Me Cheeta (30 page)

Quietly, on cushioned knuckles, I slipped away into the dark, into the house of traps, purple-edged suns exploding in my vision, three-quarters blind. The last time I’d been inside, there’d been a
rat-trap lurking behind the trophy-laden piano, and there it was still, on the off-chance, perhaps, that the mice hadn’t worked it out yet. What mice? They were all dead. I fished the trap out with delicate chimpanzee hands and, holding it with the reverence I would reserve for an honorary Oscar, should I ever be so fortunate as to receive one, moved on three limbs toward the walnut-paneled cocktail cabinet. Inside, from bottom to top, a couple of shelves of cut glass, a couple of shelves of the hard stuff, a shelf of humidors and cigar boxes and, highest of all, the usual miscellany of mixers with stained labels, rejected liqueurs, coasters, ice buckets, cans of olives, cans of nuts and a box of Triscuits. I clambered up with toeand finger-tips, pushed the Triscuits to the back of the shelf, and as gently as Laurence Olivier handled the madness and depression of Vivien Leigh—no, even more gently than that—I deposited the trap in front of it. It was terribly alert, unbreathing, like traps must be. I closed the walnut door and insinuated myself back into the sunlight.

I’d not been missed. I sank a refreshing lager or two for my nerves and sidled over to the table to savor a snack. “Cheets, come on,” Johnny said. “Don’t be greedy. Leave some for the rest of us.” He pushed the bowl of Triscuits away from me with his beautiful hand. Long fingers with big cuticle half-moons; I brushed them as I snatched the bowl back and guzzled the remainder of the biscuits. They tasted like dust.

“You little trash can!” he said half admiringly. “Sorry about my co-star’s manners. Oughta be ashamed of yourself, Cheets. I’ll go get us some more.”

“No need, no need, I’m fine.”

“Go ooon, I can’t drink this without.”

“We’ve gotta be going in a minute if we’re gonna catch Merle.”

“Well, it’s good to have some out anyway. And I know somebody
else around here who might fancy another one or two.” Johnny patted my head as he got up: I felt the wooden Illinois State Athletics Club ring he wore rub against my skull. There was still time to stop him, but you know, she was only after his money in the first place, and she didn’t like animals.

Dearest readers, gentlest jailers, sweet humans: I’ve lived longer than any chimpanzee has ever dreamed of living because of you. There are thousands of us in sanctuaries all over America, rehabilitated, well fed, unthreatened by death, because of you. Not all of them has someone like Don to keep their diabetes in check with twice-daily jabs, to keep their stress levels down, to keep them occupied and stimulated and frame their reviews. But there are thousands of Jennas and Myras and PJs out there, chopping up fruit, measuring dosages. It’s all thanks to you.

And if you’re talking about
animals
rather than just chimps, the mind boggles at the numbers you’ve saved and the even greater numbers you’re trying so desperately to save. Rats with wings, rats with tusks, rats with horns, rats with beaks, rats with fur striped for camouflage, rats with iridescent breast feathers, rats with baleen plates, rats with ingenious echo-location systems, rats with speckled flanks and transcontinental navigating powers, rats with shells, rats with antlers, rats with crests, rats with manes, rats with retractable tongues, rats with iconic dorsal fins, rats with miraculously buoyant and heat-conserving fur the color of lemon ice cream: all these rats and many, many more you try so hard to cup delicately in your hands and usher to safety. To show deliberate cruelty to a human being, to hurt those gently cupping hands—and, yes, I’ve had a couple of regrettable tiffs with fellow-actors, but that was just
Hollywood
—would be unthinkable enough. But to hurt the gentle hands of the best of humans, whom I loved and worshipped, was not easy to do. You understand? I’m using understatement
here. But I didn’t have any option. Don’t judge me too harshly, gentle readers: I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I don’t judge
you
harshly.

Well, anyway, it was even more horrible than I’d expected. He came out of the french windows already screaming, and I thought at first that the trap had actually taken his fingers off, there was so much blood flowing from the armpit where he’d hidden his hand. Even in the worst rows with Lupe, I had never seen Johnny raging like this. The argument started out unbelievably bad and got worse. She had the servants lined up and interrogated to no effect. At one point she blamed me.

“Isn’t it possible the monkey moved it?”

