4

— 4 —

For twenty-eight years the son of an Anglican missionary searched for the ancestors of Adam. On hands and knees, as if in prayer, Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey scraped at the crusty soils of Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge with shovel and trowel and dental instruments. With the faith of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, he called to the dead to come out.

Few but he believed, when he began that search in 1931, that the fossilized bones of man’s ancestors would be found beneath African soil. At a time when the prehistoric map of East Africa was practically a blank, most other paleoanthropologists were certain that man had originated in Asia or Europe. But Louis Leakey was convinced that Africa, his own birthplace, was also the cradle of humanity and that the lineage of apelike ancestors leading to man was far longer and more ancient than anyone else dared believe.

At the center of Louis’s convictions was a prodigal faith. He was, above all, a believer: he believed in God’s will, which he credited with directing his life; he believed in “wild” theories, which would eventually revolutionize the study of human origins; and he came to believe in three inexperienced young women, who would transform modern views of both man and ape.

Louis Leakey was world famous when he died in 1972. Responsible for some of the most spectacular fossil finds of the century, he had established Africa as the birthplace of mankind and had proved that the ancestral line leading to humanity was indeed very long. At a South African symposium in Leakey’s honor a year after his death, the eminent paleoanthropologist Philip Tobias said, “No single person has done more to unravel man’s past in Africa than the late Dr. Leakey.”

Louis, more explorer than scientist, was a man in constant motion. He scurried rather than walked, theorizing at every turn. (Though some of his theories proved brilliant and elegant, some were just plain strange: he thought that warthog’s warts evolved as “pincushions” for thorns, and that women could conceive only when their diet contained the elusive “Vitamin X.”) His life was riddled with what many considered paradoxical allegiances. A self-described “White African” (the title of his first autobiography), he attacked white settlers, administrators, and missionaries in his 1935 book, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems. A Biblical scholar, he devoted his career to the study of evolution, which his church decried. “There are some people whose faith in their own belief about God is so feeble that they dare not face the facts of science lest they shatter their religion,” he once wrote; he saw Genesis and evolutionary biology unified in what he called “the One Truth of Creation.” At one time or another he embarrassed almost everyone he knew, from his missionary parents to his Cambridge professors to his scientific colleagues—a feat in which he seemed to take mischievous pride.

His brand of Christianity was prodigal, too. “I don’t need to flop down on my knees to pray,” he sometimes said. “I pray anywhere—everywhere.” Louis did not have his children christened; he believed they should decide for themselves. But on visits to London he nearly always attended a service at St. John’s or King’s Chapel at Cambridge; and in his final days of illness he asked his American friends Hugh and Tita Caldwell to take communion for him at the Wednesday healing service at their Episcopal church.

It was not until late in his career that Louis envisioned studies of the great apes. He was fifty-seven when he sent Jane Goodall into the field, sixty-three when he secured funding for Dian Fossey. By the time he picked Biruté Galdikas to head up his orangutan study, when he was sixty-six, the trend was clear: he favored female protégées. To account for this preference he offered yet another of his “wild theories”: that women are better observers than men.

The idea of long-term, close-range studies of the large primates was new in 1959. “This was something extremely unusual,” remembers his friend Barbara Isaac, an archeologist who was working at the time in Kenya with her husband, Glynn. “Everyone said it couldn’t be done.” When Louis announced the names of the women he’d selected to head the studies, Barbara remembers, “people questioned his mental health.”

For the study on wild chimpanzees Louis picked a twenty-six-year-old former waitress and secretary. For a study of mountain gorillas he chose an occupational therapist who had flunked out of veterinary school. The young woman he selected to head up an orangutan study was a graduate student in anthropology, but that didn’t matter; he chose her on the basis of how she scored on a playing-card test he had devised.

Louis Leakey always defied convention, and he never allowed the experts to deflect him from his beliefs. When he announced to his professors at Cambridge University his plans to search for traces of early man in Africa, they told him the idea was foolish. “Without exception, they told me it was a waste of time to return to Kenya,” Louis later recalled. “I was just being mad.”

But Louis’s destiny was tied to Africa. When he was born, on August 7, 1903, at Lower Kabete, a small village near Nairobi, the Kikuyu neighbors sneaked into his parents’ mud and thatch mission to spit on him. He was the first white baby they had ever seen, and they were eager to bestow on him, with their spittle, the traditional Kikuyu blessing. At age thirteen he was initiated into the Kikuyu tribe.

