Ape Like: A Custody Battle Among Primates

IVAN THE GORILLA'S KEEPER thirsts. She forages. She plucks from Ivan's refrigerator a bottle of Pepsi.

Her name is Joyce Barr. ("Like where they serve drinks, but with an extra R.") Her previous job was in a pet shop in the Tacoma shopping center where for the past 27 years Ivan has lived. Joyce likes being around animals. She plays games with Ivan. She shovels out his cage and microwaves his yams. Joyce started at $4.50 an hour, no benefits; now she's up to $7 an hour, no benefits. Someday she'd like to train birds, or maybe write. Her first book would be about Ivan. "Not the cute story that everybody else has done," she says. "The true story. What they've done to us."

By this point she does not feel the need to explain who, exactly, she means by either "they" or "us."

When Joyce returns with her Pepsi, a change comes over Ivan. No longer aloof, he ambles close to the front of the custom truck trailer that is the most private of his three rooms. He sits very near the heavy metal screen - similar to the sort merchants pull down to protect their shops after closing - that separates him from Joyce.

And from Joyce's soda pop.

A television set behind Joyce flickers with an old Humphrey Bogart movie. Ivan's keepers have always said he enjoys watching TV, but this is "We're No Angels," two-and-a-half stars. Ivan's eyes stay locked on Joyce as she twists off the cap and swigs from the plastic bottle.

Ivan is as big and heavy as a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, stocked. His part of the trailer is dark. He is darker. He is a massive shadow in a shadow.

"Gimmee your lip," Joyce coos. "C'mon. Big lips. Gimmee your lip, Ivan."

A crescent of pink flashes out from the darkness. Joyce takes hold of the velvety flesh, pulls it through an opening in the screen, and pours in a few cola glugs.

"No, you're not getting it all," she says. "There you go."

Ivan takes back his lip and swallows. The process repeats itself several times, until Joyce voices concern about the effects of the sugar and caffeine.

"No, I can't give you no more. You'll be bouncin' off the walls. I'm sorry, babycakes."

Joyce, meanwhile, is feeling a bit wound-up herself. A few days earlier an agreement was announced - after years of acrimonious wrangling over Ivan's fate - that will send the gorilla to live at Zoo Atlanta. This fall, if things pan out as intended, Ivan, after spending almost all of his life in a shopping mall, will be anesthetized and crated for the flight to Georgia for a chance to dwell among other gorillas, walk on grass, and perhaps even mate.

"Have you heard?" was the first thing Joyce blurted out when I dropped by to see how Ivan was taking the news. The second thing was: "Isn't it awful?"

IVAN HAS EXPERIENCED many pleasures unavailable to a western lowland gorilla in the wild. These include: wearing a baseball uniform; drinking Pepsi from a straw; eating lettuce topped with Thousand Island dressing. Watching television; fingerpainting; riding in a convertible. Sitting on a heated concrete floor; swinging a tire; staring at a mural of foliage.

Ivan is probably Tacoma's most famous celebrity after "Dynasty" actress Linda Evans. From Istanbul to Tokyo, newspapers have picked up pieces of the Ivan saga, which combines the furry cuteness of an animal story with the soap opera tawdriness of a child custody battle.

Stripped to the bone, the Great Ivan Debate revolved around this basic set of claims and counter-claims:

# Ivan leads a cushy existence and looks pretty happy right where he is.

# Ivan, being a gorilla, deserves a chance to express his gorilla-ness in a more natural habitat than a mall.

# Ivan spent his whole life around people and is more human than ape; he resists change; to move him to a zoo might jeopardize his health, perhaps even his very life.

# Ivan faces only a small risk in moving, especially compared to the possible rewards.

The back-and-forth went round-and-round. "It's like a three-ring circus with no referees," one participant commented, and at times it appeared that the tent might never fold. One of Ivan's owners accused a cabal of zoologists with wanting Ivan only for his sperm; meanwhile, she applied for the copyright to sell Ivan T-shirts and ashtrays. Outside Ivan's home, animal-rights activists picketed as decorously as striking Manchester coal miners.

