by Cheeta
Meanwhile, he was oscillating between this rather threatening fantasy of buttonholing various exotic creatures on obscure subjects and straightforward abuse of animals. “If this unspeakable fucking shit of a goat touches my hairpiece again, I’ll rip its throat out,” he’d say in his inimitably crusty manner, and then he’d be off again, wearing his “gentle” face, with his unlikely plan to set up a multispecies salon—
I’d expatiate on Plato with a platypus
On sex I would talk man to manta ray
I’d discuss dialectical materialism with a micro-organism
I’d enquire of an echidna if Picasso were passe…
and on and on. I mean, this song of Rex’s was endless—
Oh, how I yearn to yack with yaks in Yakkish
Or interrogate a fruit bat about Freud
I’d like to natter with some gnats in Gnattish
I’d harangue orang-utans about the Void…
Ostensibly a beautiful dream, it missed the point. Nothing needs to be said. There is no need for humanity to put its love for animals into words, no need for further explanation or apology. We understand each other perfectly. And besides, Rex’s idea raised the nightmarish possibility of animals having to participate in the sort of “sophisticated” discussions the unbelievable Chaplin used to host in Beverly Hills, with unfortunate fauna being hounded for their opinions on the latest Eugene O’Neill, etc. Jesus, that poor fruit bat, I thought. If Rex got onto Freud, he’d be there all night, hearing about how bizarre it was that so many of Rex’s girlfriends had killed themselves, or tried to: I saw Rex touring the remaining forests of the planet agonizing to unwary wildebeests at the water hole about, for instance, his failure to call an ambulance when his lover Carole Landis killed herself with Seconal because he wanted to keep the affair quiet. Then turning on some warthogs and screaming that they were shits who didn’t have half the money or talent he did. I could hear him now (nobody could get the song out of their heads) below me: “Oh silly little clever little monkey / You’re going to plummet to your death in just a tick / tum-ti-tum-ti-tum, stick it up your bum / tah-ti-tah-ti-uh… ick, ick, uh…” Sadi-stic?
Belatedly I understood the full horror of the situation. It had been my co-star Rex who had made the suggestion that I accompany the other leads to Combe Hall. It was he who had floated the swattable second serve of a notion to Rachel that “If the monkey’s so much cleverer than I am, then surely it should be able to climb that tree….”
Or was I being paranoid? Ask Carole Landis if I was being paranoid. Oh, what larks!
I heard Dickie sniveling eighty feet below (“This is all very upsetting!”) and Rex cleverly setting up his mentally ill wife to take the blame (“Satisfied, darling? Shall we bring it down yet?”). I swayed above them all on the boneless branches that bit my hands and feet and looked out over the pretty fields of County Wiltshire. I watched the shadows of low, flat-bottomed clouds pass across the rain-spoiled wheat, like paranoid fantasies through Veronica Lake’s vodka-sodden mind, and saw them dissolve into a gray mass, becoming a black line at the horizon, reminding me of an unfortunate snake I once knew. England—where chimps meant tea. Somewhere out there was Jane, if she was still alive, tough as old boots, crow-footed but trim, and ferocious about the rent. Maybe Lady Combe was Jane? And Boy, too, who’d ended up in England. He was probably somewhere across the fields—a part-time film producer with his hand between the thighs of the filly he was taking down to see Ma in the MG.
I once knew a man who did talk to the animals. All he’d ever needed was a single word.
Well, in attempting to inch closer to the trunk where the branches were thicker, I jabbed my palm, lost my grip, tried again and grasped nothing. I fell. Ho-hum. Death. I had no business being here anyway. You hear a lot of crap on the Discovery Channel these days about animals making a comeback. Take it from me: don’t bother, you can’t ever come back. It was a terrible movie and I wasn’t any good in it. I descended and bumped into my first ever memory on the way: Stroheim! Hadn’t thought about him in years!
I carried on plummeting through the tree’s interior and, though I had no say in it, my fall was broken by several instinctive grabs, not so painful at that speed. It must have looked pretty good, I imagine, as I looped in three or four swings through the branches to land on my feet—ta-dah!—next to the pack of Player’s. The audience in the garden was startled into the first real applause I’d heard in a long time. I, of course, looked nonchalant and helped myself to a cigarette. What do you think about that, Rex?
