March 1961

“IF YOU CAN believe it, I’m finally in New Guinea,” Michael Rockefeller write on March 29, 1961, to his best friend, Sam Putnam. He’d flown from Boston to Tokyo, via New York, the takeoff delayed an hour because the New York radar had gone down, giving him “heart failure as I had visions of missing the flight out.” En route to Tokyo, the plane was nearly empty, and he slept sprawled across four seats. There are different kinds of travelers; people ease into new cultures in different ways. When I hit the ground in a foreign world, I revel in the place with a big meal. It’s a ritual, bodily taking in the new place, and Michael did the same, eagerly consuming Japanese culture with a “wonderful” meal of tempura.

From Tokyo he’d flown on to Biak, an island off the north coast of New Guinea, home to a former US Army Air Corps airfield on which the Dutch maintained a squadron of aircraft to protect its colony. There he linked up with Karl Heider, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology. When Heider had arrived the day before, he disappointed the throng of Dutch officials who’d gathered, thinking they were welcoming the son of the governor of New York. The two spent a day walking around in the heat and humidity of Biak and then departed to Hollandia on a DC-3. Michael perched in the cockpit. Marveling at the winding brown rivers emptying into New Guinea’s north coast, when the pilot poked him in the ribs and pointed out of the window —the right engine had died. Michael scrambled into his seat, Heider clutched his most valuable papers and possessions, the plane landed safely again in Biak, and they flew on to Hollandia the next day.

Michael was heading into Asmat but to the Great Baliem Valley in the islands’ highlands. He was tall and slender, clean-shaven and square-jawed like his father, which thick black-rimmed glasses. He’d grown up in the family townhouse in midtown Manhattan and on weekends at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York. As Abby had done with Nelson, so Nelson did with Michael, taking him to art dealers on Saturdays afternoons, a father-and-son bonding ritual that schooled his taste. His twin sister, Mary, remembered how the two of them loved to watch their father rearrange his art. And when he was eleven, his mother finally discovered why he’d been coming home from school late: he’d spotted a painting he liked through the second-floor window of the Old Masters art gallery on Madison Avenue, rang the bell, and its owners, Harry Yornakparian started letting Michael hang around as long as he didn’t get in the way.

By the time he was nearing the end of his four years at Harvard, Michael was, in the words of Sam Putnam’s girlfriend, “a quiet, artistic spirit.” And he was torn. Though his appreciation of art had been nurtured since the day he was born, his father expected his son to be like him —to pursue a career in one of the family enterprises, banking on finance, and indulge his artistic passions on the side. Michael graduated cum laude from Harvard with a BA degree in history and economics, but he yearned for something else, a different way of being. He’d traveled widely, working on his father’s ranch in Venezuela for a summer, traveling to Japan in 1957, and he’d been surrounded not just by art but by primitive art. Who’s to say where wanderlust comes from, whether it’s innate or whether experiences or books or even objects inspire it —but without a doubt, Michael had it. 

Imagine growing up in a family surrounded by objects that had been covered by your father and that spoke of far-flung places. Imagine not just appreciating those kinds of objects yourself, but wanting to go to their source and to find them and bring them home. As graduation neared, Michael and Putnam schemed. They’d been best friends since prep school at Phillips Exeter, where Michael had been art director of the yearbook and Sam editor. Now they wanted to get away, to have a big adventure before Putnam attended medical school and Michael pursued what seemed an inevitable life of business —one last hurrah, as Putnam’s then girlfriend put it. Putnam had dabbled in film and knew Robert Gardner. Gardner ran the Harvard Film Study Center and was fascinated by film as ethnographic record. He wanted to make a movie about an uncontacted Neolithic people, “to employ the art of film to a humane observation of a remote and seemingly alien group of people,” a film, he said, “about the world outside myself that also revealed me and my inner world.”

In 1959 he’s begun casting about for the right project when a distant cousin told him about an obscure tribe in New Guinea whose culture was based on ritual war. Gardner contacted Victor de Bruyn, the head of native affairs in Dutch New Guinea, who said the government might not only be interested in a film but able to help with the funding. Gardner talked to the anthropologist Margaret Mead; Robert Goldwater, director of Nelson’s Rockefeller’s Museum f Primitive Art; and Adrian Gerbrands, deputy director of the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology, who’d recently begun doing fieldwork in Asmat. De Bruyn suggested a film about the Dani tribes living in the Grand Baliem Valley, and the Dutch government eventually contributed $5,000 toward the expedition.