Even in his old age Louis often thought and dreamed in Kikuyu. He once told an interviewer: “I am African born and bred, with African sensitivities. I happen to be white.”

So in 1926, against all advice, he returned to Kenya. At Gamble’s Cave, his first dig, he promptly found shards of pottery he dated at 20,000 years B.C., four times earlier than the date at which pottery was then presumed to have been made. As Louis planned to announce the finds at an upcoming anthropology conference, his Cambridge supervisor warned him in a letter, “Do not go in for wild hypotheses. These won’t do your work any good and it’s foolish to try to make a splash.”

Advancing wild hypotheses—drawing dramatic and often premature conclusions from his finds—was the hallmark of Louis Leakey’s career. With obvious enjoyment and theatrical flair, he would call press conferences before his findings had been “properly” published; before the assembled reporters he would pull a fossil from a breast pocket and brandish it for dramatic effect. (Once his own PR backfire after he explained to a journalist that his finds were uncovered with dental instruments, the reporter cabled the newspaper: Mr. Leakey Discovers the First Dentist.) His colleagues did not appreciate his bravado. As biographer Sonia Cole wrote in her book Leakey’s Luck, throughout his adult life Louis remained “a needle embedded in the armchair of the ‘experts.’ ” What may have needled them most was that Louis’s wild claims were often right.

In 1931, on his first expedition to Olduvai Gorge, he bet his colleague Hans Reck ten pounds that he would find stone tools on his first day. Within hours Reck had to pay up: Louis had found several ancient hand axes made from basalt lava.

But it would be nearly three decades before Louis found the evidence he was really seeking at Olduvai. Under the shadeless African sun his hair turned from brown to white. He collapsed several times from heat stroke. He persisted under conditions others would consider nightmarish. At Olduvai a party of ten had to drive an hour and then walk eighteen miles to and from the single water source, a hippo wallow that yielded drinking water flavored with the animals’ urine. Fine black dust blew constantly, covering buttered bread before the slice could be brought to the mouth; often rations were so short that the party was reduced to eating rice flavored with marmalade. At another dig, at Kanjera in western Kenya, the field party ate with their trousers tucked into Wellington boots and towels covering their faces to protect them from mosquitoes. Even so, one person killed a hundred mosquitoes on his face during a single meal.

Leakey’s persistent digs uncovered a plethora of fossil material. In 1948 his second wife, Mary, found the first nearly intact skull of the extinct manlike ape known as Proconsul. At Olduvai the Leakeys unearthed stone tools and the skeletons of giant prehistoric animals: giraffes twice as tall as modern ones with horns the size of moose antlers, pigs the size of rhinos, and skeletons of Dinotherium, a cousin of the modern elephant. But for twenty-eight years Leakey found no trace of the being who used stone tools to hunt these animals.

Everything changed on the morning of July 17, 1959. Louis was in bed in his tent at Olduvai with an attack of flu. Mary Leakey went out to the site known as ELK, named, ironically, after Louis’s first wife, Frida. The rains had exposed new bones in the earth. Mary looked closely at one and saw that it was part of an upper jaw. She ran to fetch Louis from bed. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’ve found the man!”

The skull came to be called Zinjanthropus, though the popular press called it “Nutcracker Man” because of its huge teeth. Mary and Louis called the skeleton “our dear boy,” for it was with this find that Louis achieved world fame. The fossil, he concluded, was twice as ancient as human evolution had previously been estimated to be. “Here at last,” said Louis, “was the earliest known man in the world.”

A year after Zinjanthropus came another startling Leakey discovery: the skull, and then parts of the hands and feet, of a prehistoric child. This fossil, of a species Louis named Homo habilis (“Handy Man” as it was called in the press) soon displaced Zinj, in Louis’s opinion, as the direct forerunner to man.

Louis was seeking an answer to one of the central questions of human religion and philosophy: What is man? Where did we come from? Once Leakey was asked by a radio interviewer, “What has kept you going all these years?” He replied, “I want to know: Who am I? What was it that made me what I am?”

Louis realized this question could not be answered by bones and stones alone. The skeletons could reveal what early man looked like; how the bones articulated could show how he might have moved; his tools hinted at his early culture. But as Louis liked to say, “Behavior doesn’t fossilize.” To flesh out the fossilized bones of Adam’s ancestors, Louis proposed long-term, close-up studies of humankind’s closest living relatives—the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan.

