NC

As Jane and Hugo expanded the research station
at Gombe, they also developed ideas for new
films, but National Geographic wanted to keep
the spotlight on Jane in films being made for television
and the lecture circuit. The requests were
increasingly specific, as in this letter to Hugo
from Joanne Hess of the National Geographic
Society’s lecture branch:
“It will be most important and helpful to have
several shots of Jane, which you will have to pose,
showing her looking through binoculars, laughing
at chimps, staring up at chimps in trees, staring
into distance at chimps, and writing notes in
her book, etc.,” Hess wrote. “I mean you should
take about 200 feet of close-ups of Jane ‘pretending’
to do these things, so that we can cut pictures
of her into the film.”
The pressures to pose rankled Jane, but she
handled it diplomatically. In a letter to Melvin
Payne, whose National Geographic committee
oversaw her funding, Jane wrote, “Certainly I
understand that it is necessary to build up a story
around ‘Jane Goodall’ and we have cooperated
with Joanne as much as we possibly could.”
But when Hess came to Gombe to oversee
some filming, Jane allowed herself a private act
of rebellion. “We are already collecting large
numbers of evil looking spiders and centipedes
to lay around casually in her tent, in an endeavor
to shorten her visit,” Jane wrote to her mother.
When I interviewed Jane years later, during a
2015 visit to Gombe, she could look back on the
celebrity treatment more philosophically:
ROUGHING IT
In her book My Friends, the Wild
Chimpanzees,
day at Gombe, helping to pitch tents
that would serve as her home for years
to come. “I was well aware of some of
wrote. “Equally, I knew the day was
GOODALL: There’s this glamorous young girl
out in the jungle with potentially dangerous animals.
People like romanticizing, and people were
looking at me as though I was that myth that they
had created in their mind. And the Geographic
helped create it too.
GERBER: A lot of people would resist that and
fight back and say, That’s not me.
GOODALL: There was nothing I could do
about it because as far as they knew, it was me.
And there was no way I could be portrayed differently.
It wasn’t inaccurate. It’s just that people
take the facts and weave stories around them.
48 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017