In some ways, the Dani had long been more isolated than the Asmat. Although encounters with the West along the southwest coast of Asmat had been few and far in between, at least the jungles and swamps were known to be inhabited. But anyone who gazed into the interior of New Guinea saw one thing: the high and jagged mountains that ran along its central spine. And if you traveled upriver from the coast, those rivers eventually narrowed and turned into whitewater at the walls of the steep mountains. Up there was simply inhabited wilderness. In the 1930s, Australian explorers and gold-hunters began discovering the highlands on the Australian side of the island. Then, in 1938, an American named Richard Archbold, on an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, flew over the Grand Baliem Valley. He was astounded. Instead of jagged, uninhabited mountains, he found a green valley. Instead of the sparsely populated and isolated communities of the coastal people, he found a heavily populated pastoral, a world of rising tendrils of smoke and intricate, carefully terraced gardens and irrigation Canals, Stone walls, vine suspension bridges, and grass huts —and fifty thousand people, naked save for grass skirts and penis gourds, who thought they were the only people on earth. The Dani living in the Grand Baliem Valley were the last great uncontacted civilization.

By 1960 there were a few Protestant missionaries, a small contingent of Dutch officials, and an airfield, and not too much else there. The United States and the Soviet Union were sending rockets into space, but the handful of Dutch officials in the “city” of Wamena lived without running water or electricity. Little contact had been made at the north and south ends of the valley. The Dani were not headhunters or cannibals like the Asmat, but they engaged in a cyclical war of revenge with their immediate neighbors than intrigued Gardner. He, like most observers fascinated with indigenous people, felt they might offer insight into humans in an uncorrupted state, and he wanted to observe and film them over months to glean insights into man’s propensity for violence and war. 

Gardner began thinking about including writers and photographers who could depict the project in other mediums. At lunch, one afternoon, on Martha’s Vineyard at the home of the playwright Lilian Hellman, he met the writer Peter Matthiessen and invited him along the Grand Baliem Valley. “He said I’d paid.” Matthiessen told me, “and that was really important to me.” Gardner use to take smoking breaks on the steps of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, and there he met Karl Heider. When Michael came to him, Gardner sensed a possible source of funding and offered him the opportunity to be the film’s sound engineer.

It was the perfect postcollege adventure, and Michael invited Sam Putnam to join them a few months later, at the end of his first year of medical school at Harvard. Michael plunged in, learning everything he could about sound recording and asking Gardner if he could practice with the expedition’s New Nagra tape recorder at the 1960 Republican National Convention, where his father hoped to be nominated for the presidency. Before he could go, however, there was an issue with the draft. Michael got a six-month gig in the US Army Reserve and was recommended for training in teletype repair. “My first reaction was one of terror,” he wrote Gardner from basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, “… and I pictured myself shipped off to Fort Leonard Wood, Oklahoma or Fort Jackson, Kentucky.” Instead, he wrote a “passionate” letter to his captain, “describing my utter incompetence in the recommended field.” Clearly, it didn´t hurt to be the son of the governor of New York, for his orders were quickly changed, and he was off to Fort Devens, just down the road from Harvard, to be trained as a “code traffic analyst.” “At least my typing will get a good practicing [sic].” Still, he said, the army had taught him “the assets of a highly ordered day-to-day existence. I have received all sorts of useful pointers for field life in New Guinea from such things as bivouac and courses in first aid, land navigation, etc. Furthermore, I am in sterling condition.”

That was in November 1960. Gardner knew about Michael’s interest in art, and a few weeks later, he helped Michael out further by introducing him to Adrian Gerbrands, an ethnologist living in New Guinea. Gardner said Michael had been excited by Gerbrands’ work in Asmat, and “he became more and more interested in meeting you and visiting the Asmat area. Would that be possible in mid-May during a break in filming in the highlands? Gardner asked. “I can assure you that he knows how to take care of himself and would be not the slightest burden.”

BY APRIL 2, Michael was in Wamena at last, and he was excited. “The flight in was spectacular,” he wrote “Sambo.” He flew in “over lake Santani, jungle, mountains, the huge impenetrable swamp of the interior, more mountains, and then finally, the Baliem valley opening up sudden, giant fertile cavity before me. How badly we were misled in all these pictures we saw! The Baliem is a thing of magnificent vastness, decorated with the Green of the valley floor and blues of the surrounding mountains. Tones are ever changing in the shifting light. The mountains rise… over 10,000 feet on all sides and are constantly hidden and altered by the clouds that gathered about them. The valley floor is broken into fragments by the Baliem and its tributaries, hills and rocky rises, and the handmade barriers of the Ndani peoples. The climate is like Maine in the peak of the summer. Only the sun is better.”

