Book Review: The Lady from the Black Lagoon

In 1953, ichthyologist Kay Lawrence joined a research expedition searching for fossils in the Amazon Basin. This was the same year that Rosalind Franklin left King’s College in London, after she created the X-ray diffraction image of DNA that was shown to Watson and Crick without her approval or knowledge. Lawrence was the only woman in a team of five scientists, and the only one without a PhD, or at least the only one who was not referred to as “Dr.” in the publicity materials for the expedition. Her fieldwork hit some snags — not the least of which was a foreboding black lagoon and an amphibious monster that fell in love with her and her extremely scientific white bathing suit.

Yes — Kay is actress Julia Adams and the amphibious monster is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But there’s also a Rosalind Franklin figure in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and like Franklin, her contributions were obscured, overshadowed, and openly questioned for decades. Mallory O’Meara brings the story of Milicent Patrick, the makeup artist and special effects designer behind the Creature, to life in a fun and funny new biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.

O’Meara grew up loving horror films and she was over the moon when she learned that her favorite movie monster, the Creature, was designed by a woman named Milicent Patrick. The world of horror is dominated by men, and so even though O’Meara only knew the barest details, she clung to Patrick as a patron saint of representation. In her introduction, O’Meara writes:

“Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too. I accepted her invitation. I make monster movies for a living. I produce them, I write them. Over the years, I searched for information, for anything that could tell me more about her. For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.”

O’Meara’s book is wonderful and engaging. She pieces together the lost legacy of her horror icon and takes the reader along on the research journey. I listened to the audiobook and fell in love with O’Meara’s voice which is somehow both welcoming and acerbic, irreverent and admiring. And, from the beginning, I was struck by how well the world of science mapped onto The Lady from the Black Lagoon’s world of science fiction. The story of why Milicent Patrick’s legacy was lost turns out to be completely banal, standard issue sexism and O’Meara deftly places this history in the context of the #MeToo movement.

“So many women share this experience, women in every profession. We’re ignored, sexually harassed, talked down to, plagiarized and insulted in and out of the workplace. It’s worse if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a disable woman, a transwoman and worse still if you’re a combination of any of these. I don’t know a single woman working in my field, or any creative field, or any field at all, who cannot relate to Milicent Patrick. It’s not just her story. It’s mine, too.”

I love O’Meara's description of Patrick’s process during the design of the Creature: “for inspiration, Milicent researched prehistoric animals: reptiles, amphibians, fish. She specifically looked for illustrations of animals from the Devonian period, which is when the Creature claw fossil in the film is from. The Devonian period, about four hundred million years ago, was the time period when life began to adapt to dry land from the sea. She spent weeks sketching out designs.” I had no idea The Creature from the Black Lagoon built a myth from this core kernel of scientific truth. Aside from this deep dive into a specific monster origin story, O’Meara’s book is not a science story*. But, I spent much of the book’s treatment of women in the film industry thinking about women in STEM.

When O’Meara compares Patrick’s Hollywood to her own experiences in film in the 21st century, the resemblance of these narratives to the past and present in STEM fields is eerie. O’Meara began her project because the idea of Milicent Patrick — a woman working behind the scenes in horror films — embodied such an important possibility to her in a field where otherwise she did not see herself represented. But, as she uncovered uncomfortable truths about Patrick as a person, she had to grapple with how to portray an imperfect personal hero. “The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect,” she laments. “When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a mal-adaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it.” This is the hip, feminist-forward biographer’s way of saying that the water is not responsible for fixing the leaky pipeline.

I have my own Milicent Patrick, only her name is Annie Sawyer Downs. She left behind just enough of a scientific legacy that I’m awed by her botanical prowess and totally frustrated by the blanks in her life story. Like O’Meara, I’ve considered this woman to be “a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.” O’Meara opens her book with the story of her Milicent Patrick tattoo — and, even before you read Chapter 1, you see the beautiful cover art for the book, which was created by her tattoo artist. On the Literary Disco podcast in March O’Meara explained: “When you get a tattoo of someone, you become a sort of information kiosk.” O’Meara later describes an exchange with a librarian at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library: “I even sheepishly rolled up my left sleeve to show him the tattoo of Milicent and the Creature. I’m so deeply invested in this project that asking me about it is like asking a new parent to show you pictures of their baby.”

