Me Cheeta (5 page)

Forgive me, I really am getting off the point. For the record, Maureen and I certainly had our ups and downs, I won’t deny it. But there has always been a strong professional respect between us, and I think we both cherish our relationship, which has always been the healthier for a bit of teasing.

My point is: those are wise words, no matter how poorly delivered by however atrocious an actress.
The hurt will die down. It has to. Otherwise none of us could stand life.
And never mind that when the hurt doesn’t die down, you have to go ahead and stand it all the same. What Jane said remains true—call it Jane’s Law. Pain has its own long-term interests at heart. Like a virus too smart to kill off its host, it ebbs, dies down and, to our own great surprise, we live through it. Just as, for instance, my dear friend Ronnie Colman lived through his hideous wreck of a divorce from Thelma Raye and went on to marry my colleague Benita Hume, a more than adequate Cousin Rita in
Tarzan Escapes.
Or, in fact, just as Benita herself lived through that dreadful period after poor Ronnie’s lungs killed him: she picked herself up from the floor and married George Sanders. Or, indeed, just as George in his turn lived through it when bone
cancer killed his poor beloved Benita. Lived through it, that is, until of course he eventually
couldn’t
stand it any longer and killed himself in a fishing village near Barcelona on a spring day in 1972, leaving behind a note calling the world a “cesspool.” Sorry, not a good example. Jane’s Law does have these occasional tragic exceptions.

Anyway, that last day, sitting in a monsoon on the dock at Kigoma, I was frighteningly underweight and probably still in shock. A nagging voice kept telling me I wasn’t out of the woods yet. But I could already feel my grief and pain beginning to die down. I was younger and less vulnerable then. I had an immigrant’s resources. I was damn well going to live through it.

It wasn’t just that we’d been rescued, though that was, of course, a miracle in itself. There was also the astonishing care that was taken during our rehabilitation, which I like to think was due to Irving Thalberg’s legendary attention to detail. We had no way of knowing this at the time, but on the dock that day in Kigoma there was a collection of apes, monkeys and other creatures that MGM scouts had selected from among literally millions of hopefuls to play in Metro pictures. We were “part of the family” now, as Louis B. Mayer liked to say of everyone from the carpenters to Norma Shearer, valuable assets to be cosseted and packed in cotton wool. Hence the tiny protective crates in which we found ourselves snugly ensconced on the quayside. We were housed in pairs, each of us safe inside our own ingenious little slatted wooden shelters, where the raging alphas could never get at us. It was typical of the Metro touch. Once you were in with Metro, you were in. You had everything you could have asked for.

So there was Tyrone and me together, Frederick and little Deanna in the next crate. Stroheim and Spence, the wannabe-alphas, were in their own individual shelters, thankfully out of sight. Cary I didn’t see. Tyrone and I lounged through the afternoon,
secure for the moment, stuffed with strange fruit, protected from the downpour and our enemies.

Throughout that weird and disorienting day, other animals that had been chosen by MGM were set down around us in their own personal shelters. It was absolutely ingenious, an incredible system. Packed in tight were a pair of leopards, dozens of baboons, spider monkeys, blue- and red-tailed monkeys, bushpigs, mongooses. There was a sudden moldy stink of snake, and I realized that a python had been set down on top of Tyrone and me. But because of our shelters, none of us needed to come into conflict. It was as if you’d taken the jungle and poured all the death out of it. Here, by the jetties on the Zimbugu River, in the human settlement of Kigoma, I saw for the first time a forest live cheek by jowl in peace together, thanks to the intervention of Irving Thalberg, Prince of Hollywood.

Gorged on exotic fruit, Tyrone and I occupied ourselves in trying to throw the leftovers through the slats of our shelter at the leopard, which was pacing around in its own shelter next to us. He was closer than we’d ever seen a leopard before, but he seemed not to notice whenever a scrap struck his flanks. We displayed at him for a while, but he was oblivious to us. We groomed nervously, and toward dusk the rain slackened and a bank of released scents rose from us all like mist—the must of the snakes, the musk of the monkeys, the loam smell of the bushpigs, and other odors that were as indescribable to us as new colors.