He looked like a guy who’d just lost two thousand “quid,” to utilize a little Limey-speak. But he was only a weakling and a bully and a near-murderer, scumbag, self-pitier, miser, liar, ass and oaf on the outside—who isn’t? Somewhere on the inside there was a decent human being. Oh, all right: Rex Harrison was an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me—but still, you have to try to forgive people, no matter what. Otherwise we’d be back in the jungle.
I forgive you, Rex.
Anyway, I was unsurprised and quite relieved when I found out that evening that they didn’t need me any longer. Rex had had a word. And that, folks, was the end of that.
2
Early Memories
Once upon a time in a land far, far away … or pretty far away, anyway. It’s eighteen hours even if you get a direct flight from Vegas. And there’s nothing much there now anyway, except some farms and red mud. Don Google-Earthed it. Once upon a time I was a little prince in a magic kingdom. I can’t remember anything before my memory of Stroheim, as if that was the thing that shook my consciousness awake. He fell out of a fig tree chasing after a blue-tailed monkey. Thump went Stroheim, and I was off and running, once upon a time—but let me tell this straight, dearest humans. You must know how it ends….
There was Mama and me and my sister, and we lived in the forest below an escarpment with about twenty others, whose names I guess I’ll have to change. I slept high up in a nest of leaves that Mama would prepare in the crook of a branch, with Victoria curled around me and Mama around her. In the mornings Mama would take us across the stream to fish for termites. Victoria would ride on her back and I would cling underneath. The water was cold and fast-flowing and pressed against me as we crossed but I always felt safe. And when we climbed into the trees and moved through the canopy, Victoria would climb behind us on her own, following Mama’s soft hoots.
When we got to the termite mounds, Mama would strip a twig and insert it into one of the holes, leaving it in long enough for the termites to clamp their mandibles onto it. You were supposed either to crunch them off one by one or slide them through your mouth in one go, or just mop them up with the back of your wrist. You’ve seen it on National Geographic. Me and Victoria were too young for termites and I liked it very much when she copied Mama and groomed me, or held me up by one leg to dangle upside down.
What else did I like? Figs, moonfruit, a big yellowy-green fruit that fizzed when you ate it, passionflower buds, Victoria, Mama, holding on to Mama’s hair to ride her, being suckled by Mama, playing with Frederick, Tyrone and Deanna, the taste of the leaves that Mama would chew into a little sponge to dab up fresh rainwater, the flashing orange on the heads of the turacos, dreams of the escarpment and, most of all, rain dances. I didn’t like termites, palm nuts, the faces of baboons, the tree that had killed Clara, the smell of the python we chased after, Marilyn, whom Mama had to fight, young males charging at Mama if we were on our own, nightmares, the mewling of leopards, Stroheim.
You’ve never seen a rain dance, have you? They were us at our best. For hours beforehand you’d feel the electricity building in the air. You’d climb up into the lower canopy to escape the humidity, and it would slither up the trunk behind you. So you’d climb higher, until finally you’d be perched in the topmost branches, high over the rest of the forest, panting and sticky with moisture, too tired even to reach for one of those fizzing yellowy-green fruits whose name, dammit, escapes m
e.
From across the forest you’d hear the low coughs given out by other tree climbers. No birds. No insects. Only our low, muffled coughs, echoless in the wet air. Then the first pant-hoots: the long low hoots, the shorter higher breaths. Mama and the others in our tree would respond with their own hoots, counting themselves in, and then the pants would climb higher, flowering into screams, and the screams would link into a continuous long chorus, and as the rain began to leak a few drops Mama would start pounding on the trunk, shaking the branches, like she was trying to wake the tree up too, and you could hear us all through the forest, drumming up the storm. And over it all, our alpha, Kirk, summoning us to gather for the dance.
We’d climb down from our tree and follow his call through the forest. In my memory it’s always dusk as we spot Kirk, walking upright at the top of a long-grassed ridge and howling in the approaching rain, looking terrifying up close, twenty times my own size. He seems to be coaxing the thunder toward us, reeling it in. The other grown-ups, like Cary and Archie, are quieter but also tranced and visibly shaking. The thunder swings through the upper canopy, approaching in huge, looping leaps until finally it’s upon us, above us, all over us, and the air suddenly turns into rain.