Joyce made a sign of her own and hung it near Ivan. It said, in part: "THIS is his home... (We) have declared war on anyone who gets in our way."

RON IRWIN HAS long maintained: "Ivan's more than a pet. He's like a member of the family" - which reminds us that gorillas, like children, cannot choose their own relatives.

Irwin-hood is a dubious distinction these days, seeing as how the family tree has become wormholed with strife.

Ron Irwin's father, Earl, pitched a tent along South Tacoma Way in 1946 to found the shopping center that came to be known as the B&I Circus Store (the B stands for the initial of a partner Earl - the I - soon bought out). Ivan moved in at the B&I in 1967, when a store ad explained: "As an independent local store we can do what we want and think you would like best, so we raised a gorilla (who else would dare try this?)." Earl dared to dream big dreams. He boasted that his was the largest one-story department store on the Pacific Coast, and envisioned one day selling hammers and trousers and other goods directly from railroad cars. After Earl died while undergoing vitamin treatment for cancer in West Germany in 1973, his son managed the store. Last year, though, Ron was forced to turn in his keys when a bankruptcy court judge's gavel fell in favor of a liquidation plan devised by Ron's sister, Mary Lou, whose married name is Borgert.

Mary Lou and her husband owned and managed a glass shop and the garden department in the B&I but moved to Yakima after a bitter stand-off in the mid-1970s with Ron and their mother, Constance Irwin. (Ron's story: The Borgerts left after they refused to recognize the retail clerks' union. Mary Lou's version: Her mother and brother felt threatened by her "aggressive" business savvy and used the union matter as an excuse to "evict" her).

"I hated my brother for 6 months. Pure, unadulterated, eat, sleep and breathe hate," said Mary Lou, who remains the second-largest shareholder in the B&I corporation, after her mother and slightly ahead of Ron.

Ron and Mary Lou have grown up into the sort of siblings who take their quarrels to courtrooms. Still, they found time to write.

Mary Lou dropped Ron a line in 1991, while mired in a residential real-estate dispute involving less than $10,000, threatening to sue him "from here to never never land." She also blamed the B&I's financial straits on "your greed your all consuming greed - your huge EGO."

Ron wrote back to tell Mary Lou her note resembled "the ramblings of a disturbed person."

"You have always been my tormentor from my very first memories of you to today you have never changed you have always resented me and I will probably never know why."

After Ron filed for Chapter 11, his "tormentor" became Ivan's figurative keeper. Mary Lou's plan to remove the B&I from bankruptcy would, she wrote in a letter to creditors, "assure that Ivan would be moved to a zoo" and thereby "completely avoid costly litigation...over Ivan's fate."

That complications would ensue seems obvious now. On the very day the judge approved her bankruptcy plan, Mary Lou told a reporter she hoped Ivan could stay in Tacoma. Also, she was thinking of hiring Ivan a lawyer.

Mary Lou said she also considered Ivan "a member of the family." Ron, who wrings a restaurant napkin into rope at the very mention of his sister's name, scoffs: "She hasn't spent 5 minutes with Ivan in her entire life."

Mary Lou and Ron share other traits in addition to a conviction that the other is behaving in ways assured to destroy the family. Both are darkly, imperfectly handsome, Mary Lou in a way that explains why a Los Angeles movie producer interested in writing an Ivan movie along the lines of "Free Willy" met her and was reminded of Cher. Also, Ron and Mary Lou both exhibit what in some families is called stiff headedness: a pride that brings with it an unwillingness to compromise, accept defeat, or admit mistakes.

"They're definitely from the same pod," says Ron's ex-wife.

A mature male gorilla reacts to danger with a variety of so-called "agonistic behavior:" hooting, strutting, ground-thumping, chest-beating. A mature Irwin reacts similarly to the threat of moving Ivan. When I told Mary Lou that Zoo Atlanta has satisfied all the objections raised by the trustee appointed by her to liquidate the B&I and find Ivan a new home, she turned feral.

