The dolphin is swifter than a bird and he hurls himself forward in the water faster than an arrow launched from a powerful machine.
PLINY THE ELDER, GREEK NATURALIST
AS THE TELEVISION SERIES wore on, the dolphins tended to get rougher with the actors and others in the water. It was like play, but scarier. The dolphins came up under anyone in the water, divers and crew members alike, unexpectedly brushing past them without warning or slapping their tails on the water threateningly. Tail slapping, the dolphin’s style of assertiveness, has the same effect as someone pounding his fist on the table. It doesn’t hurt—the dolphins never hurt anybody—but it gets your attention. Unmistakably a threat, tail slapping kept the actors and crew on their toes, yes, but it also interfered with their work, especially in the case of the actors, who obviously couldn’t show their fear.
Toward the end of the first year’s series of TV shows, the problem became serious with Susie. We got the feeling she was testing us, going a little further all the time, like a spoiled kid looking for limits. And she was spoiled. All the Flipper dolphins were spoiled. From the beginning, they realized how important they were to us and knew as if by instinct how to bargain and manipulate us down to the penny’s worth. But it was more than that, especially later on. It was frustration, I thought, the frustration of being at odds with one’s true nature.
One day, we were about to shoot a scene of Flipper bringing a starfish to Tommy. He would take the starfish, pat Flipper on the head, and say, “Thanks, Flipper. That will do just right!”
When Tommy started to climb down into the water, he stopped halfway. I was there with my bucket of fish, as always, and Tommy asked me apprehensively, “How does he feel today?”
He wanted to know if he was safe with Susie.
If we had thought that it was dangerous for Tommy to go into the water, we wouldn’t have let him go in. Safety came first. But right on the heels of safety was our concern that Tommy might show his fear of Flipper. Susie, in fact, had been feisty all morning, but I couldn’t tell that to Tommy.
“She’s OK,” I said, smiling with confidence. Then I did my best to mollify her, tossing her lots of fish.
Susie’s bad attitude was not her fault. She had been trained to expect a reward immediately after doing a trick. But in scenes where that was impossible, Susie got angry. Then the tail slap: Whamp! Or she would rush up to you and splash you with water or hit your forearm with her snout or push you around and cut you off from shore as if in an excess of play. The rush and splash is the way dolphins off the coast of Georgia herd mullet and other fish into the shallows so that they can be picked off. Susie never hurt anybody in her whole life, but she could scare the hell out of you. When she didn’t get fed after doing a trick, she thought she was being teased. Ricou and I knew what was going on, but there was nothing we could do about it. Gradually, I phased her out, replacing her with Kathy. When Luke or Tommy climbed into the water, they asked,
“Which one is it today? Susie, or Kathy?”
When I told them that it was Kathy, they breathed a sigh of relief.
Learning from the mistake I had made with Susie, I taught Kathy not to expect an immediate reward for doing a trick.
Before I switched to Kathy, I tried Patty. That was a mistake. She was even more aggressive than Susie. We were in the middle of shooting a scene, and it wasn’t going right because Patty kept slapping her tail. The director called me aside:
“Can’t you do something about that?” He had a round face, pink from the sun, and a fringe of thin, blond hair. He ran a hand over his scalp and squinted at me. “That too much to ask?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” I said, shaking my head helplessly.
“Aren’t you the dolphin trainer?”
He knew that I was. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Then why haven’t you trained him? We can’t have this.” He frowned. “Is there a problem I don’t know about?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Look at us!” He threw his arms out wide. “We’re stopped! Your dolphin has stopped everything! Am I getting through to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent.” He nodded his head. “Now I really don’t care about how you solve this problem, so don’t tell me about it, please, but—have you ever heard the expression ‘On with the show’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what it means, don’t you?”
When people in authority resort to condescension or sarcasm, that means they’re losing control, and I tend to go military, head and eyes straight ahead. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good. Then I want to know when we can go on with the show.”
I told him it would take me a couple of hours, that I would have to switch Kathy for Patty.
“Two hours, then.” He checked his wristwatch. It was 10 A.M. “You’ll be ready by noon?”
“Yes, sir.”
His head was bobbing. “One more thing. You say that’s Patty in there now?”
I nodded.
“I don’t want to work with Patty—ever again. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Even Ricou asked me what was wrong with Patty. “She’s got the boys scared to death of her.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
He looked at me from afar. “You are the dolphin trainer.”
But I couldn’t do a thing with Patty except retire her from swimming with people. She alone of all the dolphins loved to travel, though, and so she became the mascot of the Miami Dolphins football team during the early days at the Orange Bowl.
You can’t really punish a dolphin. Except for one time, which I painfully regretted, I never even tried. I looked on my job as teaching, the main part of which is gaining the learner’s cooperation. Learning is something you’ve got to want to do. And that means sweetening the pot. If you don’t want to jump through a hoop, maybe you’ll want to for a fish. That’s true whether you’re a dolphin, a student, or a middle-level manager. It’s called operant conditioning, and in subtle hands, it can steal your very soul.