A few days later they brought hundreds of pounds of equipment via boat and foot to the northern part of the valley, where they made camp at a small stream at the base of a wall or rock and sparse pine trees. It was a beautiful spot, slightly elevated yet, protected, far enough from the Dani family compounds for the expedition to get much-needed personal space, but closed enough to get involved in everything. Matthiessen and Eliot Elisofon, a photographer for Life magazine, soon joined them, and Matthiessen had a strong first impression of Michael. “He was very, very young and a Little bit spoiled. He quoted Dad a lot.”

It was a magical time. The Baliem is as beautiful as Michael described it, a place of a thousand shades of Green changing as the clouds roll by, surrounded by jagged peaks in every direction. At six thousand feet, its temperatures are cool, with cold nights, no humidity, and few mosquitoes. When Michael arrived, the Dani there were untouched, the men naked except for long gourds covering their penises in stylized erections and a layer of pig grease, the women naked saved for loose grass skirts and net bags slung with a child or pig from their heads and across their backs. It was, in some ways, the best of the two worlds —having access to the primitive balanced with being able to retreat to a comfortable camp full of urban colleagues. The team shared civilized meals in the cook tent — omelets and orange juice and coffee for breakfast —and drank Heineken at night and the Dani gathered around, amazed by their clothing, mirrors, cameras. During the day the visitors fanned out into villages of family compounds to watch and record the Dani. Michael found them “emotionally expressive” and fantastic to look at. “Polik the warrior,” he wrote, “struts around with a fifteen-foot spear and the most incredible headdress. His face, often peering through hair that reaches his shoulders, is always blackened with charcoal and pig grease is kind of the epitome of Neolithic wildness.”

When word came of a battle, they’d all gathered on a grassy plateau no-man’s-land where opposing villages assembled to shout at each other and run at each other and threaten and occasionally engage each other. The film team’s whiteness granted them an immunity as the Dani grew used to their presence, allowing them in their midst even as they battled —as if a team of filmmakers were allowed to witness and record the set-piece battles of World War II with impunity. They were so close to the action that one day an arrow hit Michael in the leg, and the team was careful to keep it secret. It was a strange kind of war, however, compared to the destructive violence of the much more developed world. “They went to war with a set of rules far more civilized than ours,” said Matthiessen. “One killing was fine.”

Michael worked hard recording the sounds, songs, music, and warfare as well as taking photographs, which he especially loved. He “shot wildly,” he wrote, exposing eighteen rolls in a single day. Sometimes it was too much, and one day the team unloaded on Michael, criticizing him for missing important sound recordings. “Michael went away in tears,” Matthiessen said. After that night, Michael grew up and worked hard, according to Matthiessen, but he was “disorganized. Messy. He forgot things.”

Michael shared a tent with Heider, who got to know him well. “Mike was very quiet and modest,” Heider remembers, “though, of course, everyone knew who he was, who his father was. He didn’t take up much space, and it was easy to be around him. And he had patience.” The Dani opened up to him. While Elisofon, the professional, would pose for them and stage photos, Michael would just watch quietly, shooting what he saw. In the evenings, Heider was astonished to see the wealthiest member of the team darning his old army socks. But Michael was ambitious, and he began to think seriously about his photography. In late, April, he wrote his friend Sam with an idea: they should put together a book on the Dani. “It seems to me that there is a large opportunity for me and you if it can be somehow managed with medical school. The photography ought to be good enough to form the basis for a photographic essay on the Ndani culture to come out in book form. Certainly, this is a wild and conceited thought and would be very difficult to do well. Let me know what you think, “adding in a postscript, “Keep this confidential, for I have told no one but you and wouldn´t unless it was more definite.”

There are people who didn´t like hanging out with spiders and dirt and naked men in pig grease, but Michael Rockefeller wasn’t one of them. It was especially nice to be among people who didn´t care that he was Rockefeller, who had no idea what the name even meant. In New Guinea, as the weeks passed, home began to dissolve into abstraction, to lessen its hold. Material possessions began to lose their importance. There was something liberating about the intense focus on a single project. What was important was right here —a world of sweating, naked bodies, of feast and smoke-filled huts, of pigs and pig grease. Here, at last, he was free from social conventions. Free from being a Rockefeller.

Carl Hoffmann, Savage Harvest: a tale of cannibals, colonialism, and Michael Rcokefeller’s tragic quest for primitive art HarperCollins Publishers (2014).