"Why?" Mary Lou said, eyes darting. "Why can't we keep him here? Why? Why this superior attitude" of zoo directors and primate specialists that Mary Lou often calls "the gorilla Mafia"?

"We object to their tactics. They say they know better."

After Mary Lou calmed herself, she guided me on a tour of the B&I. We lingered beside a wall covered with framed black-and-white publicity photos. Many pictured exotic animals that dwelled here in the B&I's "circus store" heyday: sun bears, elephants, leopards, seals. One seal died after swallowing more than 100 pennies tossed in his pool by visitors, Mary Lou noted. Similar problems arose with a rhesus monkey and fish hooks.

Earl Irwin appears in more of the photographs than any one animal. There he is making a fist next to Robin - Batman's sidekick, not the bird. There he is staring down the barrel of the Cisco Kid's six-shooter. Earl's dark gaze falls on his daughter.

"Ivan has my father's eyes," Mary Lou said. "He's the spirit of my father. The spirit of my family."

IF ONLY GORILLAS HAD EVOLVED as much in the past century as our ideas about what's awful for them; then Ivan could have talked and told us where he wanted to live.

The popular reputation of the giant ape was long tainted by the writings of a late-19th-century explorer named Paul B. du Chaillu. In such children's books as "Lost in the Jungle" and "Stories of the Gorilla Country," du Chaillu described numerous instances where he came upon a gorilla, was filled with a mixture of awe and wonder and terror, then shot it dead.

One night before a safari, the explorer wrote, "I went to sleep, and dreamed of whole herds of elephants being slaughtered, of gigantic gorillas being killed, of new animals being discovered." The next day he bagged a gorilla. It was a magnificent specimen. "We had to disembowel him on account of his weight, in order to carry him."

A more humane view of gorillas emerged via Robert Yerkes, the primatologist whose work included the 1925 book "Almost Human." Yerkes ranked the gorilla ahead of chimpanzees and orangutans in attention, imagination and memory. One of Yerkes' gorillas remembered his face - he was sure of it - after a separation of almost a year.

Yerkes did not live to meet a research gorilla named Koko who uses sign language and has scored in the 85 to 95 range on a human IQ test, despite the test's anti-ape bias (to the question, "Where would you seek shelter from the rain?" it discounted Koko's choice, tree).

Many of us who never don a lab coat or pith helmet are eager for our own gorilla encounters. An ape named Bobo, sold to Woodland Park Zoo in 1953, became the zoo's biggest attraction, sparking what one observer called "Bobomania."

Bobo, like Ivan, was shipped to the U.S. as an infant, then raised by a family who treated the hairy tyke as if he came from an orphanage, not the rain forests of equatorial Africa ("I just poured out all my love and tenderness to make a little human out of him," the Anacortes woman who was Bobo's surrogate mother told a reporter, "rather than facing the fact he was a gorilla").

Captive gorillas generally live into their 40s. Alas, Bobo died young. His pelt was stuffed and put on display at the Museum of History and Industry. The sight of it, according to a 1968 account in The Seattle Times, moved a group of teenage girls from Bellevue to burst into tears. Their reaction says as much about gorillas as people: In 1991, when another Woodland Park gorilla, Kiki, collapsed from a cardiac arrhythmia, a crisis counselor was called in to help the staff grieve; at the memorial service, one of Kiki's keepers likened him to a saint, "the Gandhi of gorillas."

"There's something about this creature," agreed Terry Maple, director of Zoo Atlanta and author of "Gorilla Behavior," the standard text on captive care. "A gorilla is stoic. It does not reveal all of its character to you instantly. It appears to be studying you in the same way you may be studying it."

At the B&I, Ivan's visitors peer at him through windows of bulletproof glass. Sometimes he peers back. Sometimes he pounds the window. Sometimes his keeper slips him a raw egg or races him back and forth from one end of the cage to the other. Sometimes Ivan sits in a corner and occupies himself with a piece of fruit or a cough drop or a strip of styrofoam. Sometimes he scratches his chin and stares for minutes at nothing in particular.

