Chapter Sixteen
THE PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER STAMMERED AS HE READ from a piece of paper shoved into his hands at the Polo Grounds shortly after two in the afternoon, interrupting a football game between the New York Giants and a short-lived team called the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt just announced,” he said, his voice rebounding throughout the stadium on the blustery afternoon of December 7, 1941. Throughout the announced crowd of 55,501, young men stood up and made their way to the exits, preparing to report for duty.
The reality of war fell on the city like a sudden rain. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, heavily armed guards set up checkpoints at the dry docks where two 45,000-ton battleships were under construction. Police officers surrounded the Japanese consulate on Fifth Avenue, where they could detect the smell of burning paper. Fighter planes from Long Island’s Mitchel Field hummed along the shoreline, the tinny sound of their propellers echoing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan.
There was a sense that the enemy could appear at any moment, recreating the terror of Pearl Harbor along Park Avenue or the Brooklyn Promenade. New Yorkers should not “feel entirely secure because you happen to be on the Atlantic Coast. There is no comfort in that,” Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned in a radio broadcast from his desk at City Hall that was aired on five stations. Two weeks later, Life magazine published a detailed sketch showing a squadron of Nazi aircraft approaching the city from the southeast, under the headline “How Nazi Planes May Bomb New York.”
In those early days of the war, an invasion seemed inevitable. Japanese forces had crossed the Pacific and left the military complex at Pearl Harbor a smoking ruin; what would prevent them from marching farther forward and inflicting the same damage on San Francisco? Germany had hollowed out London after a barrage of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, and it seemed only a matter of time before the city would fall. Nazi submarines operated at will in the Atlantic, sinking any hopes that the width of the ocean could protect the United States from warfare.
Throughout the country, Americans began the glum process of boarding up and hiding the objects that mattered most. In Washington, DC, a congressman from Michigan named Fred Bradley proposed that all of the gleaming white marble buildings in the nation’s capital be repainted dark gray to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to see them. Workers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York began pulling down paintings from the third-floor galleries and putting them in a sandbagged storeroom each night before rehanging them each morning. On the Upper East Side, the Frick Collection painted its skylights black. Museum workers across the city received memos sent out by building engineers on how to respond in the event of a bombing, either by air or by an explosive hidden in a bag. In the case of an attack, workers should immediately head to the exhibition floors and “gather up shattered fragments [of an artwork] and wrap in cloth marked with collection number.” To ready itself for a sustained bombing of the city, the American Museum of Natural History developed plans to turn its complex of buildings into a vast public shelter, going so far as to make a deal to purchase pianos in bulk to entertain and calm those it expected to host huddled inside.
Priceless pieces of art and culture were nailed into crates and rushed away from the coasts. Seventy-five of the most important paintings and sculptures in the collection of the National Gallery of Art—including three Raphaels, three Rembrandts and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington—were loaded onto a train and sent to storage at the sprawling Biltmore estate, the largest private home in the country, tucked in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. Some fifteen thousand items from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, filling up ninety truckloads, were hidden at an empty mansion outside Philadelphia. Museum walls in San Francisco and San Diego turned bare as collections were packed and taken to protected vaults in Colorado Springs.
At the American Museum of Natural History, the size and weight of most objects on display made the question of hiding them impossible. One dinosaur specimen alone could fill up more than a dozen truckloads, making a wholesale evacuation of the collection the size and scope of a military operation. The museum did what it could at the edges, packing up precious materials such as gold and diamonds that were easy to transport. The dinosaur collection was left untouched, a silent prayer that a lone German bomb would not destroy what had persevered for millions of years. Every specimen remained in place, ready to brave whatever the war brought.
All except for one. Since Brown found the first T. rex nearly thirty-five years earlier, no one else had duplicated his feat. The three T. rex specimens in the American Museum remained the only relics of the creature known to science. Should the museum suffer a hit during a raid in New York, all evidence of what was now the world’s most recognizable dinosaur could be lost. “We had hoped that at least one specimen would be preserved,” Brown, who was curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department at the time, later wrote. Fifteen boxes of bones containing the first T. rex uncovered in Hell Creek soon arrived at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, which had agreed to purchase the specimen for roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars.