The mothers clear themselves and us children away into the sloe trees to watch. We’re absolutely rapt. Kirk, illuminated by lightning, charges down the ridge at an astonishing speed. Then Cary, who’s clever, discovers that rocks can be made to bounce up and smack satisfyingly into the foliage. Cary can always do certain things Kirk can’t. Archie is smaller than the others and finds a branch to whack against a tree trunk, leaving a series of white scars. They are our heroes, and Victoria and I are too enthralled by it all to eat our sloes. And soon, as it always is, the wicked thunder is faced down and slinks off, cowed by our vigor, sent on its way with a kick by the youngsters, like Stroheim and Spence, who are pelting down the charge route in imitation of Kirk. The rain falls as applause and we drink it up. Mama and Victoria and I share out sloes between us.
I love rain dances. When I grow up, I think, I’m going to be in them.
We were the only ones in the forest who made art or fashioned tools, the only ones who cooperated, the ones with the most sophisticated and highly evolved culture. We thought there was nobody like us. And our queen was Mama. My mother was the queen of the world.
She was extraordinarily beautiful, and not only in her children’s eyes. I know now how to describe her coat: it was the color of Coca-Cola refracted through ice, a deep black with an accent of copper, and yet there was also, especially when she sparkled with rain, a faint blue nimbus around her as if she were coolly on fire. Broad-backed and not tall, she had a low center of gravity and huge hands and feet, which meant that even the way she moved was serene. Her eyes were direct and emitted a soothing amber light. She’d lost only a few teeth and the tatter in one of her ears she wore kind of rakishly, a concession to imperfection, like the abscess on her upper lip. Kirk held sway over us, but it was Mama who shored him up, calmed Cary and the other rivals, did the grooming and reconciling and generally stopped everyone from killing each other.
Forgive the boasting, but it’s true: she was respected and loved where Kirk was merely feared. It was Mama to whom both Kirk and Cary came screaming for reassurance. She was always two steps ahead. She could figure out how a squabble between Cary and Archie over Marilyn would lead to Veronica being battered by Kirk. She gave Marilyn a real dressing-down when she ate Veronica’s baby, Jayne. We even used to visit with Stroheim’s crippled mother, Ethel, since Mama realized it would do the nervous Stroheim good if his mother could move up a little in the hierarchy. She endured the beatings she had to take with grace and was pretty handy in a ruckus. She was so beautiful, so smart; she was so young.
I remember riding her on our patrols, led by Kirk across the stream and through the ravine guarded by Clara’s tree, six or seven of us in single file through the deep grass—so deep only I, sitting on Mama’s back, could see above the blades—and down again into the forest of moonfruits and figs where our territory overlapped with that of the hostiles who roamed the other side of the escarpment. We would fall silent, grinning nervously, and I’d feel my mother’s hair bristle scratchily erect beneath me. Here, the thrashing of a branch might mean a baboon or a battle. I’ve never seen a hostile properly—I find it difficult to believe in them. Hostiles to me are black blobs who answer our calls from the ridge on the horizon. We listen an enormous silence into existence. Above us white-faced monkeys pitter-patter through the canopy; turacos flash their orange crests. Now there’s something in the silence. Everyone touches each other. We’re all here. Phew! Keep calm, everyone: we certainly do seem to need to give each other a hell of a lot of reassurance all the time. Everyone OK? And immediately there’s a pant-hoot from ahead of us and a tree quivers and a male hostile drops to the ground with a crack of branches.
We panic. Kirk and Cary are on their feet and hooting. I find myself squashed into Mama’s back as Spence and Stroheim scurry behind her, frantically embracing each other, her, me, anything. If only Kirk had a stick or some rock or something! But it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s not a hostile, only old Alfred, who used to roam with us and now lives on the other side of the escarpment. We never do meet hostiles. Still, you can’t be too careful.
