Me Cheeta

by Cheeta

  On the other hand, if you became embroiled in some real difficulty, or committed a wrongdoing so villainous that it couldn’t be dealt with by one of the Dream Factories, then Strickling and Eddie Mannix, or whoever your factory possessed, would be a tremendous help to you, straightening out the necessary paperwork and helping witnesses get their statements absolutely crystal clear. If the inimitable Joan Crawford, a very special human being whose love for animals was so exemplary, had, for instance, appeared in a one-reel pornographic film in the 1920s called something like, say, The Casting Couch, then Mannix wouldn’t have hesitated to burn down the Bakersfield house of the owner of the last remaining copy—with the owner in it, probably! Of course, Joan would never have made such a film. And if she did, where’s the proof? That kind of support you only get from true family.

  It was all win-win: you needed to keep your profile high with pictures; they would give you seven in a row and, if necessary, a personally tailored nutritional support regimen to help you optimize your performance. Judy Garland wouldn’t be the force she is today if she had not been assisted with a bespoke program of therapy and wellness supplements to help her complete the early masterpieces that made her immortal.

  So, really, where else could we be but paradise? What were we doing, drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon after a superb lunch at which Sylvia had pressed some bananas on me with a flourish and made rather a snippy observation when I declined and opted for the steak tartare and a cigarette. She was an absolute brick, though, Sylvia, and I just didn’t see in her that bloodcurdlingly shallow and avaricious gold-digger everyone tells you she became after Doug’s death, when she was briefly and lucratively married to Gable. What were we doing, pleasantly drunk in the sparkling pine-scented Californian afternoon with almost a whole day ahead of us, waiting on the lawn for Hedy Lamarr’s chauffeur to take us around to Constance Bennett’s house on Carolwood Drive for some martini-sharpened conversation with William Faulkner and a couple of sets of tennis on her private court? Could it be that we were having a hell of a good time? That this was the very happiest a higher primate could be? That this was heaven?

  “Woman beautiful. Tarzan play quick set,” Johnny said to Connie as we arrived at the Carolwood Drive house.

  Sometimes during introductions, or when he was otherwise slightly self-conscious, Johnny would seek shelter in Tarzan’s language, I’d noticed. And Connie Bennett was so tall, white, blonde and perfect that his Tarzan act was an audible blush at her consternating beauty, dappled under the magnolias there, fresh as a daisy from her success in Bed of Roses.

  “Johnny! Johnny! You are a certified crazy two-fer-a-nickel Chicago, Illinois, loon, Weissmuller.” She’d said the right thing. Johnny enjoyed being called crazy, since he wasn’t really at all.

  “When I used to sleep under the El, Connie,” Johnny said, mock-tough, “I used to say, ‘Somewhere on Park Avenue there’s a girl who’s lying awake and thinking of me right now.’” He wasn’t at all bad at precursor sexual displays. I had one hand in his and I lifted my other to seek out Connie’s and swung between them for a moment or two, as if we were a family. She suddenly thrust out her other hand.

  “And that was me. Hey. Paper, Scissors, Stone. Now—one, two, three! You lose. I blunted you. Here’s a tip for the jungle: always open with Stone. Everybody else opens with Scissors. Myron just taught me that.”

  “I should have just wrapped you up.”

  “Next time, Chicago, Illinois. Next time. Gilbert’s here, giving Irving Berlin a good hiding. Myron also tells me that you and David Niven wrecked Douglas’s open-top tourer this morning. You used your bare hands, right?”

  Elaborate courtship rituals… For Chrissakes. Connie Bennett turned and walked in her slacks down the magnolia-shaded path toward her party, swinging me between herself and Johnny, as if I was conducting something delicious between them. Oh, God, she was a beautiful human being in 1935, and that day just happened to be one of those days worth remembering for nothing more than the convergence of a number of small good things.

  Myron Selznick was running a card school in the game room where, it pains me to say, dear reader, a number of gentlemen, like Joe Schenk and Greg La Cava, the director, were smoking. Yes, indoors. Dietrich was there, enigmatic and compelling and stinking of urine. It was one of the less inhuman things about Dietrich that she often wet herself when she laughed: we blanked each other. Jackie lay at the feet of an actress with a low profile named Marilyn Miller. She was killed the following year by her nerves, but I remember her drawing great comfort from petting Jackie’s stomach that day (being an animal can sentence you to an awful lot of time with the duds at a party, it must be said). There were some highly enjoyable maples and magnolias to climb, I remember. Niv was in stupendous form and, dammit, there was a trampoline, under which I built up a furtive collection of all the abandoned drinks I had managed to lay my hands on.