The sale of the priceless T. rex holotype—the term given to the first example of any species found—to a rival institution would have been inconceivable a generation earlier. Osborn, however, had died in 1935—living just long enough to praise the rise of Nazism in Europe and Hitler’s attempts at putting the racist eugenics principles he endorsed into practice. He retired on January 1, 1933, as the most powerful person the American Museum had ever known, twenty-five years after assuming its presidency. In that time, he sent expeditions to every continent on the globe, authored more than one hundred scientific papers, planned a grand new museum entrance on Central Park West in honor of his childhood friend Theodore Roosevelt and increased the museum’s endowment by nearly $200 million in today’s dollars. Yet it was in ways unlikely to be noticed by a visitor that his influence was most greatly felt. For a generation, every display had to meet his approval, allowing his opinion that racial hierarchy was a scientific fact to infect exhibits ranging from a diorama depicting a seventeenth-century meeting between the Lenape and Dutch settlers in what was then known as New Amsterdam to the presentation of the T. rex.
The final years of Osborn’s life were consumed with his search for the origin of what he called the white race and his fear that it would be extinguished. He railed against birth control in favor of what he called birth-selection, arguing that by taking steps to engineer the next generation the country could permanently solve its problems of unemployment and overpopulation. Birth control alone “is fraught with danger to society at large and threatens rather than insures the upward ascent and evolution of the human race,” he wrote in the New York Times, consumed by the notion that the number of desirable white babies would fall behind those of less favorable stock. “Not more but better Americans,” he wrote.
While most biologists and anthropologists agreed that the first humans likely lived in Africa, Osborn continued to argue that white Nordic Protestants could trace their lineage to Asia, where, he claimed, the fossil record indicated the presence of humans living 1.5 million years ago with the same brain capacity “equal to that of at least three races living today.” At a time when science was often used to backstop racism—no less than the New York Times published a three-part essay edited by Osborn under the headline “Whence Came the White Race?” arguing that a “superior breed” whose lineage traced down to American colonists once conquered prehistoric Europe and drove lesser forms of humans to extinction over the course of a few generations—the intensity of Osborn’s vitriol was noted by his peers. By writing a preface to Madison Grant’s The Conquest of a Continent, Or the Expansion of Races in America, Osborn tied his reputation to “about the most uncompromising and aggressive plea for the maintenance of a Nordic and Protestant America, racially and nationally pure and undefiled, that has ever found its way into print,” wrote Dr. William Macdonald, a professor at Yale.
Osborn’s death extinguished the final embers of an era in which the American Museum was still new and unproven, struggling to appear relevant in the cacophony of New York. Thanks largely to its collection of dinosaurs, it had become the destination for millions of school-aged children on one of their first field trips, a place where they could experience the vast scope of the natural world in person. Until his death, Osborn hung on to the fact that his institution was the only one in the world that contained T. rex, the most famous dinosaur on Earth.
As New York prepared for a possible German aerial attack, Brown was among the last people at the museum who remembered the cowboys and prospectors whose work filled its shelves and the race between museums to find and display the most impressive dinosaurs. When the Carnegie unveiled the specimen it purchased from the American Museum in a “Godzilla pose” in 1942, it was the first time that a T. rex stood in any place other than New York City in 66 million years. The local press boasted of the museum’s “new baby,” calling it “the more spectacular of all the exhibits in the Gallery of Fossil Reptiles.” The same year, Brown turned sixty-five, the mandatory age for retirement at the institution where he had worked since he was in college. Out of respect for his contributions he was given the title Curator Emeritus and an office—his last connections to the only job he had ever known.
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BROWN WAS NOT BUILT TO slow down. Well into his fifties, he embarked on expeditions that left others struggling to keep up. For company, he often brought along his second wife, a New York socialite and author named Lilian McLaughlin. Brash and accustomed to the spotlight, Lilian was the opposite of his first wife, Marion, in nearly every way. Yet in her love of attention—and apparent willingness to indulge in affairs—she was more like her husband than he perhaps recognized. Together, they trekked through Southeast Asia, their path dictated by the needs of the museum. In Pakistan, Brown attempted to find the remains of an animal now known as Paraceratherium, an early rhinoceros that was among the largest land mammals to have ever lived. In central Burma, he disappeared for several days in the jungle after missing a fork in the trail and discovered a glowing spider that darted away when he tried to grab it. “Many nights I searched in the jungle and questioned natives and white officers who had passed through that district, but apparently no one else had reported a luminous spider, nor can I find any record of any known elsewhere,” he later wrote.
