NC

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILMS
JANE
BY TONY GERBER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HUGO VAN LAWICK
‘You may have heard my story before,’
Jane Goodall told her audience at a 2015 lecture. “But it’s like a campfire tale—it gets
better with each telling.” Her story is instantly recognizable from the many times it’s
been written, broadcast, or otherwise sent into the world: A young Englishwoman
conducts chimpanzee research in Africa and winds up revolutionizing primate science.
But how did it happen? How did a woman with a passion for animals but no
formal background in research navigate the male-dominated worlds of science
and media to make enormous discoveries in her field, and become a worldfamous
face of the conservation movement? This is that story.
Jane became widely known because of a film,
Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, which
came out in 1965 and was produced by National
Geographic. She hasn’t seen it in years. But now
I’m playing it for her on a laptop at the West London
home of a friend. The primatologist, 83 this
year, studies her 28-year-old self.
“Think how fun it would be to be that age
again,” Jane says with a smile. The young Jane
on the screen is hiking through the forest of
Gombe Stream Game Reserve in what is now
Tanzania. She’s wearing high-top canvas sneakers
and khaki shorts, and her blond hair is in the
ponytail that became her signature. She appears
to be doing field research—but in reality, Jane
says, she was reenacting events from her first six
months at Gombe so that photographer Hugo
van Lawick could film them. Those months had
been a remarkable period of solitude and discovery,
a time before cameras were present. They’ve
AFRICA
GOMBE N.P.
Lake
Tanganyika
KENYA
Nairobi
TANZANIA
NGM MAPS
REALITY TV
Once Jane and Hugo married, the focus of the human interest
frame widened to include them both. This shot required a second
BECOMING JANE 37