by Cheeta
I was pressing myself against the mesh, screaming the place down, as were the rest of us new inductees, when a couple of humans approached down the corridor between the shelters. One was clothed in white. The other, I was surprised to see, was my coach. Unlike Tony Gentry, he had come back.
“This is the one,” he said, arriving beneath my shelter. “Jiggs. This one’s going to Metro. Your guys need to learn to count a little fucking better.”
“I’m afraid that’s your responsibility. We make the purchase and collect what we’re given. I can only think you made some error at Lincoln Heights.”
“Sure I made an error. Letting your guys do the loading was the error. Shoulda done it myself. You realize how valuable an animal this is? Oughta put your man in that cage instead of this animal, teach him how to listen. ‘Don’t touch the larger chimp in the end cage.’ Told him twice. Told him twice.”
They opened my shelter, let me tumble out and leashed me. I leaped into the coach’s arms—and it wasn’t a leap of faked love, either. It wasn’t meant to be me here, it was meant to be Stroheim. The larger chimp in the end cage had been me, at least until we performed our little switcheroo-dance. Lucky. Very, very lucky. And lucky, lucky, lucky Stroheim.
“The delivery is still for a dozen animals, Mr. Gately. This leaves us with eleven.”
“Yeah—my other stock’s in Culver City being auditioned right now. So I guess you’ll have to whistle for it. Or call up Louis Mayer, ask him if he’s interested in selling.”
“A hundred eighty dollars for twelve animals, Mr. Gately. It’ll be a hundred sixty-five for eleven.”
“Hunderd senny-five for eleven animals and the aggravation,” said Coach Gately, without humor.
And that was how things ended between them, and Stroheim never knew that I’d saved his goddamned life. Gately led me out of the place on the end of the tether, avoiding a small ginger-and-white cat that tripped out tinklingly across his path on its way into the embrace of one of the white-clothed humans. Mixed emotions were slopping toxically around in my belly: selfish relief, of course, and the pure joy of being away from there. But I was still stunned by what I’d seen, and perfectly aware that Bonzo, Tyrone and the others were not heading with us out into the bright, bright blue. Did it, I wondered distractedly, ever rain in America?
Gately led me into his rolling shelter and, tying my tether tightly to the door handle, put me up beside him on a long seat at what turned out to be, when the city started to roll past us, its front end. I was guessing it was a city around us, though I saw very few humans, only rolling shelters. A hillside was called HOLLYWOOD-LAND, and I thought, That’s going to be helpful, if they start having signs up to identify everything. I could do with knowing the names of a few things.
It wasn’t a city that asked you to climb it, like New York; it was a city, I noticed, of gateways. Either side of us, hundreds of colossal gates rolled by, implying the presence of a species of colossal human. Behind these gates you could make out patches of forest, and orange trees, and palms! I didn’t get too excited: in truth, I knew it was just one of those brief periods of respite you got before another grueling session of rehab began. Straw, mesh, excrement and the same old overripe fruit. Have you any idea how time drags in the shelters?
I suddenly felt very low, as Gately rolled us under the arch of one of the gateways, definitively low, finished with it all. I knew that I simply wouldn’t be able to make it through another long session. Another shelter. The shelters didn’t even work. Another session of rehab and I’d be like Stroheim, tearing my hair out. I was through. Enough. You never think that the insistent little voice in your head forever urging survive, survive, survive might ever grow faint or silent, but in the end it does. And I really do like to think of myself as a survivor. I’ve survived seventy years in this industry. I’ve survived turkeys like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. I’ve even survived that old soak Benchley’s godawful all-night Whitman recitals at the Garden of Allah—oh, man, I’m a survivor, all right. But I was ready to quit then: I thought, I’m done. Done like Tyrone.
Gately brought everything to a halt, stretched over to untether me from the handle and flipped open the door.
We were in a forest. Chimpanzees were hooting from the tree-tops. Gazelles were grazing on the lower leaves. In the shade at the edge of the trees, a number of zebras were browsing the long, tawny grass. Spores and seeds and butterflies floated billionfold through the warm air around me. There were parakeets too, in vibrating colors, and humans sitting and standing in groups among the animals. My heart capsized. Oh, you faithless, doubting fool of an ape! You quitter! They’d done it. The humans had done it. We’d done it together! The joy of it straightened me up onto two feet and I bipedaled around in crazy circles, hooting back at the chimps. I was dancing for joy. I was rain-dancing in a rainless land! Gately came around the side of the shelter, removed my tether and took my hand. Together we made our way toward the forest, watching Frederick loop down the branches to greet us.
