Marlin Perkins, the grand old man of ”Mutual of Omaha`s Wild Kingdom,”
has faced charging rhinos, wrestled hungry alligators and cozied up to huggy pythons, any one of which might have compressed his already slender body to the diameter of a pencil. Mere talk show hosts hold no terror for him, as Jane Pauley of NBC`s ”Today” show learned recently.
Pauley opened an interview with the one accusation guaranteed to make Perkins as dangerous as some of the animals he has been introducing to television audiences for 24 unbroken seasons. ”People still assume, after all these years, that that film footage is staged,” she said.
Perkins, who has been beaten up by an elephant in India, chased off a beach by an enraged elephant seal and bitten by everything from a rattlesnake to a deadly gaboon viper, flashed anger, then retaliated by launching a blatant commercial for his lifelong sponsor, unabashedly touting Mutual of Omaha for the rest of the interview while Pauley floundered, unable either to shut him up or change the subject.
Perkins, 80 and stricken with cancer, may have lost the physical vitality that carried him on his grueling 25-year trek through deserts, rain forests and the highest reaches of the Himalayas in search of exotic fauna, but he obviously has lost none of his inner fire. Even his cancer, now in remission after a year of debilitating chemotherapy and radiation, is just one more deadly beast he has managed to tame.
”I`ve had lymphoma,” Perkins said as he prepared to pass the torch he started carrying for NBC in the 1950s as host of Chicago`s ”Zoo Parade” to younger, stronger colleagues. ”It got into my left eye and I eventually had to lose it. I`m wearing an artificial eye there now and it`s not nearly as good because I can`t see anything with it. I do miss my left peripheral vision. If I`m walking on the sidewalk and somebody comes along, I can`t see them. But it`ll work out. I`ll get used to it. Cancer is not the end of the world for me.”
Perkins, whose silver hair and neatly trimmed moustache have become the living logo of the nation`s conservation movement, was on an intensive promotional tour for his show that has just finished its 16th syndicated year on more than 200 stations following a highly-rated prime time run of 9 seasons with NBC.
He is turning it over to his longtime colleague, Jim Fowler, and a newcomer, Peter Gros, who looks like a cross between Tom Selleck and a running back for the Miami Dolphins, but Perkins said he has no intention of retiring. Despite deteriorating health, he will join the national anti-cancer campaign with his wife, Carol, who also has been a cancer victim, and do occasional hour-long specials for the show. As always, his beloved animals lead all priorities.
”We`ll never run out of material,” he said. ”There are lots and lots of things we haven`t filmed. There is an eagle in the Philippines called the monkey eating eagle, and it`s an endangered species because the people with money use that bird as a stuffed symbol of their affluence. They shoot them out of the sky and have them mounted and they`re getting scarcer and scarcer. We never got to film them. We`ve wanted to film killer whales as they live naturally and we haven`t done that. There are lots of things in Africa we haven`t filmed yet. We`ve never filmed an aardvark. The world is filled with so many wonderful things.”
Perkins` only worry is that mankind, which sometimes seems bent upon reducing the population of planet Earth to little more than people, pets and cockroaches, may not leave ”Wild Kingdom” time to film remaining wonders of nature, let alone preserve them for future generations. He was especially alarmed at destruction of the world`s tropical rain forests that National Geographic experts two years ago said were being stripped away at a rate of 3,000 acres per hour.
”We`re all concerned about the destruction of the rain forests,” he said. ”In Papua, New Guinea, the Japanese have invented a piece of equipment that will go in and clear-cut the entire tropical forest, including the hard wood which previously stopped them. This machine will grind even the hard wood up with the soft wood to make pulp. Of course, when they do this, there are thousands and thousands of species that are killed. Killed for pulp! It`s all for money. The same thing is true in the Amazon basin, the Congo basin, Southeast Asia and Indonesia. All these forests are being cleared and the botanists and zoologists are horrified.”
Third World nations, however, are not the only despoilers that draw Perkins` wrath. He can find plenty of targets right in his own back yard, and one of them has induced him to set up a wolf sanctuary in his native Missouri in the hope of maintaining a breeding strain to preserve the rapidly vanishing packs.
”It was the cattle people surrounding Yellowstone National Park who put enough political pressure in Washington to make the warden in charge eliminate wolves and mountain lions,” he said. ”Now the elk population is out of control. We filmed the round-up of elk one year and they had three helicopters and about 40 men and it cost them thousands and thousands of dollars to cut down the number. It would be far less expensive to our government, and much more desirable for the visitors to have an opportunity to see a wolf or a mountain lion in Yellowstone, to have paid the ranchers for the occasional animal the wolves or mountain lions killed and ate. All this takes away from our children an opportunity to see nature as it was before.”
Perkins said the crush of human population now may be the most dangerous situation on the planet, putting humans themselves on the potential list of endangered species.
”We`re too urbanized,” he said. ”All up and down the East Coast, all up and down the Mississippi. Have you been to Texas recently? Those cities are like miniature New Yorks. I don`t know how you can avoid the increase in population. That`s the No. 1 problem of the world. There are just too many people.
”The biggest increase in population of any country in the world today is Kenya. If they continue, within 50 years or so they will need 7 areas as large as Kenya to feed them all. When things get out of balance, nature does something about it. In the early days, we had epidemics that reduced the number of people in thickly populated parts of western Europe and something will come along now that will knock off so many people that it will thin out a bit. I can`t tell you what that is. Man sometimes helps nature and I hope it`s not going to be an atomic bomb, but something will level the situation.”
”It`s very discouraging,” Perkins said. ”The only thing we can do, as we have been doing on `Wild Kingdom,` is tell people about it and make them aware and ask them to join conservation organizations and help with their dollars to counteract many of the bad practices that are going on. Everybody has to do what he can.”
Perkins never dreamed, in 1945, when he was curator of reptiles at Lincoln Park Zoo, that he eventually would carry his passion for conservation to a worldwide audience of 38 million and become a television star with four Emmy awards on the shelf. WBKB-TV then had an audience of fewer than 300 television sets in the Chicago area and because it was starved for
programming, its management asked Perkins to carry monkeys, snakes and other creatures of the ”Zoo Parade” to the studio for live broadcasting.
”I was doing this just to promote the zoo,” he said. ”They`d let me get on with my animals and talk until I ran out of steam. I never had any idea it would become the thing it developed into.”
”Zoo Parade,” eventually picked up for local play by NBC, ran until 1962 when its sponsor changed the name to ”Mutual of Omaha`s Wild Kingdom”
and moved it to NBC prime time and a national audience.
Fowler, a naturalist and explorer who is as passionate about hawks and eagles as Perkins is about reptiles, has been with ”Wild Kingdom” from its network outset and now will replace Perkins as host, yielding his No. 2 position, in turn, to Gros, 34, an expert animal-handler from Marine World/
Africa USA, a San Francisco theme park.
Both were on hand the day after Perkins` ”Today” show interview, to help him dedicate a new national headquarters building his sponsor has established in Rye, N.Y. Though visibly weary and complaining of pain in his back, Perkins quickly rallied, draping a 7-foot Burmese python across his shoulders and posing for pictures with assembled insurance agents and their spouses. He was flanked by Fowler, who displayed one of his beloved eagles, and Gros, who held a great, blinking horned owl.
”Who needs wolves?” Perkins said in response to a question. ”Who needs mountain lions and grizzly bears? Who needs the earthworm? We all do. They fit into the web of nature wherever they are.”
