Betty Leslie-Melville, 78; Nurtured Once-Imperiled Rothschild’s Giraffes

Betty Leslie-Melville, an unconventional conservationist who dedicated much of her life to protecting the once-imperiled Rothschild’s giraffe, has died. She was 78.

She died Friday of dementia at the Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care in Baltimore.

Known as the Giraffe Lady, Leslie-Melville founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife USA after settling in Kenya nearly 40 years ago.

She worked to save the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe, one of three subspecies that is characterized by its white legs.

“She was a very charismatic lady, and lots and lots of fun. She charmed everybody,” said her son, Rick Anderson, who lives at Giraffe Manor, a stone inn and wildlife sanctuary in Nairobi, Kenya.

“She was not a preservationist. She was a conservationist,” Anderson said. “She started with educating children because she found those who lived in the cities of Kenya and the agricultural area had actually never seen wildlife. It is only the nomadic, pastoral people who are out with the wild animals.”

She and her third husband, Jock Leslie-Melville, established the Giraffe Center in Nairobi in 1983 and raised money for it in the United States. In the last year, the center was host to 57,000 schoolchildren and 73,000 general visitors.

The Rothschild’s giraffe’s numbers were once down to 120. They were sequestered on a ranch that was about to be developed. About 300 of the giraffes now live on three private ranches and three national parks, all in Kenya.

Born Betty McDonnell in Baltimore, Leslie-Melville attended Johns Hopkins University and became a department store model, appeared in a beer commercial on American television and ran a nursery school with her sister.

She once told the Baltimore Sun that she had always been intrigued by stories of Africa but had no intention of visiting until a close friend moved there. Leslie-Melville visited Africa in 1958.

“I fell in love with the country,” she said of Kenya in a 1994 Baltimore Sun interview. “It’s a fascinating place to live.... You go there, and it’s like you’re in a Technicolor world. It’s magic.”

At the time, she was married to her second husband, banker Dancy Bruce, and had three small children. Two years later, the couple moved to Kenya, where Bruce ran a non-hunting safari business, but several years later their marriage dissolved.

About that time, she met Jock Leslie-Melville, the grandson of a Scottish earl who had been raised in Africa. The two were married in 1964.

Several years later, they bought the stone manor house, which had been built in 1932 for a Kenyan engineer and heir to an English toffee fortune. Wild giraffes from a nearby national park often wandered through their frontyard.

“I’d wake up, and they’d have their heads in the second-floor window looking for me,” she said in the interview.

When conservationists began asking the Leslie-Melvilles to move young Rothschild’s giraffes onto their property or to sanctuaries nearby, she founded the endangered wildlife fund. Her husband founded its Kenyan counterpart, an umbrella organization that runs the center.

Between them, the Leslie-Melvilles wrote 10 books about living in Africa and their experiences with giraffes and other wildlife.

When they weren’t writing, lecturing in the United States or raising money for conservation causes, they were hosts to such notables as Walter Cronkite, TV host Jack Paar, Candice Bergen and Johnny Carson, on whose “Tonight Show” she appeared.

“She has scampered across two continents like the heroine of a picaresque novel, leaving a glittering wake of crazy and glamorous stories,” said a 1980 profile in the Baltimore Evening Sun.

In 1979, CBS made a TV movie of the Leslie-Melvilles’ lives, based loosely on their book, “Raising Daisy Rothschild.”

“I hated the movie,” Leslie-Melville recalled in 1994. “It was the worst experience of my life. The trainer killed two baby giraffes.”

In 1984, her husband died of brain cancer and she turned over the operation of Giraffe Manor to her son, who continues to run it with his wife.

Leslie-Melville then married retired Vice Adm. George Peabody Steele, whom she met on a safari, but kept the name Leslie-Melville for professional reasons.

She returned to Baltimore in the 1980s but visited Kenya several times a year.

In addition to Steele and Anderson, her son from her first marriage to Lloyd Anderson, Leslie-Melville is survived by a daughter, Dancy Bruce Mills; and five grandchildren. Another son, McDonnell Marshall “Mac” Bruce, died in 2004.