The Book of the Dead

Charleston was outraged. Bomb threats meant the ceremony had to take place in their front parlor, and Newsweek claimed the event had “shaken the Confederacy.” It certainly didn’t shock Margaret Rutherford. She told Time magazine, “I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!” She offered practical support, too, leaning on the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (with the help of her friend Tony Benn), to organize a second, English, ceremony in Hastings.

In Charleston, things went from bad to worse. The crate containing the couple’s wedding presents, sent over from England, was deliberately set on fire in the street. The local police chief arrived personally to serve Simmons a ticket, claiming that the smoldering remains of the blaze (which his own men had swept into the street) were obstructing the highway. The couple’s dogs were poisoned; they were shot at on the street for walking hand in hand; there were rumors of a Mafia contract taken out on Dawn’s life. The birth of her daughter, Natasha, in 1972 was the final straw. Charleston denounced it as a stunt, but Margaret Rutherford was able to produce a Harley Street surgeon to confirm that Dawn Langley Simmons had a fully functioning womb. Shortly afterward, the baby was attacked by an intruder who proceeded to rape Dawn and left her with a broken nose and severely injured arm. The Simmonses decided enough was enough and moved to Catskill, New York.

By then, however, their marriage had turned sour. John-Paul was drinking heavily. She claimed he was also beating her and selling her possessions to buy whiskey. In 1974 he left her for another woman “who had shot and killed her first husband,” but soon afterward he was committed to a mental institution, suffering from schizophrenia. Dawn divorced him, but continued to look after him until her death in 2000.

In 1981, when Dawn was still living as Gordon in Hudson, New York, working as a teacher in a Catholic school, he/she was commissioned to write a biography of his/her adoptive mother, Margaret Rutherford. Her own autobiography, Dawn: A Charleston Legend, followed in 1995. Both were well received and widely reviewed. Dawn’s final years were spent back in Charleston with Natasha and her three granddaughters, to whom she was a proud and devoted granny. The city that had once tried to ruin her now happily accommodated her as a much loved, if slightly wacky, local celebrity.

After Dawn’s autobiography was published in 1995, Nigel Nicolson wrote a moving piece about her in the Spectator. “I have maligned her in the past, mocked her strange fate and refused to meet her,” he wrote. “She had asked me for help in arranging an English marriage, and when she called on me, I hid.” He had even refused to meet her when he visited Charleston. It was only when he saw her interviewed on television and saw pictures of his own mother on her wall that he relented. “For the first time, I was touched.” He added that, in spite of his unkind behavior toward her, “there is not a word of reproach for me in her book. Like everything else about Dinky, it is gallant, resilient and unfailingly generous.”

The unlikely and optimistic story of Dawn Langley Simmons concludes this catalog of men and women assailed by bizarre and unlooked-for misfortune.

As we have seen, such disaster may not bring self-knowledge (Santa Anna), victory (Stuyvesant), love (Florence Nightingale), longevity (Lambert), or happiness (Pessoa), but (the appalling Santa Anna apart) it always produced a change for the better, giving each of them an assured place in history.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that difficulties were necessary for health. They offer potential for change, most particularly a change of attitude. The Stoics of ancient Athens based a whole school of philosophy on this idea, but it is the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (whose only misfortune was to have an even more brilliant and famous brother) who expressed it most succinctly:

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Monkey Keepers Oliver Cromwell—Catherine de’ Medici—Sir Jeffrey Hudson—Rembrandt van Rijn—Frida Kahlo —Madame Mao—Frank Buckland—King Alexander I of Greece

Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there.

HENRY JAMES

Unlike cats, monkeys demand active husbandry, deep pockets, and endless patience. No one keeps a monkey by accident. More people than you might imagine have taken on the job. As well as the eight mentioned in this chapter, other notable monkey keepers include Peter the Great, Lord Byron, Alexander von Humboldt, Francis Galton, Meher Baba, and Michael Jackson.

As Queen Victoria remarked after being introduced to Jenny the orangutan at the London Zoo, monkeys and apes are “frightfully and painfully and disagreeably human.” Monkeys are bonsai people: They remind us of ourselves.

The long and controversial career of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) almost didn’t happen. His parents were regular visitors to Hinchingbrooke, the country estate of his grandfather, Henry, and it was there, shortly after Oliver was born, that he was abducted by grandpa’s pet monkey. The creature grabbed the baby from his crib and made for the roof. Servants rushed to bring mattresses into the courtyard to soften his fall if the animal dropped him, but for several minutes the monkey ignored them, hopping from ridge to ridge with young Oliver clamped under his hairy arm. The assembled company at last enticed the beast down, and the future Lord Protector of England was returned unharmed. There is no record of how they did it—though modern monkey handlers recommend that a dish of jam usually does the trick.

As far as we know, Cromwell never kept a pet monkey himself—it would have been rather surprising if he had—but in the frontispiece of a 1664 satirical cookbook, purporting to be by his wife, Elizabeth, she appears with a monkey on her shoulder. The illustration portrays her as a plain-looking frump and the anonymous author refers to her throughout as “Joan” (the stock name for a scullery maid), mockingly remarking that Whitehall had been turned into a dairy and that her “sordid frugality and thrifty baseness” was “a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace.” The monkey on her shoulder is there to make a monkey out of Mrs. Cromwell, letting everyone know she is a jumped-up country bumpkin and reminding readers of the old proverb, “the higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see of its arse.”

For several centuries, monkeys had been the favored pet of queens: “Joan” Cromwell’s monkey also implies that she was “aping” her royal betters. Monkeys that appear in portraits of actual queens are coded symbols for lust, childish exuberance, bad decision making, or a weakness for the occult. All these qualities were brought together in the most famous of all monkey-owning queens, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89). Also known as the Black Queen, Madame La Serpente, and the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb, she was the most powerful woman in Europe for more than forty years.

Catherine was the great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the man who bankrolled the Florentine Renaissance, but she didn’t have an easy start in life. As a merchant’s daughter, she was technically a commoner and, within weeks of her birth, an orphan, too. Things looked up a little in 1523, when her cousin was elected Pope Clement VII. Aged only four, she became a bargaining chip in the endless marital poker game of European royal politics. Then, in 1527, the Medicis were overthrown in Florence. Catherine was taken hostage and imprisoned in a series of convents.

By the time she was twelve, she had been made to ride through the streets on a donkey, had been jeered at by an angry crowd, and had survived a planned attempt on her life that would have seen her lowered naked in a basket outside the city wall in an attempt to trick members of her own family to shoot at her. (They were besieging “their” city at the time.) When Florence surrendered, Catherine was summoned to Rome by her papal cousin, who