Me Cheeta (28 page)

The thing with the fish used to worry me. Sure, things were safer for tuna and barracuda with the sharks and the marlins out of the picture, but what did the tuna eat? Smaller fish, surely: grunion and sardines, whatever. What about those? Wouldn’t they be safer without the tuna and the barracuda? But then those grunion and sardines were themselves making life hell for the sprats and the whitebait and it just didn’t make any sense…until I belatedly figured it out with a little help from a PBS documentary, which completely restored my faith in humanity. They’re getting rid of
all of them
, you dummy. The death-teeming seas just cannot be helped. Only you, I thought in awe, only you could be so audacious, so inspired
as to conceive a plan to clear the oceans of the planet of all the death that teems in them.

It’s only a pity that you’ll no longer be able to console the heartbroken by telling them about the fish in the sea. But, for heaven’s sake, who’s to say there’s going to
be
any heartbroken when this all comes to fruition?

Just as we were wrapping
New York Adventure
, a bunch of little brown monkeys attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into a murderous hierarchical dispute! No, it was just a bit of misinformation “Duke” Wayne passed on to me in the panic of the immediate aftermath, though the rumor stubbornly persisted for years. It turned out to be the Japanese, which was disappointing considering their backbreakingly heroic work on the marine aspects of the Project.

Tragically, one of the first Americans killed in the line of duty was my old friend Carole Lombard. She was traveling back to Hollywood from a war-bond rally when her plane lost its bearings (navigational lights on the ground had been blacked out) and crashed into a mountain near Vegas, killing her and twenty-two other possibly equally special human beings. Johnny was traveling around the country giving demonstrations of how to survive burning oil slicks if your ship were to be torpedoed, so I had nobody to take me to Carole’s funeral, and I particularly wanted to go because I hadn’t been allowed to participate in the three-minute silence that was held for her at the MGM commissary. Gable was devastated—he never really recovered. And in general it hit the dreamers hard. It wasn’t a death like, say, Emma’s or Clara Bow’s, where you weren’t supposed to talk about it, and I remember being struck by how downhearted the humans were. “It happens to us all…” I kept hearing. “We’ve all gotta go sometime.” “When your number’s up, your number’s up.”

It was this damn senseless war that made everybody so gloomy about their prospects, I thought. I was out at Irene Dunne’s one evening when I overheard William Powell tell Jane Russell that “The two inevitable things in life, as Mark Twain had it, are death and taxis.” Taxis, sure: wherever there are humans there’ll be cars, there’s no doubting that. And those cars will doubtless always include taxis. But death? Bill had once been married to Carole and, after Jean Harlow’s husband killed himself, had been involved with her until her kidneys killed her in ’37, so perhaps his gloom was understandable.

I wanted to shake him and the rest of the humans out of it. Don’t be so damned fatalistic! Of course death’s always a danger, but you ought to hear some of the guys I meet on my trips out to the hospices in Palm Springs. These are guys—and some of them, I have to say, don’t look in all that terrific shape—who are always delighted to greet me and Don with a cheerful invitation to their hundredth birthday parties. They say things like “See you next month, kid. I’m not planning on dying any time before then. I’m not planning on dying, period!” and they see us off with a “You keep going and I’ll keep going!” pact. They don’t have this pessimistic inevitability thing that you sometimes hear among humans. In fact, they’re insatiable for tips on how not to die. After “Where’s Johnny?,” the question they always ask me is, “What’s your secret?”

What’s my secret? Isn’t it obvious? There isn’t any. Except, maybe, this: the ones who believe they’re going to make it are the ones who always do.

But the Second World War was a tragedy. It was a terrible shock to me to discover that chimpanzees were not the only species to practice organized murder. “Why men have to kill each other?” was Tarzan’s take on it in
Tarzan Triumphs.
You were such innocents, thinking that you were uniquely wicked. You didn’t know anything.
I wanted to say, Don’t be so hard on yourselves! But I also thought, Ah, go ahead, be hard on yourselves. You really ought to be ashamed, carrying on no better than a pack of animals, with all your advantages. And, goddammit, not only was the war responsible for taking Johnny away from Los Angeles for extended periods but the downturn in foreign sales (which had always formed a major part of the success of the Tarzan series) meant that MGM decided to let their option lapse, and the series passed to Sol Lesser at RKO. Senseless madness!

