Me Cheeta (14 page)

Twenty-eighth day of shooting
—Lake Toluca. Everything has returned to normal! Tarzan is back to full health, and he greets Arlington and Holt with firm handshakes and no hard feelings as they arrive on the escarpment to try to tempt Jane back to London with their garments and perfumes. Johnny walks on his hands for me in the morning, his polo shirt veiling his face. “See you on the set, sport!” He and the carpenters saw through the legs of Maureen’s canvas-backed chair again. Conway sits in it.

And so it seems to be on the escarpment—life repeats itself. Arlington and Holt will always arrive. Jane will always be tempted. Tarzan will always survive the perils of the white men and return to innocence. The elephants will always wake from their sleep. And I will always be leaping into his arms and being peeled off. “Always is
just beginning,” as Maureen says to Johnny, snuggling into his embrace on the back of an elephant.

And so it continued. Tarzan was wounded again. Jane saw the error of her ways again. And then one day, after Gately had failed to arrive for three mornings in a row, I began to realize that “always” was over. This was the beginning of December 1933—
Tarzan and His Mate
wasn’t released until mid-April of the following year. I was wising up fast about the way Hollywood worked, but I didn’t at that time understand the key rule—you’re only as good as your last picture. And nobody had seen it yet.

So I spent the winter of’ 33/’34 waiting for Gately and watching a host of actors pass by me on the other side of the diamond mesh. Of course, that was where I yearned to be, among the grass-skirted, flower-draped natives and the merry peasants with their pitchforks and woven baskets. I wanted to share smokes with the scarlettunicked officers, share confidences with the fan-fluttering
crème
of Viennese society, get into scrapes with the ragamuffins, scheme with the courtesans, dance with the gypsies, carouse with the jolly knights of old and play cowboys and Indians with the cowboys and Indians. I’ll never forget my roots—they’re tremendously important to me—but we were chimpanzees in a cage, and once you’ve got through the grooming, the eating, the masturbation and the clambering, you’re pretty much done. Meanwhile, an inch away, the myriad tribes of humanity were sweeping by us, so various, so beautiful, so new. How could I not long to join in? How could I not envy humans? Every day they paraded in front of us, like an endless advertisement for the history of the human race. They were so much more
interesting
than anything any other species had ever come up with. Yeah, and we sat in a box, along with all the rest of the animals in the MGM menagerie,
rustling straw and considering another nap. Human history—there’s no other show in town, that was the message. We were just a sideshow.

There must have been a couple of months of this “resting,” waiting for Gately to come. Anybody in the entertainment business, actors especially, will tell you what an insecure profession it is, and through the winter a doubt grew in the back of my mind about the research lab.
Outside
of a cage, that was where you were safest, among the humans. The more they looked and laughed at you, the better your chances. In front of the cameras was best of all: you were never even beaten there. So I felt intense relief mingled with joy when I saw not Gately but Johnny detach himself from the stream of human history one evening in March 1934 and poke his fingers through the mesh. “How’s-a-boy, Cheets. You wanna drive up to Carole Lombard’s house for a snifter?”

All five of us crowded up to him, and for a terrible second I feared he wouldn’t recognize me. But he did—you wouldn’t believe how few humans look you in the eye, but Johnny always did—and his smile went off like a klieg.

“That’s the one, that’s my leading lady right there.”

“You mean Jiggs, Mr. Weissmuller?” our keeper and excrement-pilferer asked.

“Hell, no, I mean Cheeta!”

“He ain’t really Cheeta, Mr. Weissmuller, he’s Jiggs. You be careful now, in case he bites ya.”

I hurtled through the cage door and up Johnny’s trunk, and planted a number of smacks on him. It might have seemed excessive but I wanted the keeper to get an eyeful. That was the difference, you see—in there I
was
just Jiggs. In the real world I was Cheeta. I was Jiggs on the dotted line, but in Johnny’s arms I was always Cheeta.

We drove up to Beverly Hills, and Johnny shared his potato chips with me, talking to me all the way: “See? The Los Angeles Country Club, where I play golf. And this is North Wilshire Boulevard, and up there is Pickfair, where Doug Fairbanks lives.” He turned through a gate and down a drive bordered on either side by live oaks, little flaming torches and automobiles. “OK, Cheets,” Johnny said. “You’re going to behave yourself? No thumping Maureen?”

