by Cheeta
Sure enough, the next day Stroheim was squatting beside Julius on top of the wheelhouse, engaged in some lesson requiring a large amount of bananas. I could see that Julius was having a little difficulty with him, since Stroheim kept breaking off to pant-hoot at the elephants, which were obviously causing him distress, but all afternoon Julius kept him at it. I stayed downwind of them and tried to put them out of my mind, tumbling with Bonzo in the giraffes’ mound of straw and generally keeping my head down. But bluffing or packing came around all the same, with the humans in a state of high hilarity. Mr. Gentry and me, Earl and Frederick, Baxter and young Bonzo, Captain Mannicher, DiMarco and, making a grand entrance, wiry little Julius with—like the big dog the small man tends toward—the bulky Stroheim.
“Gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you my assistant, Dempsey,” said Julius (Dempsey?), “who will be cutting the pack for us tonight. Some cards, please, for Dempsey.”
Cutting a “deck” (I know, very tricky) of bluffing or packing cards was something Mr. Gentry had been helping me master. But cards are terribly difficult for a young chimpanzee to manipulate, and my attempts at cutting had never elicited the full banana of approval from Mr. Gentry. There was room for improvement, to be honest—I either dropped or ate them. As the oldest chimp on Forest Lawn, Stroheim could be expected to make a better job of things requiring more developed motor control—that must have been Julius’s thinking—but it never came to that.
Stroheim was staring at me with his muddy brown eyes and his hair erect, making a series of threatening pant-grunts. He ripped his hand out of Julius’s and thumped up onto the table with a heavy, hollow ber-bang, hooting at me in an aggressive four-square posture—arms out, knuckles down, ready to spring. I abandoned to him the banana I was peeling and scampered around the back of Mr. Gentry, who stood up, making a rucksack of me. Bonzo and Frederick had scattered, squealing but ignored by Stroheim, who was still bristling and pant-grunting at me even though he was now in possession of both my banana and the cigarette I’d left burning on the table. We were straight back in the jungle.
“Are we playing cards or having a tea party?” Captain Mannicher asked, reasonably enough. “Get it out of here, Julius. And the rest of them. Put ’em back in their cages and we can get on with our game.” Stroheim had retracted himself into a sullen bundle and was puffing gloomily on my cigarette as if savoring the shift in mood. “And Cheats as well, Tony. Enough. We’re gonna have some serious poker tonight.”
So we were all trooped back into Hold Number Four. I didn’t mind it as much as you might think—I’d been wondering about the safety of my shelter ever since I’d seen Stroheim gibbering around the wheelhouse roof that afternoon. Without shelters there was no rehabilitation program. The program’s key principle—not to be constantly threatened by death (a good principle: mark me down as a “pro”)—was dependent on them. After the light and the wind of the Atlantic, the hold seemed black with dreams and comforting thick smells: feces, urine, rotting fruit.
“Hardly the goddamned Ritz down here, is it?” said Julius, admiringly.
“Smells like the, uh, the Tijuana Hilton,” said Baxter, “but with better room service,” which confirmed my suspicions that we were indeed recipients of some special treatment on Forest Lawn.
Earl peeled off with Bonzo and Frederick, and Julius hit a little cluster of moonfruit-like globes on a stand (whose sudden light stirred up a fluster of cheeps and squeaks from those expecting dinner). He and Baxter were leading the banana-clutching Stroheim and me back toward our shelters—and I thought, We’ll be back in our shelters in a second anyway, and what can he do while there are two humans here? That’s my goddamned banana! and I jinked sideways and plucked it—ha!—from Stroheim’s grasp.
Unfortunately, my momentum carried me into Julius’s legs, and in catching his balance, his hand separated from Stroheim’s, freeing him. Stroheim swiveled, ducked Julius’s grab and—he had this way of instantaneously converting his sullenness to ferocity—charged shrieking into me, catching me and clutching hard so that we spun over painfully into the side of a shelter. For a moment I was winded, and then, dropping the banana in the hope that that’d be enough for him, I skittered out of reach and doubled back toward the humans. I figured they were my best option. But Earl and Julius were backing away from me with expressions I had not yet seen on human faces, and I had time to think, Surely between the pair of you, you can handle him—and don’t forget, guys, it was my banana in the first place, before they started to shout.
Down from its busted shelter flowed the charcoal-gray snake. It decanted itself, horrible in its ease of motion, raised its head from the ground, flashing its paler underside, and bared its mouth.
The inside of its mouth was black. It wasn’t the black of a chimp, or a crow, or a panther—it was infinitely more intense. It was what you’d arrive at when you got to the end of black. You just looked at it and thought: Death. That’s Death.
“It’s the fucking mamba, Earl,” Julius said, “the fucking mamba!”
The snake moved with a quite hideous rapidity toward Stroheim, who was hoisting himself up the outside of a stack of shelters. It strained after him, five, six feet vertically upward, then fell sideways and magicked itself into the darkness behind a stand of lights.
