Me Cheeta (12 page)

Interesting…. During our charitable visits to hospices around Palm Springs, Don and I have found ourselves more than once in a children’s ward dominated by posters of computer-animated heroes. The wisecracking eyeball, the smart-aleck donkey. The kids love them—but
they’re not fucking there
, are they? They’re not there, sharing a bag of pretzels with a terminal teen, a kidney dish on their head and a blood-pressure monitor in their mouth, are they? And they never will be there in the flesh when it really counts, prolapsed on the end of a child’s hospital bed like a
memento mori
That’s the real magic of movies: their flesh and blood. Does Buzz Lightyear ever suffer for his art? No, and that’s why he’s no good. Though, I do have to say, the children haven’t the faintest idea who
I am. Well, anyhow, computer-generated imagery, CGI, that’s supposedly the way forward, according to Don and Jane. Support their campaign: www.noreelapes.org or something like that.

I digress. If we sometimes had it a little rough, so what? MGM had given us the opportunity of a lifetime. I didn’t know that it was normal during the heyday of the studio system to let young stars languish for a year or more while they built up their confidence and the right part was constructed for them. How
could
I have known that the starving and beating all formed part of Louis Mayer’s painstaking grooming process—almost exactly the same process as MGM put Ava Gardner through?

In fact, Ava had it worse than us, and you never heard her complain. She was a real stand-up dame, Ava, despite her occasional indiscretions, like letting slip how sexually inadequate she found her first husband, Mickey Rooney—rather a cruel thing to do to a real “ladies’ man,” as Mickey referred to himself, and the sort of thing that’s best forgotten. When she was first put under contract— “Honey, he may have enjoyed it but I sure as hell didn’t,”
that’s
what it was—sorry, when she was first put under contract at MGM it took them more than a year to wrench the North Carolina accent out of her, like teeth. And they had to teach her how to act, which took much longer with Ava than it did with me. Betty Bacall had six months of intensive voice coaching, near-starvation and Howard Hawks breathing down her neck every second of every day. Plus she was at Warner’s, and believe me, once you’d heard the stars’ horror stories about Warner’s, you’d have preferred a lifetime of imprisonment and beatings to a contract with them. “If you can survive even seven years at Warner’s,” said Cagney, who knew all about it, “then you can survive anything.” And over the course of two wonderful decades in MGM and RKO cages, I’d often shudder at what poor Jimmy must have been suffering under the Warners.

So, no complaints. MGM had extended a hell of a lot of faith to a bunch of unknowns and they had a right to polish their investment. That leopard on the other side of the courtyard might have seemed a bit listless and dazed, but it went on to work with the great trainer Olga Celeste and landed one of the key parts of the decade, playing not one but two different leopards opposite Asta the fox terrier and Kate Hepburn in
Bringing Up Baby.
Put it this way: the number of chimpanzees who would have traded places with me in an instant was, well, lots. Mind you, I don’t know how many of us were still left in the wild then. More than 150,000, anyway. Millions, probably. Apart from the mix-up with the lab (a highly-infectious-diseases research facility, which was absorbed into the military just after the Second World War and is now located near Encino), which was essentially Stroheim’s fault, I couldn’t have dreamed of anything more. I’d been nurtured and tutored and now I was ready to be taken to the bosom of the vast happy family of MGM. The next time you hear Louis Mayer traduced as a bully, tyrant, witness-buying perverter of justice and all those other half-truths, remember that I’d be nowhere without him.

There the lab was, though, undeniably, the underside to the Glamour Capital of the World. I’d worked out pretty quickly what it was. It was where you would end up if you couldn’t make it in pictures. And even if you made it, any animal who’s ever seen the once-popular Edison short of an elephant being electrocuted to death in Coney Island will recognize just how brief and hollow the rewards of fame can be! And that’s Hollywood for you: a heartbreaking town. “Do NOT try to become an actor. For every ONE we employ, we turn away a THOUSAND.”

Down through the long grass walked Gately and I, toward the clumps of humans dotted around the clearings, with everything
dream-sharp and sparkling, like Beverly Hills in Cary Grant’s LSD-inflected eyes. Frederick and the other two chosen chimps came hooting up to us, and we all embraced each other and mock-charged in delight and generally kicked up a maelstrom of happiness, so that a man near the center of one of the clumps of humans called over to Gately to quiet us down: “Can you restrain those little fuckers for a second? In fact, come on over and we’ll take a look at them now!”

