Me Cheeta (23 page)

Anyway, Johnny and I drove up there in the Continental sometime in the early fall of 1938. I was utterly delighted to see him, of course—Metro had loaned him out to Billy Rose’s Aquacade in New York for a spell, and though there was still a reasonably regular stream of fellow stars who might take me for a bite in the commissary, or up to Lionel Atwill’s to add a decadent touch to an orgy, the days had been weighing heavy without Johnny around.

He seemed happy: rolled from under the stone of Lupe, unbowed still by Jane. He was always on a high after he’d swum, and the Continental shook little drops of water from the heavy bunching of hair at the back of his head, darkening his suit collar. I sat on his lap and tooted the horn, and we dusted off the old stoplight routine a couple of times on the way up to Beverly Hills. You could smell the mimosa, the jacaranda, the wild sage and the eucalyptus through the open window, see the ocean so pale it merged in a haze with the sky. You could hear the natives at work on their machines in the great gardens you passed, like rhinoceros birds grooming crumbs from the back of an enormous oblivious beast, and sense
his
water-tuned ears noting the very special humans a-splash in their pools. The Enchanted Escarpment!

Chaplin, Johnny explained to me, had specifically requested that
I be brought along. He liked animals and had a little menagerie on the grounds. Well, possibly that was the reason, but what human didn’t like animals? It was more likely, I supposed, that I’d been invited because Chaplin had become aware of the plaudits that
Tarzan Escapes
had garnered. I’ve never paid much attention to reviews, but if memory serves,
Variety
had said something like “direction moves along at a reasonable pace and fullest advantage is taken of cute antics of the ape Cheta [
sic
again].” The
Hollywood Reporter
had it that “A female ape called Cheta [oh, why bother?] is the Tarzans’ pet and houseworker, and expert handling of the monk provides the picture with some of its more legitimately comic moments.” I was aware there was some kind of groundswell of acclamation going on for my “work,” but to be absolutely honest, the garnering of critical acclaim has never meant much to me—quite unlike the role it played in Charlie’s life, which was pretty similar to the role morphine played in Bela Lugosi’s, or the erect male sexual organ in dear, sweet Mary Astor’s, which is to say, he was hopelessly dependent upon it.

One of Chaplin’s butlers ushered us into the garden, where the great man was seated in a cane chair, looking pensively up at the branches of the plum tree above him. Scattered around his feet were half a dozen late-adolescent or early-adult females in tennis gear, arrayed in postures of rapt fascination. Seated on a wicker swing that hung from the tree were an old couple (he in serious need of a haircut) behind whom I could see various birds and tasty-looking monkeys in the menagerie. There was a separate shelter, which held half a dozen apes, ostensibly the explanation for my presence. Poor suckers, stuck inside on such a glorious day!

“Tarzan bring Cheeta!” Johnny called across the lawn. Chaplin waved hello, and continued his examination of the fruit tree.

“A hypothesis occurs,” he opened, as we took our places on the grass. “If it is funny for a man to be hit on the head by a falling plum, then it should consequently be more amusing for him to be hit on the head by a fruit of greater weight, for example, um, a coconut. Yet a coconut might cause serious injury. What, therefore, is the optimum weight of a fruit falling for comic purposes? An apple, perhaps, Professor? The same fruit that was assisted by the force of gravity into contact with the cerebellum of the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton? Neither a plum nor a coconut would have been quite suitable for the purposes of awakening that Knight of the Realm to the Laws of Gravitation. The apple is perfect. It is a moment of perfect comedy, giving rise to a perfect intellectual inspiration. Is there not something… umm?”

Johnny had an expression on his face as if he’d just jumped on a leopard and, on reaching for his knife, had realized that he’d forgotten to put it on that morning.

The old gentleman in the swinging chair filled the silence. “I believe, Charles, that the apple didn’t actually fall
on
Newton’s head. But it’s certainly a funny picture you paint.”

“On his head, near his head, I think the point stands, Professor.”

Chaplin continued to talk in a similar vein for quite some time while I busied myself in a quest for a drink. I’d been very good over the last couple of months but I could have murdered a highball, which the flock of girls obliged me with, and a smoke to help it down. This was in the days, as I’ve said, when lighting up was pretty much a guarantee of a laugh rather than a scolding, and the girls were presently tinkling away like ice cubes at my insouciant side-of-the-mouth exhalations. I was gamboling around the lawn, midway through a standard attention-grabber—offering the cigarette around as if to share it, then snatching it back—when Chaplin suddenly transferred his gaze to me.