Bo stuck up for me. “It’s been here all the time, Beryl. Look, it’s finished off six bottles of beer, see? How could it have been gone?”

He shouldn’t have got involved. Beryl began letting fly with dark hints about what her bridge group had “heard” about him and the Beverly Management Corporation, and the whole thing lurched into a deeper nastiness. Bo was a thief, she was a bitch, Johnny was a fool, I was a violent, dirty, smelly animal. It cleared the air all right. With a raised and clawed right hand, she bore down on me where I was hunched on the terrace-table and I leapt, still holding the beer I’d been soothing my anxiety with, into her helpless embrace. The more she scratched and tore at me, the tighter I clung, and the tighter I clung (Johnny’s baby between us) the more conciliatory and loving I seemed, and the more unfair, the uglier her hatred for me appeared.

Within a couple of minutes, Bo, Johnny and I were driving very fast down Rockingham Avenue on the way to Cedars-Sinai, and I never saw the place again. He must have gone back there two or three more times but never when she was there. The pool house never got converted. The whole damn house of cards just collapsed like a house of cards.

I’m ashamed. I
feel
ashamed, and that should count for something, shouldn’t it? But it was a very unhappy marriage, and what I later learned about Beryl’s vindictiveness and disregard for her own children’s welfare … well, it’s documented elsewhere. She might as well have eaten them herself. Much later, apparently, she married a very nice man called Königshofer, and was reasonably happy for a time, although I heard that she drank.

I was reminded of that day with Beryl recently, when Don took me out visiting at the Palm Springs Eldercare Center.

“Oh, Don,” said the old lady we were sitting with, “don’t I get enough of the darn monkey?”

This was Don’s mother, who says crazy things from time to time. She claims, for instance, that she didn’t vote for Obama in November because he stole the nomination from her beloved Hillary. She says she voted for McCain—how crazy can you get? A lifelong Democrat on Bush III’s side? That’s just insane.
Nobody
in Palm Springs voted for McCain except Don’s mom. A number of people were pressuring Don to get me to campaign for Obama, but he’s told them it would be undignified and tacky, and animals should be above politics. Besides, I am above politics: I haven’t got a vote. Don didn’t vote for anyone, because he thinks they’re all as bad as each other.

The fact that Don’s mom occasionally says crazy things can come in handy sometimes, though. Six months ago she was around at the Casa de Cheeta for lunch on the deck. She and Don weren’t talking much—they have a selection of silences they like to work through, like cheeses—and it was a classic holding-something-back one that she broke.

“When I arrived earlier, Don,” she said, “Cheeta was smoking a cigarette in the garden.”

Don carefully laid down his utensil. I thought, Oh,
shit.
That’s that, then. If Don knew about my smoking there would be, to be brutally realistic, no possibility of ever enjoying a cigarette again. He’d find the stash in the flowerbed and I’d be screwed. It had to happen some time, but what unbelievably bad fucking luck, I was thinking. I put on an expression of perhaps overdone unconcern.

“Did you? OK. Hey, you know we sold over twenty paintings this week?”

“I’m not being mad, you know. He was sitting there smoking. Holding the cigarette upright and puffing away.”

“Mom, I’m sorry. But I really shouldn’t reinforce here. Look, how in the world could Cheeta possibly be smoking? Where would he get cigarettes? Where would he keep them? Think about it.”

Oh, you’re lucky, Cheeta, very
lucky.

“Oh, God, oh, God, how can this be happening?” she said, and smashed her plate on the decking.
“Fucking fucking fuck!
Fuck! Why is this
happening
to me?”

Don’s mom has a very great deal of straight gray hair and a nose like a raptor’s, which Don hasn’t inherited, and she can be very frightening indeed when she’s having her troubles. I scooted back as fast as I could manage. Not so very fast, these days: I trundled back. Poor old Don was trying his best to soothe her but he knew the signs as well as I do, and in these moments she was liable to say hurtful things to him. That’s why family caregiving just isn’t a good idea if you can possibly afford another option. It can be tremendously distressing for the nonprofessional caregiver and those around them. The
language
you hear! The poor woman was swearing at her son, denigrating him horribly.

“Don’t touch me. I don’t need your help, Don. I’m not a monkey, you useless fuck. Why are you such a useless fuck, Don? Why do I never get to see my grandchildren? Where are my grandchildren?”