“Johnny, you sonofabitch!” came a voice from the portico. “Is that Lupe Vélez with you or am I drunker than I think I am?”

This turned out to be a line that, with minor variations, approximately half the humans at Lombard’s house that evening chose to introduce themselves. “Tarzan bring Cheeta,” said Johnny, and we entered Lombard’s palace. Or, rather, it was the place she was renting after her marriage to William Powell had fallen apart. It had belonged to some producer who’d lost his place in the hierarchy, and Carole was camped out there, with fifteen bedrooms, oak paneling, a billiard room, a small zoo (how the humans loved their animals!) and a private screening room where, after drinks, introductions (Wallace Rathbone, Basil Chevalier, Maurice Beery, Cary Crawford, Joan Cooper, Gary Grant—I couldn’t keep up) and a paradise
of cigarettes we began the evening by watching
Tarzan and His Mate.

Conway was there, and Gibbie with Dolores del Rio, and Arlington and Harry Holt—I noticed that most of the guests were wearing the same kind of helmets and khaki suits the white men had worn on the escarpment. Maureen was there too, wearing the silver dress that had caused her to lose her temper with me. I loped cautiously over to her and held out a hand, which she declined to take.

“Johnny, you haven’t! You great big hunk of brainless beef, she’ll be miserable here,” Maureen predicted, inaccurately. “Oh, come on, then, come on, Cheeta darling,” she relented, stooping to invite me into her arms. “Don’t blame me when she—oof, you’re heavy—when she gets bored! And you will get bored, won’t you, poor thing? Bet you wish you were in the jungle, not here with all these boring people. Now be careful with my dress—bad, Cheeta, no!” All very Maureenesque. There were really only two notes in her voice, nagging and cooing, and it could get on your nerves, though you wanted to like her. She wasn’t really talking to you but to the children she could already feel lining up inside her.

We were interrupted by the entrance of one of the ape-actors, charging threateningly, if unrealistically, into the screening room and stopping in the dead center of the dream screen. It displayed violently, and removed its head to reveal, to my surprise, a magnificent blonde female human.

“Hot voodoo,” she said, to whoops of delight. “Damn Paramount to hell. Damn Sternberg. And fuck Hollywood. But bless you all. Carole, angel, beloved angel, bless you most of all, though your house is an abortion. The Barrymores have come as a zebra.” This was Marlene Dietrich, whom I felt sorry for, a beautiful woman reduced to playing apes.

A zebra did indeed arrive shortly after, bisecting itself into a
couple of humans. It was pursued by a lion called Fredric March, and a hunter with a gun, introduced to me as George Sanders. “Cheetah, my deah,” Sanders said. “If you’re anything like me you’ll find it absolutely excruciating to watch yourself on screen. I should leave now, before these terrible monstahs turn against you and skin you alive. It’s not going to shit on me, is it, Maureen?”

I remember also that Charles Boyer arrived some time later that evening dressed as a crocodile, and that Johnny was pressured to wrestle him in the pool.

You see, every person in the screening room belonged to the studio bosses, one of the seven alphas of Hollywood. When the actors weren’t dreaming movies, they spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing from the seven alphas, who had an extensive network of spies run by two old women, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper—one short, dumpy, vague, blurred like a dissolve, and deadly; the other tall, rail-thin, bright, boned like a bat wing, and deadly. To escape Louella and Hedda’s spies, the stars preferred parties in each other’s houses, and the result of this was that they lived in each other’s pockets and became bored. They couldn’t go out for a drink without having to adhere to some “theme” that had been devised to disguise the monotony. Hence Mercedes de Acosta and Franchot Tone as two leopards, complaining at each other that it was too late to change their spots.

Maureen returned me to Johnny’s arms and I was introduced to another dizzying succession of humans: John Fonda, Henry G. Robinson, George Astor, Gloria Joel, Mary Gilbert, C. Aubrey McCrea, Edward Swanson, names that meant nothing to me at the time. They all approached with highly snatchable cigarettes and drinks. Johnny was shaking hands pretty much continually, modestly deflecting most of the conversation onto me. “Gee, thanks, that’s swell of you to say so. I just stand there and try not to look too
dumb. You met Cheeta?” And “Maureen does the acting for both of us, you know. Cheeta’s givin’ me lessons too, aintcha?” Or “Lupe’s filming up at Mount Whitney and Garbo wouldn’t be my date, so I brought Cheets here….”

I felt very proud to be in the crook of his arm, because he was so easy and so well liked. He was well liked because there was a simplicity to his happiness that the other humans perceived and wanted for themselves. He was an alpha even in this roomful of alphas, and he wasn’t even trying.

The lights went down and Maureen called out, “No booing!” which generated a sustained period of booing. In the darkness and the heat, with Johnny’s hands stroking my fur and a couple of large glugs of Claudette Colbert’s Pink Lady inside me, I have to say I nodded off. I dreamed again of the old escarpment in the forest, where the fig trees were, in moonlight, and when I awoke the dream merely seemed to be continuing in front of me on the screen. So my mind wasn’t as completely blown as it might have been, watching Johnny play around in the canopy with a scruffy little slip of a chimp whom he addressed (surely not, it can’t be, I look so… and my
voice
…) as Cheeta. I thought, All right, so that’s me. Let’s see where this is headed.

I’ve seen
Tarzan and His Mate
more times than I care to say over the last twenty years. First it was a special occasion whenever it was scheduled on TV, but since they brought out the DVDs, Don finds any excuse to stick a Weissmuller-Cheeta picture on. In fact, he watches them in sequence once a year, a little two-week-long Tarzan festival, in the evenings, when my blood sugar’s down and I’m too tired to heft myself off the sofa. Also, any time we have a visitor—that to Don is a golden opportunity for an unscheduled half-hour-long “glimpse.” Any children come around—another chance to revisit a deathless classic such as
Tarzan and the Leopard
Woman.
And of course I can’t tear myself away, least of all from
Tarzan and His Mate
, the purest, the truest, the most beautifully shot, the
best
one of the series. It’s not me—early work, to be honest, no more than juvenilia—it’s
Johnny.

Dearest, dearest humans, if ever I’m feeling low and troubled by doubts about your wisdom or your right to exercise dominion over us—and let me confess now that I do, very occasionally, waver in my faith—I think of the beauty of Tarzan in MGM’s 1934 worldwide smash
Tarzan and His Mate.
In Carole Lombard’s screening room seventy-five years ago, I detached my left hand from Claudette Colbert’s and my right from Johnny’s and began to applaud. I was hooting too, I think. Johnny was a beautiful specimen, but this—this silvery-white creature on the screen was the paragon of animals, the ultimate alpha. You looked at him and thought—the rest of us? We’re just
beasts.
If you can come up with something as beautiful as that, well, then, maybe you’re right: we
ought
to obey you.

So I couldn’t stop this little outburst of awe spilling out of me. Maureen leaned over Johnny and cooed, “Hush now, hush there, Cheeta. You shush up now.” It’s true, I was hooting quite a bit. “She’s going to have to leave, Johnny,” she said.

But whatever Johnny was about to say was drowned out by the sound of a pair of hands behind us accelerating into applause and George Sanders drawling, “Quite right, Cheeta, you shame us. Quite applaudable, your physique, Mr. Weissmuller. Bravo, Cheeta!” which was taken up by a crescendo of general clapping and cheers. So that shut her up. Immediately afterward, I got a big laugh for a bit of business on screen involving a cigarette, and then the place erupted when I came out of Arlington’s tent wearing my elbow-length gloves. They… loved me!

The dream continued, thrillingly, agonizingly. I was desperate to
know what had happened after we’d been sent home from the escarpment. And I had to admit, too, that Maureen was pretty good. To my shame, the bruise on her right flank where I’d thumped her was highly visible throughout. She was loving and wise, and Tarzan loved the hell out of her, and when he plucked off her silver dress and threw her into the river to swim, you saw how the escarpment might be paradise for the two of them as well as for me. Freed of clothes, Jane showed her true nature. Her naked body, latticed with light from the river’s ripples, was more beautiful even than Tarzan’s. Under the water the two of them forgot Arlington and Holt, the silver dress, the escarpment, time, air, the movie, everything but themselves. There was total silence in the screening room, broken only by Dietrich.

“My dears, that is not Hollywood. That is art.”

“Oh, Maureen! And Mr. Conway!” George said. The whole room was clapping.

“I only wonder what Mr. Breen will make of it,” called Conway over his shoulder. “And the damn Catholic League of Decency. Breen’s not going to let it through.”