a transfusion: four pints of type A blood. Time is short, but there’s enough time for the Coast Guard helicopter to reach him. The trip by helicopter would take about an hour.
Ranger Porter Ricks is aboard the helicopter when the call comes through, and the crew goes into action. Already near the hospital in Miami, they call, order the plasma, land on the roof, and pick it up, then off they fly at full speed down the coast till they spot the doctor’s sailboat. But as they lower the plasma to the doctor—disaster! The sailboat lurches and the line gets tangled in the rigging, and the package comes loose and falls into the water, then sinks to the bottom, 300 feet below. The Coast Guardsmen are appalled. They can’t fly back to Miami for more plasma, then all the way back to the boat. There’s no time for that. Indeed, there isn’t enough time even to radio for a second helicopter to pick up another package of plasma and make the hour-long trip.
These are anxious moments, but Sandy, listening to the drama at home on his own receiver, has an idea. He breaks in with a suggestion: if they buzz by and pick up him and Flipper, just fifteen minutes away, Flipper could dive down and retrieve the package of blood plasma.
But will it work? Will Flipper understand what they want him to do? That’s the story’s real question, the problem of interspecies communication.
Earlier in the show, we saw Flipper playing with an ammunition box he had found in the water, a box like the one that holds the plasma. The ammunition box was in the skiff back at the house with Flipper. The rescuers fly back in the helicopter to the Ricks home, put Flipper in a sling, and hoist him aboard, then Sandy picks up the ammunition box and off they fly to the sailboat.
En route, Sandy shows Flipper the ammunition box, then points straight down. Flipper doesn’t understand at first. He cocks his head to one side, puzzled. Sandy tries again. And this time, Flipper understands. He bobs his head up and down and chatters excitedly.
“He’s got it! He knows what we want!” Sandy tells the Coast Guardsmen. “But I’ll go in the water with him to make sure.
The arrival at the sailboat was to be the big scene. The helicopter could have hovered within a few feet of the water and Flipper could have made a nonspectacular dive into the ocean. But that’s not very good theater. So we went up fifteen feet, and there Flipper and I (stunt-doubling for Sandy) were scheduled to take the plunge.
I jumped, sure. That was my job. But did we actually drop Flipper out of the helicopter into the bay?
That was never even considered. Not that she would have swum away. I think Susie, Kathy, Patty, Squirt, and Scottie, the whole gang, would have come back. But we weren’t about to take such a risk. We needed a stand-in dolphin. We had a fiberglass dolphin and a frozen dolphin we could have used. These were props. The frozen dolphin had been in the fish freezer for years. Where it came from, nobody knew. It might have been found dead on a beach somewhere, or it could have died at the Seaquarium. We had used these two props in close-ups before, when Flipper was supposedly charging into the belly of a tiger shark.
But dropping the props from a helicopter? No, that wouldn’t do. I was talking to Ricou about it.
“I don’t like it either,” he said. “But what else?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, snapping my fingers. “You don’t pay me for bright ideas, but I’ve got one anyway.”
Ricou frowned. He hated unnecessary dialogue.
“Jimmy Kline,” I said cryptically, rolling my eyes.
“Well? What about Jimmy Kline? You’re not suggesting that. . .”
“No,” I said, half smiling at the thought. “No, we can’t dress Jimmy Kline up like Flipper and dump him over the side. But he says he has a dolphin he’s going to release. Maybe we can use him.”
I happened to have run into Jimmy in the snack bar earlier that week, where he was hunched over his coffee smoking a cigarette, and I had asked him how his new crop of dolphins were. They needed new dolphins from time to time in the Top Deck Show and the collecting boat simply went out and got them. They’re all OK, Jimmy told me, except for one. This sometimes happened. Some dolphins simply refused to perform in captivity. Usually, they were the older ones. “So far,” he said, “all we’ve been able to train him to do is eat.”
That was a standard joke among the divers.
