Me Cheeta (24 page)

Never underestimate the condescension the living have for the dead, for all our fine words.

Thalberg had once saved my life. He’d also tried harder than anyone to save the escarpment from being polluted by words.
Less
dialogue, more action
, he’d written. But now he was gone there was nobody to stop the babble of “civilized” chatter stinking up the place. More dialogue was coming. We were still there, me and the rest of the chimps, Mary and Emma and the pachyderms, and the warthogs from Luna Park zoo and the ostriches from the ranch up on Mission Drive and crocodiles from the alligator farm in Lincoln Heights: we still teemed miraculously through paradise, so various, so beautiful, so glamorous, but right from the start of this dream there was a sense of our having been shifted from the center of things. OK for me, playing the lead. But naturally I was nervous for my fellow workers.

They were all absolutely marvelous, of course, but there were no guarantees for animals who worked as extras. Out of the hundreds of horses who worked with Niv and Flynn on Warner’s
The Charge of the Light Brigade
there wasn’t a single “name.” When the news came through that nearly two hundred of them hadn’t survived the dreaming (more horses were killed than during the original Charge, history buffs may be interested to learn) there wasn’t really a sense of surprise. It had been an accident waiting to happen.

Anyway, it all began with a… with an… I don’t know, a kind of
iron bird
that fell from the skies. I’m kidding, it was a Bellanca Aircruiser P-200 Deluxe, the nine-seater model discontinued in ’42. In its wreckage there was a human baby, which we chimps extracted, rather foolishly allowing the Gabonis to get to its parents’ bodies before we could tuck in ourselves. But there we go, life ain’t perfect, as the one and only Wallace Beery supposedly told Gloria Swanson after raping her on their wedding night. We all make mistakes, as—hey, nice coincidence!—Mannix told the incorrigible Beery when Beery rang him after Ted Healy, the creator of the Three Stooges, was beaten to death by “college students” outside the Trocadero Restaurant in December 1937.

I was about to make a truly irrevocable mistake. In an unreachable corner of my mind there was a trace memory of something maddeningly similar—an infant plucked from a shattered plane, us staring down confusedly at it, its trusting smile, its apelike eyes. It made me think of my dear, wise Tarzan. It was something I wanted him to remember—where he came from. It was a compulsion. I couldn’t stop. With soft hands I carried the bundle through the canopy toward the treeless zone that had developed around the Casa Felicitas. Even then it might have been all right—Tarzan was utterly perplexed by the baby, which was already testing out its hierarchical role with a marathon demonstration of power-display screaming. I thought, Fine, it’s been an interesting diversion, an amusing anecdote, let’s chuck it away now or get it on the rotisserie spit. And then Jane came in, with an armful of freshly cut flowers.

Why we needed the flowers when we lived in a forest I can’t tell you. Now there’d be no flowers in the place she’d got them from. Maybe the next time we were down there I could take
these
ones back, brighten the place up a bit!
Fucking
idiot! Marriage to Farrow had finally extinguished any last flicker of fun in her—Jane was now about as effervescent as a gin and tonic left all winter in a shuttered summerhouse. Her hemline was down half a foot; her hair had become anti-erotically complex, and her eyes… her eyes were tunnels. They saw the baby and nothing else. She went white with triumph. You see—and I don’t think there’s any way I can avoid the subject—Tarzan wouldn’t give her a child. And for all that Jane had designed off-putting twin beds for them in the zebrahide-and-leopard-skin-themed master bedroom, it was a child she craved.

There were two ways things could go on the escarpment. Either we would never grow up, like Fred and Ginger or Stan and Ollie, like the Marx Brothers or Flash Gordon or Sam Spade, like Roy
Rogers and Trigger, like Cary and Kate—we could do that and live forever—or we could give in to Jane’s time-disease and throw it all away. And he was weak. The King of the Jungle was weak because he was an orphan, because he’d never had a father to topple. There was no father to get out from under, so alphadom had come too easily to him, as a gift from his body. He was wide open to tough girls like Jane: they went at him like a herd of elephants at a Gaboni hut. Sure, he loved children. He made children want to
be
his sons. All his life he was surrounded by wannabe sons (I was one). But I don’t think he was ever that set on being a father.

Jane brushed past him toward the power-displaying infant. “Tarzan!
What on earth
are you doing?” she said, flowers forgotten. “There, there, now, Jane will look after you! Where will we get it some milk? I suppose coconuts will have to do. Hurry, Tarzan, the poor little thing’s hungry!”

