Myfriend Attenborough andIhave foundthekeyto eternalyouth!
Even at 90, naturalist Desmond Morris works until 4am and has colourful views on everything from Love Island to porn. So what’s his secret?
When he was 40, Desmond Morris researched the history of ten of his paternal forefathers and calculated that, on the basis of their rather meagre life spans, he would probably live to just 61-and-a-half.
So he started cramming things in like mad. he became a workaholic, churning out books and paintings ( he’s a Surrealist) like a man possessed. he was forever on our screens, presenting hundreds of hours of zoological shows.
Then, in just four weeks in 1967, he wrote and published The naked Ape, a groundbreaking bestseller about human behaviour which introduced us to the concept of ‘ body language’ and what it reveals.
It made him fantastically rich. he and his wife Ramona moved to Malta, bought a 27-room house, two RollsRoyces and a yacht and holidayed with his great pal Sir David Attenborough and his family.
After five years — ‘ We had a lot of childlike fun,’ he tells me — he’d blown the lot.
So Desmond and the family moved back to Oxford, where he wrote endless books about everything from dog breeds to the art of ancient Cyprus and presented countless more TV programmes about animal and human behaviour, and travelled the world (his current tally, marked by coloured pins stuck in a map, is 107 countries).
By the time he was 76, he was rather surprised to still be kicking about and publicly declared he had just four good years left.
‘All creative thought ends when you’re 80,’ he said.
Roll on another decade and today, at 90, he’s busier than ever.
every night he toils in his book-lined studio from 10pm to 4am.
‘My brain works better at night,’ he says. ‘It’s a ridiculous thing that I’m not pleased about, but it’s something I’m stuck with.’
he never takes a night off — ‘I don’t recognise weekends, haven’t for decades’ — sleeps until lunchtime, and spends the rest of the day looking after Ramona, to whom he’s been married for 66 years, who is bedridden with ‘ very, very bad’ arthritis.
EARlIeRthis year, his book on the Surrealist painters — many of whom were his great friends — became a surprise hit and is already being reprinted. he is now busy with a sequel.
‘I’ve got 30,000 words to write by the beginning of August! It’s crazy . . . crazy I’m so busy. I seem to be working harder and harder,’ he says gleefully as he lumbers unsteadily round his vast, jampacked studio in Oxford.
‘My brain’s working, but my legs have more or less given out,’ he says. ‘It’s annoying, but it is just nature’s way of recycling and I’d rather have it that way round.
‘When I last saw Iris Murdoch [ the acclaimed novelist who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 1999] well, oh dear! her body was in great shape, but there was no one home.’
Desmond, meanwhile, is bright and beady with thoughtful views on everything from ITV reality show love Island to feminism (he says he is a feminist); why all politicians should be women (‘with men, egos get involved — that’s how wars get started’), to the disappointingly poor quality of 21st-century porn.
he spends half the year writing and the other half painting, and he claims to be a loner, but loves catching up with his mate Attenborough. ‘Of course, he makes me feel like a wimp,’ he says. ‘I ring up for a chat and his daughter says: “I’m sorry, I think he’s in a bat cave in Borneo at the moment.” he’s 92!’
So the other day, Desmond says, he rang David and said: ‘I hear you’ve got bipolar disease!’
And when a rather alarmed David barked back: ‘Who told you that? Who told you that?!’ Desmond laughed and said: ‘I hear you’re the only person to go to both poles in your 80s, ha ha!’
They’ve been firm friends since they presented rival animal shows in the Fifties — David with Zoo Quest for the BBC and Desmond on Granada with Zoo Time.
neither man had any great wish to be on TV, but were somehow pushed into it because there was no one else available.
‘ The original presenter of David’s programme, the curator of reptiles at london Zoo, jumped into a swamp and got some hideous tropical disease and died, and the director said, “You’ll have to take over, Attenborough”, so that was that,’ says Desmond.
‘ But we were good at it because we cared about our subject so desperately.’
he also insists that, despite a degree in zoology and a successful TV series, he wasn’t that keen at all to write The naked Ape.
When it was published, it caused great excitement thanks to his revelations that humans have the highest ratio of penis size to body mass of all primates, our ear lobes had developed as additional erogenous zones, and the more rounded shape of female breasts meant they doubled as sexual signalling devices.
It was banned from some schools, infuriated feminists who didn’t like his claim that men and women have evolved to take on different roles, and has since sold more than 20 million copies.
‘I was bullied into it,’ he insists. ‘I was a quiet scientist and I wasn’t a controversialist.
‘I was used to writing nice books about snakes and pandas with my wife. And then, of course, all hell broke out and it was strange because I’m a very private person.’
Really? he gives the appearance of being such a showman.
‘Always have been,’ he says firmly. ‘I love solitude, but I am never lonely.
‘I was an only child — me and my wife both were, and our son Jason is an only child — so we’re used to our own company.’
his childhood, growing up in
Wiltshire, sounds rather dismal. His father, an unsuccessful children’s author, suffered terrible lung damage from a gas attack in World War I and died when his son was 14.
Desmond blamed mankind, and his cynicism and disillusion were evident in a school essay in which he described the human being as a ‘monkey with a diseased brain’. He chose to immerse himself in animals, nature and art.
After National Service, during which he taught painting to the soldiers, he got a first in Zoology at Birmingham University, held a Surrealist exhibition with his friend Joan Miro and, in 1954, earned a doctorate in philosophy for his work on the unusual sex life of the ten-spined stickleback.
(For anyone interested, the male makes a nest of weeds and attracts as many females as possible to lay eggs there.)
His career then flitted seamlessly between the Zoological Society, TV, academia, the arts — he was executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts for a year — and football. ‘I love sport!’ he says.