“Girls! Is it not abominable to inflict the vices of Mankind upon an animal? Regard the poor creature! And some find it funny to see animals emulating the actions of their human cousins! How can it be funny when the animal has no consciousness of humor? If there is comedy it is not in, or of, the creature itself but something we bring
to
it.”

I took a deep toke and gave him a brief round of ironic applause. Chaplin gave a little chuckle. “Even Cheeta herself agrees with me! What do you think, Johnny?”

“I guess Cheeta’s pretty funny, I always thought,” Johnny said, offhandedly furnishing me with one of the dozen or so greatest memories of my life. “The kids absolutely love Cheeta. Do the lips, Cheets.”

He demonstrated and I did the double-lip flip, following up with a swig of one of the girls’ mint juleps and granting myself another quick round of applause. But there was silence from the girls. He’d killed my crowd stone dead.

“Mere imitation,” said Chaplin. “Monkey see, monkey do, as the saying has it. Whereas if
I
take, excuse me, Helen…”

“Marian.”

“Forgive me, Marian—if I take your mint julep, I can from mere
imagination
become a teetotal spinster taking her first sip of alcohol… and finding that I enjoy it! I can be a reluctant drunkard, trying to resist temptation… and failing!” These accompanied by excruciating little mimes and laughter from the girls and the professor. And from Johnny, unfailingly polite as he was.

“I can even be a bibulous chimpanzee stealing a sly swig and finding… that it disagrees with me!” He added a couple of scurrying circles, as if the “chimpanzee” had suddenly become very drunk, and keeled over with his legs in the air. This generated a round of applause and calls for more from the crowd, which our
host resisted for a seemly period before capitulating and sending a non-special human being scurrying off for his cane and hat.

I’m painfully conscious here, by the way, that most of you will have no idea who this “Chaplin” is or what a “cane and hat” signify, so cruelly has time treated Charlie’s work (but do try digging on the net!). Suffice it to say that the cane and hat signified a long afternoon of being privileged to watch while Chaplin (whose first marriage was said to have inspired the Kubrick picture
Lolita
—there we go, something of him
will
survive!) ran through an extended sequence of what anyone could diagnose as utterly transparent sexual courtship rituals. It couldn’t have been comedy, at any rate. He was like Don’s goddamn whale—a monomaniacal bore unstoppably propagandizing his own sexual status—and, I’m sorry to say, I could nose a significant heightening of response from the girls.

Arriving at the end of a mime in which he played both a starving ragamuffin chasing after a ten-dollar bill and the policeman who is obliviously standing on it, the perspiring old satyr volunteered through the applause the idea that “What distinguishes Man from beast is not his capacity for reason, nor the fact that he makes tools, or uses language, for many species do indeed enjoy sophisticated forms of communication, but his sense of humor. We are the only species that laughs. Man—the
‘animal ridens.’
Phew! I think I need to change my shirt!”

This got a laugh from everybody but me, but there you go, I didn’t have a sense of humor.

“Oh, but before I forget: Anita. And, uh, Jean. I promised to show you the Brancusis, didn’t I? We might as well have a look at them now, before our other guests arrive, mightn’t we? Johnny, you’re not interested in fine art, are you, by any chance? You really ought to see these pieces, you know.”

Johnny hesitated for a second. His head came up suddenly to catch Chaplin’s gaze.

“Um… I believe not, Charlie, thanks all the same. I don’t know much about art, really. I’ll stay here with Cheeta and the prof.” And off Chaplin went with the two girls to examine the sculptures.

“You know, I should rather like a look at those Brancusis myself,” the professor remarked, which, for somebody I later heard described as “the smartest man in the world,” wasn’t a particularly acute observation.

For nearly an hour we sat under the plum tree, hostless, our group steadily enlarging with the regular drip-drip of guests arriving for evening drinks. Servants illuminated paper lanterns that hung like humorless fruit from the branches of the garden’s trees. The prof was trying his best to entertain the group with a little lesson in his own theories, but there was relatively little interest. Johnny had recognized a couple of pals in Fredric March and Fernando Lamas, and I noticed that even the girls were perceptibly less interested in me than they had been earlier, before Chaplin’s little display. So, left to my own devices, I picked up Chaplin’s hat (an absolutely instinctive gesture by that point in my life—not even cigarettes were as much of a guarantee of a laugh as a hat) and wandered away from the chink of drinks and the growing gusts of laughter toward the menagerie.