Bacterial infection, not boredom, has long been the biggest threat to captive gorillas. Accordingly, the animals have lived primarily in concrete and polished tile enclosures that were easy to clean but exuded a penal sterility. That changed with the use of antibiotics and the vision of people like David Hancocks. Hancocks directed Woodland Park Zoo in the mid-'70s, when Seattle built the country's first radically naturalistic gorilla habitat.

Hancocks, a British architect by training who had once specialized in low-income housing, considered the typical bars-and-concrete zoo gorilla exhibit "an insane asylum" that exhibited the animals "like freaks in a side show."

State-of-the-art exhibits such as those in Seattle, Dallas and Zoo Atlanta attempt to mimic a gorilla's natural state, which includes several gorillas joined in a social group: generally a mature male, or "silverback," distinguished by a region of whitish hair, and a "harem" of females and their young.

"What Robert Yerkes said about chimpanzees could also be said about gorillas," the illustrious Central Washington University primatologist Roger Fouts told me. "One gorilla is no gorilla."

"There's no way you or I could tickle Ivan or play with him or groom him like another gorilla could. No matter how we wish or try. We're defective gorillas as far as gorillas are concerned."

THE B&I IS A SUPERIOR place to park your car and, in one fell swoop, eat a corn dog, buy a bundle of tube socks, a pet ferret, peat moss, a radio-controlled model airplane, blue jeans with a built-in black leather-look belt, a silver ingot, and a gun. Each department at the B&I is separately owned, giving the place a huge, hodgepodge feel, like a department store mashed with a dollop of mall and a dash of flea market. One island of glass cases displays knives, Zippo lighters and men's cologne. There is an entire department specializing in foam rubber.

In the B&I's entertainment zone, dozens of video games stand shoulder-to-shoulder with assorted coin-operated vibrating vehicles and a giant gumball dispenser. There is also: a carnival carousel; 9 holes of miniature golf with stained greens; and a cast-iron scale that will tell your weight and fortune for a dime. One way to amuse yourself for free at the B&I is to turn a knob on the scale that controls a scroll printed with more than 200 questions and answers.

With a little turning you will come to: "I dreamed I saw a circus."

Answer: "Your habits will make you unhappy."

It was a traveling circus bound for Canada, the story goes, that found its papers in disorder and loaned several animals to Earl Irwin for safekeeping at the B&I, thereby planting the seed for the "Circus Store" concept.

Irwin was a promotional genius, a P.T. Barnum of dry goods. In 1957 he stacked a reported 125 tons of ice blocks in his parking lot and held a contest to guess when the last chip would melt. He flew in Hollywood stars for personal appearances. When he couldn't afford the real thing, he might hire some college kid to dress in a cape and purple tights and pose as Batman.

The B&I animals were stars who worked, literally, for chicken feed and peanuts. A hen named Henrietta played a crude style of baseball. A rabbit drove a fire truck. In one publicity stunt, a chimpanzee couple dressed in formal attire was married by a judge on the steps of the Tacoma courthouse.

In 1964, from what is now Zaire, Irwin paid $7,500 for a pair of infant gorillas - the female died in transit - and sent the scrawny 9-pound survivor to live with Ruben Johnson, a clerk at the B&I pet shop. Soon, "Ivan" was introduced to the public in newspaper feature stories and full-page ads. Understandably, none mentioned how young gorillas like Ivan invariably were exported by hunters who created orphans on the same kind of bloody expeditions that du Chaillu described.

"You can't judge somebody by the political correctness of the '90s for what happened in the '60s," Ron bristled. "What dad did was a very noble thing. The person called from Africa and said `We've got two orphan gorillas.' It was good for him. Good for the gorillas. Good for everyone involved."

Ivan wore short pants. He slept in the same bed as Ruben's son Larry, ate fried chicken and baked ham, and zipped around on the back of a motorcycle. He guest starred in an episode of "Daktari," but never let Hollywood stardom go to his head: Yes, Ivan knew the pleasures of room service, but back in Tacoma he was content to slum it in the back seat of Ron Irwin's convertible at a local hamburger stand.