During the mad ‘Malta blowout’ period, he became firm friends with Anthony Burgess, the novelist and author of A Clockwork Orange, who lived down the road.
‘He used to work so slowly — one novel every three years!’ says Desmond.
‘Then his doctor told him he had a year to live and he wrote three books in 12 months in a panic and from then on became one of our most prolific authors.’
The diagnosis, it turned out, was wrong, but Burgess, like Desmond, had also learned to keep his mind active in a race against time. Clearly, the approach has worked.
Today, Desmond’s enormous brain is still wonderfully, dauntingly, agile and we bounce about from subject to subject, from his beloved Surrealists to the body language of the England football team which, until last night, was giving him cause for ‘cautious optimism’.
His view of humans is now more benign. Desmond insists we are a far kinder species than most of us realise and should never bother worrying about our health because anxiety suppresses the immune system.
He also says some people’s obsession with the antics on Love Island is just a new version of the gossip that has fuelled community life for years but better, because ‘now you can enjoy the fun of who’s going to make love to whom without having to know them’.
There is no secret to his phenomenal brain power, he says, it’s just that ‘I have never stopped asking questions and the more actively you use your brain, the more connections between your brain cells you grow’.
AS A Result, he thinks it highly likely that the recently reported fall in IQ levels in those born after 1995, after years of increasing scores in successive generations, may well be to do with the increases in technology.
‘There is more passive activity going on. If things are fed to you on a plate, you stop questioning, you stop looking,’ he says.
‘But we are resilient and we will adapt.’ He and ramona have had to adapt a lot lately. Every so often during our chat, the phone rings and he hauls himself up to answer it in case it’s her on the intercom.
The ‘ studio’ where he works is actually a coach house, with several rooms, next door to their home which they had to buy to house his 11,000- strong library. ‘My books drive ramona mad!’ he says.
While they have a housekeeper who pops in every day, Desmond is the main carer — and now also the house chef.
‘It’s bad enough for her being confined to bed, but having to put up with my cooking, too!’
He’d never been allowed in the kitchen before, so it was a bit of a challenge, but one he’s embraced.
‘My signature dish is crispy duck and my drizzle is the talk of North Oxford!’ he beams.
‘She keeps saying, “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance”, but no, no,
It’s just a pleasure to be able to do anything for her. We met in the Forties, for God’s sake!’
It was at a party at the house of a renowned art collector that Desmond and ramona met.
He was a 21-year-old struggling artist in a bright yellow shirt, bright red tie, shoulder-length hair and boasted a long list of previous girlfriends, starting with the teenage Diana Dors whom he describes fondly as ‘ an exceptionally well developed young girl’.
ramona was still at school, but he says she looked more like a movie star with her red lipstick and white make-up. ‘Very, very beautiful. Immediately this was different,’ he says. Desmond pursued ramona enthusiastically — at first around the art collector’s house during a raucous game of sardines.
Then to Paris, back to Oxford, and he waited impatiently until she did her Oxford finals in 1952. They were married the day after. ‘She is far more intelligent than me — always good to marry a woman who is more intelligent — no! but I have more drive,’ he says. ‘I was just very lucky to find someone prepared to put up with my extraordinary ways.’
They argue ferociously — he got her age wrong recently, claiming she was 88, not 87 as is the case and was ‘really choked off about that!’ — debate everything, laugh every single day, have never shared a bedroom and work together very well.
Over the years, ramona helped with Desmond’s research and, occasionally, counselled caution.
‘I do tend to rush in,’ he says.
DESMOND makes no apology for breaking new ground. In 1994, his BBC documentary, The Human Animal, caused controversy when it showed intimate shots of a couple achieving orgasm.
‘I felt it was important to try to explain why humans have developed such a strong interest in sex. With a monkey, it lasts about eight seconds and that’s it,’ he says.
‘Every species has an urge to reproduce, but in our case, we take it much further. We’ve developed it into an art, almost.
‘It’s aesthetic. We’re a playful species and we’ve had fun with it.’
He’s certainly had fun writing and broadcasting about sex. But when I mention the recent explosion of pornography accessible online, he looks dismayed.
‘The trouble with porn is that it’s always such poor quality! There were a few erotic masterpieces in the cinema — ooh, I’m trying to think back to those wonderful films we used to see.
‘If only I could remember the names,’ he says somewhat mournfully. ‘Anyway . . . porn today is coarse and lacks sensitivity and is poor quality and damaging as a result. I wish it were done better. I wish it were done well because sex is not coarse.’
And, er, is it still important to him?
‘At 90?,’ he nearly falls off his chair. ‘It’s a fond memory!’
He is, though, still overflowing with the joys of being alive — ‘there’s so much you can do, so much you can enjoy’ — and is very keen to share his and Sir David’s secret to a long, happy and incredibly productive life.
‘ It’s called neophilia — love of the new!’ he says.
‘A happy life is one that maintains a child-like pleasure in looking for new things, asking questions and being playful.
‘If you hang onto that as David and I have been very lucky to, you can enjoy life much more.’
Even better, Desmond insists that anyone can benefit if they ‘ stop settling for routine, try something different, go someplace you haven’t’.
‘That’s why David and I are always so very busy. There’s so much to do still and we can’t say, “Oh, I’ll do that next year” because we don’t know if we’ll be here — so we have to do it now!’
Finally, now he’s 90 and has exceeded all previous expectations, has he given up predicting the future?
‘Oh no! I give myself a couple more years. Statistically, being objective, maybe three.’
And with that, and after the most wonderful hour or so I can remember, we say farewell because he has a book to write, paintings to paint and duck to cook and, naturally, is itching to get on.