When I think about it I sometimes wonder whether Louis Mayer was in fact right and that Thalberg was losing it. There was simply no chance that that snake could have handled an MGM family-oriented or comedy role. Warner’s could have used it, perhaps. TV, sure, but not opposite Deanna Durbin. What had Thalberg been thinking in offering it a slot on Forest Lawn? The snake was like poor old Anna Sten (remember her?)—everybody in Hollywood, apart from Sam Goldwyn himself, knew it just wasn’t going to happen for her. Or it might have been that Tony Gentry had simply picked the snake up hoping for a straight-to-zoo sale. Whatever the reason for its presence on Forest Lawn, with the mamba’s escape the whole noble premise of the rehabilitation center collapsed. You try to make it out of the jungle and the jungle comes with you. Death was still here, shelters or not.
And, in a sort of chain reaction, the serenity of Forest Lawn exploded. Captain Mannicher was furious and used his hand against Julius. It was the first blow I had ever seen between humans. “We’re six hours out of New York!” he shouted. “Don’t give me this shit! Who the fuck do you think is liable? The longshoremen? They’re not even going to think about unloading the cargo! My men aren’t going to touch it. Don’t fucking tell me it was damaged in transit! This is your fucking liability. Your fucking problem!”
Mr. Gentry was behind Captain Mannicher, trying to groom him down from his display. “Pete, come on, this isn’t helping us….”
“Don’t tell me what’s helping, Gentry. I’ve got a million and a half dollars’ worth of cargo that the Port Authority’s not gonna let me unload until you find this fucking thing and I am gonna—listen to me—I’m gonna fucking close you down if it harms anybody on board this vessel.” It was fear-based aggression, I could see. And he hadn’t even seen the fucking thing yet!
I would like, by the way, to make the point again that it was actually my banana in the first place, not Stroheim’s, and in that sense it was all his fault. It was not easy to communicate this at the time.
“I’m not suggesting that anyone involved with the freight company or the ship look for the mamba. Quite the contrary,” Mr. Gentry said, with calming gestures of submission. “This is a highly aggressive, deadly animal. No antivenom has been developed for it. It’ll be disoriented by its surroundings, which may mean it’s less aggressive, or it may not. But I and my men will do the searching. In the meantime, I suggest that you keep on all the lights we have and gather the crew here on the top deck.” “Rats, Tony,” said Earl.
“Yeah, I know. It’ll feed on rats, Captain, given its ‘druthers. Tell the men to stay clear of places where rodents might be found—the giraffes’ straw, the bulkheads, the binnacles, you know better than me
. OK, Earl, come on, not your fault. Let’s go.”
“Don’t let the fucking lions out,” Mannicher said in farewell. “Never afuckingain, Gentry. And take fucking Bonzo with you!”
“This animal is safer where you are, Captain. The mamba won’t have any difficulty entering the cages in the hold and getting after the stock. In fact, that’s where we’re starting. So let’s just all keep our heads and we’ll solve this.” Mr. Gentry was very white where Mannicher was red. “And it’s not Bonzo, Captain,” he said, “it’s Cheater.”
A very special human being, Mr. Tony Gentry.
All that evening I stayed in the wheelhouse with Captain Mannicher and various other extremely anxious humans. As the night wore on they relaxed somewhat, having little else to do except display cards and drink whiskey. DiMarco was volunteered to travel with a number of others to the galley and return with something to eat, and by the time they came back, unscathed, the humans were again laughing and conversing in that reassuring way of theirs. “Skipper, a specialty of my country: linguine alla nero” said DiMarco, laughing and lifting the lid from one of his silver dishes and dangling a handful of writhing black strands in front of Captain Mannicher. All the men displayed and wept with laughter. There was something terribly strange and not very human about them at that moment, as if they had gone slightly mad.
Not able to stand any more of it, I knuckled outside with a couple of bananas and gingerly dropped down to the deck, keeping an eye out for the death-snake. Away across the Atlantic, I noticed that some of the stars had formed themselves into a thick cluster in a way I’d never seen before, all crushed together like a broken-up moon.
Day came slowly. Mr. Gentry, Earl and Julius came up on deck for coffee and descended into the holds again. Nobody had any news of the death-snake. But now I saw that, where the star-cluster had been, there was a solid gray mass, high and steep like the escarpment in the forest. It didn’t move, and when I looked again a while later, it still hadn’t moved. It was, surely, the other bank of the river!
Captain Mannicher and members of the crew began to walk cautiously around the deck now, each of them holding a long piece of wood, scouring the planking with their gazes. I shuffled over and held out an arm to DiMarco, and he allowed me up into the crook of his elbow. “All your fuckin’ fault, kid,” he muttered soothingly. “We’re stuck here until we kill it or it kills us. You bad chimp. No America for you.” I was very grateful for the consolation, the human touch.
We moved slowly around Forest Lawn while the gray mass stayed where it was and I suddenly noticed that DiMarco was unaware that the death-snake, blacker in daylight, was pouring itself out of the grille of a bent-over kind of funnel thing about ten yards ahead of us. It noticed us, though. Opening its terrible, terrible black mouth again it slid toward us, veered away toward Mannicher (“It’s the—the—the fucking thing!” he managed to get out) and held its position, switching its head from side to side as if uncertain whether to go for the captain or DiMarco and me, scenting the air with its tongue. It didn’t look disoriented by its surroundings at all. It looked like it was spoiling for a fight and simply couldn’t decide which opponent was nearest.