When I told Ricou about it, he gave me the go-ahead, and I called Jimmy and lined it up. “Sure,” he said. “He’s all yours.”
Roger Conklin, a big, friendly man with a flair for public speaking and storytelling, was head of public relations at Miami Seaquarium. When he heard about the story we were shooting, he saw a news tie-in. “Miami Seaquarium to Release Flipper,” he headlined a release.
A newsman from WTVJ, a television station that Wometco then owned, came out to check on it. He spotted me out by the small training pool and came over with his mike in hand, grinning. His TV camera running, he asked, “Surely you’re not going to set Flipper free, are you?”
“That’s right,” I said, pointing at the old male we were going to release. “This dolphin is a stunt-dolphin double.”
“He’ll fill in for Flipper in the drop?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s his name?”
Nobody had named the dolphin yet, so I gave him the first name that popped into my head. “His name is Ricou.” I said.
It made the evening news.
When we got aboard the helicopter for the drop, I was ready to double for Sandy. I was wearing his cut-off blue jeans, a polo shirt, and white sneakers. At first, when I did stunts for Sandy, I wore a wig. But wigs always look like wigs. My hair is naturally curly, so I made the supreme sacrifice and had my hair straightened and dyed blond.
We caught the old male dolphin, and once we were in the U.S. Coast Guard jet helicopter, I covered his eyes with a towel when we took off and rode right beside him. We circled above Biscayne Bay and got into position.
The drop was scheduled for 9 A.M. Aboard the helicopter were the camera operator and his assistant; Ben Chapman, the production manager; and me with Ricou the dolphin and a fiberglass dolphin in case something went wrong. Ben, who was in charge of production costs, had the earphones on and was connected by walkie-talkie with everyone else. There were two boats with camera crews, a formula race boat near the drop, a second boat for long shots, each with a two- or three-man camera crew, and the barge, where the real Ricou was, with yet another camera and crew, the script clerk, and the assistant director, as well as water-safety experts and a paramedic, who was always available on tricky shots like this one.
As we circled off camera, Ben, getting word from Ricou below, held his hand up as a signal to the pilot, then he made a short, chopping movement of his hand and said, “Let’s go.” We swooped in and hovered about fifteen feet above the spot, then Ben and I pushed Ricou the dolphin out, followed by me, feet first. It worked the first time. It was shown from several camera angles, but on the film it lasted twenty seconds.
Later that night after the drop, Ricou called me on the phone and said he had watched the TV news where I had named the dolphin after him. “I guess that was because he was big and strong and very bright,” Ricou said.
“Not really,” I replied. “He was stubborn as a mule, and just as ornery.”
I’ll never forget the day I finally taught Susie to throw a fish into the boat. It was November 22, 1963. I had been puzzling for some time about how to get such a complicated idea over to her. The story in Flipper’s New Adventure involves Sandy adrift in a skiff far at sea, helpless and dying of hunger. Flipper finds him at last, catches a blue runner, and tosses it into the boat for him. This was complicated, because usually, when Susie had a fish in her mouth, it went only one way: down. The problem was getting her to throw the fish instead of swallowing it. I thought at first we should work with an imitation blue runner, figuring that when she learned to throw the fake fish, I could switch her over to the real one. So I put in an order for some.
The special effects department at MGM sent me half a dozen rubber blue runners, perfect in every detail. Or so I thought. Susie was not impressed. She caught on to the fact that I wanted her to throw it back into the boat, but her performance lacked something—enthusiasm. I began to have second thoughts. If Susie didn’t get the connection between the rubber fish and a real one, wouldn’t I have the same problem about her eating the fish instead of throwing it when I switched to the real fish? In short, was I wasting a lot of time with this imitation fish?
Determined to settle this once and for all, late that morning I grabbed Flipper’s bucket and headed for the skiff
“Where are you going?” Luke asked as I went by.