Since food is so important to dolphins, it might seem that you could withhold their food and force them to follow orders. But that doesn’t work. Mistreated, the dolphin becomes a titan of individuality. He might even kill himself. Dr. Lilly reports that a number of his experimental dolphins once dived to the bottom of their tank and wouldn’t come up. He suggests that dolphins may consider suicide an acceptable solution to an unacceptable life. In that same report, incidentally, Dr. Lilly suggests, or allows the reader to infer, that this incident occurred when the dolphins read his mind and realized that he was about to cancel his experiments with them.
Although I was their trainer, their friend, and special envoy to the world of human beings, the dolphins who played Flipper nevertheless pushed me around about as much as anyone else. But I always thought I understood the reason for it and didn’t take exception. Except once. Patty had gone too far, and frankly, I was glad it finally happened, because it gave me an excuse to do something about it. I went to Jordan Kline, an underwater engineer and photographer who owned a dive ship in Miami. He made amazing underwater devices of all sorts. “Could you make a dolphin prod?” I asked him.
“You mean, like a cattle prod?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Give me a week. I’ll get back to you.”
A week later, he called and said he had something. I went out to his shop. He handed me a tube about two feet long, like a policeman’s billy club. On the business end were two silver knobs, at the other end a red button. I held the prod in one hand and bounced it in the other. “Have you tested it?”
“I looked for volunteers, but there were none,” he said, “so I tried it out on myself.”
“And?”
“It works.”
“What’s it like?”
“Like sticking your finger in a light socket.”
I smiled. “I’ll take it.”
“When the two silver knobs make contact,” he said, “you push the button.”
I took it into the water with Patty several times but couldn’t get it to work. I probably didn’t want it to. I was about to take it back to the shop and get it worked on again when I walked by some of the divers at the reef tank.
“That the shock stick?” Dave asked. He was intrigued by anything that might keep the dolphins in line. “I heard about it. How does it work?”
“It doesn’t,” I said.
“Let me see it,” Doug Bonham said. “You probably just don’t know how.” Doug had gone through the same diving school I had, the Divers Training Academy, and had taken my place in the Underwater Show and the Top Deck Show when I went with Flipper.
“I know how it’s supposed to work,” I said. “All you have to do is push this red button right here, and you see these metal contacts down there?” Everyone was leaning in to see. “All I’ve got to do is make contact with these silver points—” and at that moment I touched the contacts to Doug’s knee. He shot up like a rocket about four feet and came down in the reef tank with a big splash.
“I’ve got news for you!” Doug yelled. “It works!”
Years later, I came back to the Miami Seaquarium—I needed to borrow a dolphin (Sharkey) for a movie called Danny and the Mermaid—and the dolphin trainers, all of them attractive young women now, asked me about the shock stick.
“The what?” I had forgotten about it.
“The shock stick,” Joan Caron said. She was the head trainer. “We found it in the stockroom.” She glanced at Sally Roth, her fellow dolphin trainer, then back at me. “Did you use it when you trained Flipper?”
By now, I knew what they were talking about. “Oh, that,” I said. “No. I never used it. I tried it once or twice, but couldn’t get it to work. It was a bad idea. In fact, the only time I ever used it was on Doug Bonham. He jumped about four feet in the air. When he came down, they wanted him to jump with the dolphins four shows a day. He would be a star and get a raise in pay—all the fish he could eat. But you know Doug. He wouldn’t go along with it.”
Though I was never able to get the shock stick to work on Patty, I’ll never forget the one time I did punish her. She was always more belligerent than the other dolphins, rushing at the actors and others in the water, slapping her tail, and giving us the clear signal that she expected more out of life than this.
I had heard about the way she acted, but I was never there when it happened. Then one day, I was there. It happened to me. It was around noon, and I was at one end of Flipper’s Lake, everybody else at the other end shooting a scene. I had waded in with my yellow Flipper bucket to put Patty through a training session, which is the way I fed the dolphins. I was about waist deep when she came over with an unnecessary splash, then dived down and flicked me on the head with her tail. It was quite deliberate.
“Good,” I said. “I’ve waited for this moment.”
The dolphin’s tail is pure muscle. All his life it pumps up and down, never stopping. Even when he’s still in the water, the tail is moving. Patty had turned and headed back. I made a fist, and when she got to me, bang! I hit her on her back, next to the dorsal fin, as hard as I could. It didn’t hurt her. But it gave her a message. “This is me you’re messing around with,” I was saying, “and if this is the way you want to talk about it, that’s fine with me!”
As Patty swam past me, she glanced at me in a new way. Good, I thought. I was tired of being the good guy all the time. And if this worked, well, I hated to admit it, but maybe Dave was right. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? Patty went out to midlake. I watched her dorsal fin cut through the water. She turned briskly. She was heading back. Is she swimming faster than usual? I asked myself The dorsal fin sliced through the water like a knife. I made another fist. “Come and get it, Patty,” I said. “This will be a lesson you will never forget.”