The cluster of humans was arranged in a rough circle around the man who had spoken. We moved through the crowd toward him on the ends of our tethers. Other animals—lion cubs, antelopes—were playing with their coaches among the humans. This was a new kind of forest to me.

“I’m Cedric Gibbons. You’re Gately, right? You can get these animals to do what you tell ’em?”

“Yes, I can. But it depends on factors. The way they react to individuals.”

“So you brought us a short list, in case love doesn’t bloom. Show me.”

“Put out your hand,” said Gately, and made Frederick shake hands with Gibbons and then pluck his hat off. “Give it back now, Buster.”

“Not me he needs to be meeting,” Gibbons said. “Maureen, come on over and meet your new leading man. And where’s the King of the Jungle? You seen him?”

“He’s on the escarpment,” somebody said, and a number of the humans began to shout, “Johnny! Call Johnny!” and in answer there came a faint, high call, like the trumpet of an elephant.

“You seen
Tarzan the Ape Man
, Gately? No? We had a good chimp in that, but old. Can’t use it any more. What we’re looking for—” and Gibbons was interrupted by the high call again.
“Johnny!
For Chrissakes. What we’re looking for is comic relief. Uh, an animal with a bit of mischief, but easy for Maureen to handle….”

Here Gibbons was interrupted again, by a human, a male adult, dropping down from a tree and sprinting over to us. Dropping down from a tree! He wore no clothes except a flap of hide around his middle and I was amazed to see what a human’s musculature was, how powerful they were underneath their coverings. It was impossible that he wasn’t an alpha, probably the alpha of the whole group, yet there was no tyrant’s force in his face as he said, smiling, “Me on escarpment with second unit. Me meet chimps now.”

“Oh, Johnny.” Maureen sighed as she strolled over toward us. She was not much more than half his height. He was so
upright
“Do you think you could
possibly
give it a rest with the ape-talk? It’s just a trifle wearying….”

“Jane angry. Jane need smack on rear end,” said Johnny.

Yes, this was the king of the forest, all right.

“Shall I to the marriage of true hearts admit impediments?” Maureen started to sort of sing. “The language of Shakespeare, Johnny. Of Edna St. Vincent Millay! You do know who Shakespeare is?”

“Guy in pool hall. Me meet chimps,” Johnny said, looking over the four of us and holding out his hand. Ah, humanity, you were so beautiful! “Me Tarzan. Me Johnny. Who Cheeta?”

And actors talk about auditions going like a dream… Frederick and the other two (and Stroheim now, lumbering up late for the big moment) didn’t stand a chance. Who Cheeta? What kind of a question was that?

I leaped into the home of the arms of the King of the Jungle and, for the second time that day, my heart tipped over. It was me. Me—Kong, Jiggs, Louis, the Cheater of Death—me,
Cheeta.

There was Tarzan, me and Jane, and we lived in a forest at the top of an escarpment that rose in sheer cliffs above a cloud-covered world where savage tribes warred among themselves far below. We lived in a dream. We could speak to each other and to the other animals, except those with cold blood. Only two words were really needed—
“aaahhheeyeeyeeyeeaaaahheeyeeyeeyaaahhhh”
which meant “I am.” And
“umgawa”
which meant “Let it be so.”

We took milk from antelopes and eggs from invisible ostriches, ate fish, fruit and roasted buffalo calf, and slept in adjoining nests in the trees. Only elephants died, or any predator who challenged Tarzan to single combat; the sole weapon allowed on the escarpment was his knife. Tarzan loved Jane: they sublimated their love into swimming. Tarzan loved me: we sublimated our love into flying. Jane and I were jealous of each other, but we got on fine: although we were the two different sides of him, we loved him too much to fight. On the escarpment, chimpanzees didn’t fight or kill and I belonged to a group, but my loyalties were to the humans. They needed me more. Johnny was Tarzan and Maureen was Jane; I was myself.

Or not quite. You had to pay a small toll of transformation to
enter the dream, it seemed—I was (and I think I never got the credit for this when the Academy Award nominations rolled obliviously around each year)
female.