“I’m going to try something different,” I said.
“You are? Can I go?”
“Sure,” I said.
We got in the skiff, and I paddled out to the middle, followed by Susie.
“Exactly how are you going to do this?” Luke asked.
“When in doubt, I turn to Ricou’s Common Sense Method,” I said.
He thought that over. “What does that mean?”
“That,” I said, “remains to be seen. But maybe I’ve made it more complicated than it needs to be. Now, let me think this through. In some ways, this trick—throwing a fish into the boat—is like any other trick. When Susie does what I want her to do, I give her a reward. The reward is a fish. And that’s what complicates this trick, because in this case, the trick is not to eat the fish, which is what she does with her reward fish, but to throw it. See the difference?”
Luke gave me a puzzled look. “I’m not sure,” he said, “But maybe Susie does.”
“Anyway,” I said. “I asked myself what I’ve been doing wrong.” Nodding solemnly, I jabbed at my head with my index finger. “And I think—but why talk about it? Let’s see if it works!”
Susie was at the end of the skiff. I had a blue runner in one hand, two blue runners in the other. When Susie opened her mouth, I put one of the blue runners into it. Before she could swallow it, however, I flipped it into the boat. Then, quickly, I gave her two blue runners to eat.
Susie was amazed but delighted. In my research of what goes on in the mind of a dolphin, I established that one of the dolphin paradigms goes like this: A fish in the mouth is worth two in the bucket. In this case, I was teaching Susie a variation that went, “One in the boat equals two in the mouth.”
Two fish for one was a game Susie would play all day. I did it several times, putting the blue runner into her mouth, then flipping it into the boat and giving her two fish to eat.
Finally, the crucial moment came. She opened her mouth, and I put a blue runner into it, and instead of flipping it out, I gave her the signal to “throw” it: both hands straight out, palms up, then bringing the hands straight up to the shoulders. Susie, waiting for me to flip the fish out and give her two fish for the one, didn’t know what to think at first. Then suddenly, in a moment of genius or desperation, she flipped her head and tossed the blue runner into the boat. “Yo!” I cried. That’s what I wanted! And I let her know it! I gave her three blue runners!
Then I turned around to Luke, grinning, and he grinned back. “Is that pretty good, or what?” I said.
“That’s pretty good!” he said.
The rest was easy. In simple, commonsense stages, I gradually changed the trick so that instead of putting the blue runner into her mouth, I put it into the water. Then I worked on getting Susie to throw the fish perfectly into the boat. Suddenly, I realized that Susie was not just learning to do a scene in a movie. She was practically fishing for me. If I had wanted her to, Susie would have caught the blue runner herself, a live one, and thrown it in the boat for me.
This was so good, I could hardly wait to tell the others. This was more than just a new trick; it was a dolphin breakthrough. Quickly, I rowed Luke and myself back to the dock and tied up, then headed toward the snack shop, elated, where I was sure to see some people I could tell. I was walking on air, but on the way, a woman from the front office went by, a handkerchief to her face, crying. “What’s the matter?” I asked. She shook her head—she couldn’t speak—and walked on hurriedly.
“This is bizarre,” I thought. I was almost at the snack shop when a man hurried by, his face a mask of anger. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“The president has been shot.”
I was stunned. “John Kennedy?”
“Yes,” he said, shaking his head miserably. “And I think he’s dead.”
“Damn.” I said. I don’t remember what happened after that, except that I told nobody about Susie’s new trick and the dolphin breakthrough. It didn’t seem important anymore.
Florida was to be represented at the 1964 New York World’s Fair with a pavilion featuring trained dolphins from Miami Seaquarium. Eight new dolphins had been captured for the honor and were put into a new tank, which was the same size as the one to be built in New York, twenty by fifty by ten feet, complete with a feeding platform like the one in the Main Tank.