But I remember this incident because Stroheim, his nerves too taut, came barreling out from behind the shelter of Mama’s legs, screaming, and caught Alfred with a kick on the side of the head just as he was turning his back to be groomed. Everybody else panicked again, but Mama was there first, to sink her teeth into Stroheim’s arm and hustle him away from the maelstrom he’d nearly created. Give her an awkward social situation and she always blossomed. She was the one who coaxed the sulking Stroheim down from his tree to join in the general grooming session everybody felt the need of after all that. It was Mama who kissed and cradled him, nuzzled the wound (not serious) in his arm and meticulously picked over every inch of his back as if in search of what it is in some that makes their every cell crave dominance.
His problem was that he just couldn’t act to save his life. Ricocheting downward between the branches of the fig tree as that blue-tailed monkey scampered away, poor old Stroheim was already, before he hit the ground, composing his features into an expression of wholly unconvincing unconcern. Breaking his ribs? Sure, that was what he’d been meaning to do—potential alphas liked nothing better!
Nothing that he did convinced. Whenever the big lummox did manage to catch a blue-tailed monkey he was somehow never able to keep it in the melees that ensued, and his supposedly indifferent saunter toward the empty fruit trees was heartbreaking to see. And acting was so very important, so central to everything we did, because of the hierarchy. Acting big, acting injured to save yourself from worse, acting unconcerned to avoid conflict, acting yourself into a credible rage. Stroheim hadn’t played enough as an infant because Ethel’s withered leg isolated her—but he was huge for his age. He had no confidence; he had an excess of confidence. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be. Since human beings have both a mother and a “father,” you should be able to imagine it easily enough. How, if the two things that made you are constantly fighting, it can just rip you apart. But we only had mothers, who would build us nests from leaves, and soothe us when we whimpered in our sleep, dreaming of the bird that was red, blue, green and gold at the same time, or of the escarpment, where I always imagined there was a paradise of figs, tended by wiser, gentler apes than us. Our mothers woke us by blowing in our faces. They were always with us, only abandoning us for a moment to climb an awkward tree and shake down fruit for us. I can remember waiting and waiting in the grass for what must in fact have been only a minute while Mama shook away at the branches of the tree above me, and how, out of the canopy, came dropping one of those fizzy yellowy-green fruits… whose name now drops from an obscure branch of memory into my beautiful home here in Palm Springs, gently rotating as it falls. W
ild custard apples.
I was a little prince, whose mama was the queen of the world, and then everything changed.
In ’39 or something, I remember being at this theme party in Marion Davies’s beach hut—you could have fitted a beach inside it—with Nigel Bruce, the English actor you’ll remember as Basil Rathbone’s sidekick, an excessively slow-witted Dr. Watson. The theme was Movie Stars. Wallace Beery had come as Rudolph Valentino. Joan Crawford had come as Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple had come as Joan Crawford. Gloria Swanson had come as Gloria Swanson. W. C. Fields had come as Rex the Wonder Horse. Rex hadn’t been invited. Champion the Wonder Horse had come as Rin Tin Tin. Nobody had come as Charles Foster Kane. And Nigel Bruce, who was a friend of Johnny’s and had arranged to borrow me from MGM, had come as Tarzan. He wore a loose pinkish body stocking on which were printed leopard-skin shorts. Nigel was an absolute brick and had furnished me with a cigar so that if anyone asked he could tell them I’d come as Groucho Marx. I strained at Nigel’s hand, convinced I was bound to see Johnny somewhere in the ballroom. I swore I saw him, thought I saw him again, caught a glimpse of bare flesh and leather that turned out to be a Red Indian, and then saw him again…
It was just a pity for Nigel and for my misused heart that Melvyn Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, George Axelrod, Louis Calhern, F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least two of the Hearst sons and Myrna Loy had all come as the King of the Jungle. Some were in body stockings with the seams showing, some stripped down to impressively authentic loincloths: all of them (apart from Fitzgerald, who had accidentally left his in a cloakroom) accompanied by leashed chimpanzees, mostly borrowed from Hearst’s zoo at San Simeon. And meanwhile, Johnny was nowhere to be seen. But then again, how was I to know what to look for? He might have been blacked up as Al Jolson or masked as the Phantom of the goddamn Opera.