Big game hunted

摘要

For much of her long life, Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre enjoyed a charmed existence. Born in 1902 to extreme wealth (her father had inherited close to a billion dollars in today's money), for her the 1920s were "a blur of parties, dances, theatre and music". Boredom was kept at bay by travel—ranging from Africa, where she and her future husband Sidney dined with Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, to Indochina—and by a passion for hunting that kept America's museums stocked with specimens from around the world. As Peter Finn notes in his beautifully paced book, she inspired a Broadway play and a film starring Katherine Hepburn as "an amusing, cocky, sometimes abrasive society girl who wants to escape the confining expectations of her family's fabulous wealth".