BABOON DOC SEZ: “EVERYONE LIKES TO WATCH”
Beryl Cook, Keyhole, 1981; courtesy Portal Gallery, London
Already, it’s all beginning to blur, although I’m trying to hold on to the details. Was “Kato” Kaelin secretly Tonya Harding’s lover? Do I remember correctly that Heidi Fleiss hired the Menendez brothers to do the hit on John Wayne Bobbitt? And was Woody Allen driving the white Ford Bronco when Michael Jackson fled the apartment being rented by John-John Kennedy and Daryl Hannah?
It’s embarrassing to have such a poor memory sometimes. And it’s more embarrassing to have ever known such things. You sit there on the commuter train, conspicuously reading Sartre in French, Sony Walkman cranked up so everyone can hear that you’re listening to a Bartók string quartet. And then you can’t help it, you just can’t stop yourself, you have to lean forward ever so slightly to peer over the shoulder of the person in front of you, the one with the People magazine, all to check out Leslie Abramson’s new hairdo.
It’s even worse when you have a get-together of friends. There’s a tentativeness about bringing up any of the hot scandals, an offhandedness. Once the subject is raised, there are definitely rules on how you can do it, as a card-carrying intellectual. Simpson—America, where you can get all the justice that money can buy, versus the racial angle, versus another go at the death penalty debate. Woody and Mia—breakdown of the nuclear family. The night wears on and the pressure to be detached and intellectual grows. Lorena Bobbitt—obvious parallels to Australian aboriginal genital mutilation rites. Menendez brothers—new unlikely insights into the Louisiana Purchase and the decline of the American bison herds. And despite the highbrow tone, you still feel sullied. We should be discussing Marx and what his carbuncles had to do with dialectical materialism. And because of the highbrow tone, you feel maddeningly frustrated. I want to ask everyone who they think would be more of a drag to be stuck with in an elevator, Johnnie Cochran or Nancy Kerrigan.
How can we be so voyeuristic, so little able to resist sensationalism and Oprahatics? When I’ve hit bottom, when I’m exhausted at work because I stayed up late watching Ted Koppel—even Ted!—go after one of these fifteen-minutes-of-famers, I resort to a reassuring fact. We are not alone.
I lead a dual scientific life, and when I’m not in the laboratory studying neurons and stress hormones, I spend my time in the grasslands of East Africa, studying troops of wild baboons. I spend an inordinate amount of time watching their social machinations, the complexities of their interactions among a hundred animals in the savannah. And they do the same thing.
Bunch of baboons sitting around in a field when there’s a fight. Two large, high-ranking males, tension has been building up between them over something, and it finally erupts. A hundred pounds of muscle and testosterone, sharpened canines that are bigger than in an adult lion, slashing, lunging, brawling. Someone in the vicinity might get hurt, either amid the fighting or immediately afterward, with the loser taking out his frustrations on someone smaller. What’s the logical thing? Get the hell out of there. And what do half the animals do? Stop what they’re doing, stand bipedally, push in closer, all for a better view. Perhaps they are trying to pick up some pointers about strategy, or maybe they are bearing silent witness to the failure of pacifism. Nah. They just want to see what’s going to happen.
Sometimes the voyeurism takes another familiar form. A few years ago, an adolescent male whom I named Absolom joined the troop, and he took this habit to new heights. He had just discovered girls, i.e., female baboons. Nothing was happening to him personally in that department, and he was reduced to a vigilance that consumed half his day. Any sexual consortship in the troop, and he would be lurking around in the bushes nearby, trying to catch sight of the good stuff, craning for a view of the action, holding his tail throughout. Here’s how bad he got: one day, a high-ranking male and a female who was at the peak of being in heat sat quietly grooming each other. They were peripheral to the rest of the troop, secluded, no doubt working up to a moment of even greater intimacy. Suddenly, Absolom, who had silently slithered his way out to a branch of the tree just above them for a really good view, collapsed it under his weight and crashed down on top of them. None were pleased.
