Friederike Viktoria Gessner

JOY ADAMSON: THE LION-TAMER THEY CALLED AN ALLEY CAT

<font face="Arial">WHEN JOY ADAMSON WAS MURDERED IN A HORRIFIC KNIFE ATTACK, IT PUT AN END TO THE MYTH OF THE SAINTLY BORN FREE CHARACTER. THE REAL JOY WAS A VIOLENT AND PROMISCUOUS WOMAN - EVEN BY KENYA'S "HAPPY VALLEY" STANDARDS. THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING HER DEATH ARE STILL OBSCURE.

BY CAROLINE CASS

She was as impossible as she was exceptional. The gentle creature portrayed in the 1966 film Born Free was a myth; the real Joy Adamson was feline, fierce and sexually voracious. Although the famous film ensured that Joy's life was for many the stuff of dreams - living in an exotic land surrounded by the big cats she loved obsessively - in private Joy was often lonely and frustrated. She fought tooth and nail those she felt betrayed her: officials in the Kenya game department who thwarted her conservation plans; husbands who could not give her the constant, passionate love she so craved; and the many lovers who constantly let her down. All her life, her restless spirit searched for fulfillment and happiness but it continually eluded her. By the end of her life, alone in the arid African bush, she felt life had treated her harshly. But much of it was of her own making.

She was born Friederike Viktoria Gessner on 20 January 1910, in Troppau, Austria. Her middle-class parents had desperately wanted a boy, and the birth of this second daughter was a blow to an already ailing marriage. She adored her mother who unfortunately harboured a certain coldness towards her offspring. Fifi (as she was nicknamed) was treated as a son. Her father called her Fritz and made her -- missing text -- adventurous tomboy, determined to beat her numerous cousins in swimming races and tennis at her great-grandfather's large feudal estate near Troppau. Two particular memories stood out in her mind. During the First World War, when luxuries in Austria were at an all-time low, Frau Gessner served up Fifi's favourite playmate, an albino rabbit called Hasi, for dinner. The young girl was devastated. The second incident, which throughout her life brought an instant deluge of tears, was the moment she shot and killed a young roebuck. Delighted with her accurate shooting, the family gamekeeper presented her with a small twig dipped in the animal's blood. Fifi later declared "I was deeply ashamed about what I had done but we were not allowed to talk about weaknesses - people might think one was neurotic, and I certainly do not think I am neurotic."

When Fifi was twelve her mother ran off with Hans Hoffman, the children's handsome tutor who was virulently anti-Semitic. The breakup of her parents' marriage, the ensuing divorce and her mother's remarriage to Hans changed Fifi's relation -- missing text -- never forgiven; it scarred her for life and deepened her insecurity. Together with one of her two sisters, she went to live in Vienna with Oma, her adored maternal grandmother. By the time she was seventeen she had a stunning figure and definite sex appeal. Her blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes were used to disarming effect. An Austrian cousin said, "She looked just like a Ziegfield Follies girl. She should have gone on stage and had an audience of thousands. She'd have loved it." However, Fifi was fiercely ambitious with a compulsion to achieve something lasting. During the following two years of intense work towards her final music exam, she strained both her hands: their span turned out to be too small for a concert pianist. Instead, she flirted with painting and developed a love of sculpting.

There was, however, time for amusement as well. At the highlight of the season in Vienna, the Gschnaus fancy dress ball, Fifi was swept into the arms of a laughing masked Apache who wooed the pretty blonde with the romantic opening line, "You are mine." She was whirled off into an affair that she later described as "arousing emotions sometimes almost beyond what I could bear". For the next two years Fifi was deeply involved with the young man, the Jewish son of a bank president, who possessed a wild, bohemian streak which greatly appealed to her. He carefully taught her the art of lovemaking (future lovers often declared that she was good in bed). However, she became pregnant and had a backstreet abortion. Its tragic result was that Fifi was never able to bear a child, one of the great sadnesses of her life. Soon afterwards, her lover abandoned her.