With this proposition he alarmed even Mary, who did not think that study of the great apes was relevant to understanding early man. But what truly confounded his colleagues at the time was his selection of the young Jane Goodall to head up this study.

Jane, who had come to Africa without a job, had finagled a position at the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi, which Louis directed, and had worked with the Leakey family at Olduvai. The idea to study chimps wasn’t hers; it was Louis’s, and he had to convince even Jane that she could do it.

“There seriously were people who told Louis he was practically insane,” Jane later recalled, “and that this wasn’t the sort of thing he should do at all.” It was bad enough, in the opinion of the experts, that Jane had no academic qualifications. But the real reason Louis’s colleagues were horrified, Jane remembers, was that “I was a defenseless young female going out in the wild.”

In 1966 Louis selected Dian Fossey, then thirty-four, to study the mountain gorilla. Responding to Louis’s plea to help finance Dian’s first expedition, the president of the New York Zoological Society, Fairfield Osborn, wrote to him in consternation: “What new breed of human beings is this? These young women go out to far places, obviously relishing the risks involved. Do you think they are trying to prove they are better than men? A subconscious motivation of which they may not be aware?”

By the time he chose twenty-three-year-old Biruté Galdikas as his “orangutan girl” in 1969, no one was terribly surprised. As his right-hand people, Louis nearly always chose women.

It was his wife Mary—ten years Louis’s junior—who actually discovered most of the famous Leakey finds: Proconsul and Zinjanthropus, and later the prehuman footprints embedded in the ash of Laetoli. When Louis established a center for primate studies at Tigoni, outside Nairobi, he chose a woman as its director and staffed it almost entirely with young women. The last major dig of his life—at Calico Hills in California—was also headed by a young woman.

For work in fields traditionally dominated by experienced men, youth and womanhood were not faults Louis managed to overlook. They were qualities he actively sought. For in these young women he saw the attributes to which he credited his own success.

Louis’s first archeological finds came about as a result of jumping to an incorrect conclusion simply because he didn’t know any better.

When he was twelve, an English cousin sent him a book for Christmas that excited his imagination. Days Before History, by H. N. Hall, told of flint arrowheads and axheads found in Europe. Though Louis did not know what flint looked like, he decided to look for flint tools in Kenyan soils.

What he found was not flint at all. His parents dismissed his “prehistoric tools” as “pieces of broken glass.” Louis did not know that two years earlier two American archeologists had dismissed similar finds with the same conclusion. In search of prehistoric stone implements, the archeologists had visited Nakuru and Naivasha lake basins. When they found only “pieces of broken glass,” which they assumed originated from a nearby hotel serving bottled beer, they canceled the detailed study they had envisioned.

Young Louis took his finds to Arthur Loveridge, assistant curator of the natural history museum in Nairobi. Loveridge told him that the pieces were not broken glass—nor were they flint. They were worked obsidian. The Kikuyu call all pieces of obsidian nyenji cia ngoma: razors of the spirits. Loveridge confirmed that Leakey had found the knives and weapons of a long-dead race, tools made by Stone Age man.

“Had I known what flint was,” Louis concluded in White African, “I might never have found any stone implements at all.”

With none of the bias of a conventional Western education, Louis learned to think for himself. With the spittle of his Kikuyu neighbors bestowed at birth he was doubly blessed: his unfettered childhood gave him the freedom to explore and the local Kikuyu taught him the skills to see.

Joshua, a teacher of mixed Kikuyu and Ndorobo blood, taught Louis the habits of the neighborhood animals: duiker, dik-dik, mongoose, porcupine, aardvark, jackal, hyena, and genet. Firsthand observation was paramount.

To demonstrate that man needed tools to survive, Louis tried skinning animals with his teeth (“most unsatisfactory,” he concluded). To better understand early tool making, he became an expert flint knapper. So, in later life, he did not look for conventional qualifications in the applicants he interviewed for his projects.

Geza Teleki, who later worked with Jane Goodall at Gombe, recalls his first interview with Louis, in the mid-1960s. It took place at a Washington hotel, across from Louis’s perennial source of funds, the National Geographic Society:

“The whole room was full of fossils, and you couldn’t sit down anyplace, and he was drinking sherry out of a tumbler the size of a basketball, and it was just very odd. He sort of exploded at you with everything. He’d jump up and accost you with a question. There were all these little rocks and stuff, and he’d say: ‘What is it?’ I didn’t know. He’d pick something off a table, stick it in your hands and say: What is it? I think he almost couldn’t contain himself. He’d run over next to you and ask it right to your nose.