A bout of malaria that left Brown with a fever of 106.2 degrees was among the few things that could stop him. Lilian packed him in a bathtub full of ice and administered massive doses of quinine as he rambled in delusions. “It was mostly of his youth that he spoke. Sometimes he was a small boy again, wandering over the coal mounds on his father’s Kansas farm, collecting his first precious specimens,” she wrote in a memoir of their adventures titled I Married a Dinosaur. “Finally, the words would turn into meaningless whispers that ended in silence, or suddenly jumble together and be lost in his ravings.” After six days, the fever broke. A shell of his former self, Brown weighed less than a hundred pounds and was too weak to walk more than a few paces. Yet within a few weeks, he was strolling through a nearby garden. “Before we knew it, the man was dressing in his new Palm Beach suit and wanting to go places,” Lilian wrote.
After each expedition, Brown returned to the sanctum of the American Museum. Not long after they were married, he took Lilian on a private tour of the dinosaur halls, where, “when Barnum explained them, speaking as one would of old friends, [the specimens] seemed to change and warm into life,” Lilian wrote. “Strolling further down the hall, neither of us spoke. An ageless silence seemed to enshroud that incredible assemblage once flesh and blood, now stony reminders of Nature’s magnificent experiment with bulk and brawn. And suddenly it dawned on me as never before why my husband was so obsessed with his work. It was a great work. He had done this. The amassing of these prehistoric wonders had been chiefly his doing, and it was not a small thing.”
The drive to do great work did not go away with age. Not long after his retirement in the summer of 1942, Brown received a call from Colonel William J. Donovan. A few months earlier, Donovan had been named chief of the newly-created Office of Strategic Services, a military agency that was the forerunner of the modern Central Intelligence Agency. Donovan was the head of a sprawling network of more than twelve thousand people, working both within the government and outside it to understand the Nazi war machine and ready occupied Europe for the eventual landing of American soldiers. He turned to Brown for assistance in planning a possible invasion route via the Aegean Sea, based on Brown’s experience prospecting for fossils in the region. Brown jumped at the prospect of another adventure. He left Lilian at their apartment on Broadway, around the corner from the museum, and rushed to wartime Washington, where he spent his days detailing the geological formations and features of the Greek islands.
There was no time for him to find his own place to live in Washington, so he moved in with the person whom he had been avoiding for much of her life: his daughter, Frances. He unpacked his bags in an empty room in her apartment downtown, the first and only time that the pair had lived together since she was an infant. She had been in Washington for over a year, working in the editorial office of the American Red Cross, after the junior college where she taught English literature for seven years closed due to the war. When they stood next to each other, the resemblance between the two was undeniable. Frances shared her father’s soft eyes, round face and lips that turned up at the edges, as if always ready to break out in a laugh. But that was as far as the similarities went. She was in nearly every way his foil—a thoroughness that could have come about only by choice. Where he once jumped aboard a boat to Patagonia with two hours’ notice, she directed church choirs; where he delighted in breaking rules, she once worked as a college dean. The gap between their approaches to life was so great that it seemed as if Brown had served as a sort of alternative compass, granting Frances security in feeling that if she remained in opposition to her father’s far-flung ways, she would always find shelter.
There was no denying Brown for long, though. Like her mother before her, Frances slowly found herself swept up in her father’s energy. One night they would go to a party, the next a concert and then a reception the following evening only to repeat the cycle again, a storm with Brown always at its center. Each day would be filled with work, each night with drinks and a sense of possibility. It was as if Frances had opened her home to a twenty-something, not an aging, weathered man who was nominally retired.
Within a few weeks of his arrival, Brown met “a gorgeous and delightful blonde beauty with a Teutonic accent who had no trouble at all in completely captivating Barnum,” Frances wrote in her memoir. Soon, all of her father’s time outside the office was spent with the new woman, leaving Frances once again on the sideline of his life. “Not that Frances was bothered by Barnum’s affairs with women, but she quickly learned that this particular lady was, in all probability, a very competent Nazi spy,” she wrote. She warned her father that his new companion might be attempting to get him to spill secrets that could affect the war. “No amount of reasoning seemed to penetrate, and so Frances spent a good many weeks dreaming of an international incident before the lady, somewhat suddenly, departed from the Washington scene and, presumably, went back to Germany not as successful as she hoped to be,” Frances wrote.