“Mom, you don’t have any grandchildren.”

Don’s mom had to laugh. Oh, boy, did she have to laugh at that! “I do know that. I’m not being crazy. I was just being horrible. I meant, ‘Where are my grandchildren?’ You know.” She was subsiding. “I was just being unkind. Oh, God, I was sure I saw Cheeta… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Don, I’m so sorry.”

And so was I. One way or the other, I seem to have made a habit of hurting women. She was fine again, though, and stayed to watch a bit of TCM with us in the den: Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman in
Intermezzo.
There’s nothing like a classic movie in a situation like that: the humans were crying their eyes out.

An interesting question for me, though: where are
my
grandchildren? There’s young Jeeter, of course, who lives with us at the Sanctuary. Ex-showbiz, used to be a pretty good performer. He’s not a bad chimp, Jeeter, even if he is going through that rather wearying late-adolescent stage at the moment. Nearly killed me, actually, in 2004. But the rest, God knows where they are, or how many there are of them. If I engendered forty or fifty children at RKO, then I could have hundreds—I could have
thousands
of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are about ten thousand chimps in sanctuaries around America. OK, I’m a comedian, not a mathematician, but it raises the question, how many of them might be mine? A hundred? Half of them? Are they
all
me? Is it basically just
me
in a cage all over America?

Well, to return to my memoir of love and art set against the turbulent backdrop of the Second World War…. By the time we started work on 1945’s
Tarzan and the Amazons
, I could no longer kid myself that the dream of the escarpment was still alive. The dream was over, the truth was out: we were just a bunch of actors in a series of increasingly terrible films. Now, supposedly, we were in no danger. Even if
Amazons
and its 1946 follow-up
Tarzan and the
Leopard Woman
were only second features—B’s, really—we were still being watched by hundreds of millions of humans on five continents. The received wisdom at RKO was that we could churn them out indefinitely.

I begged to differ. Slapping my hands against the crown of my head and backward-somersaulting in frustration and anxiety, I begged to fucking differ. One day soon, I worried, somebody was going to say: “This is too silly, too boring, I just don’t believe you.” The fan mail would fall below acceptable thresholds and we’d be doomed.

Rin Tin Tin—younger readers, you
must
have heard of Rinty!—Rin Tin Tin was a German shepherd pup rescued by (who else?) humans from a bombed-out town in France at the end of the First World War, brought to America and turned into an enormous star by Warner’s. Rinty was huge. He was bigger than me. Think of Lassie and cube it. He was known, you older humans may remember, as “The Dog That Saved Warner’s.” His pictures in the early twenties were so popular he kept the whole damn studio from going bankrupt—a pity in a way, since that meant another forty-odd years of the psychopathic Jack Warner. Well, you can go and visit him if you like, in the dog cemetery in Paris where he now lies. “Killed by the coming of sound”—that’s the other phrase you hear attached to Rin Tin Tin. 1927,
The Jazz Singer;
1931
The Lightning Warrior
, Rinty’s last; 1932, dead. If it could happen to Rinty, it could happen to me. You
haven’t
ever heard of him, have you, you younger readers? Have you? Younger readers? You know, I do hope I’m not talking to myself here.

Perhaps I worried too much. I was doing some of my best work. I was the last great remaining practitioner of silent screen comedy—I
am
the last great remaining practitioner of silent screen comedy!—and I was garnering more plaudits than ever.
“Again the best thing in it is Cheta the chimpanzee” is highlighted on
Variety’s
review of
Tarzan and the Amazons
in the den.

More importantly, and kind of bewilderingly,
she
was back. The war was over, the Nazis defeated, and Jane returned from England in a spanking new beret and twinset outfit. The Boy and I said nothing, but Tarzan’s embarrassment about needing a new sexual partner was so strong that we had to go through an elaborate charade that this upbeat blond American woman called Brenda Joyce was actually his old Jane returned from nursing soldiers in Mayfair. We were old enough to be told the truth, I thought. Hey, you get lonely, you have needs, it’s only human. Or perhaps the shame of having lost his one true love to “civilization” was too deep even to broach. Whichever it was, we respected him enough still to play along. Sure it’s “Jane,” Tarzan, sure it is. There was always this threat of loneliness on the escarpment that never went away. Loneliness and boredom—those were the ever-present threats.