That was all there was, apart from Jane’s problem. Jane had quit civilization, but she was still an addict deep down, and her family would come from London to tempt her back with words, which she still craved. It didn’t matter. Tarzan was stronger than the jungle
(umgawa
, knife), Jane was stronger than Tarzan (worshipped, adored), the white men were stronger than Jane (home, duty), the Gaboni tribe were stronger than the white men (ambush, kidnap), the jungle was stronger than the Gaboni (elephants, stampede) and Tarzan was stronger than the jungle
(aaahhheeyeeyeeaaahhheeyeeyeeyaaahhh)
—so even that was resolved easily enough, via a kind of natural cycle, and we could return to our dream on the escarpment.
Umgawa.

So there was Johnny, me and Maureen and we lived, during the early autumn of 1933, in Sherwood Forest near Thousand Oaks, and by Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley, and sometimes in Lot Two at Culver City Studios, dreaming
Tarzan and His Mate
with Jack Conway directing. Jack had replaced Cedric Gibbons at the end of August because Gibbie was really an art director and was in over his head. Plus I don’t think he could take any more jokes about Gibbons working with the Ape Man. Poor old Gibbie was married to Dolores del Rio, who slept in a separate bedroom above his. Gibbie could only access it via a trapdoor, and only then if she deigned to open it and let down the ladder.

What we did in the Dream Factory was—well, I’m sure you’re as uninterested in the technical aspects of moviemaking as I am. But you’ve heard of the primitive who thinks the camera is stealing his soul? Of course, the opposite was true: we enacted the dream, and as a kind of by-product of converting the dream into the past, the
cameras gave us our souls. They poured soul over us and if they gave you enough of it you started to become an Immortal. I don’t want to blind you with science here. Once the dream was in the past, it was considered moving (“moving” pictures) and moviegoers would rush in their millions to live in it rather than the present. Essentially, our business was selling past dreams, and we were the dreamers.

In all there were seven main Dream Factories, run by seven alpha males: Mayer, Warner, Goldwyn, Cohn, Zukor, Zanuck and Laemmle. These alphas were the kings of the town, but there were a number of other kings: a King of Hollywood (Gable), a King of the Silents (Fairbanks), a King of the Jungle (Johnny), and a Queen of Hollywood (Myrna Loy), a Queen of Warner’s (Kay Francis), a Queen of the World (Dietrich) and a Dragon Queen (Joan Crawford). There was also a Baron, a Duke, a First Lady of Hollywood, and rarer creatures—an Iron Butterfly, a Platinum Blonde, a Profane Angel, an Old Stoneface, a Love Goddess, a Great Profile, a Sweater Girl, an Oomph Girl, a Girl-with-the-Wink. Somewhere in the hills above the factories, among the groves of maple and flowering eucalyptus, you might come across The Look or The Face or even The Most Beautiful Animal in the World (not me—Ava Gardner). They were so beautiful, such very, very special human beings, that from time to time the earth itselfunder Hollywood seemed to shiver with pleasure, as if it had been caressed too sweetly.

That’s how I remember my earliest days in L.A. Above all, there was the pleasure of the dream, or the “work,” as it was drolly dubbed, which more than fulfilled the promise made by the MGM motto
“ars gratia artis”:
art gratifies the artist. Art makes the artist happy… it was a whoop of delight at our own good fortune. This
motto was there for all to see before every MGM movie, accompanied by a roar from my good friend and colleague Jackie the lion, which I have to confess made me somewhat uneasy, since Jackie was so obviously telling the audience to back off. “Get the fuck out of my fucking territory now or I’ll fucking rip you to fucking pieces” would be a rough translation of what Jackie was saying.

I often think of Jackie when Don sticks on one of those CDs he’s so inexplicably addicted to, with a bunch of turacos and parrots screaming at each other and generally spoiling for a fight by some waterfall in some jungle somewhere. Christ, and then we get half an hour of a whale lugubriously detailing just how incredibly impressive he’d be in bed. And we have it on repeat, for crying out loud. All goddamn day we have to listen to those parrots and that whale, and they set off the chickadees in the wild date palm behind the Sanctuary so that we’re drowned out by nerve-shredding territorial aggression while Don stretches out on the deck. He says it “de-stresses” him. Anyway, moviegoers didn’t seem to mind Jackie, who was in truth the mildest of animals, and something of a cult figure.

Meanwhile, my art was making me happy. I felt like one of those hummingbirds that plundered the nectar from the jacaranda bushes that grew around the stars’ dressing rooms in the Culver City complex. There was an intense sweetness to life, which I came to realize only later was my long dread finally lifting. I was rehabilitated, almost. There was one more thing to go through, it turned out.