So there was America and there was me. And between us, Death.
We were the nearest. DiMarco was slow to see it, and by the time he did, it was gathering speed across the gap. They’re fast, black mambas, you’ll remember from Discovery, and they like to strike high. Two or three feet of its body was raised above the ground as it rippled over the planking. “Oh, Jesus,” breathed DiMarco, because he could see that any chance of outrunning the thing had already gone in the previous second. He must also have seen the awful black of the inside of its mouth. And it flowed up into the air, four, five feet off the ground and still rising as it struck, and we were suddenly tumbling down on the deck with the heavy body of the snake whipping over us.
It was one of my fucking discarded banana skins that DiMarco had stepped on, we later worked out. It had taken his legs from under him just at the moment of the mamba’s strike.
Captain Mannicher and the crew ran over to the snake as it sprawled, somewhat surprised, or as surprised as a snake can ever look, and momentarily vulnerable. A couple of them managed to jam its head down against the deck with their wooden sticks and, with a long knife, Mannicher decapitated it.
And still the snake’s head and half a foot of its body continued to slither on toward him, and we watched it, pleading with it to die so that we could go to America.
It did. But to this day, I retain a loathing for two things in particular. (Three, if you count Mickey Rooney.) I fear snakes. And I cannot stand the taste of bananas.
That was April 9, 1933: my official date of birth, if you look at the website. The day of my arrival on American soil. As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration.
5
Big Apple!
I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic “hotel-room sequence,” can be found in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures, New York Adventure was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.
I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the New York Times reviewer—“Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hatcheck girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wisecracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…. More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp”—but the truth behind that “picture-stealing” performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. The famous nightclub sequence with the hatcheck girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to me to be some sort of paradise.
The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile rehab units. I was touched to see how delighted the longshoremen along the pier were at the sight of the rescued animals, crowding around the shelters, offering bits of food and cigarettes, calling and waving. If not quite on the same scale as, say, Gloria Swanson’s reception on her return from Paris, with crowds strewing gardenias and roses in the path of America’s Sweetheart (while she secretly nursed a near-suicidal guilt over the child she’d just aborted in order to stay on top), Forest Lawn nonetheless received a welcome that, I think, would have satisfied even my old friend the great MGM publicist Howard Strickling. It was a very moving moment, and confirmed everything I’d suspected about humans—they were the happiest damn things I’d ever seen in my life. And they loved animals.
“Sonofabitch, this goddamn Depression,” Mr. Gentry muttered inexplicably, as the longshoremen maneuvered the shelters around. Christ, I thought, if they’re like this when they’re depressed… “Soon as Earl gets this lot sent off to Trefflich’s you know what I’m gonna do, DiMarco?”
“You’re gonna quit with the poisonous snakes.”
“I might do that. And I might take a walk down to the corner of Fulton and Church where I hear a little place called the White Rose Tavern has opened for business. And I suggest we make a Noble Experiment on our first legal drinks in the United States of America.”
“We takin’ the Cheater, boss?”
“The Cheater of Death? Sure we are. Gentlemen, I propose we embark on a little stroll.”
Which was what Julius, DiMarco, Mr. Gentry and I did. Now, I don’t know whether
or not April 1933 was some sort of an economic peak in American history—I’m an entertainer, not a historian, never claimed to be one—but it seemed to me like you humans must have been going through a quite mind-boggling period of success. Over the course of that first awestruck walk I saw lines of men and women patiently attending huge vats of steaming soup, not shoving or fighting for it as we’d have done, but respectfully observing a hierarchy that extended back down the street for hundreds upon hundreds of humans. They also had a miraculous system of circular receptacles on the trails beside the streets, into which humans would toss scraps of food for other humans to discover and relish. Even in the gutters there could be found pieces of exotic fruits, which I saw several humans scoop up and savor! New York wasn’t, good grief, a “jungle,” as it’s so often described—the forest, now that was a jungle, with its everyday infanticide and cannibalism. There were no leopards, no snakes here, “Nothing to fear but fear itself!” was the boast I would keep hearing. And I thought I began to understand why Forest Lawn had been refused entry to America while the death-snake was still at large. This land was a haven dedicated to freedom from Death. The whole damn place was a rehabilitation center!
Any remaining anxieties I might have been harboring about being separated from the other chimps were overwhelmed by the storm of sense-impressions of Lower Manhattan, and the bewildering fact that every second person on the street seemed to know my name: “Hey, Cheeta!,” “Where’s Tarzan, bud?,” “You’re in the wrong jungle, Cheeta!” Either that or they called out, “Kong! Hey, Kong! You takin’ that thing up the Empire State, mister?” It was a case of mistaken identity, perhaps. Perhaps I’d somehow been here before. I mean, what was going on? My head swam with it all—the humans crowding around smiling at me and shaking my hand, the stacked towers of shelters that hinted at the promise of unimaginable fruits should you clamber to their crowns, the glossy black shelters on wheels that sped by and kept the humans penned in on the “sidewalks…”