For all her ebullient, sparkling personality, enthusiasm and varying interests, hers was an empty life. She fell into a deep depression and eventually attempted suicide by taking a handful of pills. Luckily she was saved by Oma.

Once she regained her lust for life, Fifi bewitched men with a combination of physical attraction, artistic talent and a steely determination. At a party one night in the spring of 1935, a close friend of hers, Herbert Tichy, was begged by another man to be introduced. His name was Viktor von Klarwill. He was charming, cultured, from a well-to-do Jewish family, and his casual good looks and laconic style appealed to Fifi. He was a fanatical sportsman, indulging every spare moment in skiing and canoeing. Within weeks he proposed to her and was accepted. However, beneath the veneer of physical attraction and a love of sport, the couple had little in common. While Fifi passionately wanted to become a mother, her husband was appalled by the thought of squalling babies. Life soon became a battle of wills, which, through pleading and occasional eruptions into volcanic displays of emotion, Fifi eventually won. She became pregnant again, only to suffer a miscarriage. Added to domestic disharmony was the fact that this was 1936 and Viktor was becoming increasingly concerned about his homeland being no longer a safe place to live. To cheer up his increasingly unhappy wife, he decided that Fifi would travel to Kenya, alone, to size up the possibilities of a life there together. Superstitious and nervous about her future Fifi consulted a fortune-teller, who told her she would live the rest of her life in the tropics and that she would never have any children. Little did Viktor and Joy know they had struck a fatal bargain.

Unfortunately for Viktor, by the time Fifi arrived in Mombasa she had fallen passionately in love with a fellow traveller, a gentle Swiss botanist named Peter Bally. She also swiftly fell in love with the beauty of Kenya. On her return to Austria she asked her husband for a divorce, to which he reluctantly agreed. Although Bally had had reservations about marrying Fifi, recognising in her a deep well of unhappiness, in addition to a possible streak of instability, he nevertheless felt committed. After a swift marriage he and his new bride, whom he had renamed Joy, spent a few years mostly on safari. Bally's great interest was succulent plants, and as his work for the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi took him away in search of rare and elusive plants, Joy accompanied him less and less. But Joy was a woman who needed a great deal of attention. In her quest to find love and the perfect match, she attached herself to men whose lives and work she admired. To keep his emotional, frequently complaining wife occupied, Bally taught her how to paint flowers and botanical plants. She had finally found a lasting interest and one at which she soon excelled, illustrating five books on the flora of the country.

However, following another miscarriage, the marriage began to turn sour and Joy embarked on a series of predatory affairs which soon earned her the title "the Viennese alley cat." In the "Happy Valley" atmosphere of Kenya, with its permissive culture of sex and booze, it took some doing to become notorious as a loose woman. In her thick Austrian accent Joy would pronounce to anyone who listened: "Men in Kenya are so sveet, but ze women, zey are cabbages".

Her sexual adventures were swiftly interrupted when she was interned as a spy during the early days of the war. It was an absurd notion, and Peter frantically ran around Nairobi trying to obtain his wife's release. Although successful, Peter was by now thoroughly disillusioned with his marriage and retreated into his work. When later asked about her relationship with her second husband, Joy guardedly commented that while Peter's intellect stimulated her immensely, he failed to do the same in bed. Many years later, when bumping into a neighbour of Bally's, she asked, "How is Peter? Is he still impotent?"

Like everyone else in Kenya, Joy had heard romantic tales of the legendary game warden George Adamson, famous for one particular hair-raising incident. Lying helpless and delirious after a savage mauling from a lioness, he had had to shoot from his sickbed to kill a rogue elephant charging on his tent. Joy first met him at a Christmas party in the Northern Frontier District. George, goatee bearded and pipe-smoking, was monosyllabic. Determined to dent his reputation for being woman-proof, Joy was got up to kill in a slinky silver dress and brilliant make-up. "George," a game warden recalled, "was like a sitting rabbit." "Blurry" was George's own summing up of that night. But there was nothing hazy about the safari on which Adamson later took Joy and her husband; Bally found his wife and George in bed together. "You can have her," he shouted, as he stormed off.

George was not sure that he wanted her. Nevertheless, his emotions had been aroused. He once marched into Bally's house, punched him for his cavalier behaviour towards his wife and carried Joy off caveman-style. Joy, unsure of this new attachment, begged Bally to take her back. She even went so far as to throw herself at his feet, and often barricaded herself in his house. Bally had no intention of having his wife back and would spend the night with neighbours rather than face her wrath. For many years, Joy would tell people how she had begged her husband's forgiveness. "If only I could have Peter back I would go down on my knees," she would say. This was once swiftly answered by one wag, "Forget about your knees, Joy. You've been on your back for so many people since that he'll never return to you." For the rest of her life Joy was convinced that "Peter was the only husband who never really loved me."

Once separated, Joy retreated to Mount Kenya, alone except for her dog Pippin and a gun bearer, and spent the best part of the next year painting the mountain's flowers. She had severe doubts about marrying George, but she eventually capitulated and they arranged to be married on 17 January 1944. In despair, the day before, she swallowed a bottle of sulphanilamide tablets, which produced nothing more severe than an acute attack of vomiting.

Conflicts began at once at the couple's new home in Isiolo in northern Kenya. There were rows over George's taste for whisky. Occasionally sympathetic friends, on bringing George home from the nearby club, would retreat hell-for-leather to avoid Joy's fury. Joy often stormed from the house firing a shotgun in the air, while George crouched on all fours to avoid the flak. She once broke two of his ribs with a dining-room chair after catching him drinking. But the most corrosive disputes between the two were over sex. George was devastated by his bride's insistence on sleeping alone. "We never slept in the same bedroom from the day we were married", he later revealed. It did not stop him trying for years to win her love. While Joy thought nothing of taking lovers, she would only make love with George sporadically.

She miscarried more than once. On one occasion, when a lover arrived, she drove George out of the house with a hippo-hide whip to sleep in the guest-house. His reaction was usually to puff on his pipe and take no notice. Every so often, though, he got his own back. During one of her flings on safari, her lover's stealthy arrival woke the whole camp. George had booby-trapped her tent by attaching tin cans to its ropes. At other times his sexual frustration drove him to violence. According to Joy he would beat her nearly senseless with a rifle butt. There were witnesses to the black-and-blue bruises on her torso. Once or twice, in front of others he almost throttled her. "Joy could provoke an angel," was the general opinion among the Kenyans, most of whose sympathies rested entirely with George.

It was George's outdoor lifestyle that Joy was in love with - the untamed bush and its teeming animals, the tribes and the sultry African nights throbbing with a thousand cicadas. It inspired Joy to produce a remarkable series of 700 paintings depicting fast-disappearing tribal dress. The next five years of incessant and almost fanatical work involved her in long safaris on foot or donkey. She painted Boran soothsayers, Boni girls before infibulation ceremonies and Masai warriors in their lion's mane headdresses.

George was the one who, in 1956, found the lioness Elsa - "the creature I loved best in the world," Joy called her. Hers was an obsessive love, one she declared "I never found with another human being". Elsa brought the couple closer together, although it changed their lives for ever. The story of the orphan cub, raised and adored like the child they never had, and her release back into the wild to raise her own family is a favourite twentieth century saga. Joy's book, Born Free, published in 1960, was largely based on George's meticulous daily notes - a fact Joy was reluctant to reveal. For all her devotion, it was George, a highly experienced game warden with a deep understanding of animals, who proved better at handling Elsa. Joy, with her highly-strung, erratic temperament, tended to make her animals nervous, and there were those around her who remarked that Joy was not really that "good with animals". Nevertheless, her intentions were heart-felt and without her determination and the money raised by her books and films, conservation in Kenya would not have been given such a generous kickstart. It was the seed from which the modern movement grew. Of all the people in the world who have contributed to the preservation of wildlife, especially in Kenya, Joy, through the Trust she set up, must head the list. With the death of Elsa four years later, Joy's world collapsed and one of the greatest regrets of her life was that she was away in Nairobi at the end. "Why did Elsa have to die in your arms instead of mine?" she cried to George as he tried to console her. Their grief was deep and mutual. For years afterwards, Joy claimed that she was still telepathically in touch with her lioness.