On the bright side, Johnny’s two children meant he wasn’t likely to be called up to fight. And if he was rarely in town any longer, at least he wasn’t trapped like a slug in a halved grapefruit at Rockingham Avenue. I thought he’d be happy. I
knew
he’d be happy, kidding around with teenage GIs, kids from the Midwest who’d never seen the sea, showing them, hoarse from giving Tarzan yells, how to swim, how to dive, how not to die….

But I missed him. After an unfortunate and rather public incident that ensued when I encountered Dietrich at the Hollywood Canteen (not my fault—she’d frightened me), my social life had undergone something of a contraction. I also ought to mention the run-in I had with the inimitable Maureen O’Hara—not a clever move after the Dietrich incident (there were only so many times you could get away with the being-frightened thing), but she’d made a comment about Johnny. It isn’t anything worth repeating, but I rose to it—and the sad truth is I owe Maureen an apology. The sad truth is that I’d hoped, what with Hollywood being such a village, Johnny might get to hear about it somehow. It didn’t seem too far-fetched to picture him laughing down the phone in some Midwestern hotel room, asking after me and getting a detailed account of how I’d tried to defend him. How else could I get in touch? I liked to think of Niv telling him (“Apparently, Cheeta took one
look at her and without further ado, in front of the whole party…”) but it turned out that Niv was in England, fighting in the goddamn war.

I was at the pinnacle of my profession. This was the period after Rin Tin Tin’s memory had faded but before Pal the collie had his triumph in
Lassie Come Home.
Roy Rogers’ sidekick Trigger, the amusing (to children) trick-performing horse, was pretty big in B’s. Archibald the Boa Constrictor’s comedy thrillers with Shirley Temple were not yet
kidding
, just kidding! Along with Trigs, I was pretty much the most famous animal on earth. But how famous is that? Without Johnny around, I felt sometimes a little neglected by my fellow legends.

The transfer to RKO had meant a change of residency to the Selig zoo in Lincoln Heights and there were no more impromptu lunches at the Metro commissary. Instead, the company of baboons, a view of giraffes and the Santa Monica mountains behind, and a faint sense of having been shifted from the center of things.

It probably did me good to get out of the human social whirl. I was back on the wagon, off the smokes, and able to concentrate on family affairs, fathering a few dozen more kids. I lived quietly, kept my head down, and every day I pictured how things might be on the escarpment without her. The Boy was young enough still to be cured of the time-disease his mother had infected him with; creepers and vines could be allowed slowly to finger their way back across the breakfast bar in the Treehouse; the forest could reclaim us; we could live there happily ever after. Yeah, that’s what we could do. To
live happily ever after
, that was the plan.

So I didn’t feel any bitterness toward Metro. If L.B. had decided we’d be better off with Lesser and RKO, then it was probably the right call, just like his decision to cover up the 1937 gang-rape of Patricia Douglas at an MGM stag party by bribing several key witnesses
and her
mother.
Plus Mr. Lesser had plenty of energy; he had some terrific ideas (leopard-worshipping death cults! Giant spider attacks! Girls!); he had scriptwriters of the caliber of Marjorie L. Pfaelzer, his daughter; he had a new escarpment at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum, located in a little suburb just north of L.A. which went by the promising name of Arcadia.

He had also come up with a brilliant solution to the absence of Jane. Like it or not, her treachery had helped fill the dream-palaces. Yes, she’d been defeated and banished. The word was she was finally back in her beloved London, “nursing the wounded” in the war. But this left us with the problem of replacing the series’ long-running villain. Who could possibly fill the hole left by Jane? Nazis, of course! Lesser was a genius. Apparently the Nazis were interested in the rich mineral deposits that could be mined from the lost Kingdom of Palandria, just around the corner from the escarpment!

I was absolutely delighted at the prospect of contributing to the war effort. All I’d managed to do so far was to bite Marlene Dietrich, who had turned out, to my annoyance, to be what they called a “good” German. If Dietrich was a good German, I thought, then the bad ones must be absolutely fucking terrifying. Count me in.

So in Arcadia, in a jump cut, as it were, I was back in his arms again. “Oof, sport, you’ve put on a few pounds! You’re getting too heavy for me.” He was a few pounds heavier himself; his northward-tending loincloth had now hurdled his navel. But he was still my Johnny, beautiful in his simplicity. Not,
contra
the inimitable Maureen O’Hara, “bland.” Now, I do admire Maureen. Anyone who can bounce back from the news of her ex-husband’s suicide with a peppy “This is the happiest day of my life!” has got to be saluted for her positivity. But I think I’d better stop calling her “inimitable.”

