QI The Book of the Dead

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 smouldering 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 rumours 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 afterwards, 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 whisky. In 1974 he left her for another woman ‘who had shot and killed her first husband’, but soon afterwards 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 whacky, 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 behaviour towards 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 Simmonsconcludes this catalogue 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
     
     
    Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats – all human life is there .
HENRY JAMES
     
    U nlike 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 the job on. As well as the eight mentioned below, 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 orang utan at 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