  As the light began to do its sunset turn, Gilbert Roland, Connie’s beau, had happened to scoop me up around his shoulders when I’d gone down to the tennis court to look for Johnny. He carried me with him up to Connie’s bedroom, where she lay in nothing but her white slacks arching her back and stretching her arms like a cat aching to be scratched. One classy dame, Constance Bennett. I sort of wanted to be her.

  Of course, they were both health freaks, and started to share out some quack homeopathic remedy Connie referred to as “star-powder,” which they ingested (endlessly surprising humans, I salute you!) through their noses. Humans are so endlessly surprising! I hopped onto the bed and put my arms around Connie in the hope of a quick groom, and we kissed for a bit, while a bracedlooking Gilbert occupied himself with his herbal extracts.

  “Gilbert, umm, would you close the door?”

  “We’re all friends here, adorada” said Gilbert.

  “No, it’s, uh, it’s Cheeta, she tickles. I kinda like it. Just… give me some of that, willya?”

  Gilbert brought over a little silver box of powder, and the white lady licked her finger and dabbed it in. Then she made a fear-grimace for me, which I imitated, and she slid her finger into my opened mouth. I sucked it.

  “Connie! You’ve not got started, have you?” Gilbert complained maritally, though they would continue to live in sin for several years before their Dream Factory ordered them to make it official.

  “Wait. Shut up. No, I haven’t got started. Yet. Hey. Cheeta’s one of us—one of Louis Mayer’s slaves and she deserves a little treat.” Constance sprinkled a little trail of the remedy in the hollow between her breasts for me, and began laughing and arching her back and shivering, shouting, “Stop, stop, stop, ooh, I’m a disgraceful girl!”

  And this, for example, is what you’d deny to chimps, is it, Professor Goodall? Is it, dearest Don? No ape, if your campaign has its way, will ever again have the opportunity to enjoy a career in show business, with all its attendant delights? You’re just going to take that hope away from the hundreds of thousands of talented young apes who’ll suddenly find themselves with no parts whatsoever to go up for? For nine-tenths of the apes you meet, acting, or the long-term survival strategy of celebrity in general, represents their best chance of an escape from the grind of everyday existence. And you want to take that away and replace it with a man in a suit covered with luminous ping-pong balls having his every movement captured by computers and re-rendered in ten-million-a-penny pixels? You haven’t thought it through, have you, my distinguished and brow-furrowed friends? So answer me this: if No Reel Apes (that pun: that’s the real fucking Lubitsch touch, isn’t it?) becomes a reality on the back of congressional lobbying funded by this autobiography of mine, then who’s going to play me in the film of the book? Is that moment, do you think, going to work well, artistically, with a CGI Cheeta hovering weightlessly above the untruthfully erect nipples of Naomi Watts? Take your time.

  It doesn’t matter whether every single hair on my CGI pelt catches, at just the right angle, the early-evening light beginn
ing to strain through the louvered blinds of Constance Bennett’s bedroom window because no one cares. People want to see animals. You need us. Without us, you’re left staring around at the terrifying monotony of yourselves, yourselves, yourselves. One of these days Animal Planet and Discovery and National Geographic will be entirely CGI too, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the meantime, remember that some of us will put up with a little suffering for our art. And our art is for you, to keep you sane. So have a little gratitude.

  You want to get rid of pain, Dr. Goodall. But I don’t care about the pain, I care about the art. Anyway, don’t forget: www.noreelapes.something!