To let you in on a Hollywood secret, Maureen was in reality highly imitable. I myself can do a reasonable Maureen O’Hara, simply by screeching as loudly as I can and flinging my excrement around. She was (or “you were”: hi, Maureen!!) just another common or garden hierarchy addict, concealing your status anxieties behind the same old aggression displays, which we all agreed euphemistically to refer to as “feistiness.” No, it was
Johnny
who was inimitable, not you, though it’s hardly surprising you couldn’t get him. The beauty of his sunny simplicities wouldn’t even be visible to an armor-plated belligerent such as you, like the weather outside a tank. He wasn’t
bland.
Rather, he had attained a hard-won shallowness where other humans never got beyond “depth.” And incidentally, Maureen, I have to say that between Lupe Vélez, Marlene Dietrich, Maureen O’Sullivan, Joan Crawford, Brenda Joyce and yourself, you were easily the worst-tasting dame I ever—I’m getting off the point here.

To get back on track: after the buildup I’d had about the Nazis I was somewhat surprised to find when we encountered the enemy in person that they were completely hopeless. They really were the most useless human beings I had ever had the misfortune to bump into—rather reminiscent, in their stupidity, of Maureen O’Hara and, in their loudness, offensiveness and incompetence at fighting, of poor old Spencer Tracy when he allowed his demons to get the better of him in some saloon.
Tarzan Triumphs
was the name of the dream.
Quite Easily
was the implied subtitle. Undaunted by their rout, the plucky Nazis tried again in
Tarzan’s Desert Mystery
, which we went straight into. They were attempting to subvert the Sheikh of Birherari with a horse, I think. Birherari? On the other side of the escarpment from Palandria. We were certainly getting out and about.

I’ve watched
Tarzan’s Desert Mystery
at least once a year for the
last two and a half decades, on video and DVD, with Don interpolating his own director’s commentary of “Ooh, watch out!” and “Who’s that, Cheeta?” and I’m still not sure what happens. A man-eating plant assassinates the sheikh’s son, causing ructions between rival tribes over the wonder horse, but luckily a wisecracking female magician from New Jersey thwarts the Nazis’ alliance with a giant spider and helps Tarzan and me win… trading rights? A holiday? I don’t know. It’s an anti-war piece. Anyway, after an hour and a bit the movie stops and we’re declared the winners. I filled the gaps with comedy: I was doing a lot of hat-snatching, for which I garnered this plaudit from the
New York Times
, December 1943: “… worth seeing for the [seriously intended sequence with a giant spider that is almost as amusing as the]
delightful comedy contributed by Cheta,”
Don’s italics, or highlighter pen, rather.

I ought to have seen it coming. The “Lesser” Tarzan pictures—that was a bit of a giveaway, wasn’t it? I ought to have paid more attention to the ominous notice that somebody had written in foot-high chalk letters above the gates at Paramount: “In the event of an AIR-RAID go directly to RKO. They haven’t had a HIT in YEARS!” The first thing I noticed was that we were doing it all in significantly fewer takes—we were scraping the dreams more thinly from the world. In Arcadia, the trees of the forest were threadbare, the waterfalls had dried up, the Gabonis had completely died out and the animals were less numerous. The flocks of cranes and flamingos, the herds of buffaloes and antelopes, the covens of crocodiles and battalions of elephants had all but disappeared.

There were more humans about. Trade routes had opened up the continent. Strategic interests and revenue streams now had to be considered. And there were changes in Tarzan too. Instead of helping me cure the Boy, he had himself become infected with a
touch of the time-disease, I thought. He was bored. Needed these little adventures to keep him going. Time was turning him from Tarzan the Ape Man into a sort of
Tarzan: Jungle Detective.
Suddenly, white men were no longer bad.

He had become a popular local celebrity in the trading posts and towns that seemed to have sprung up all over the place, as respected in the British High Commission at Bagandi as he was among the shopkeepers of the bustling bazaars of Taranga, where he occasionally hunted for bargains. There he went, with his lad and his pet monkey, an oddity, a reactionary, a hermit and, sure, a bit of a flake, but thought of as essentially sound on questions of forest management. His interventions in the region’s politics were generally met with approval by the prevailing colonial interests.