“Tarzan eat now!” Tarzan commented.

“Tarzan. You go and get those coconuts right now!”

It was beginning to dawn on me what I had done. The terrible error I had made. I heard Otto give a faint sad woof from some spectral lawn.

So, we ascertained that the child’s parents were dead, and within an hour I was being testily ordered down to milk Gladys the antelope. “Be careful!” Jane hollered, as I got in the elevator, the milk slopping around in the hollowed coconut as Emma wearily tugged on the “up” vine.
Be careful, how useful is it to say “Be careful” when I’m obviously being careful, I mean just how much more perfect an example of the pointless violence of human communication do you want than telling me to be careful when I’m already
being
careful?
I was thinking, or something similar, as I stepped out of the lift. Don’t bite her.
Whatever you do, don’t bite her, just give her the milk.
Survive, survive, survive… I saw Tarzan at work building an
ostrich-feathered crib. I was his best friend, his constant companion, his brother. I was his uncle, his shoulder to cry on, his partner in crime, his go-to guy. I was his tutor, his helpmeet, his sidekick, his rescuer. I was all of these things in a female form. I was his everything, before Jane showed up. I was his
son.

And now I was the humble household Negro, wearing an expression of nothing, nothing at all, as I shuffled up to hand his wife a coconut and await my instructions. That expression, that look of benevolent vacancy? That’s
acting.
Inside, I was thinking, What have I done? Come around and surprise me and Don one day and we’ll stick the DVD on for you. I’ll be in and out, unable to watch, unable to tear myself away. But the film historians among you may care to note that
Tarzan Finds a Son!
was released several months
before
Hattie McDaniel’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Mammy in
Gone With the Wind.

I don’t know why I said that Chaplin’s honorary Academy Awards were “not for real.” If anything, such an award is worth more than a standard Oscar. In a sense, they’re a tremendously generous recognition by the Academy of past mistakes, a way of apologizing for overlooking you at the time. An honorary award is a way of saying, “We took you for granted. You were right. Have this with our humblest apologies, Kirk, or Sophia, or Groucho, or Edward G., or Michelangelo, or Cary.” You’d be surprised who gets missed. On the other hand, it’s an obvious “thanks, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out” kind of superannuation tool, as with Mickey R.’s award in ’83. I don’t honestly think Mickey would dispute that assessment.

Speaking of Mickey, Don had parked me in front of the
1000 Greatest Oscar Moments of All Time
the other night when I realized that Mickey had in fact won an Oscar before—an Academy Juvenile
Award. They stopped giving them in the early sixties. A separate category for non-adult humans seems like a pretty reasonable idea, don’t you think? But the Academy is such an august and well-run institution that I’m sure they’ve got it in hand.

Anyway, they grow up fast, don’t they? In the blink of an eye, the baby was a slightly pot-bellied, tousle-haired six-year-old called Boy. Six years of “Not in here!” and “Be a dear and get the milk in, would you?” and “Off, Cheeta!” Six years of serfdom settling like dust on me, six years of creeping marginalization all edited away into a single soothing modulation from gurgling bald alien to chubby boy a-swing on a vine. The kindness of editing.

The kid himself was OK. He wasn’t going to be winning the Academy Juvenile Award any time soon, but I became quite fond of him in a way, protective, even. His other name was, of course, Johnny—“Little John,” as opposed to the big one—and he was a tough little thing, I’ll give him that, didn’t cry too much when I tested him out with the occasional nip. But there was nothing of Tarzan in him. He was an unmagical foundling, an all-American man-cub with a laugh like a slap. He bullied the animals he could and mocked the rest from a safe distance. I was under no illusions: give him a few years and I’d be nothing more than his pet.

It goes without saying that he loved Johnny. We’d play Hollywood Frisbee together, like a real family, zipping the lid of a 35mm film can back and forth with me in the role of the piggy, clutching at air. Or gin rummy, another game I’d never been able to master, on account of how enjoyable the cards were to snack on. His catchphrase was “Ha ha
ha!”
shouted rather than laughed. “Ha ha ha, look at Cheeta!” Look at Cheeta, the long-suffering family retainer, usurped as the maker of mischief, sitting sucking a Chesterfield and wringing his hands with frustration while Johnny teaches the Boy to swim in Lake Sherwood, squirting
him once, twice and, third time around, himself. “Ha ha
ha, do
it again!” No, don’t do it again, I was trying to communicate, with my hopping and cheeping and my shaking wrists. Come on out and have a drink with me. Get in the Lincoln and let’s go down to Lakeside for eighteen holes, or stop off at Chasen’s for a sharpener before turning some heads at the Cocoanut Grove (where plaster palm trees, from whose wire fronds bread rolls could be dropped, grew high above the diners). Instead he went to Silver Springs in Florida with the Boy to shoot their underwater scenes, which would later be intercut with shots of me fretting on a river-bank. It’s obvious if you watch the dream that it’s a dream of separation. You can tell that although the ape and the two humans seem almost within touching distance, they’re three thousand miles apart.