  Well, that was a nice moment with Constance, and I felt tremendously invigorated by our little romp. I boinged off the bed and skidded out to the balcony, where the balustrade presented a mouthwatering clambering opportunity. Tah-ti-tum-ti-ti-tah down the banisters and then, hup!, across to the chandelier, ha ha ha, which I could swing across to, ta-dah!, the horn of a rhinoceros that Connie had commemorated there on the wall, and then, whoops, onto a coatrack, which I managed to sort of Doug Fairbanks my way down as it toppled over. The Chimpo Pirate! The Mark of Cheeta! Ha ha ha ha! And there was Marlene, drowsily sashaying like an idiot through the atrium, so I gave her a good solid thwack on the tush and scampered past, then changed my mind and doubled back waving my arms in a full-on threat display, which instantaneously evaporated the Fräulein’s sangfroid, and she shriekingly ducked and ran. On the escarpment, we don’t talk to creatures with cold blood, Marlene. (Oh, that was funny! It still makes me laugh, actually. Marlene, wherever you are, mein Liebchen, I want you to know: you’re awful.) I pinged into the garden, thinking: Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, come on, let’s go trampolining!

  I don’t mean to give the impression that this was a typical day exactly. For instance, it would be true to say that I spent at least sixty-five percent of 1935 masturbating in a cage. But, you know, a cage is a cage is a cage, as Gertrude Stein might have said. Sometimes Marie Dressler or Ronnie Colman or dear Lionel Barrymore might swing by the menagerie and take me out for lunch or a walk or a picnic, or a young Ginger Rogers might take me to the races at Santa Anita. Connie’s star-powder game became a bit of a craze for a while, and I enjoyed snuffling around the bared cleavages of Mary Astor, Tallulah Bankhead, Pola Negri, Evelyn Keyes and so on, as if in search of that indefinable “it” they all had—and the health benefits were obvious. Scott Fitzgerald took me to see Fredric March in The Affairs of Cellini and made his way through a crate of twenty-four Cokes during the double feature. “Only thing I can manage, Cheets,” he said. My seat trembled with him throughout—he was buzzing with fear. “That was just pots of fun, wasn’t it?” was his only comment on our hour-long walk home. None of my fellow chimps, I’m pleased to report, treated me any differently from how they’d always done. They shuffled glumly around in the straw in the same way as ever. Gately came to keep us up to snuff. Conway took me for a spin once. Thalberg himself shook hands through the mesh: a great honor. But somewhere along the line it had ceased to matter too much whether I was in the shelter or outside: I just felt like I was in a cage whenever I wasn’t with him.

  He was in the garden on an arbor seat under a cherry tree, talking with a girl, his jacket folded neatly beside him, leaning forward with his beautiful hands clasped between his knees and head tilted in that posture of listening interest. The sound of balls on racquets came from behind the house. I leaped into his arms and he took me like a quarterback, without looking. We were a team.

  “She’s in Nevada for a couple more weeks, and I guess I’m missing her like crazy,” Johnny said. “And every time I go out I think, It’s no fun without a date! So I sometimes swing by the studio and pick up this menace.”

  “She’s away, and you get lonesome. It’s natural.”

  “And she drives me bananas. On the phone. You know, stories about people you haven’t met. You know. Makes me feel a long way away, I guess.”

  “Well, while she’s a long way away…”

  “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand, I’m sorry,” said Johnny. “I love her. I love her so much.”

  Ah. “Lupe.” He had one of those lifelong monogamous arrangements (his third) going on at this time. These arrangements were sort of ritual periods of reduced sexual promiscuity, which the dreamers indulged in, often for several years at a stretch, as a kind of relief from their natural state of undiscriminating sexual appetite, I guess. All a bit complicated, but bear with me.

  Although they lasted longer, they were similar to the bonds between chimpanzees in that the alphas discouraged you from forming one of these attachments with someone too far below you in the hierarchy. For instance, Johnny’s second “marriage” had been with a female called Bobbe Arnst, an ex-Ziegfeld hoofer and nightclub singer, whose fan mail was so much less than Johnny’s that L.B.’s right-hand man Mannix had to step in and rectify the imbalance when Johnny originally joined Metro. He could not be married unless it was to another dreamer who occupied a similar ranking in the hierarchy.

  Johnny misunderstood this rule, and he refused to end the marriage: he loved Bobbe. He was just a kid from Chicago, remember, who’d dropped out of high school at the age of twelve. But Mannix managed to straighten things out with a ten-thousand-dollar gift to the girl, who understood the entertainment industry a little better than he did, and she called a halt to their temporary arrangement herself. Ten thousand bucks was quite a lot of money in those days. It’s always difficult translating the real value of money across the decades. Younger readers may find it helpful to think of ten thousand dollars as about a third of what Johnny had been earning per year promoting swimwear, so that gives you the approximate price of a marriage in 1932. Not quite enough to get a really good nightclub band going back home in Jacksonville, Florida. Anyway, Johnny’s third lifelong bond posed no threat to his immortality since it was to another MGM star of almost equal ranking, and her name was Lupe Vélez.

