Footnote: This story was written for Business Daily but it was never published because the Lion Whisperer's promoter gave the same story to another newspaper including the same photographs, and their story got published the day before mine was to appear. The story is two years old but as this blog is something of an archive for me, I decided to place it here.
BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (August 2016)
Kevin Costner
Is coming to Kenya before the end of the year. The ‘Dancing With Wolves’ movie
star will be here making a film with his fellow executive producer Ralph
Helfer, the animal behaviorist who wrote true story about an African elephant
named ‘Modoc’, which is also the name of the book, the film rights of which Costner now
owns.
Modoc the
movie will be made both in Africa and in India, says Helfer, 85, who is no
stranger- to working with Hollywood stars, supplying them with tamed African
animals. Everyone from John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood to Kurt
Douglas, Walt Disney and even Marilyn Monroe has called on this gentle, magical
man to provide them with both feathered and furry two and four legged creatures to be co-stars
in their films.
“Marilyn
Monroe needed a raccoon to be in ‘River of no return’, while Clint Eastwood
required an orangutan for his movie ‘Any Which Way But Loose” and Kurt Douglas
had to have a rattle snake thrown in his face in the film ‘Indian Fighter,”
recalls Helfer who occasionally also acted in films like ‘Indian Fighter’ where
he had to be the one to throw the snake since none of the other stunt men dared
to play around with a poisonous viper.
Yet Helfer
says he’s trained everything from snakes and scorpions to leopards, tigers and
500 pound lions to gorillas, orangutans and baby chimps. His skillful
sensitivity earned him the name, the ‘Lion Whisperer’, yet lions are just one
breed of creature that he’s befriended over the years.
But it’s not
as if he grew up surrounded by animals. On the contrary, his family first lived
on the poorer side of Chicago, USA, a windy city he was happy to leave at age
11 when his parents split up and his mother moved with her brother’s family to
sunny California. “I never went back,” says Helfer who always knew he’d one day
surround himself with live creatures and live in Africa.
At first he
thought he’d become a veterinarian but before he fulfilled that dream, his
plans changed. It shift began while he was still in high school by setting up
his own pet shop. “It was my uncle ‘Irv’ who provided the means for me to open
the shop,” he says, admitting Irv couldn’t afford to help him buy exotic or
domestic animals to sell in the shop.
“So I’d go
out and collect lizards, scorpions and snakes; that’s how I began. People also
used to give me animals they didn’t want, so the shop gradually grew.”
Fortunately,
his school had a work-study program whereby he’d go to school four hours a day
and then work another four hours developing marketable skills. That’s how he
got through high school and earned himself enough to start a university program
to become a veterinarian.
“But I
quickly realized that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go, so I went back to
the pet shop which was actually in the heart of Hollywood,”
By then,
he’d already evolved his unique system of working with creatures which he calls
‘affection training.’
“Before me,
most animal trainers looked on African animals with fear, so they’d train them
using things like whips and ropes and cages, which meant that most Hollywood
actors didn’t feel safe working in films that featured animals,” he says.
All that
changed however, once the stars started coming into his pet shop and learning
how well he related to his animals.
“Cornel Wilde
was the first film star to come into the shop and after seeing the scorpions,
asked if I could set up a fight scene between two of them which the studio
would then magnify for a science fiction movie.”
His first
success led to many more jobs on movie sets. The main reason he got so much
work, he says, is because his style of taming was fool-proof. “The actors no
longer feared working with any kind of creature. And people like Walt Disney
wouldn’t work with anyone’s animals but mine.”
Over the
next 30 years, Helfer’s animals would feature in 2300 productions. His
‘affection training’ would effectively revolutionize the way wild life movies
would be made. His training program involves four basic elements which he says
are “like ingredients in a soup. All four must be there for the soup to taste
good; so my [affection] training involves love, patience, understanding and
respect. All four have to be there or the training won’t work.”
In fact, his
training style worked so well that at one point he employed 50 trainers (whom
he’d taught) helping him work with the 1500 animals he had in residence at his
southern California ranch which he named Africa USA.
But the
ranch (which was six square kilometers) didn’t happen overnight. A major
turning point in his career came when the actor William Holden (who once owned
Mount Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki, Kenya) walked into his pet shop and told
him he needed a tame super-sized lion who could work well with the 10 year old
girl who was set to star in Holden’s next movie, called ‘The Lion’.
Ralph had
just the lion for him. Zamba had been found by an American couple when he was
small and nearly dead. They never knew what happened to him but they look care
of him until they had to go back to the States. Although the lion cub was
already tame, their place in New York City was too small. They knew about Ralph
and shipped Zamba to his farm where Ralph brought him up as if he were his son
(in the Lion Whisperer’s own words).
The next
time Helfer saw Holden, he was walking into the star’s 20th Century
Fox office with his 528 pound Zamba on a leach, as if the lion was a sweet
harmless puppy dog. That was in 1961. By 1962, Pamela Franklin, now 11, and
Zamba were being filmed in Nanyuki.
That was the
first time Helfer had come to Kenya, but it wouldn’t be the last. He went back
to California, sold his ranch and set up his Enchanted Village, a 30 acre
animal park (which was nothing like a zoo) which he says had up to 600,000
visitors in its peak year. He also set up his own motion picture production
company through which he made both documentary and feature films. But that
first trip to Kenya worked some sort of magic on the man.
In ‘The Lion’,
there was a scene in which a Maasai warrior wrestles with Zamba, a feat which
the studio couldn’t find a real Maasai to enact. “So I was enlisted to play the
part,” says Helfer whose whole body was stained black for that one scene.
What was the
real eye-opener about his ‘being a black man’ for several months came when he
and a few of his Kenyan friends were walking along the street in Nanyuki and
one British soldier bashed him for no apparent reason. But it seems the soldier
was offended that a would-be ‘African’ would dare to walk passed him without
deferring to the white man.
It was an
incident that Helfer has never forgotten and which only increased his empathy
for local Kenyans, one of whom he would eventually marry named Suzzie Mutua.
But long
before he met Suzzie who lives with him today in Tigoni on a tea plantation in
Kenya, Helfer would travel back and forth between Kenya and California where he
would often appear on TV talk shows with hosts like Johnnie Carson of the
popular ‘Tonight’ show, bringing on whichever animal the host would ask for
that night.
“Betty White
[who had her own TV talk show] had one blind girl on her show who had always
wanted to ‘see’ a lion, so I was asked to bring Zamba for her to meet,” Helfer
says. In front of millions of late night TV viewers, the young girl sat with
Zamba and felt his face and mane and even his sharp teeth. That night Betty had
an unprecedented number of viewers, it was such a moving experience to see.
Helfer would
eventually sell his animal park and his production company. “I knew from my
first trip to Kenya that this is where I wanted to live the rest of my life
since I always knew I would live surrounded by animals,” he says.
But in the
early Sixties, few if any African animals were endangered, unlike today. Helfer
admits he’s nostalgic for the past, but that is one reason why he’s become a
writer of animal stories like Modoc, which is about an elephant befriended by a
boy who never wants to leave the animal’s side.
That was the
book Kevin Costner read and instantly knew he wanted to make into a movie.
Fortunately, he’s managed to raise several hundred million shillings to make
the Modoc film which he hopes will be even better than his award winning
‘Dancing with Wolves.’ By working closely with Ralph Helfer, there’s no doubt
that he will.