These dolphins could be taught the old standard tricks—leaps, jumping through hoops, wearing hats, and playing such games as basketball and bowling—but we were always on the lookout for a dolphin with a special talent, something that could become the basis of a new trick.
One day while working with Susie on Flipper’s New Adventure, I glanced over into the New York Tank to see what the new dolphins were like, and something caught my eye. One of them was playing with a feather. To keep from becoming bored, dolphins play with anything that happens to fall into their tank. And there were always feathers, because the tank was near a stand of sixty-foot-high Australian pines, which were full of waterbirds: cranes, pelicans, gosset hawks, seagulls. What caught my eye was not that the dolphin was playing with a feather—they did that all the time—but the way he was playing with it. He was shooting a little jet of water out of his mouth at it, spitting water about five inches, tchoo-tchoo-tchoo, to drive the feather from one end of the pool to the other. My bucket of fish was handy, so I tossed the dolphin a fish, and he did it again!
When Jimmy Kline, who was in charge of the eight new dolphins, noticed the one that was squirting a jet of water, now about six inches long, his eyes bugged out. He tossed the dolphin a fish, too, and suddenly the jet of water became nearly a foot long. The more Jimmy rewarded the dolphin, the longer the jet of water got. Finally, the dolphin was squirting a stream of water three feet long!
A dolphin that squirts water three feet is a novelty, perhaps, but not in itself an act. If Jimmy Kline had a gift, it was gnawing at an idea till it became an act of pure kitsch. Finally, it came to him: fire!
Jimmy made a fire in a hibachi grill next to the pool and got the dolphin to squirt his three-foot stream of water on it and put it out. That was creative, entertaining, and potentially useful, but would it go in New York City? Jimmy had his doubts. From my vantage point at Susie’s pool, I watched with fascination over the weeks as Jimmy elaborated on his gimmick, finally putting the fire in a two-story dollhouse open at the back. Then the master’s touch: a skit. An announcer described the situation:
“Fire! Fire! The house is on fire! What can we do?”
Smoke is pouring out of the dollhouse.
“Hold on!” the announcer says. “Help is on the way!”
A siren wails! Bells clang! And now, rushing across the water, comes a dolphin to the rescue! With—what’s that on his head? It looks like—yes, it is—a fireman’s hat! The dolphin screeches to a stop at the edge of the pool. And phrewewewew! A stream of water three feet long, a perfect shot, puts out the fire and saves the house.
The crowd loved it, and so did the dolphin, for he circled the tank to admiring applause and came back for an extra Spanish mackerel.
When I read the script that involved Flipper’s having to swim into an underwater cave, I knew it would not be easy. The story was about Sandy scuba diving at the Tongue of the Ocean and darting into an underwater cave to escape from a hungry shark. But Sandy, waiting till the shark leaves, is running out of air. Flipper discovers Sandy’s plight, kills the shark, and swims into the cave to pull Sandy out to safety, letting him hold onto her dorsal fin.
Killing the shark is simple. We did that with plastic mock-ups. And the rescue, Flipper pulling Sandy out with her dorsal fin, is routine. But getting Flipper to swim into the underwater cave was something else. I wanted her to swim up to the opening, look inside, and then swim in. Two cameras would be stationed underwater, one outside the cave entrance and one just inside to show Flipper actually swimming in.
Usually, the only difficult part in training dolphins is to think of the right way to communicate what you want the dolphin to do. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy. But not in this case. Kathy knew exactly what I wanted her to do, but she didn’t want to do it. She was afraid to.
This was one of the few underwater scenes we shot at the Seaquarium. Set designers at the North Miami studio made the cave of fiberglass. It was gray and craggy-looking, with an opening about 4½ feet in diameter. They hauled it to the New York Tank on the Seaquarium grounds, where the scene was to be shot. I looked it over when they were making it. I always checked everything the dolphins came in contact with, making sure there were no sharp edges or anything sticking out, like a nail. I ran my hand along all the surfaces. The construction was OK. But the idea of the cave itself had lots of scary things about it—scary to Kathy.