By his third year in captivity, Ivan had grown to 80 pounds and developed the strength to gut the Johnson's house. Earl Irwin built him a truck trailer "mobile home" - variously described as costing $60,000 and $100,000 - with 7,000 lineal feet of steel bars, air conditioning, kitchen, operating table, and built-in TV set. Irwin also promised $500 to the winner of the "Ivan caging contest" ("All you need to do is tell us the exact date...hour and second").

Ivan's full-time life behind bars at the B&I began on March 4, 1967. Unnamed "animal experts" warned he might "die of loneliness," one ad said, but the "laws of Mother Nature" required the move. For the first week, Larry Johnson slept in the cage.

Ivan acclimated. His quarters grew, but, despite a few brief attempts to find Ivan a mate, his same-species companionship did not. He ate banana cake on his birthday, and learned to fingerpaint.

David Hancocks learned of Ivan soon after arriving at Woodland Park Zoo in 1973 and tried to rally support among his Seattle colleagues to move the gorilla, but recalls finding "absolutely zero interest." Nevertheless, Ron Irwin became aware of "a real change in attitude toward animals." (Ivan is the only animal left at the B&I, outside of those for sale in the pet shop.)

"We stopped using Ivan in the advertising in the late '70s," Ron said. "About the same time we got rid of the chicken that played baseball."

In the 1980s, the first few tentative inquiries were made - by the Portland zoo and the Progressive Animal Welfare Society in Lynnwood - to move Ivan out of the B&I.

Then, in 1991, Ivan finally was flushed out of obscurity. It took some well-chosen images and the dulcet voice of Glenn Close.

A National Geographic Explorer documentary titled "The Urban Gorilla" telecast moving pictures of Ivan, alone and listless-looking in the smallest of his three rooms, "a victim of circumstance," Close narrated, "the sad reminder of a less-enlightened era when gorillas were seen as nothing more than exotic attractions." The Ivan images contrasted starkly with a feel-good segment on Willie B., the Zoo Atlanta gorilla, who, after 27 years of solitary confinement was shown taking his first steps into a grassy outdoor habitat.

Soon, mail to the B&I began to include pleas from entire elementary school classes. More than one letter to editor of the Tacoma newspaper suggested that Ron Irwin be caged.

The Dallas and Seattle zoos extended well-publicized offers to adopt Ivan, to no avail.

"He said he had a better offer, in California, for money," recalls David Towne, who succeeded Hancocks as director of Woodland Park Zoo, where a second gorilla exhibit was in the works.

The California offer came from Michael Jackson, said to be interested in moving Ivan with a female gorilla to his Wonderland ranch. A "gorilla palace," reports called the potential new home, but the offer soon evaporated.

Ron Irwin, incensed at any hint of besmirching of the family name, kept coming up with reasons not to budge: Ivan's possible zoo homes were too small, too rainy, too distant, too this, too that. Irwin echoed the B&I ads of 20 years earlier; he feared the shock of moving might kill his father's gorilla.

Irwin had other worries. A B&I bookkeeper, later convicted, had siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars, sending the business wobbling toward financial ruin. Bankruptcy might have been the only turn of events that could give Ivan the chance to leave the B&I, like an animal escaping a derailed circus train.

THE "GORILLA MAFIA" strikes me as not so nefarious a group, but then again, I don't own an ape.

Here is their official, if less quotable, name: the Gorilla Species Survival Program.

Made up of 53 zoo directors and curators, the GSSP was founded in 1982 on the theory that some sort of binding oversight was needed to ensure the health and propagation of the North American zoo gorilla population, which numbers 325. Ivan is one of only four gorillas in the U.S. not in an accredited zoo; the others live in Florida.

The first time David Towne of Woodland Park Zoo heard "gorilla mafia," he laughed. Zoo Atlanta's Terry Maple, on the other hand, winced, and still does.

"I hated it," said Maple, a bear-like and bearded man. "We're just a group of professionals trying to do well by the gorilla."

