by Cheeta
Mercedes was about to protest, but Dietrich stopped her. “No, no, no, that’s quite all right, George.”
I wanted to leave them and return to Johnny, but Dietrich grasped me by the hand and I obediently trotted along with her and Mercedes, as they began a “little exploration” of Lombard’s house. I was rather touched to see that the previous owner had absolutely covered the place with memorials to animals who had obviously meant a lot to him. The walls above the staircase we ascended were covered with the preserved heads of various species, presumably much-loved pets who had passed on.
“Baby,” said Dietrich, opening a heavy oak door, “wonderful one! You know I would never hurt Jack deliberately? Otherwise I wouldn’t give a fig for what those people think. Moonbeam.”
“Moonglow,” said Mercedes.
“Moontan! Wonderful one! We’re in Africa tonight. I feel the hot voodoo rising.”
“Moonstroke. The wind is hot off the dunes….”
“The emperor’s wife has banished all her eunuchs to be alone with the newest slave in her husband’s harem. Only an ape from the deepest jungle looks on. Is the ape turning you on, wonderful one?”
“Yes, that… do that… Aren’t you clever, Marlene? I only worry that Tarzan must be looking for it, dear one.”
I was wandering about the room checking for any food, or maybe a half-drunk and forgotten Brandy Alexander.
“Weissmuller?” Marlene said. “Isn’t he magnificent? But a child, an American child from Chicago who loves his mother….Do you know, I think he’s been nursing that same highball all evening?”
“Don’t stop. Moondrop.”
“I’m not stopping. What do you make of the Irish girl? As an actress, I mean. In person she seems to me… mmf… virginally repressed.”
“Well, it wasn’t her, was it? Don’t stop. Stop talking. Under water. Which was the only bearable bit in it. The rest was just cheese.”
“Yes, well, I knew it wasn’t her, of course. George… mmmf… George told me all about it yesterday at Lakeside. He knows the stand-in very well, apparently. Oh, you slave-girl! You wicked beast.”
Incidentally, during this conversation, Marlene and Mercedes were stimulating each other’s sexual organs. You can well imagine how bored I was watching them, and I managed to work out the door handle—I was getting good at doors—and scamper off to look for Johnny.
I greeted Gable, who was discussing different storm-window installation techniques in the atrium, skipped around Clara Bow, slumped across the corridor crying softly to herself, and went out of the French windows onto the lawn, where John Barrymore was wiping the vomit from his shirtfront. The glamour of it all was intoxicating. I had a hunch I might find Johnny in the pool, so I descended the slope toward the lamps of the pool house. It had been a long night.
Behind the pool house the firefly lights of Los Angeles disappeared into a black ocean so far below us that I suddenly saw that at last here I actually was, on a real escarpment high above a plain. It was a nice feeling so I stopped to savor it, with the smells of eucalyptus and wild sage, the twitterings of the birds and monkeys in the little zoo. Lucky, lucky, what a lucky life it’s been!
There was splashing coming from the pool, but as I knuckled up to it, I saw by the kicked-off heels and silver dress folded on a chaise that it wasn’t Johnny in the water. It was Maureen. I gave her a pant-hoot to say hello and bipedaled up to the marble edging. Maureen shrieked and recovered herself. “Oh, Cheeta, dear, you gave me a shock!” She continued to glide from side to side, naked, luxuriating in the water. “Come on in!” she said. “Or, no, you can’t, can you?” She disappeared under the surface and came up laughing, spraying water from her nose. “You don’t know what you’re missing! Wonderful, the feeling of the water! You know, Cheeta, I’ve never dared to go skinny-dipping before! Never!”
The silver dress lay on the chaise and I thought something like, It’s the dress that tempts her away from the jungle. If she learned to live without it, the three of us could stay on the escarpment together forever. Or maybe I just thought, Johnny likes that, I’ll show it to him. Whatever, I snatched it up and scurried up the lawn, with Maureen’s voice trying to order me back. “Oh, Cheeta, that isn’t funny. Cheeta, I’ve got nothing on. Give it to me, Cheeta. Give it to me! Give it to me! Oh, why does everybody hate me?”