“It was not the kind of interview I expected,” Geza continues. “I thought he’d want me to tell him what I was interested in, why I would go and all that stuff. He asked me three questions: was I a Boy Scout, could I fix a car, and could I cook. Then he asked me to prepare a meal for him. He had some pork chops in the refrigerator and a kitchen in his suite. And I made him a meal. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about where I’d gone to school, what I had studied, or whether I was properly equipped intellectually.”

At Biruté Galdikas’s first interview with Louis, he did not ask about her academic qualifications. Instead he subjected her, she remembers, to “weird little intelligence tests like you see in magazines.” He turned over some cards and asked her to recall which were red and which were black. She immediately mentioned that half of the cards were slightly bent.

Men, Louis said, seldom noticed this detail; women usually did. And this, says Tita Caldwell, a founder of the Leakey Foundation, was the key to the interview: in observing the lives of nonspeaking primates, Louis considered attention to detail—especially details that others might consider of little consequence—of paramount importance. “Louis was looking for a quality of perception,” Tita said. “He was testing them for their powers of observation. Louis firmly believed that women were more observant than men, so there’s a lot less training to do with them. Whenever Louis was interviewing someone for a position, if there were three applicants and he only had time to interview one, he would interview the woman.”

Dian recalled that Louis continued to test her powers of observation from time to time. After she had been in the field for some months, she visited him in Nairobi at the Coryndon Museum. In front of the building he suddenly asked her what she saw at a certain spot. “I would look and see a spider web, thinking myself very, very observant,” she wrote in an unpublished memorial to Louis after his death. “He would see a spider web, a bee, a dead fly—he would see twenty-odd things when I would see one. So I learned to use my eyes, and that’s what he wanted.”

“My Kikuyu training taught me this,” Louis once wrote in a National Geographic article: “If you have reason to believe that something should be in a given spot but you don’t find it, you must not conclude it isn’t there. Rather, you must conclude that your powers of observation are faulty.”

When each of the three women met the famous Dr. Leakey for the first time, they believed he was not particularly impressed with them.

Jane’s introduction to Louis was far from warm. Having gathered the courage to telephone the museum to ask for a job, she timidly asked the voice who answered the phone if she could speak with Dr. Leakey. “I’m Dr. Leakey,” the voice announced brusquely and then demanded: “What do you want?”

Dian wrote in a Leakey Foundation tribute to Louis after his death, “A less propitious beginning to a deep and prolonged friendship with a man who was to shape my life and destiny could not be imagined.” On her first African safari in 1963 she traveled to the Leakey digs at Olduvai. Louis dismissed her as “another bothersome tourist” and charged her fourteen shillings to tour the excavations. (She did prove bothersome: she fell down a ravine, broke a precious fossil with her fall, and then, nauseated by the pain of her sprained ankle, vomited on the specimen.)

Biruté spoke to Louis of her deep wish to study orangutans after hearing his lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology. She recalls, “Dr. Leakey looked at me very coldly and didn’t say much. I could have been telling him he had dandruff for all his interest.”

It was only when she told him that she had already begun to make arrangements for her study by contacting orangutan researchers in Sarawak that she elicited a glimmer of interest. “I only support people who know what they want to do and are determined to do it,” Biruté remembers Louis telling her.

The depth of Dian’s determination was foreshadowed from the start. After Mary bandaged her sprained ankle, she insisted upon leaving Olduvai to stagger up a 10,000-foot volcano in search of mountain gorillas. Three years later, after Louis agreed to secure funding for her study, he suggested jokingly that she have her appendix removed as a precaution. Before she received his letter telling her he was only joking, she had already undergone the surgery. (Biruté went one better: at her job interview with Louis she offered up her tonsils as well.)

For the studies Louis had in mind, tenacity was as important as keen observation. Jane, Dian, and Biruté were not the first people to study the great apes. Henry Nissen had ventured to French Guinea in the 1930s to study the chimpanzee; he stayed two and a half months. George Schaller had spent a year among the mountain gorillas of Zaire in the 1950s. And, before Biruté, John MacKinnon had undertaken the longest study of orangutans. After spending a year at Gombe with Goodall, he began an orangutan study that spanned three years. These early male primatologists all went on to study other animals in other places. And this, remarks Biruté, is “the typical way males do things.”