I was such a kid when I first arrived in the States! Basically, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Of course everything was bewildering, but scanning back over what I’ve written, I wonder if I’ve perhaps been guilty of touching up my history with darker shades than were really there. Probably gone over the top a bit, to be honest: forgive me. My memory, my child’s eye, has acquired a little Dickensian distortion. Plus I did want to give a push to No Reel Apes, and anyway, I want to sell a few books here, and I’m told the childhood-adversity stuff plays well these days.
Sure, difficult childhoods can make great artists—it’s the thread that links Van Gogh, Dickens, Herman Melville, Hitchcock, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, Kirk Douglas, Margaret Seltzer and me—but this is not one of those autobiographies that Don likes so much, with those huge-eyed children staring accusingly at you from their covers, their faces blanched out like lemurs’. It’s only that I felt obliged to touch on some of the problems that Don and the attractive Dr. Goodall are eager to highlight for their No Reel Apes campaign. Cruelty to apes in the name of entertainment is obscene and must stop, though of course it can lead to some absolutely tremendous movies, and I personally had a wonderful time in Hollywood. Which, as I’ve said, saved my life, so there are two sides to each story. But do support the campaign if you can, which—get this—proposes the replacement of living primates in cinema with computer-generated ones.
Interesting…. During our charitable visits to hospices around Palm Springs, Don and I have found ourselves more than once in a children’s ward dominated by posters of computer-animated heroes. The wisecracking eyeball, the smart-aleck donkey. The kids love them—but they’re not fucking there, are they? They’re not there, sharing a bag of pretzels with a terminal teen, a kidney dish on their head and a blood-pressure monitor in their mouth, are they? And they never will be there in the flesh when it really counts, prolapsed on the end of a child’s hospital bed like a memento mori That’s the real magic of movies: their flesh and blood. Does Buzz Lightyear ever suffer for his art? No, and that’s why he’s no good. Though, I do have to say, the children haven’t the faintest idea who I am. Well, anyhow, computer-generated imagery, CGI, that’s supposedly the way forward, according to Don and Jane. Support their campaign: www.noreelapes.org or something like that.
I digress. If we sometimes had it a little rough, so what? MGM had given us the opportunity of a lifetime. I didn’t know that it was normal during the heyday of the studio system to let young stars languish for a year or more while they built up their confidence and the right part was constructed for them. How could I have known that the starving and beating all formed part of Louis Mayer’s painstaking grooming process—almost exactly the same process as MGM put Ava Gardner through?
In fact, Ava had it worse than us, and you never heard her complain. She was a real stand-up dame, Ava, despite her occasional indiscretions, like letting slip how sexually inadequate she found her first husband, Mickey Rooney—r
ather a cruel thing to do to a real “ladies’ man,” as Mickey referred to himself, and the sort of thing that’s best forgotten. When she was first put under contract— “Honey, he may have enjoyed it but I sure as hell didn’t,” that’s what it was—sorry, when she was first put under contract at MGM it took them more than a year to wrench the North Carolina accent out of her, like teeth. And they had to teach her how to act, which took much longer with Ava than it did with me. Betty Bacall had six months of intensive voice coaching, near-starvation and Howard Hawks breathing down her neck every second of every day. Plus she was at Warner’s, and believe me, once you’d heard the stars’ horror stories about Warner’s, you’d have preferred a lifetime of imprisonment and beatings to a contract with them. “If you can survive even seven years at Warner’s,” said Cagney, who knew all about it, “then you can survive anything.” And over the course of two wonderful decades in MGM and RKO cages, I’d often shudder at what poor Jimmy must have been suffering under the Warners.