She cut through the water, a torpedo now, then a blur from about three o’clock in the sky, and the next thing I knew I was in Mercy Hospital, a knot on my head. Ricou was there with Jack Cowden. “What happened?” Jack said.
I shook my head, confused. “The last thing I remember, I was disciplining Patty.” I looked around. “How did I get here?”
“Concussion,” Ricou said. “Jack saw you up on the shore. We brought you here.”
“I was up on shore? Don’t kid me, now. The last thing I remember, I was waist-deep.”
Ricou shrugged.
“You know what that could mean?” I said.
“It means you probably staggered up there yourself,” Ricou said.
“Unless Patty pushed me up there?”
Ricou made a disapproving face.
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Nobody saw it, Ric.”
I glanced shrewdly at Ricou. “I think I remember being pushed up there by a dolphin.”
Ricou and Jack exchanged looks; nobody spoke for a long moment.
“I saw you first,” Jack said, “but I didn’t see that.”
“Nobody saw it,” Ricou said flatly.
“You don’t think—”
They were shaking their heads no, and I dropped it. I was kept in the hospital for three days, and during that time I tried to remember if I had staggered up on the beach myself or if Patty, perhaps overcome with remorse at having tail-slapped me, had pushed me there. I decided finally that it could go either way and that, alas, because there were no witnesses, I would never know.
Flipper was one of the friendliest creatures on Earth. He was always laughing, smiling through any adversity or pain. He never complained, either. He was intelligent, helpful, enterprising, and lovable—and sometimes positively psychic.
It might seem, therefore, that all dolphins have an inviolable love affair with human beings. But that’s an overstatement.
If I was a good trainer, it was because of one talent I may have had in more than average amounts: empathy. I thought I could understand the feelings behind the dolphin’s smile. I could tell when they were cooperative, and when they wanted to be left alone.
After the Flipper series, I was the head dolphin trainer in Key Tortuga, an ABC-Paramount Movie of the Week that was shot at the Britannia Beach Hotel & Casino at Nassau’s Paradise Beach. The scene we wanted was simple, a dolphin pulling an actor through the water. The hotel had two dolphins available in its lagoon: Abaco, a female, and her mate, who was called the Big Male. They had been there for years. I chose Abaco to work with because she was obviously more cooperative. In fact, when I first saw the Big Male, I realized that he was suffering from burnout. He was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it any more. Nevertheless, we had a job to do. We blocked him off into a small portion of the lagoon so that we could work with Abaco. And he went off the deep end. The gate to the lagoon was actually a heavy double-plywood door held in place with two-by-fours. The Big Male battered desperately at it with his head.
I had never seen anything like that in my life. I told all the movie people and everybody I saw that the Big Male should be left alone, that he was dangerous. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew that the Big Male had suffered enough, and despite himself, he would hurt someone if they went even a little too far.
I told the hotel manager. He was a young native Bahamian with gleaming black slicked-back hair who wore an expensive silk suit. “What do you want me to do? Can’t just turn him loose. He’s been here longer than I have.” He shook his head and turned the corners of his mouth down. “He’d never make it in the wild.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But ‘he’s not making it now, either. Keeping him in that little lagoon is cruel and inhuman.”
The manager looked puzzled, then smiled. “Inhuman?” He gave an explosive laugh. “But dolphins are inhuman.”
“No,” I corrected him, “you are inhuman. Dolphins are nonhuman.”
The manager shrugged. “Whatever. Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer.”
I left. I didn’t have the answer, either. What we needed was a way to ease dolphins back into their own world again. A kind of repatriation. It’s merely romantic to think that dolphins always hear a clarion call of the wild, that they can go home again anytime they want to. Dolphins who are full of human impressions are virtually cripples. Dolphins who live in human society very long need deprogramming. They are alienated from their true selves. They get used to being pets and having people swim around with them. As they adapt to being hand-fed dead fish, they put aside the skills of survival like catching live fish in the sea and staying clear of sharks. They need time to readapt, to learn how to live with natural dolphins. They need to brush up on their signals and sounds. They need to forget swimming round and round in a tiny tank because in the sea, they will swim mile after mile in a straight line. To make a successful transition from life in the human world to their own, dolphins need a halfway house.
One of the associate producers of the movie seemed to feel a special relationship with the Big Male. On his free time, he used to lie on the edge of the dolphin’s pen and pet him on the head and, strangely enough, reach into his mouth and fondle his tongue. I walked by one day as he was doing this and told him, as I told everybody, that he was tempting fate.
“Really? But we’re friends,” he said.
Then, one day, shortly after that, it happened. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. The Big Male simply closed his mouth on the movie maker’s arm and ripped off most of the skin. It was not an accident; it was absolutely deliberate.
Happily, nobody suggested that the Big Male be punished. After all, I had told them something dreadful like that was sure to happen.