And now here came our visitors, toiling up the escarpment with the Gaboni at their heels as usual. This time they were the Boy’s distant relatives—Austin and Mrs. Lancing, wise Sir Thomas and unscrupulous Sandy the hunter. There was the usual wrangling about inheritances and so on, a repeat of our excruciating lunch with Captain Fry (“It’s such short notice, I haven’t got a thing in!” Jane twittered) and then Jane dropped her bombshell. The Lancings were right, the Boy
should
go back to civilization. “I know what it’s like back there,” she said, in her “urgent” voice, her head tilted to one side as it seemed permanently to be these days. “You’ve no way of imagining the things that civilization can give him! Things we never could give him here!”

This was “civilization,” remember, a place I have rarely heard any human describe with anything other than the greatest contempt. You only ever use the word with a pair of quotation marks, like tweezers, so your fingers don’t have to touch it. It’s famously difficult to define exactly. It sort of means the dark flip side, the
negative, of human society. I’ve heard people describe things like the atom bomb, or a trash can in a national park, as “civilization,” with those disdainful, shrugging quotes. Whatever it is, we were lucky in Hollywood, which was a “civilization” -free paradise. And we don’t, touch wood, have any of it in Palm Springs. (Don’s hatred for “civilization” is an ever-burning flame: he loathes it tirelessly.) And of course it was the dirtiest word on the escarpment, after “guns.” But now the Housewife of the Jungle felt she’d concealed her yearning long enough and was praising it openly!

“Boy stay!” Tarzan demurred.

This presented me with a dilemma. As far as I was concerned, a dozen years at one of the great private schools in England could do the Boy nothing but good, and then he’d be going up to Christ Church and with any luck, the next time we’d see him on the escarpment he’d be trying to fund a coup backed by Maoist Gaboni rebels. But that was as foolish a dream as Lana Turner’s daughter Cheryl’s hope that her stepfather Lex Barker would stop raping her. If the Boy went to England, Jane wouldn’t wait on the escarpment for a biannual visit. She’d be off, and she’d take Tarzan with her.

So, I didn’t want the Boy to leave. Neither did he, of course. “Boy stay!” It was an impasse. And now, with glycerine tears and her head practically diagonal with wishful rationalizations, Jane’s long-folded bud of opposition finally flowered into full betrayal.

It had to—she just was not capable of allowing her will to be balked. She couldn’t stop. She sawed through a vine and left Tarzan stranded at the bottom of Koruva grotto, a deep limestone basin worn by a waterfall on the far side of the escarpment, enabling the Lancings to take the uncomprehending Boy with them.

Gibbering with glee, just about rubbing my hands with it, I seized on her mistake and knuckled across the escarpment to the grotto to fulfill my destiny—the Redeemer of Tarzan and Thwarter
of the Great Betrayer, Jane. But I was somewhat put out, when I arrived at the lip of the gorge and set about locating a suitable vine, to be interrupted in my struggle by the Boy. He’d managed to escape, dammit. While he organized a party of elephants to convert an old lightning-shafted tree into a ladder, I contributed by impotently capering around the grotto’s edge. It was a team effort.

It turned out that the Gabonis, bless ’em, had, as ever, captured the white men. This meant that, as ever, they were about to have their village stampeded by elephants. What they needed was a moat or something. How many times could they keep rebuilding their village and not learn the lesson that skimping on anti-elephant defense was false economy? It needed discussing—the elephant in the room of Gaboni society was the fact that there usually
was
an elephant in their room, standing on them. I mounted Emma and followed the heroic little busybody (who had been propped on a darling junior-size elephant calf of his own) over the Gabonis’ flattened palisade and into their village, feeling kind of detached from the whole chaotic spectacle. Nothing mattered any longer, really, amid the dust and the splintered huts and wounded Gabonis, other than the one crucial question. Could Tarzan bring himself to not forgive her?