Jane and I, we just never quite … We were fated somehow not to get along. It was just one of those things where all the good intentions in the world can’t stop you taking things the wrong way, or mistiming jokes, or picking the wrong moment. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. It was the dress’s fault, maybe—the dress started it. It took quite a long search to find Johnny, so that by the time a little delegation, including Marlene and George, had formed to return the dress to her, Maureen was sneezing and sniffling and had to be coaxed out of the pool house by Johnny, who insisted on driving her home with us. He dropped me off first.
3
Happy Days!
You heard things about the alphas’ powers of life and death over their employees. Adolph Zukor was “a killer.” Harry Cohn “put more in the cemetery than all the rest of them combined.” Jack Warner killed his brother—“Harry didn’t die,” Harry’s widow said. “Jack killed him.” But as long as your fan mail maintained its numbers, you were basically OK. That was the key to the hierarchy: the quantity of letters you managed to harvest from America each week. Over the years to come I would never dip below fifty, which was less than Rin Tin Tin’s had been but more than Rex the Wonder Dog’s, thank God, given what happened to Rex.
Each of my letters, by the way, received the same stock response and mimeographed fingerprint in reply, in which I confided that I was “having a swinging time up on the escarpment with Tarzan and Jane. I’m getting up to all sorts of monkey business out here in Hollywood and looking forward to a slap-up banana dinner at the Brown Derby tonight! Thanks again for your letter, and I hope you’ll join Johnny and Maureen and me for our next adventure, monkeying around in Darkest Africa!” which struck me as a worryingly easy-to-decipher fraud. Some of my public were surely going to suspect there was something fishy about those letters, weren’t they? Maybe not. I was a star, and stars have strange powers.
Johnny set aside an hour five mornings a week to respond to his letters. His fans were mainly women and boys. He loved the company of men, and the company of animals, but women and boys were the two types of human over whom he had special powers. They sought the space under his arms, the shelter under his eaves. He reminded you of one of those trees in the forest that would suddenly flare white or pink as a particular species of butterfly mobbed it. He’d be on the beach at Santa Monica, where he worked three shifts a week as a volunteer lifeguard, and phwoomph!, he’d go up like one of those trees in a blossom of boys and fluttering women. I know because Mayer sent Maureen and me down there for publicity shots with him. The three of us would sit in the speedboat MGM had donated to the lifeguard squad, TARZAN emblazoned on its side. It was a scheme of Howard Strickling’s, of course.
Since Tarzan and His Mate, Maureen’s fan mail consisted pretty much exclusively of demands that she rid motion pictures of her presence, that she bury her shame in a convent and leave the screen to more wholesome role models like Mary Brian or Loretta Young, no matter that it was not actually her muscular bottom or Grecian groin that had caused all this distress. Nor indeed that Loretta was a byword for hypocrisy around town, and “Why are there so many churches in Hollywood? Because every time Loretta sins she builds one” was a standard industry joke.
It was cruelly unfair to Maureen. I’m a chimp, I’ve seen some real sex-beacon tushes in my time, and believe me, that ass wasn’t giving out any signals. She was one of the most buttoned-up girls in Hollywood, and the heartland of America thought she was worse than Jean Harlow.
So, Strickling figured that a cheerfully frolicking Maureen in a virginal white swimsuit would reassure the Catholic League of Decency of her essential w
holesomeness while at the same time enabling him to grab a few surreptitious cheesecake shots of her legs. Even better, she and Johnny could help save American lives by demonstrating swimming and life-saving techniques. Maureen was cast as what she was—a girl in danger of drowning—and Johnny would tirelessly arrow himself into the swell to rescue and resurrect her, clearing her airways and breathing wholesomeness back into her to keep her career alive, while I hopped up and down at a safe distance from the surf, the only animal on the beach that really couldn’t swim.
Women and boys he loved especially because he could teach them to swim. With a woman resting her abdomen on the insides of his twelve-and-a-quarter-inch forearms, an eight-year-old boy diving off his head and the Pacific Ocean washing around his shoulders, he was so happy he’d spill over into a Tarzan yodel.
Aaahhheeyeeyeeyaaahhheeyeeyeeyaaah! I am! I am!