So, no complaints. MGM had extended a hell of a lot of faith to a bunch of unknowns and they had a right to polish their investment. That leopard on the other side of the courtyard might have seemed a bit listless and dazed, but it went on to work with the great trainer Olga Celeste and landed one of the key parts of the decade, playing not one but two different leopards opposite Asta the fox terrier and Kate Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. Put it this way: the number of chimpanzees who would have traded places with me in an instant was, well, lots. Mind you, I don’t know how many of us were still left in the wild then. More than 150,000, anyway. Millions, probably. Apart from the mix-up with the lab (a highly-infectious-diseases research facility, which was absorbed into the military just after the Second World War and is now located near Encino), which was essentially Stroheim’s fault, I couldn’t have dreamed of anything more. I’d been nurtured and tutored and now I was ready to be taken to the bosom of the vast happy family of MGM. The next time you hear Louis Mayer traduced as a bully, tyrant, witness-buying perverter of justice and all those other half-truths, remember that I’d be nowhere without him.
There the lab was, though, undeniably, the underside to the Glamour Capital of the World. I’d worked out pretty quickly what it was. It was where you would end up if you couldn’t make it in pictures. And even if you made it, any animal who’s ever seen the once-popular Edison short of an elephant being electrocuted to death in Coney Island will recognize just how brief and hollow the rewards of fame can be! And that’s Hollywood for you: a heartbreaking town. “Do NOT try to become an actor. For every ONE we employ, we turn away a THOUSAND.”
Down through the long grass walked Gately and I, toward the clumps of humans dotted around the clearings, with everything dream-sharp and sparkling, like Beverly Hills in Cary Grant’s LSD-inflected eyes. Frederick and the other two chosen chimps came hooting up to us, and we all embraced each other and mock-charged in delight and generally kicked up a maelstrom of happiness, so that a man near the center of one of the clumps of humans called over to Gately to quiet us down: “Can you restrain those little fuckers for a second? In fact, come on over and we’ll take a look at them now!”
The cluster of humans was arranged in a rough circle around the man who had spoken. We moved through the crowd toward him on the ends of our tethers. Other animals—lion cubs, antelopes—were playing with their coaches among the humans. This was a new kind of forest to me.
“I’m Cedric Gibbons. You’re Gately, right? You can get these animals to do what you tell ’em?”
“Yes, I can. But it depends on factors. The way they react to individuals.”
“So you brought us a short list, in case love doesn’t bloom. Show me.”
“Put out your hand,” said Gately, and made Frederick shake hands with Gibbons and then pluck his hat off. “Give it back now, Buster.”
“Not me he needs to be meeting,” Gibbons said. “Maureen, come on over and meet your new leading man. And where’s the King of the Jungle? You seen him?”
“He’s on the escarpment,” somebody said, and a number of the humans began to shout, “Johnny! Call Johnny!” and in answer there came a faint, high call, like the trumpet of an elephant.
“You seen Tarzan the Ape Man, Gately? No? We had a good chimp in that, but old. Can’t use it any more. What we’re looking for—” and Gibbons was interrupted by the high call again. “Johnny! For Chrissakes. What we’re looking for is comic relief. Uh, an animal with a bit of mischief, but easy for Maureen to handle….”
Here Gibbons was interrupted again, by a human, a male adult, dropping down from a tree and sprinting over to us. Dropping down from a tree! He wore no clothes except a flap of hide around his middle and I was amazed to see what a human’s musculature was, how powerful they were underneath their coverings. It was impossible that he wasn’t an alpha, probably the alpha of the whole group, yet there was no tyrant’s force in his face as he said, smiling, “Me on escarpment with second unit. Me meet chimps now.”
“Oh, Johnny.” Maureen sighed as she strolled over toward us. She was not much more than half his height. He was so upright “Do you think you could possibly give it a rest with the ape-talk? It’s just a trifle wearying….”
“Jane angry. Jane need smack on rear end,” said Johnny.
Yes, this was the king of the forest, all right.
“Shall I to the marriage of true hearts admit impediments?” Maureen started to sort of sing. “The language of Shakespeare, Johnny. Of Edna St. Vincent Millay! You do know who Shakespeare is?”
“Guy in pool hall. Me meet chimps,” Johnny said, looking over the four of us and holding out his hand. Ah, humanity, you were so beautiful! “Me Tarzan. Me Johnny. Who Cheeta?”
And actors talk about auditions going like a dream… Frederick and the other two (and Stroheim now, lumbering up late for the big moment) didn’t stand a chance. Who Cheeta? What kind of a question was that?
I leaped into the home of the arms of the King of the Jungle and, for the second time that day, my heart tipped over. It was me. Me—Kong, Jiggs, Louis, the Cheater of Death—me, Cheeta.