The men were fine naturalists, but basically they were “adventurers,” Biruté says. “It must be exhilarating—to go to a new place, find the lay of the land . . . and then you move on to a new area. That’s the way men are. You conquer, and you move on to the next conquest.”

Throughout his career Louis scorned “armchair anthropologists” who were “only prepared to devote a few months to research and then return to more lucrative and comfortable work in the universities.” The genius of Louis Leakey’s vision was that he insisted upon long-term studies. (When he first told Goodall he expected her to stay at Gombe for ten years, she laughed and thought, “Well, maybe three.”)

Louis believed that women were particularly well suited to long-term studies. Both biology and society encourage women to invest their time in long-term projects, he pointed out: raising a child to adulthood, for instance, demands two decades of commitment. Women, he believed, were of necessity tougher and more tenacious than men.

And for Louis’s three “ape ladies,” as well as for his own work at Olduvai, tenacity was the source of the achievement: it was not that they went, but that they stayed.

Many people raised eyebrows at the idea that Louis took on young female protégées in his “dotage.” In Leakey’s Luck, biographer Cole suggests that Leakey launched his primate studies after the fashion of the older middle-aged man suddenly buying a new sports car, a classic response to “male menopause.”

“His sons had flown the nest . . . his wife was ensconced at Olduvai . . . Leakey became disabled physically, unable to do active field research and reluctant to adopt modern techniques,” she notes. Perhaps he encouraged the careers of young women in part to “ease his loneliness.”

That Mary did not take kindly to many of Louis’s female protégées fueled the rumors. Penny Caldwell, an early student of Louis’s at his Tigoni primate center, remembers the reception she got from Mary when she first arrived in Nairobi. “She looked me up and down, up and down, up and down, and finally said, ‘Well, everyone to his own taste.’ ” When Glynn Isaac, one of the few male archeologists who worked successfully under Louis, brought his bride-to-be to meet his employer’s wife, Mary Leakey made the meeting extremely stressful, Barbara Isaac recalls. Mary immediately subjected her to a spelling test. (“I did very well,” Barbara recalls. “I got most of them right, but no more than had Mary’s mother.”)

Mary, who had married Louis after he left his first wife pregnant with their second child, could not have failed to notice that her aging husband basked in the attention of his entourage of pretty young women.

Although strikingly handsome as a square-jawed young man, by the time Louis was made famous by the Zinjanthropus discovery, he looked old. Pained by an arthritic hip, in his fifties he already walked with a cane (later he used crutches), and his neck-forward posture had collapsed to an old man’s hunch. A 1966 National Geographic TV special showed him at Olduvai seated on a rock, his legs framing a paunch. A long slip of white hair, wagging in the breeze, flopped sillily over the wrong side of his part. His voice seemed almost effeminate in a professorial way. Yet women swarmed.

“I first met him when he was old and ugly and had practically no teeth left and had a belly hanging over his belt,” recalled the anthropologist wife of one Harvard professor, “and still he was one of the most attractive men I had ever met. Women just fell all over themselves for him.”

A charismatic speaker, a charming and witty dinner guest, Louis was a male magnet who dominated a room. Biruté found him “extraordinarily inspirational,” attributing his charisma to “his total self-confidence.”

Yet his female followers may have been equally attracted by his own deeply feminine qualities. Louis was in many ways a traditional nurturer. When Mary and Louis’s first child, Jonathan, was born, Mary was too enthralled with prehistory to spend much time with him; a nurse cared for the baby by day, but at night it was Louis who bottle-fed him and changed diapers. His mothering extended also to orphaned animals. His “field pets” included adopted wildebeest calves, a colobus monkey, and an infant baboon named Baby, with whom he often slept. When he gave his and Mary’s second son, Richard, a pony as a pet, he allowed it to sleep in their house at Langata while a paddock was being constructed.

He loved to cook. At Olduvai he often baked bread, and he often cooked at get-togethers, whether he was host or not. Jane’s mother, Vanne, remembers his “specs, completely opaque with flour and other tit-bits from a sputtering pan . . . perched atop his head” as the smells of a succulent roast—the joint chosen personally by Louis at the butcher shop that morning—wafted through the Goodall kitchen.

Louis himself may not have considered these qualities particularly feminine. But “one of the main things Louis stressed about women,” said Tita Caldwell, “was that women are blessed and cursed with sensitivity and intuition that only one in a million men have. It is very rare in men. But Louis had it.”