I watched him—in Santa Monica Bay, in Lake Sherwood, shaded by magnolias in the Black Sea pool at the Garden of Allah, resting on the lane lines in the rectangular pool at the Hollywood Athletic Club, sprayed by the artificial waterfall at Merle Oberon’s sculpted jungle-grotto swimming hole. I watched him from the sides of all the pools of Hollywood introducing women and boys to water. “Everybody can swim,” he’d say. Everybody but me, that was, dry as a bone and overdressed in my Coca-Cola-colored fur, rattling the shaft of a beach umbrella in frustration.
After an hour by any pool he had a sixth sense of who hadn’t swum and who was never going to. Often he’d glide to the edge and squeeze an amazingly accurate squirt of water from between his clasped palms at the lonely or sullen or fractious kid, or whoever it was, then submerge and glide away again. A couple of minutes later he’d repeat the squirt, letting himself get caught this time. “Wasn’t me, it was this whale in here. Whyn’t you come on in and see for yourself? You don’t like swimming? I’m gonna squirt you for that.” And then he would squeeze out of his hands another squirt of water, but backward this time, into his own eye. “Aaargh! Hey, kid, how would you like me to teach you to swim properly? Imagine you’re in a boat, and a real whale comes along and sinks it—are you just gonna drown? Or are you gonna save your life by swimming to that lifeboat over there? Go get your trunks, kid, and I’ll show you how to win the Olympics.” There were always children like this around the sides of Hollywood pools, oddly self-sufficient children well-practiced at occupying themselves with the funny papers, on too-familiar terms with the pool waiter and hotel manager. “Let’s see how much you’ve learned,” Johnny would say afterward, tossing them in high arcs of screaming glee into the water. Their mothers wouldn’t have liked it, but where were their mothers? Not there, anyway, where the children and the young females were, buoyed up by the arms of the Adonis of the Jungle, practicing the six-beat-per-cycle leg-kick of the Weissmuller Crawl. “I feel so embarrassed, but I saw you with that little boy and I thought if he can, and I wondered if you would…”
Yes, some of those women were sexually presenting themselves to Johnny, but the swimming lessons were, on his side at least, about swimming. He was introducing them to the love of his life, after all.
It was only many, many years later, on a flight back from Acapulco, that I heard the story of the Favorite: a two-story excursion boat that ferried passengers between the various parks on Lake Michigan’s North Shore. One late afternoon in the summer of 1927, it was hit by a sudden squall. Johnny was on the shore less than half a mile away, taking a break from training with his brother Pete. By the time they’d rowed out to the Favorite, it had sunk. The captain was sitting on the pilothouse roof, which still protruded from the lake, smoking, in shock. He couldn’t swim! Johnny and Pete dived to save who they could. The water was black but the people’s faces shone out white in it, and they dived down and came up with bodies, passing them into the care of the people now arriving in tenders and dinghies. They kept diving, bringing up the dead bodies, twenty of them, thirty of them, and eleven of those bodies were returned to life with artificial respiration and “pulmotors.” Johnny and Pete delivered eleven citizens of Chicago back to life. But all the dead, except one, were women and children.
So there was nothing lecherous about him then, despite the dense smog of female human sexual desire almost visibly rippling the air around him. He was turning something that was death for them into what it was for him, which was life. Or that was what was happening with the ones who weren’t just pretending to be unable to swim. “It’s hard to die when Mr. Tarzan’s around,” as that marvelous performer Barry Fitzgerald put it so beautifully during his famous “fever monologue” in Tarzan’s Secret Treasure. And, to be sure, so it was.
All over America children were fending off death with Johnny’s help. You humans had recently developed a way of refining the impurities out of flour, allowing you to bake healthier “white” bread, and Johnny was on the packaging of these super-nutritious loaves, encouraging youngsters to protect themselves against disease by eating plenty of the new food. His campaign against death took him onto the boxes of Wheaties breakfast cereal, promoting its HEALTH-GIVING GOODNESS and handing you the KEY TO VITALITY. And then there was the twelve-year-old boy, Bob Wheeler, who must have been almost as happy as Mayer and Thalberg were when Johnny, in August 1934, pulled his unconscious body from the waves near the Santa Monica municipal pier and resuscitated him. “You’re Tarzan!” were Bob’s first words on returning to life.
