A sad tale of two women

Joan and Alan Root filming a spitting cobra. Of course, she's the one that got the venom in the eyes.

As we drive past the shrouded slopes of Mt. Kenya, I keep thinking of Joan and Alan Root. As well as Osa and Martin Johnson. So many similarities. Both couples were glamorous wildlife cinematographers, the Johnsons in the 20s and 30s, the Roots in the late 60s and 70s. They both pioneered new ways of seeing wildlife, the Johnsons by filming Africa from their amphibian planes, Osa’s Ark and The Spirit of Africa in 1933, the Roots by being the first to fly over Kilimanjaro in a hot-air balloon in 1974.

Osa Johnson standing in the way of elephants at Lake Paradise while Martin films the confrontation.

And then there was the similar dynamics in their marriages. In both cases, the women pretty much ran the business, organized the many filming safaris, and put themselves on the front line of action (Martin would often have Osa intentionally enrage a rhino or elephant to make them charge while he filmed the exciting sequence; Alan, while filming a spitting cobra, had Joan bob back and forth in front of the deadly snake which then unleashed a stream of venom straight to her glasses and into her eyes).

Yet it was always about the men. It was their egos that had to be stoked, their names that were always the more prominent (in some early films made by the Johnsons, Osa didn’t even get a filming credit though she often operated the cameras as much as Martin), and the men that got most of the adulation and awards.

And in the end both of the women got left behind. Osa when her husband died in a plane crash in 1937 just as they’d begun a nationwide lecture and radio tour, and Joan when Alan left her for another woman in 1982 shortly after the release of perhaps their most successful movie, Two in the Bush, about the couple’s extraordinary life and times in Africa. Joan Root was murdered in her bed in her home on Lake Naivasha; Osa Johnson became an alcoholic (her agent said after her death, “She would go into bars and quickly attract a crowd of admirers by telling people who she was. She entertained them with stories, and they bought her drinks.”) and was found dead, at the age of 58, in an empty bathtub at a room she’d rented in a New York hotel.

I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s just that here is a tale of two extraordinary women, both pioneering filmmakers in Africa, and they both had tragic endings. Their stories aren’t really linked. Yet for some reason I can’t stop thinking about them.