PART 2
1
Movie Madness!
There was Tarzan, me and Jane, and we lived in a forest at the top of an escarpment that rose in sheer cliffs above a cloud-covered world where savage tribes warred among themselves far below. We lived in a dream. We could speak to each other and to the other animals, except those with cold blood. Only two words were really needed— “aaahhheeyeeyeeyeeaaaahheeyeeyeeyaaahhhh” which meant “I am.” And “umgawa” which meant “Let it be so.”
We took milk from antelopes and eggs from invisible ostriches, ate fish, fruit and roasted buffalo calf, and slept in adjoining nests in the trees. Only elephants died, or any predator who challenged Tarzan to single combat; the sole weapon allowed on the escarpment was his knife. Tarzan loved Jane: they sublimated their love into swimming. Tarzan loved me: we sublimated our love into flying. Jane and I were jealous of each other, but we got on fine: although we were the two different sides of him, we loved him too much to fight. On the escarpment, chimpanzees didn’t fight or kill and I belonged to a group, but my loyalties were to the humans. They needed me more. Johnny was Tarzan and Maureen was Jane; I was myself.
Or not quite. You had to pay a small toll of transformation to enter the dream, it seemed—I was (and I think I never got the credit for this when the Academy Award nominations rolled obliviously around each year) female.
That was all there was, apart from Jane’s problem. Jane had quit civilization, but she was still an addict deep down, and her family would come from London to tempt her back with words, which she still craved. It didn’t matter. Tarzan was stronger than the jungle (umgawa, knife), Jane was stronger than Tarzan (worshipped, adored), the white men were stronger than Jane (home, duty), the Gaboni tribe were stronger than the white men (ambush, kidnap), the jungle was stronger than the Gaboni (elephants, stampede) and Tarzan was stronger than the ju
ngle (aaahhheeyeeyeeaaahhheeyeeyeeyaaahhh)—so even that was resolved easily enough, via a kind of natural cycle, and we could return to our dream on the escarpment. Umgawa.
So there was Johnny, me and Maureen and we lived, during the early autumn of 1933, in Sherwood Forest near Thousand Oaks, and by Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley, and sometimes in Lot Two at Culver City Studios, dreaming Tarzan and His Mate with Jack Conway directing. Jack had replaced Cedric Gibbons at the end of August because Gibbie was really an art director and was in over his head. Plus I don’t think he could take any more jokes about Gibbons working with the Ape Man. Poor old Gibbie was married to Dolores del Rio, who slept in a separate bedroom above his. Gibbie could only access it via a trapdoor, and only then if she deigned to open it and let down the ladder.
What we did in the Dream Factory was—well, I’m sure you’re as uninterested in the technical aspects of moviemaking as I am. But you’ve heard of the primitive who thinks the camera is stealing his soul? Of course, the opposite was true: we enacted the dream, and as a kind of by-product of converting the dream into the past, the cameras gave us our souls. They poured soul over us and if they gave you enough of it you started to become an Immortal. I don’t want to blind you with science here. Once the dream was in the past, it was considered moving (“moving” pictures) and moviegoers would rush in their millions to live in it rather than the present. Essentially, our business was selling past dreams, and we were the dreamers.
In all there were seven main Dream Factories, run by seven alpha males: Mayer, Warner, Goldwyn, Cohn, Zukor, Zanuck and Laemmle. These alphas were the kings of the town, but there were a number of other kings: a King of Hollywood (Gable), a King of the Silents (Fairbanks), a King of the Jungle (Johnny), and a Queen of Hollywood (Myrna Loy), a Queen of Warner’s (Kay Francis), a Queen of the World (Dietrich) and a Dragon Queen (Joan Crawford). There was also a Baron, a Duke, a First Lady of Hollywood, and rarer creatures—an Iron Butterfly, a Platinum Blonde, a Profane Angel, an Old Stoneface, a Love Goddess, a Great Profile, a Sweater Girl, an Oomph Girl, a Girl-with-the-Wink. Somewhere in the hills above the factories, among the groves of maple and flowering eucalyptus, you might come across The Look or The Face or even The Most Beautiful Animal in the World (not me—Ava Gardner). They were so beautiful, such very, very special human beings, that from time to time the earth itselfunder Hollywood seemed to shiver with pleasure, as if it had been caressed too sweetly.