It was hard to die when Johnny was around. When I plunged through Harold Lloyd’s algae-veiled ninth green, he was the one who held out a three-wood to me while the other golfers split their sides. I count that as saving my life. Plus there was the time I was posing for photographs behind the wheel of Doug Fairbanks’s open-top Rolls-Royce and accidentally knocked the hand brake off. Johnny was the one who vaulted in to halt the car as it rolled down the driveway. It’s true that the accident itself would hardly have proved fatal, since Doug’s driveway curved and the car’s trajectory would surely have been stopped by the statue he had of three humans murdering a couple of snakes. But if I’d wrecked his Rolls, Doug would have killed me.
Poor old Doug was fifty by then, and spent most of his days working out with a trainer and masseur called Chuck, or nakedly shuttling from his steam bath to a kind of mirrored tent in the garden in which he liked to do himself to a turn. His body still twanged with a weary vigor, but his face looked like San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. “Johnny, you fucking crazy fool,” he’d laughed just before I knocked the hand brake, “if your ugly monkey damages my beautiful automobile, I’ll fucking kill it. This car requires an artist behind its wheel. It must be handled like a…” Doug went on describing the beauties of the Rolls (he was a disgusting Anglophile) but I was no longer listening. It was the first time anybody had called me Johnny’s monkey. In fact, it was my excitement at this that caused me to dislodge the damn brake.
Perhaps it was the incident with the Rolls that prompted Johnny to start my driving lessons. Everybody knows that not being able to drive in Los Angeles is a social death sentence, and he seemed to think it important that I should master the basics. These consisted of sitting on his lap and depressing the bulb of the horn with one hand while manipulating the wheel with the other. After a period of experiment, we decided to restrict ourselves to the horn (I’m not a natural driver, but I certainly caused fewer fatalities among pedestrians than did certain other MGM stars of the Golden Age).
So Johnny would swing by the MGM zoo every so often around five o’clock, usually with a friend in tow—Jimmy Durante, Errol Flynn, Ramon Navarro, David Niven, of course, who wasn’t yet a star although it was just a matter of time—and we would drive down to Sunset and pull up opposite the Hollywood High School for Girls. When the girls, who seemed pretty much like adult females to me, came pouring out through the gates, I was to sound the horn while Flynn or Niv or Ramón and Johnny flattened themselves on the sidewalk and watched the girls’ reactions from under the car’s chassis, moaning about jailbait and San Qu
entin prison.
Then they’d pile back in and we’d drive another quarter-mile down Sunset to the gate outside the theater of Earl Carroll’s Vanities, where an illuminated sign informed you that “Through These Portals Pass the Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” and repeat the procedure as the girls arrived for the evening show. Johnny would reward me with potato chips, Flynn with nips from his fifth of bourbon, Niv with smokes, but I sensed they were disappointed in the responses I was getting.
“My dear fellow,” Niven decided, “if our act is to have any true elan, then we have to give Cheeta something to work with.”
The next time I saw Niv he had engineered a little contraption out of two shaving mirrors and a stick. Now Johnny was able to lie out of sight on the Chevy’s front seat, gingerly steering the car with one hand on the underside of the wheel, the other holding Niven’s periscope. Lying the other way, Niven was using his feet to control the pedals. I was standing on Johnny’s head with one hand resting on the top of the wheel, the other honking the horn and a cigar (Niven’s prop again) between my teeth. Like this we would pull rather shakily away from the curb. The effect was unsatisfactory, like a palsied lecher beating a guilty retreat, and besides, Johnny and Niv couldn’t see the girls’ reactions.
This was when Johnny hit upon the idea of using a couple of old colleagues of his from Tarzan the Ape Man, the first Tarzan picture, a sort of preliminary sketch for the triumphs to come. Chet and Len were the first two dwarfs I had ever met. Years later, during the period when I decided to concentrate on stage work rather than movie roles, I would come to know a number of dwarfs, and Chet and Len were pretty typical of them—aggressively sexual, extremely bibulous (they were all drunks), cynical, quarrelsome and very loving toward animals.
Chet squatted in the well of the driver’s side, operating the pedals, and Len, small enough not to have to lie sideways to steer, could lean back in the seat and, using an improved periscope, direct the Chevy unseen and in comfort, with me standing on his thighs and driving, and Weissmuller and Niven waving regally from the back. And all of this was just to attract the attention of some sexually receptive females.