I don’t have a tattoo of Annie Sawyer Downs, but I did name my kid after her. Asking me to show you pictures of my baby is literally asking me to dive into the story of my Milicent Patrick. I loved following O’Meara’s journey as she tracked down the pieces of Patrick’s life because I’ve done that too — I finagled an invitation to the Maine summer house that Annie Sawyer Downs’ built, I found her herbarium specimens at Harvard, I read through her collaborator’s field notes and could not help but notice that after she mentored him for the better part of a decade he went on to found a botanical club that did not admit women as members. I’m so happy that O’Meara got to write the book on Patrick — and I really did love this book — but I found the whole experience of listening to it to be bittersweet, and not just because the misogyny that ended Patrick’s career still hangs over Hollywood — and everywhere else. It was bittersweet for me to watch someone else find their Annie Sawyer Downs, tie up the loose ends, and bring a full story to light because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that for Annie. Annie died almost a century before Milicent Patrick, her trail is colder, her work is less renowned, there is no cult following of Rhododendron canadense forma albiflora like there is for the Creature**. And, as much as I feel Annie deserves a book like The Lady from the Black Lagoon, I know there are countless fully erased BIWOC in my field who didn’t even get to leave behind a name, let alone a trail of breadcrumbs, for future historians to follow. And so, once again Milicent Patrick is a kind of singular woman — a stand in for a whole suite of women who have given the faintest glimmer of representation to my generation, a small hope that we could see ourselves in them, even if we couldn’t read their full story in a book or Wikipedia page. Maybe I can’t have that for Annie, but I’d love to read the story of another ecologist’s Milicent Patrick figure next — write that book and/or send me your recommendation!  

*Still, some science creeps in to the science fiction, for example in O’Meara’s footnote on page 19: “Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Directory in 2010, the first and only. Sixty women have been to space. It’s harder for women to get into Hollywood than it is for us to get to space.”

**There definitely should be more botanical cult classics.

Book Review: The Feather Thief

I’ve got my conference roadtrip routine dialed in. This spring I drove to the Northeast Natural History Conference (215 miles each way), the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering (150 miles), the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s Borns Symposium (250 miles), and (as a fan, not an ecologist) the New England Division 1 College Men’s Ultimate Frisbee Regional Tournament (100 miles). I packed insulated mugs for both hot and iced coffee, a trusty ice scraper for the always-lovely April ice storm in northern Vermont, a light-weight wrap to chase the air conditioning chill on my bare arms after ducking inside on the actually-lovely first 70° days of spring in Maine, and a garment bag of professional clothes to replace my ripped maternity jeans/driving uniform upon rolling into the conference center. I hit the best bakeries (King Arthur’s, Beach Pea, Florence Pie Bar). And on the last few legs, I listened to an amazing, engrossing audiobook: Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. 

My favorite moment in The Feather Thief is not the poignant description of Alfred Russel Wallace watching four years worth of his South American collections burn at sea from the lifeboat of the Helen, or the almost heroic depiction of the generations of curators of natural history collections shepherding scientific information through the ages. It is the suitcase scene. Author Kirk Wallace Johnson and his wife are packing a suitcase: a laundry-laden re-enactment of Edwin Rist’s 2009 theft of hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring: 

“Do you think two hundred ninety-nine birds would’ve fit in just one?”…Seeing where her questions led—that multiple suitcases would suggest multiple people—I got out a medium-size suitcase. Having seen the window at the Tring, I knew he couldn't have fit one much larger through it. Working together, we spent the next hour building a pile of fake birds. A rolled-up pair of dress socks formed a Blue Chatter. She folded several dozen T-shirts and dish towels in the approximate size of an Indian Crow, and used her leggings to fashion Respendent Quetzal tails.We started packing. Marie-Josée, consulting the Tring’s spreadsheet, counted off each species. When the suitcase was halfway full, we were already at eighty birds. Of course, our experiment was hardly scientific—my washcloth Flame Bowerbirds might have been a bit large—but it seemed as though it would’ve been difficult to fit all of them in a single suitcase.

 By this point in the book, the reader (in my case, the listener) has followed rapt while Johnson evolved from a memoirist trying to escape writer’s block through fly-fishing to an amateur detective with an accordion file of notes on the history of biogeography and conservation biology. In the prologue, when he first hears of Edwin Rist’s theft, Johnson is running a foundation committed to helping Iraqi refugees who have worked for U.S.-affiliated organizations to obtain visas to the U.S. (This American Life listeners may remember Johnson’s story from Nancy Updike’s interview in episode 607). He knows almost nothing about fly-tying, museum bird collections, Alfred Russel Wallace, or how these topics could possible overlap. The Feather Thief weaves these niche interests and the unbelievable robbery of 299 bird skins from the Tring into a compelling, larger-than-life narrative that traces Wallace’s birds of paradise from Southeast Asia to Victorian trends in hat fashion to the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey. 