With all these smells, we were excited into sound, and up went the hoots and barks. There was Spence’s voice, then Frederick’s. There were growls and grunts and whistles, the call-and-response of the turacos, the squeakings of the marmosets, the hypersonic trilling of the snakes, or whatever the hell it is they do, and there were other voices I’d never heard before and couldn’t possibly
describe to you. I realized that there were hundreds upon hundreds of us in our shelters here in Kigoma. Maybe the whole forest was being evacuated! Maybe every last one of us down to the termites had, in Thalberg’s eyes, potential star quality!

And at that moment, as we all celebrated ourselves, the sinking sun shot a sideways gleam across us and illuminated a shining wall standing upright in the river—what I later learned was the 420-ton, 215-foot freighter SS
Forest Lawn.
Anyway, with the freighter lit up on the river like that, it seemed, to my ears at least, as if our chorus of voices formed one great ironic cheer of utter relief to be getting the hell out of Africa.

And that’s my last memory of the place, pretty much, because soon afterward I fell asleep and when I woke up it wasn’t there anymore and never came back, for which deliverance I owe every human being on this planet a drink.

Not all of us went on to be stars, or anything more than extras, but I can say with some pride and great fondness that
Forest Lawn
carried probably the biggest concentration of simian, avian and pachydermatous acting talent that has ever been assembled. For years afterward you’d come across elephants, antelopes or zebras you recognized from
Forest Lawn
, dumb animals that had quite forgotten where they came from. Elephants—let me tell you definitively—forget. But I remember it all perfectly.

The primary purpose of the place seemed to be as a rehabilitation center. It appeared the humans recognized how traumatized most of the animals were by their experiences in the jungle because we were all subjected to a lengthy period of complete rest and relaxation. This consisted of almost permanent darkness, coupled with a total lack of potentially distressing or dangerous social interaction, and strictly no exercise. Indeed, many of the animals required such intensive therapy that they adhered to this routine
throughout the whole of their stay on
Forest Lawn. We
were encouraged to sleep and, soothed by the constant low hum and initially rather uncanny gentle rocking, also to unwind in general and let our shattered nerves repair. You could actually feel the tension drain out of you. Tyrone and I spent virtually the whole of our time snoozing in one another’s arms.

At regular intervals there was an explosion of stark light as a rescuer interrupted our twenty-hour naps with a fresh bucket of exotic fruit. I would take the chance to look around and do a who’s who of our party. There were various birds stacked up in little boxes not much bigger than my head, a delicious assortment of edible monkeys, some equally delicious-looking bushpigs, a fat and hairy chimp with a black face and a gentle expression, a number of pythons taking the weight off, six or seven other chimps and a charcoal-gray snake that I instinctively feared. Stroheim and Spence were both displaying and hooting like idiots—I didn’t respond; like, get with the program, we’re here to relax. “Here you go, boys,” our kind rescuer would say, poking bits of fruit through the slats of our shelters. “Here you go, you poor little fucked-up lonely little hairy fucking bastards.”

To be honest, what changed everything for me on
Forest Lawn
was a fruit—a fruit that will forever therefore be associated for me with humans—the banana. My first banana! I remember thinking, Why don’t
we
eat these? Why didn’t we have
these
in the forest? I had a similar feeling years later, sipping my first properly mixed martini in Chasen’s—a pulse of surprise that it was legal. Same as my first snort of cocaine off Constance Bennett’s breasts. The flesh: firm with a kind of memory of a snap to it, but melting as you held it in your mouth. This is the banana, not Connie’s breasts. The skin: a sensationally chewy contrast, with the added bonus of a chompable fibrous stalk to round it all off. I’m still talking about
the banana here. The flavor: like a
cleverer
flavor than any other fruit. The size: the perfect shape for a single lateral mouthful.

My second banana was, I’m ashamed to say, supposed to be Tyrone’s, but he, like many of the other chimps, had become so lethargic on the
Forest Lawn
discipline of constant sleep and catered meals that he hardly even stirred when the rescuer brought the fruit around.