Was Chaplin right? I was musing, in that melancholy haze that gin always gives you. Perhaps I wasn’t really as funny as I thought I was, notwithstanding Johnny’s faith in me. On the escarpment I got a laugh from Tarzan and Jane every time I donned a visitor’s hat or pelted an elephant with fruit, but where was the competition? I was the funniest animal in the world—look at my reviews—but how funny was that? Miserably, ginnishly, I began to masturbate in our species’ characteristic distracted fashion.

With a click and a buzz the electric lights in the shelters were tripped—by dusk, I assumed, rather than a butler—and behind the mesh diamonds of the shelter were, hello there, half a dozen chimpanzees. All of them, I smelled rather than saw, were female. I looked at them, looked down at the erect penis in my hand, and made a dim connection. They looked at me, looked at the erect penis in my hand and made, probably, a somewhat less dim connection. To be quite frank, and not at all meaning to boast, I must have seemed tremendously compelling to them, hobnobbing with the humans on the other side of the mesh (probably something big in pictures), a cigarette in one hand and an erect penis in the other, a bowler hat jammed over my head at a
boulevardier’s
rakish angle. Ah,
comme j’étais charmant en ma jeunesse!
Anyway, a big whoop went up from the cage, almost drowning the applause behind me as Chaplin and his two art-loving friends made a return to the party.

I didn’t think. There were two pink beacons of vaginal swelling, at least, dancing like spots before my eyes. I wasn’t really seeing much else. I unlatched the external bolt on the shelter door and stepped inside. My nose was doing all the work for me now. All those years of juvenile masturbation with no clear idea of the why of it. Well, at last I got it—here was the why of it.

There was a female squatting before me, something alluringly indescribable in her musk, and I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea what on earth I was supposed to do. The perfect end to a perfect evening, I thought, ritual sexual humiliation in front of half a dozen females. Was I supposed to use my hand? Or how did it go—it was a kind of hug, wasn’t it? A long time since I’d watched my mother in the forest. A long time since I’d even
seen
a female. They seemed so small, their scent so strange. You bent at the knees or, no, you went on to your knuckles. I didn’t have a clue… and now my
sex- and gin-fogged consciousness was picking up on something else. The sound of the party had cohered into a rhythmic chant, accompanied by claps, and I glanced over my shoulder to see a dozen or so humans looking on and applauding.

“Hey, Charlie! Look, Charlie, it’s you!” the crowd was shouting. The chant found its rhythm. “Char-lie! Char-lie! Char-lie!”

Chaplin came running up to the cage, unamused at the appropriation of his hat, and I wish I was Niv, because I’d be able to tell you that “I doffed the bowler at the empurpled and aging Lothario, gave him a wink, and began to work my way through the females,” but I only did the last of those three. Chaplin began to protest, but as his guests accurately warned him, “It might be dangerous to try and separate the animals while they’re mating.” And it was sweet, yes it was, to skip from one trembling partner to another, ejaculating near-instantaneously like an old hand, buoyed by the joyous laughter of my contemporaries. Not
funny
, Charlie? You’re sure?

Well, the first time ought to be special… only two things spoiled the moment. My disheartening, some would even say devastating, discovery that the apes were not in fact chimpanzees at all but bonobos (yes, very
funny).
And the ominous title of our new dream, which I overheard as I circulated post-coitally through the garden. It was to be called
Tarzan Finds a Son!

What did he want with one of
those?

Thalberg was dead—died the week
Tarzan Escapes
was released. “Happens to us all,” as you often hear humans say, in that somewhat melodramatic way of yours. But in Thalberg’s case, like Lupe’s, there really
was
a sense of inevitability about Death’s intervention in his affairs. The Prince of Hollywood lay in his casket in the B’nai B’rith Temple on Wilshire Boulevard, where every major star in Hollywood except me was crammed, like a refutation of that crazily hopeful human dictum “Hard work never killed anybody.” There was no point in sticking your head in the sand—hard work had killed the Boy Wonder. I’m sure a lot of the dreamers at the synagogue that day were silently vowing not to make the same mistake as the great man, and certainly there was a faint but just perceptible lessening of intensity in Hollywood after Thalberg’s time. Dear old L.B. summed up the day, as an alpha should. “Ain’t God good to me?” he was heard to murmur over his rival’s body. A little prayer of straightforward happiness at being alive.