When Johnson begins packing his suitcase with laundry-birds, we are deep into the story — the thief has been caught, the case is closed, the Tring curators are sifting through the remains of bird skins separated from their tags, including Ziploc bags of feathers plucked for individual sale and returned to the museum by a paltry few of the fly-tiers who discovered their eBay purchases were stolen goods. In the suitcase scene are the echoes of all the travels of both the bird and human characters of the book — Wallace’s voyages, the ships laden with feathers for fancy hats, the bird skins and other natural history collections spirited to the English countryside and away from bombed out London during World War II, the American flautist studying at the Royal Academy of Music, the stolen bird skins mailed to eBay customers across the globe, Johnson’s own travels from Iraq to New Mexico’s Red River, to New Jersey, South Africa, Germany, and Norway tracking down fly-tiers associated with Rist. 

Many of the legs of Johnson’s trip will be familiar to ecologists. As a community, we know the namesake of the Wallace Line, we’re familiar with the story of how Wallace’s correspondence coerced the plodding Darwin to finally, publicly share his theory of natural selection, we know that some of the earliest major conservation policy was driven by women who were appalled by the hidden cost of other women's decorative hat choices, and we can expound on the value of natural history collections. Though, The Feather Thief might make us think twice before again exclaiming broadly, “Given [natural history collections] breadth of importance and relevance, it would be difficult to imagine anyone dismissing the value of natural history collections to society relative to the research, education, and training of next generation scientists” (Bradley et al 2014).

Throughout the book, the value of natural history collections to society is routinely dismissed — the tags associated with Wallace’s bird skins are tossed aside and the record-keeping at the Tring is questioned by fly-tiers who suggest the museum should sell their extra skins to fly-tiers instead of keeping them in musty drawers. Reflecting on the scientific loss related to his crime, Rist cavalierly (and wrongly) says, “after a certain period of time—I think about a hundred years—technically speaking, all of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.” This scene reminded me of another science-heist book, Sex on the Moon, in which a NASA intern steals a lab safe full of moon rocks for kicks. The scientist whose samples were taken tells the FBI that the safe also contained his notebooks documenting thirty years of research. The thief “didn’t remember seeing any green notebooks in the safe. As far as he knew, they hadn’t thrown any thing out, other than the safe itself, so if there were notebooks, they’d still be either in Sandra’s storage shed or in the suitcase that had been with them in the Sheraton. But [the thief] didn’t really want to talk about some phantom notebooks.” In both cases, the scientific value of the stolen goods barely registers with the young, white males who believe they are entitled to these rare items.

In The Feather Thief this tension between the curators who mourn the loss of the skins and tags, and the general public’s perception of the heist — a hilarious tale of an American kid robbing a British museum for feathers so he can tie flys that no one will ever actually fish with! — reflects our biases; we, as scientists, do not clearly understand the difference between how we value natural history collections within our community and how these same collections are valued by those outside of science. 

Finally, I want to note one failing in the book. As a former natural history museum intern (shout out to Worcester’s EcoTarium) and herbarium researcher, I bumped on the clumsy way that Johnson described the record keeping associated with museum specimens. He never explained the accessioning process — how museums enter items, like skins or specimens, into their collections. I think that this oversight diminishes Johnson’s eureka moment when he, late in the book, receives the Tring’s spreadsheet of stolen birds: “it meticulously noted the exact number of skins gathered from Edwin’s apartment the morning of the arrest (174), the number of those with tags (102) and without (72), and the number of skins subsequently returned by mail (19).” Later, this same spreadsheet returns but when Johnson reads the column headings aloud, the first one is “Number of Specimens Missing in July 2009.” This column sounds like it was sourced from a museum database, while the first description reflects numbers collected by the police from a crime scene. Johnson documents the fly-tying community’s dismissal of the Tring’s records — "'Ask Tring the last time they counted all their birds!'"— but drops the ball on presenting clear, compelling evidence to support the museum's count of 299 lost skins. It’s never explicitly explained how the 299 tally is calculated, which is a shame because I imagine that opening the empty drawers in the Tring, matching the tags of the left-behind birds — juvenile males and females without the prized technicolor feathers — to the accession numbers and digital photographs of museum records, creating a Missing List for each species and drawer, all of this would be high drama while also offering a window into the work of natural history collections. What specific research had these skins, the missing and the left-behind, contributed to in the past? Which birds had donated DNA or geographic information to scientists before the heist? I imagined these notes, papers, and reports exist but Johnson doesn’t cover them, except to offer general examples of the kinds of research that rely on collections. And here’s the thing: The List Project literally started as a spreadsheet. Johnson knows spreadsheets. Why is this one, which figures so prominently in Johnson’s moment as a main character, which drives his detective work as he dives deeper into the case, so poorly-described? Just another unsolved mystery of The Feather Thief… 

References:

Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Viking, 2018.

Robert D. Bradley, Lisa C. Bradley, Heath J. Garner, Robert J. Baker; Assessing the Value of Natural History Collections and Addressing Issues Regarding Long-Term Growth and Care, BioScience, Volume 64, Issue 12, 1 December 2014, Pages 1150–1158, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu166