Me Cheeta (21 page)

Nonetheless, Jane was hell-bent on hosting a lunch party for the visitors. After all, she’d been waiting two years for an opportunity to use her fired-earth dinner service. It did not go well. Instead of sitting down to a mound of fruit or monkey chow, I was banished to the kitchen while the humans fussed around with Jane’s seating arrangements and admired the hardwood cutlery. Stunned, I complied. She only had two friends—Tarzan and me—and I didn’t get an invitation to her lunch party? But, of course, I wasn’t a friend, I was the air-conditioning.

“Cheeta, you wouldn’t mind turning that fan on for a while, would you?” Jane crooned in an elsewhere kind of voice.

She had insisted on Tarzan installing the fan when the treehouse had, how surprising, proved to be infinitely less cool than our old nests in the canopy. It was a wheel of dried msuba leaves operated by another pulley. Jane had never been known to operate it, of course, and there were few other forest creatures with the necessary
dexterity, so it was I, dear old Mrs. Cheeta, who had to crank it. And, not wishing to cause a scene, I did.

Jane popped her head around the kitchenette door, waggling the sort of index finger that must have made Mia Farrow chalk the days off until her sixteenth birthday. “Don’t you dare let that roast burn!”

I made no comment. She was referring to the vertical spit that hung in front of the clay oven, on which Tarzan impaled the hunks of wildebeest that we’d previously air-cured. Jane cherished the idea of a little “rotisserie,” so the spit was commissioned and a nook constructed above the chimney for me to perch on as I turned the meat. If the fire hadn’t been going full blast, I wouldn’t have had to get the fan going, would I, I was thinking, while Jane babbled melodiously on in the dining room about the “awful savages” you got around these parts. Oh, yes, Maureen, ebsolutely frightful! And have you
seen
their cutlery? But she seemed happy, at least, and I rotated the fan and the spit for her, multitasking, because it was so painfully obvious how desperate she was for this party to go well.

Once the roast had been served, I was to enter with the table water in a hollowed-out gourd. I took Tarzan’s “Eat now!” as my signal and made my way into the dining room, where Jane was still chattering on about the natives. “I dare say they’d be well enough pleased if we were to clear orf and leave this whole happy hunting ground to them…. Oh, thank you, Cheeta!” (This “thank you” for the guests’ benefit.)

Duty done, I helped myself to a slice of mango, seeing as I hadn’t had any lunch myself yet.

“No, no, now, greedy!” she said, handing me one of the smaller segments instead. “Here. Take this outside. Go on!”

Take it
outside?
Oh, yes, to avoid getting juice on the leopard-skin throws. I mean, you know the type: television shows her
recurring throughout all human history, co-opting dinosaurs or robots into her dystopia of domestic bliss. Thank God TV hadn’t been invented back then, or she’d have had the lot of us running around the clearing for an hour after dinner, doing classic scenes from National Geographic to help her relax.

How had it come to this? It was like the time I’d had supper with Joan Crawford’s poodle Clicquot. We had to eat off bone china plates, and if Clicquot spilled a crumb Crawford would extract a tissue from the heart-shaped pocket of his red-velvet monogrammed jacket and tskingly clean it up. Not a fun evening. For Tarzan’s sake, I made no comment, only accepted my sliver of mango and bipedaled back to the kitchen with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Her table manners aren’t all they should be!” she twinkled to the cousins and Captain Fry.

And I’m afraid the little tinkling-bells laugh with which she accompanied her statement was more than enough for this punkah-wallah. Since when had our jungle idyll become dependent on table fucking manners? We never used to have table manners because we never used to have a fucking
table.
“The scratch and grunt school of Method acting” was for some years the tag used by lazy critics in charting the influence of my work on the young Marlon Brando, you’ll remember. Imagine Stanley Kowalski dealing with Blanche Dubois and you’ll understand how I felt toward Jane at that moment. I’m not proud of myself. It was unprofessional. But momentarily I lost control and, hurling the mango to the spotless sisal-grass floor, I’m afraid to say that I tried to rip her poised little fucking throat out. In fact, I succeeded merely in getting in a glancing nip through the surprisingly tough hide of her calfskin dress before Gately, who was always silently haunting the corners of the dream, strode up and brought the ugly-stick
down on my back and shoulders more times than seemed strictly commensurate.

You won’t see that sequence in
Tarzan Escapes
, as the film was retitled for its 1936 release. It didn’t fit the dream. But if it hadn’t been for Johnny, things could have turned out a lot worse. “That’s enough, Gately. Let me calm it down. It trusts me,” he said, and at the sound of his voice, I came running, as I always did. In the cradle of his arm I was calmed, stroked down from my fury, and it was easier for us all to agree on a convenient white lie about my having been “frightened” by something.

And as my rage subsided, I found that for the first time on the escarpment, I
was
frightened of something. Not Gately, or the leopards or the Gaboni or Mary the rhino, but the possibility I had managed to bury at the back of my mind for two years: that if Mayer or Thalberg didn’t like what they were seeing, or if the moviegoers no longer believed in our dream, or if Maureen turned against me, or if I just didn’t make ’em laugh like I had in
Tarzan and His Mate
, then the research center would always be happy to take me in, along with all the rest of Hollywood’s rejected. “Oh, yeah, I used to be a star. Used to be very close with Johnny Weissmuller. But it’s more rewarding working in medicine.” Don’t ever forget it, I told myself. This business is your
life.
Time might go by but Death never loses interest in you.

Stardom was my shelter, and without it, I could easily end up at the bottom of the H of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, with the British actress Peg Entwistle, or in an unmarked grave with Florence Lawrence, the “Biograph Girl,” who could do nothing to stop herself swallowing a cocktail of cough syrup and ant poison after the work dried up. Or I might end up being prodded and shaken by two children exploring the stairwell of a New York tenement building as the ex-child star Bobby Driscoll had, or on one of the
foothills of the city dump with Rex the Wonder Dog. Stardom protected you against these dangers, and only the seven alphas of Hollywood could give it to you. Why antagonize them? Remember what happened to Maurice the lion? I thrashed in Johnny’s arms and he let me down gently so that I could make my way across the dining room to rest a conciliatory hand on Maureen’s thigh. I thought, From now on, I’m only gonna touch the little idiot when no one’s around.

The humans settled back to their lunch. But the fizz had rather gone out of the party. With profound hypocrisy, Jane was now objecting to Captain Fry’s idea that Tarzan himself be brought back to England. Tarzan could make a fortune, could make mountains of money “lecturing on wildlife.” “Money?” Johnny said uncomprehendingly. He and I never had the faintest clue about money. All that sort of thing he left to his friend Bo Roos.

“No, Tarzan, you don’t understand,” Cousin Eric tried to assure him.

“Of course he doesn’t understand!” Jane burst out, rising to her feet. “I hope he never does!”

And then it all came pouring out—she was off to England, was going to leave Tarzan, but “only for the time it takes the moon to make three safaris,” she claimed. Yeah, yeah, and Garbo was always going to go back to John Gilbert, and Jayne Mansfield was always going to go back to Mickey Hargitay. How stupid did she think he was? Why couldn’t Tarzan come with her? Because, and Jane had a well-thumbed little stump speech on the subject, “In civilization he’d be a… a sort of freak. He could never tolerate it, or if he did, that might be worse!”

In which case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—and feel free to picture me as Charles Laughton here, or Spencer Tracy in
Inherit the Wind
, perhaps, rounding on my heel with an index finger spiraling
into the air—in which case, Miss, uh, Parker, or will “Jane” do? In which case,
Jane
, why are you trying to bring civilization to the escarpment? Hypocrite! Liar! She had even taken to wearing a pair of calfskin bloomers underneath her dress, for propriety’s sake, for fuck’s sake.

And the terrible thing was that he loved her so. The guy was totally broken up about it. It was Lupe all over again. Or as Bobbe Arnst told
Photoplay
in 1932, dolefully folding her ten-thousand-dollar check from Mannix into her purse next to the IOU for her lost soul, “I guess marriage can’t ever be the victor in Hollywood.” And Johnny’s face was an index of the purity of his system. Grief rose to its surface in a pure form; his face didn’t filter his despair. His suffering was written all over his brow, and his brow was like a continent you hoped would never be visited by those tall ships. It broke your heart. People have forgotten, or they failed to see it at the time—and you may doubt my objectivity but: don’t—for two or three pictures, Johnny Weissmuller was a great, great silent movie star, a transmitter of joy, a transmitter of sorrow.

And in his despair, he was wide open to Captain Fry who, I now realized, was not an animal rehabilitator but a cad of the first water. Fry had an iron shelter into which he was able to fool the love-addled King of the Jungle. It was a situation tailor-made for the natural climax of any Weissmuller-Cheeta picture—my daredevil rescue of my partner. I evaded the usual lethargic predators, enlisted the help of Emma, got him out of there, watched the Gaboni capture the white men, the elephants stampede the Gaboni village and so on and so forth and none of it seemed quite the same as it had been. I could bust Tarzan out of Fry’s cage, but what about the one Jane was building around him? Her terrible Casa Felicitas?

The only thing to do was put it all out of my mind and enjoy the escarpment’s delights. Somewhere in America, I’m sure, there’s a
box of photographs that Johnny took with his Box Brownie during the shooting of
Tarzan Escapes.
He was going through that phase all humans go through, of thinking he was quite a talented photographer. I hope in that box there’s a picture of us playing Find the Lady with the Gabonis. I had a great system going with Bomba, where he’d do the flickering magic with the three cards and I’d point to the queen, and Bomba would say to the rest of the Gabonis, “A monkey can play this game, fellers! You ain’t got nuthin’ to fear, fellers! Come on and find that sweet, sweet lady. She
wants
you to find her, fellers!”

But they never could find her, those Gabonis.

When I’m swinging upside down in my tire behind the Sanctuary, the contrails of the airplanes segmenting the little rectangle of blue visible above the climbproof wall appear to me like the wakes of yachts racing around Catalina Island; and the planes themselves look just like the flying fish who skipped beside us. If Lupe wasn’t coming to the shore for the weekend, Johnny would take me and Otto down in his new Continental, lingering at every stoplight for a little triumph of handshakes and a quick Tarzan yell, with Otto in his lap and me around his shoulders, my hands on the wheel, bamboozling the bums and lushes.
Good morning, sir, I’m looking for the source of the Zambezi but I seem to have taken a wrong turn at Wilshire Boulevard!
NDSN, as the stage direction used to go—Nobody Don’t Say Nuthin’.
Umgawa!
I loved him and he loved Otto and me and we loved each other and I felt, at those moments, almost entirely unendangered.

Occasionally, on a Lupe weekend, Peter Lorre—a very special human being and a wonderful actor whose beautiful manners were largely unaffected by his addiction to morphine—might pick me up and I would spend most of my time on the yacht club lawn with
him and his wife, of whom I was very fond, trying to apologize for upsetting the black and white ornaments they would arrange with great thoughtfulness in a kind of courtship dance on their checkered board, outrunning the unpredictable geysers throwing rainbows over the grass, and accustoming myself to my lowered status, my starvation rations of affection, my ten-minute poolside audiences.

It was on one of those weekends that Flynn arranged for a steer to be slaughtered and sunk beside his
Sirocco
with lead weights and a buoy to attract some “motherfucking fish” and maybe “a few hungry merbroads.” Kate Hepburn was staying with Bogie and Mayo on
Santana
and she rowed me out there herself in the tender, I remember, to where
Allure
was moored beside the Bogarts, and there they were, the World’s Most Perfect Male and the Latino Tornado. Lupe was wearing a British naval officer’s cap at an angle, which somehow managed to articulate a tolerant contempt for everything aquatic. Tarzan and His Mate.

Otto snuffled around in the swell, like a great dumb happy seal, getting ready to shake himself dry over Lupe’s chic little brass-buttoned jacket, bless him. I wanted to throw him a fish. Johnny spent the afternoon lined up on the stern of
Allure
with Flynn and Bogie, rods out, alpha males at peace. There was a strong atmosphere of closeted male defensiveness coming off them, exacerbated as the day wore on by their failure to catch any fish for their females, who talked and drank with a smattering of beta males in the bows. The very special human beings glimmered in the ocean glare, as did the slightly less special ones who ferried them their drinks.

At some point in the evening, after Otto had been dragged, sopping, belowdecks, and I had been amusingly established with one of Ward Bond’s Cuban cigars and a margarita, I began to notice
how connected everything seemed to everything else. OK, it was the margaritas working in me, and the champagne cocktails, but I was no more than reasonably well mulled.

I’m a drinker, never made a secret of it—always have been, until my time at the Sanctuary—but I’ve always known when to stop. And I’d even argue that there’s a little more dignity in sharing a couple of cocktails, some caviar and a good cigar on a yacht with Katharine Hepburn and Nunnally Johnson than there is in washing down your sugar-free seventy-fifth birthday cake with a can of warm Diet Pepsi and a SpongeBob SquarePants hat askew on your head. I’d mixed it a little, but I wasn’t anything like as oiled as Mayo Bogart or Lupe or Ward was. No, it was the feeling, the absolute conviction, that although the humans and the dead steer in the water, the fish, Otto and I were all part of the same thing, they would never understand that they were all—it sounds banal now when I say it, it sounds ridiculous, and I wouldn’t presume to claim anything like a
human
intelligence (all I know is as much as you
can
know from dedicating a quarter of your life to watching TV) but it was a feeling you get only once or twice and when it comes you have to trust it: it was like the feeling I’d gotten from Connie Bennett’s star-powder, but infinitely stronger, realer.