And sometimes the voyeurism has the feel of small-town coffee klatching. It was the season that a female named Rebekah had her first child. Primiparous mothers—those with their first child—are rarely particularly skillful, but Rebekah was plain awful. She forgot the kid when she left a group of other females, slapped him frequently, couldn’t seem to learn how to position him to ride on her back, so that he sprawled sideways, clutching the base of her tail. One day, as she leapt from one branch to another in a tree with the kid in that precarious position, he lost his grip and dropped ten feet to the ground. We various primates observing proved our close kinship, proved how we probably utilized the exact same number of synapses in our brains in watching and responding to this event by doing the exact same thing in unison. Five female baboons in the tree and we two humans present all gasped as one. And then fell silent, eyes trained on the kid. A moment passed, he righted himself, looked up in the tree at his mother, and then scampered off after some nearby friends. And as a chorus, we all started clucking to each other in relief.
An anthropologist once said, “Humans had to invent language so we would have something to talk about around the fire at night.” Koko and Michael are the gorillas famed for having been taught the rudiments of American Sign Language. Whether that constitutes language use on their part is rejected by most in the know, and I find their criticisms pretty convincing. Nevertheless, they are doing something communicative. Once, one morning, Michael witnessed one of his human teachers arguing with his girlfriend. And later that day, Michael told another human teacher about it. Proto-gossip.
Mark Twain defined humans as the only species that can blush or that needs to. We may indeed blush when we reveal that we’re unduly informed about the details of the Presley-Jacksons, whereas the baboons would never blush as they elbow for a better view of their equivalent of Madonna tussling with David Letterman. But beyond that, there are few differences. Rubber necks appear to be a common feature of the primate order.
There was a temptation to update this piece by substituting this week’s scandals. The trouble is, of course, that this week’s and last year’s will be equally archival by the time next week rolls around, so, by definition, it is not possible to have this piece be anything other than a trivia test by the time it is published. Thus, to refresh the memories of most readers, or to give important new information to those who wasted their time a few years back thinking about global warming or the collapse of the Soviet Union:
Kato was the world’s most famous houseguest and poster child for the Let’s Put Diction Lessons Back in our Classrooms movement. Tonya and Nancy provided us with the greatest villain/heroine set piece since Saturday cliff-hanger movies until Tonya pushed the villainess envelope by crying in front of the Olympic judges and Nancy did in her statuesque goddess number by being mean and cranky at Disneyland. Meanwhile, back on the farm, Heidi Fleiss illegally provided a service so that a bunch of rich and famous Hollywood males with testosterone problems could do something illegal in return and wound up being the only one to get in trouble for it.
Leslie Abramson inspired future generations of lawyers by sticking the Menendez boys in cardigans and temporarily delaying their getting convicted for blowing away their folks; she at least resisted the “take pity on them, they’re orphans” gambit. In an unrelated episode, Lorena Bobbitt took an ax and gave John Wayne forty whacks, or at least one effective one; judging by his subsequent behavior, it’s clear he didn’t learn much from the incident.
Woody and Mia gravely disappointed us all by winding up on this list.
Michael Jackson possibly did some disturbed things with children and then, just when we least expected it, managed to top that. The Presley-Jacksons’ connubial bliss lasted about a year, if my history textbooks are correct. Meanwhile, JFK Jr. and Daryl Hannah had such a brief, incandescent instant of being The Most Important Couple in the World before giving the crown back to those fun Windsors that I can’t remember a thing about them anymore. Sorry.
On another front, the white Ford Bronco was part of the pioneering marketing gimmick of generating sales by having celebrities drive it slowly. And Johnnie Cochran, besides fostering racial tolerance in our land, pioneered the use of wool caps and rhyming couplets in the courtroom. Finally, Madonna appeared on David Letterman’s show and was foul and unappealing even by late-night TV standards. The incident did not particularly harm her: as of this writing, she is reveling in her next supernova of fifteen minutedom with her first foray into maternal behavior, while continuing to serve ably as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
People magazine, of course.
The incident about Michael the gorilla is reported in T. Crail, Apetalk and Whalespeak (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1981), 137, 150.