In December, the GSSP narrowed its short list - zoos in Seattle, Columbus, Washington and Atlanta - and announced its decision of the best possible home for Ivan.

As the group reiterated in a resolution drafted in Cincinnati during its annual spring meeting: "Zoo Atlanta's facility is large and flexible, and the staff has successfully managed the social and reproductive rehabilitation of an isolated male gorilla," referring to Willie B.

The way the zoos presented a united front rubbed Mary Lou Borgert the wrong way. Likewise Blanca Harrison, the real-estate broker handpicked by Mary Lou to serve as bankruptcy trustee, charged with liquidating the B&I's assets and selecting a new home for Ivan.

"In any other business," Harrison said, "it would be called racketeering."

Harrison is a female Horatio Alger story, a college drop-out who began as a glorified secretary in a Seattle real-estate company and rose to become partner, managing dozens of shopping malls. She drives a Mercedes Benz with a fax machine in the trunk. Her office furnishings include a bullwhip, which she jokingly calls her "rent collection device."

She is no zoologist or biologist - the only -ist you would append to her name demands "capital" up front. After being named Ivan's trustee, though, Harrison took a cram course in gorilla. She toured Zoo Atlanta. She conferred with Towne and others from Woodland Park Zoo in a four-hour session that came to be known as "Gorilla 101." She learned enough about the care and breeding of gorillas to give the GSSP experts fits.

"They're zoologists and I'm a ball-busting real-estate broker," Harrison said, "so we talk a different language."

She didn't like the way the GSSP elevated the good of the species above the good of the individual animal. She raised the specter that the virile Ivan would be treated like "a sperm bank." She spun numerous worst-case scenarios, and latched onto the technique used to collect semen from gorillas that fail to mate naturally, repeating its name as often as possible: electro-ejaculation.

Maple said, "If people could understand how hard we've fought to make gorilla management a science, to objectify it, to do it right, instead of based on personal opinion, then they'd understand better why were were steadfast in our position. We never stopped caring about Ivan. We were willing to go through all sort of character assassination."

Eventually, remarkably, Zoo Atlanta budged a little, Harrison budged a little more, and they came to terms. By then, Harrison had found time to write a manuscript for a children's book about Ivan. She called it "What's Going to Happen to Me?" It rhymed, but lacked an ending.

Maple predicts it will be a process of gradual acclimation, with Ivan glimpsing, smelling and touching a series of female gorillas. Eventually, a door to outside will be opened.

"When somebody tells you - By golly he's never going to be a gorilla, he thinks he's a person - I don't know what that means," Maple said. "Nobody knows what that means. What we do know is these animals have more capabilities than most of us gave them credit for."

Reading Maple's resume, I noticed he earned his first degree in psychology, and his master's and doctorate in psychobiology. I asked him what he learned from the tug-of-war over Ivan.

"I'll tell you one thing," Maple said. "We're not as rational as we think we are. A lot of what we do is based on emotions. We are primates, you know."

AFTER MARY LOU Borgert showed me the B&I's old photos of seals and bears and elephants, we walked past a pile of pants and ran into Ivan's other keeper, Tonya Hill. Tonya has worked with Ivan for 10 years. A set of keys dangled from her belt loop. Tonya carries herself in such a way that there is no reason to doubt her when she says someone stole her truck and she reclaimed it with the help of a baseball bat.

Tonya was sniffling, wiping her eyes.

"It's like the decision's already been made," she said."I'm not trying to be a baby."

"I know," Mary Lou told her. "I get the same way."

"The divorce. My truck gets stolen. Now this."

Mary Lou said goodbye to Tonya, then turned to me: "Ivan cares about it when they cry. How many men are going to give them that?"

Then we visited Ivan and Mary Lou fed him apple slices through a slot. Ivan ate the flesh and spat out the skin, as is his wont.

"There's a loyalty with animals that you don't find in humans," Mary Lou said, slicing another apple. "Humans will turn on you, let you down. Ivan will never let you down."

Kit Boss is a Pacific staff writer. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.