Kathy had been in the tank with the fiberglass cave for several days so that she would get used to it, and day by day, I had edged her closer to the cave entrance. Finally, it was time, I thought, to get serious. We were both about eight feet underwater in the tank, I in scuba gear and with a bag of fish chunks, Kathy going up for a breath of air every thirty seconds or so and hovering near me and the fish chunks. I swam over to the cave opening, she followed, and I thrust my arm into the cave, a signal for her to go in. She didn’t move. I did it again. Nothing. I moved a little closer and tried the arm thrust again, very authoritatively. She wouldn’t budge. Then I swam inside the cave myself to show her there was nothing to be afraid of. She still wouldn’t move. I tapped on my metal air bottle with my ring, the signal for her to come. She tried but got to the entrance and stopped.
Over the years, I had spent hundreds of dollars on all sorts of sophisticated electronic equipment for signaling the dolphins, but in the end I settled on the simple little “cricket.” It’s a small curved metal toy usually painted like a cricket, and has a stiff metal underpart that goes “click” when you press it. It used to cost about a penny. When I clicked it, it meant to come or, sometimes, that I was about to give another signal.
I had my cricket with me. I got it out and pressed it. That never failed. But it failed now. Then I tried to lure her in with fish chunks. I held them up enticingly. She held her ground, and I was beginning to wonder if this was the trick that couldn’t be done.
Dolphins refuse to do tricks usually because the price isn’t right. The dolphin is saying, “No thanks. Not now. I’m full.”
That kind of refusal is temporary. In a few hours, the dolphin will be hungry again and will jump at the chance to do the trick.
But when I tried to get Kathy to go into the cave, she was refusing in a very different way. She was saying with every fiber in her body, “Never!”
I knew that I was asking her to go against her instincts. Dolphins have an instinctive fear of underwater openings, the same as our fear of falling, of snakes, and of sudden noises. Why do dolphins have such fears? I’m not sure. Maybe when she sonars a cave, the return signals are jumbled in a scary way, possibly outlining the shape of some hideous ancient thing in the water. Of course, she knew that there was nothing hideous or ancient in the water, or I wouldn’t have been there, but if you don’t trust your instincts, what can you trust? Perhaps, more simply, dolphins fear being trapped underwater. For a long time, I thought it was their fear of drowning. If human beings and almost all other vertebrates (including even lizards and birds) are trapped underwater, they finally drown. They have a dive reflex that causes them to breathe involuntarily. When their sensors detect a certain level of carbon dioxide in the blood and a low level of oxygen, it’s automatic. They breathe water and drown. But dolphins and other whales have their sensors at different thresholds and will die before they are forced to breathe. That means that when dolphins get trapped in tuna nets, they don’t drown—which is to suck water into your lungs—they suffocate to death, holding their breath. That, not fear of drowning, was what made Kathy refuse to go into the cave.
I never questioned whether I should get dolphins to do tricks or not. I resolved this early on, deciding with my own set of instincts that if I didn’t do my job somebody else would. I made sure the trick was safe, and then I did everything I could to get the dolphins to go along.
I was inside the cave, so I swam back outside with Kathy. She went up for a breath of air and came back down. I put my arm around her back just above the dorsal fin. She was trembling and very nervous, going one way and the other. Scared to death.
Kathy never conquered her fear, but on the ninth day she swam into the cave with me despite it. With my arm around her tightly, I swam into the cave with her, then we turned and swam slowly back out. I let her go, and she popped to the surface. So did I. And I rewarded her lavishly with fish. We did the trick again, this time Kathy all alone. I notified Ricou, the director, who had had the underwater crew on standby and ready for days. He called the camera operators, and everybody eased into the water and got ready, then Kathy, still trembling, did the trick a final time for the cameras. I was happy that I never had to ask her to do that trick again.