Tita and her husband, Hugh, called this intuition “Louis’s weird antennae.” Even when mobbed by fans after a successful lecture, he would somehow spot, across a crowded room, the one person who was in distress or needing assurance and would gravitate to that person. Many people have noticed this same ability in Jane and Dian and Biruté. Martta Marshalko, who works at the National Geographic Society, was struck by this quality in Dian. The two would converse briefly each time Dian visited her sponsor in Washington. “In 1984 she came by and I told her, ‘Next time you come I won’t be on the fifth floor.’ She looked at me sharply and said, ‘You were very very unhappy here, weren’t you?’ I had never complained to Dian. But I had been miserable. I said, ‘How did you know?’ She said, ‘It was obvious to me.’ ”

“People don’t realize,” said Tita Caldwell, “that to these women, who can interpret the minds of a nonspeaking primate, to sit in a room full of speaking animals and interpret their behavior is duck soup!”

As a consequence of his weird antennae, Louis was constantly adopting people, many of them young women in distress. He would write letters, phone them from Africa, give them jobs. One of the women he encouraged was Joy Adamson, who came to him almost penniless after her divorce from her first husband. He gave her a job at the museum and encouraged her artistic skills and love of nature. She later moved on to study lions and to write the classic Born Free.

In his most successful protégées, Jane, Dian, and Biruté, Louis took special pride. Joan Travis, a cofounder of the foundation that bears Leakey’s name, recalls that he always carried with him the latest communication from any one of the three; he would often whip out their telexes from a breast pocket to read aloud at his lectures. He called them his “three primates”—a phrase that always prompted his breathless, body-heaving laugh. Louis showed the typical African delight in word play in the expression, a triple play on words: not only were the women primates studying primates, but the highest post in the Anglican church is that of primate—a position only a man could hold.

But though Jane, Dian, and Biruté would always be linked publicly to Louis as a trio, his personal relationships with them were as different as the women were from one another.

To Louis, Jane was a best-loved, golden-haired daughter. His first child, with his first wife Frida, was a daughter, but he divorced Frida when little Priscilla was five. Louis’s investment in Jane—and his involvement with her sister and mother—was far stronger than the attachments he maintained with his first family. And in his final years he spent more time with the Goodalls, particularly Jane’s mother, than he did with his second wife. In her 1984 autobiography, Disclosing the Past, Mary Leakey wrote ruefully: “I am sure he derived from [Vanne’s] kindness and friendship much of the support I myself could no longer provide.”

After agreeing to hire Jane as an assistant secretary at the Coryndon Museum, Louis almost immediately adopted her as his “Foster Fairy Daughter,” as he called her. This “adoption” quickly extended to the entire Goodall family.

When Vanne, who was divorced, came to visit Jane in Nairobi, Louis squired mother and daughter around on safari. To ease Jane into her new role as “chimp girl,” Louis packed her off for training at Dr. John Napier’s primate unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He then secured funding for both Vanne and Jane to go to Gombe. Two years later he persuaded the English weekly newspaper Reveille to pay for Jane’s sister, Judy, to go out to Gombe also—ostensibly as a photographer, though Judy had little previous experience with a camera.

Louis continued to orchestrate the careers of his foster family. He decided that Jane needed a doctorate, and arranged for her to work toward one at his alma mater, Cambridge—despite the fact that she did not have a bachelor’s degree. He set Judy up in a fossil-casting business—“FD [for Foster Daughter] Castings”—provoking the jealousy of his son Richard, who was trying his hand at paleoanthropology himself. Louis later helped Judy and her husband get a loan to buy their first house.

In a letter in 1961, Louis informed Vanne of yet another prize he had secured for his family: “I’ve found the perfect husband for Jane,” he announced. He had met Hugo van Lawick through friends. Hugo worked briefly with Louis, filming his work at Olduvai for a National Geographic program. Louis arranged for Hugo to film Jane’s work at Gombe for another National Geographic documentary, and the couple fell in love and married.

Though Louis never visited Jane at Gombe—at first he deliberately kept out of her way, and later his bad health prevented a visit—they wrote each other constantly, she signing her letters with the initials FC for Foster Child. The Goodall flat in London became a frequent stopover on Louis’s flights from Kenya to the United States. Vanne and he would go to plays and ballet, and he often went to church with Judy. Vanne, a talented writer, helped edit Louis’s books and articles and coauthored the book Unveiling Man’s Origins with him in 1969.