  4

  Latino Tornado!

  Child-size Lupe filled her Spanish-style dream home on Rodeo Drive with a score of canaries, half a dozen native servants, successive pairs of chihuahuas, whose amusingly coupled names would change annually so that I was never quite certain whether they were the same dogs or not, a minimum of ten guests at any given time, and Johnny, whom she valued above all for the quantity of air he displaced. The house was called “Casa Felicitas”—the Happy House. “I like beeg guys—and John-ee, my Popp-ee, ees a beeg guy!” she would charmingly confide in a voice like the chirruping of twenty canaries, and which she had last used in proper innocence two decades earlier as a six-year-old girl in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, discovering how powerfully adorable she could be.

  It was this child’s voice that was largely responsible for Lupe’s beautiful home, animals, servants, guests and easily enchantable air-displacing husband. Pretending to be herself as a bad child was her chosen career—adorably wicked Little Whoopee Lupe’s public lived for the chance to forgive her her trespasses. She had “Lure.” “The Mexican whirlwind tops the Lure market by several miles!”

  “I am a leetle beet naughty sometimes,” she would admit to Photoplay magazine, “but John-ee cannot expect me to grow the leetle weengs on my back.”

  She weighed maybe twenty pounds more than I did, and if I lifted up my arms to Johnny for a share of an embrace, my hands, as she pushed them away, would be slightly higher than her head, and her voice without its Latin wheedle was like the snarling of a pair of chihuahuas. When she wasn’t sexually aroused, which in my experience was very rarely, she spoke in perfectly accented English, quietly dispensing orders to the servants tending her lawns and flowerbeds, a compact little adult dense with dissatisfied power, somehow distressed by all the lack of opposition in the unfilled air.

  She loved him, the mad bitch, I’ll allow her that. The first time I saw her, the first time she visited our jungle set, Johnny bounded up t
o her between takes, hoisting her above his head in his folding chair, riding with her (from “lumber” to “gallop”) on the mechanical rhinoceros’s back, and from that moment I knew I would have to conceal. Everyone, including Johnny, knew that when Gary Cooper had finally walked out on her she had, to the delight of the MGM publicity department, adorably pulled a gun on my very dear and gentle friend Coop. And I thought, through my dismay and desolation, that there was plenty of death in her that she wasn’t fully in control of. It was most likely to come out against a rival—and she might kill a rival in order not to kill Johnny! So if ever I was around Johnny and Lupe was there, I held back. I acted. Survival in this whole business is simply a matter of not being killed, I have learned.

  She loved him, but it was asking a lot to forgive her her trespasses against him. The scratches and bites that Johnny revealed each morning when he undressed the World’s Finest Physique on set I took for the standard markings of human sexual possession. I could deal with that. But not the blue-black bruise on his cheekbone or the cigarette burn on his dear upper arm, which, relaxed, measured thirteen inches, and flexed, fourteen and a half.

  I remember once sitting in the house on Rodeo Drive with my arm like a furtive tendril around Johnny’s foreleg as he talked into one of those listening devices that always reminded me, with their shiny black carapaces and tiny insect voices, of the giant beetles I played with as a baby in Africa. Lupe was troubling the air somewhere nearby.

  “No, there isn’t,” Johnny was saying. “I guess we’re just blessed here. Not even one tiny cloud. It’s an even eighty, Mom. What is it in Chicago?… Well, if you come up the drive there’s kind of a big bush with little purple flowers out and trees on either side and it’s like a hacienda except bigger….” His mother often called him from Chicago and had him describe the house and the California weather to her in great detail, as if she suspected him of having made the whole thing up. “You wouldn’t have to if you came to see it for yourself. So you gotta come out, we keep waiting for ya to come out. Come out to paradise.” And then Lupe started in on him. “Lupe, will ya…? No, we’re not. No, she’s not. No, I’m not. No, it’s not. No, you’re— Goddammit, Lupe, then go afuckinghead and kill yourself. Just fucking do it someplace else! Go kill yourself in the garden! Run yourself over with the fucking lawnmower!”