Like all of Brown’s adventures, his time in Washington was short-lived. He spent less than twelve months in the capital before joining the Board of Economic Warfare in 1943, where he turned his attention to completing an aerial survey of Alberta to locate potential oil fields. Upon his return, he went to work for the military by scanning photographs taken by spy planes over areas where he had once prospected in Africa, India and the Mediterranean islands, searching for signs of enemy camouflage. By that time, Frances had left Washington for a job at another college.
Though brief, the time spent in his daughter’s company finally opened Brown up to the possibility of a relationship. He brought her along on expeditions to Guatemala and Montana, answering her unspoken question of what she had been missing while in the care of her grandparents as a young girl. In the final years of his life, Frances became one of Brown’s closest confidants, the one person besides Marion who could tame a man who for decades had defined himself by running away in search of something new. In 1962, the Sinclair Refining Company asked Brown, then eighty-nine years old, to supervise the construction of nine life-size fiberglass dinosaurs planned for its Dinoland exhibition at the 1964 World’s Fair, where the dinosaurs would stand within sight of models of Saturn V rockets and pavilions housing early computers and modems. Fifty million people were expected to attend. Brown commuted daily by limousine from Manhattan to Hudson, New York, to ensure that the anatomy of each specimen was accurate. It seemed only fitting that a man so connected to the deep past would play a small part in a celebration of the future. “This was sheer joy for him. Who else at eighty-nine years of age could command an important, new job,” Frances wrote.
As he rode each day along the Hudson River, he often had Frances at his side. Their conversations ranged widely, touching on everything from proposed modifications to the exhibition’s plans, to how the models would be loaded on a raft to take them to Queens, to any new idea that he had. But most of those concerns soon drifted away, lost in a spell of unhurried moments together as Frances listened to her father tell stories from his life in the prospecting fields. “She never forgot the innumerable things he told her of his past exploits, nor his gleeful speculation about the probable reactions of onlookers when the dinosaurs were eventually floated down the Hudson River to the fair site,” she wrote.
Brown did not live to see his dinosaurs delight the city that had made his dreams possible. Two weeks before his ninetieth birthday, he laid down his fork at the dinner table and told Lilian that he was very tired. He slipped into a coma that night and never recovered, dying in St. Luke’s Hospital on February 5, 1963. He was buried in Oxford, New York, next to his first wife, Marion. His death was noted in a short article in the New York Times, surreally placed next to an illustration of sketches by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. “Dr. Brown was a tireless fossil hunter and was known as the Father of the Dinosaurs because of his successes during the nearly seven decades in which he served the museum,” the paper noted, a eulogy that Brown would no doubt have enjoyed given his difficulties in completing a doctorate at Columbia.
During his life, Brown was widely recognized as the best dinosaur collector who ever lived. He went out into the unknown and came back with new puzzle pieces that told the story of life on Earth, and he did it again and again and again, a run of success and discovery as impressive as navigating the stars. At his death, more than half of the dinosaur specimens on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History were the result of his work, a priceless collection that turned it from an afterthought into one of the most vital museums in the world. “He has discovered many of the most important and most spectacular specimens in the whole history of paleontology,” a fellow collector, Roy Chapman Andrew, wrote in a foreword to Lilian Brown’s first book. “When he ceases to look for bones on this earth, the celestial fossil fields may well prepare for a thorough inspection by his all-seeing eyes. He’ll arrive in the Other World with a pick, shellack, and plaster or else he won’t go.”
The New York World’s Fair opened on April 22, 1964, a little more than a year after Brown’s death. Visitors who walked the grounds in Queens could catch a glimpse of the first Ford Mustang, ride on a Ferris wheel in the shape of a giant tire or try to get the song from Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride out of their heads. The fair was an assault on the senses, the only time in the history of humankind when a person could watch trained dolphins toss plastic oranges into an audience and within minutes board a slow-moving walkway to view Michelangelo’s Pietà positioned behind bulletproof glass. For a brief moment, it was as if P. T. Barnum’s dime museum had been reborn for the modern age. And in the middle of the fair, staring directly at the giant Ferris wheel, stood a 20-foot-tall celebrity. Fifty-nine years after Barnum Brown first uncovered it in the Montana badlands, a modern monster reigned in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline: Tyrannosaurus rex.