Louis’s fatherly pride in Jane never flagged. One day, Vanne remembers, Louis predicted to friends gathered at the flat that someone would raise a statue to Jane. “And somebody said, ‘Oh, no—to you first, Dr. Leakey.’ And he said, ‘No—to Jane.’ ”

Louis’s relationship with Biruté was less intense. Perhaps because she was his third “primate,” perhaps because she was married, perhaps because her field work was not in Africa, Biruté was “very much the third daughter,” as she recalls. He invited her and her first husband, Rod, to join him on an African safari, as a “vacation” on their way to Indonesia; he encouraged her with frequent, inspirational letters, like a kindly uncle. Though his influence upon her was profound, she admits that she didn’t get to know him very well; he died only three years after she met him.

Dian, however, was no daughter to Louis. With Dian he fell hopelessly, adolescently, in love.

In October 1969, nearly three years into her study, she went to Nairobi for medical tests and to Louis for solace. She was depressed about the poachers at Karisoke and sick with what she feared was tuberculosis. Louis proposed accompanying her on a luxurious, weeklong safari in south central Kenya to cheer her up. At age sixty-six Louis was smitten.

His love letters, which Dian kept with her mementos, read like a teenager’s: “I love you,” he wrote her in his almost unintelligible, sprawling scrawl, “quite simply, deeply, whether you are miles and miles away or very, very close.”

“It was lovely just seeing you,” he wrote Dian. “Even briefly and knowing that you do love as I can do deeply love you. . . . I feel we belong and so I was very very happy.”

Whether his love for Dian was ever physically consummated is not known; but that they “belonged” was in a sense true. Dian seldom spoke to anyone about her sad childhood, but the moment Louis met her, he told Tita Caldwell, he recognized her past and future, as if he had known her in a previous life: “Her life was a tragedy and will always be a tragedy,” Louis predicted. “She is a tragic person, and I want you to promise me you will never desert her.” Louis begged others to be tolerant of Dian, “because she has been through so much.”

Dian attracted many suitors in her youth, but it may have been her tragedy that touched a chord in Louis. He shared with her a dark side. Most people recall him as constantly ebullient, but Vanne Goodall remembers moods that would “envelop him in a dark fury, or in a martyr’s gloom.” They came on suddenly, unpredictably, making him “testy and irritable, harshly critical, sometimes rude.” The description is almost exactly like what other people said of Dian’s mood swings and outbursts.

He also shared with Dian an African sense of humor. They both delighted in lampooning people, particularly the self-important. Exaggeratedly miming the gait, inflection, and facial expression of some official, they’d draw howls of laughter from their respective African staffs. They both enjoyed word play, especially when Dian would produce a scatological or obscene double-entendre.

Louis showered love letters upon his “dearest love” for the next three years. He bought her a ruby ring. From entries in her diaries, it seems that Dian didn’t know what to make of his romantic attentions. She never obeyed his urgings to write him at his private post office box in Nairobi, a secret he kept from his wife. But she did care for him. She visited him in the hospital in London after his first heart attack in 1970. A year later Louis was attacked by African bees and stung hundreds of times; when he hit the ground in pain, the fall caused a concussion that left him comatose for a week. During his recovery Dian regaled him with cheerful, humorous letters.

When Louis awoke from his coma, his first thoughts were of Dian. He feared she was short of funds, and immediately dictated a letter to her. Whatever she needed, he’d fix it somehow. He had plans to visit her for the first time at Karisoke in April 1972. She worried endlessly whether his health could withstand the trip. He did eventually cancel the plans because his health was failing.

Louis did not live long enough to visit the study sites of any of his three primates. He felt the first symptoms of his fatal heart attack at Vanne’s London flat in the autumn of 1972. There, before starting his planned lecture tour in the States, he was putting the finishing touches on his second autobiography, By the Evidence. He was scheduled to fly to New York on October 2.

On September 30 he felt weary; his doctor advised him to postpone the flight. On the morning of October 1 he suffered a coronary. Vanne left the hospital at nine A.M., and he died half an hour later.

Not long before he died, when Jane’s sister and some friends were visiting him at the flat, Vanne recalls that the conversation turned to death. Someone asked, “Are you afraid of dying, Dr. Leakey?”

“Dying? Why should I mind dying?” he replied. “My spirit will live on in my family—but I—my soul will go on forever.”