We developed a routine, this rescuer and I, whereby I’d cling to the slats of our shelter as he approached and make grabs at his bucket. “You’re a little fucking Dillinger, aintcha, you little smartass sonofabitch?” he’d croon, as I rummaged through the bucket in search of the bananas. Sometimes he would hold up other fruits for me—a custard apple, a fig, half an orange—and wait for my reaction before he handed over the only thing I wasn’t silent with disapproval at. On other occasions he’d hold out his two hands, a fruit distending each fist differently, and allow me to peel open one set of fingers—the
banana
, thanks very much. Then
four
figs on the floor outside the
left
of the shelter versus
one
banana on the floor outside the—banana, thanks. (All this, by the way, accompanied by a background track of impatient screaming from Stroheim, who had, I noticed, progressed in the meantime to the dizzy heights of the dominant male in an environment of one.) Finally, a whole bunch of bananas was wafted at me, withdrawn and set down out of reach near the charcoal-gray snake. Tricky, but whatever was necessary, I’d do it. At long last I was managing to put on some weight, even though the increasing difficulty of obtaining my bananas was starting to give me a headache.

The human showed me a small, intricately glittering object and opened the front of the shelter, all the while making reassuring noises: “All right, you goddamn little fucking Edison, you little Greenwich fucking Village fucking pointy-head, work this one
out.” He slowly placed the intricate object on the floor to the other side of the custard apples, within reach. I understood that if I were to choose the custard apples, I would be denied the glittering thing. I got that. What the glittering thing had to do with bananas was anyone’s guess.

Again he fixed his eyes on me, picked up the glittering thing and opened the shelter’s front. Then he slowly replaced the glittering thing and waited, all the time staring at me and muttering kindly, “You’re not so fucking smart after fucking all, are ya, H. L. fucking Mencken?” I didn’t have the faintest whiff of an idea what was going on—I’m a comedian, not an intellectual, never claimed to be one—but once more, holding my gaze, he picked up the glittering thing and opened the shelter and I thought, No, don’t know, but since it’s open … and I whipped through the opening in the shelter between his legs and bounded toward the bananas. The ashen snake showed its startled pale underside as I veered past it, pouching the loot. I could hear the human coming fast behind me, shouting violently over the screeches of Stroheim and Spence, so I scooted with my bananas up a sort of vertical sequence of branches and kept going toward where the light was coming from. My disused legs seemed about as sturdy as a pair of termite-fishing sticks and one of my hands was full of bananas so I nearly fell, hauling with one arm only on the glossy branches, but I kept hoisting myself up, and eventually knuckled out, limping, into a somewhat bewildering landscape.

For a moment I thought I’d come out of the wrong opening—the one marked “Not Your Life”— and almost backed quietly out, as if I’d inadvertently walked in on Jack Warner banging a secretary (which I have done). For a start,
where was everything?
Why was I standing in the middle of a windy gray plain? How come the rehabilitation center didn’t open onto a gentle prospect of fruiting fig
trees and termite mounds, as I’d half suspected it did? It took me a moment to grasp that we were in the middle of a huge, swiftly flowing river, that the world was circular like the moon, that what I needed above all was to get back to my shelter. But, much as Gary Cooper always appeared to be profoundly in touch with the nuances of existence while what was actually passing through his head was “food, sex, sleep,” what I thought then was “bananas, safety, up!”

I clambered up a handily narrow treelike thing and found a place to cling with my legs so that I had both hands free, for the eating of bananas. Down below me I could see scores of huge shelters containing leopards and various other unnameable and mind-boggling megafauna—the first elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, zebras and giraffes I’d ever seen. Now, the Discovery Channel becomes reliably breathy and awestruck whenever it approaches the subject of “the visitor’s first glimpse of the animals who make their home here, on these teeming, majestic plains.” Imagine how overwhelming that “first glimpse” might be with all of them seen at once in a single panoramic view. On top of that, all around, the gray water was rushing by us uninterrupted as far as I could see. There were no banks! I wondered if Kigoma and the forest had simply been
flooded
, and that what we had here was a small number of humans who had collected as many other life-forms as possible on a kind of floating platform with a view to starting afresh when the waters receded. Was everyone else dead? Were we the Saved? Was this the reason that, as I had noticed, all of us chimpanzees were
children?
It seemed too insane an idea to be plausible, so I dismissed it and concentrated instead on eating half a dozen bananas, while various humans called up at me, “Hey, cheat! Come on down, you damn cheat!” Eventually I allowed myself to be coaxed down and recaptured. They were offering more bananas as bait, you see.