After Elsa died George and Joy lived in different camps. George declared that if it had not been so, "life would have been intolerable". But they never divorced - Joy had at one stage wished to after a tumultuous row in which she received a particularly severe beating. Thanks mainly to Ken Smith, a game warden friend of theirs, she dropped the idea after he pointed out that George, herself and Elsa were an enduring symbol throughout the world, and any adverse publicity caused by a divorce could well alienate her from the very set of which she needed to be part - the conservationists. As time went on the visits between the two became less frequent, but each was always there for the other in times of trouble. After most of Joy's visits to his camp George would be left visibly shaken and badly in need of a whisky to help him to recover from the rows. Joy disapproved of practically everything George did and was jealous of his increasing popularity. All their married life she tried to dominate him and bend him to her will. As in all other things, she wanted nothing to stand in her way. She used the same tactic with those in the game department, many of whom came up against the Adamsons and their cats. When the game warden of the Meru National Reserve refused to burn off grassland to make hunting easier for Pippa, Joy's cheetah, Joy burnt it herself and almost destroyed the warden's house. After she underwent a series of horrendous accidents - she broke her right hand so badly she was never able to hold a paintbrush again - in 1977 she eventually went to live at Shaba, in the Northern Frontier District, to rehabilitate a leopard named Penny. George went off with his lions to Kora game reserve, a remote, arid part of northern Kenya. His life with the animals, who breed like housecats, was disapproved of by some in the game department, who thought it a waste of valuable conservation money. "Mind you," said one, "in the beginning I was all for it. I thought he was going to teach them to eat Joy."

Another area in which Joy had difficulty was in her handling of servants. She would drag them off to a district commissioner, demanding they be flogged for some minor indiscretion like burning the soup. Once she flung a cup of scalding tea into the face of a young kitchen boy. A Somali chief who saw the boy screaming in agony was only just prevented from stabbing Joy on the spot. In the spare abstract landscape of northern Kenya, Joy led an increasingly isolated and lonely life, with only young assistants, who never lasted long, servants, a gun bearer and her beloved tapes of classical music for company. She still followed her habits of the previous twelve years. Rising at dawn, she showered fully clothed in a canvas shower unit hung beneath a tree, then spent the day tracking her large cat, sketching it and taking copious notes on the animal's behaviour. Few people dropped in - Joy was adamant that Penny's natural habitat must not be disturbed by a stream of tourists and curious visitors. Her critics were numerous, her friends few.

It was here on the eve of her 70th birthday that she met her violent end, stabbed to death with an African dagger. Her body was found by her young South African assistant Pieter Mawson, who immediately declared she had been killed by a lion. Once the real reason for her death became apparent, the police pounced on Paul Ekai, a Turkana ex-servant whom Joy had repeatedly humiliated. Some people suspected Mawson had been involved but, although two out of the three assessors in court had found him innocent, Ekai, now 28, has served eleven years of a life sentence. After Joy's funeral, George travelled to Meru and scattered her ashes on the graves of her cherished animals, Elsa and Pippa.

George's own death was more heroic. In 1989, at the age of 83, he was gunned down by a gang of Somali bandits. Only minutes earlier, a young woman friend of his had left his lion colony at Kora. On hearing shots, he drove to her rescue and was fatally shot trying to break up their ambush.

Caroline Cass is the author of Joy Adamson: Behind the Mask</font>