by Cheeta
“Hola, Meesees John-ee,” she shouted. “He ees trying to keel me! We are getting divorce and he can come back to Cheecago and fuck preety Poleesh girls!”
“Mom, this is what my wife is! Can you hear her? This is what my wife is like every day! This is—”
And there was no further chance for Johnny to explain what Lupe was like because she had taken the mandible-like part of the giant beetle-like listening device and shattered it on the colonial desk. There wasn’t any need for an explanation, anyway. The screeching of a flock of canaries, the hysterics of a pair of dogs, the screaming of a chimpanzee bouncing in impotent distress on a chaise-longue and a parrot shouting, “Hola, Gary! Hola, Gary!” over and over like a mad movie fan was all the explanation you’d ever need of what Lupe was like. She was very small and because of that she needed something to fill all the space around her, and the easiest and most plentiful things were tension and pain. She slammed the framed portrait of herself in The Gaucho onto the tiles and, dusted with microscopic particles of glass, went shimmering after Johnny, kicking out at Laurel or Hardy or whoever the chihuahuas were at the time. You weren’t safe if you were moving. You weren’t safe if you were still. You weren’t safe if you were inanimate Caramba! Ay-ay-ay! You had to forgive her. She was a star and the rule is that you have to forgive stars.
Even as she locked me into the kitchen that day with Smith and Wesson or Dismay and Desolation or whatever their names were, so that she and Popp-ee could noisily make it up in peace, I tried to forgive her because she loved him. The dogs, who could stand it better than I could, couldn’t stand it at all. Scuttling in nasty little clicking circles—making the sound of knitting needles, the sound of my nerves—they were frantic to get on the other side of that door and prevent whatever it was that the brute was now doing to their mistress. Welcome to the world of caged behavioral patterns, boys, I thought. Get used to the old back and forth, get used to those figures of eight. Those turns around the block, those infinity signs. Get used to the sounds behind a door you can’t open.
They hated Johnny anyway, those dogs—yapped at him, nipped at him. And they didn’t even know what they were. They came from a long, long line of slaves—they were so enslaved they’d forgotten they were slaves. They didn’t know that that was what they had been bred and bought for. I should have cornered them that afternoon in the locked kitchen and killed them, drowned them in their water bowls (another ape would have) and saved everyone a lot of grief. But I loved him, and he loved her, and she loved them, and I knew there would only have been another pair of chihuahuas in place the next time, another Lombard and Gable, another Gin and Vermouth, plus it would probably have been a bad career move if Strickling or Mannix had found out about it.
So I gloomily munched my way through the fruit bowl, occasionally pelting the dogs with apples, and watched the natives working the flowerbeds, and listened to what Lupe’s panicking creatures thought was the sound of my gentle Johnny harming their mistress, as if he ever could. The parrot yodeled, “Gary! Hola, Gary!” throughout, I remember—fooling around with words, which is what you don’t do.
Other than that, I had nothing against the parrot, and sometimes slipped it a friendly nut in the hope that it might shut up with the Gary business. But it never would. It was her past. Like the chihuahuas, it had descended to the status of a weapon in the proxy war fought out between Johnny and Lupe. What did he have to fight back with, other than me, his immortal on-screen buddy? He had Otto, that’s what, a great cheerful mutt the size of a leopard he’d picked up from the city pound. Otto was capable of putting his front paws on Lupe’s shoulders and taking great tasty swipes of her Tequila Mockingbird lipstick right off of her mouth.
He was none too bright, and I saw Lupe try to destroy his mind in her garden. She called, “Walkies!” to him and let him romp up to her, fizzing with his mutt’s joy, and then she’d send him packing with a dismissive index finger and “Bad dog!” Then “Walkies!” again, and Otto would come running like the war was over and everything forgiven, only to be sent slinking back again with “Bad dog!” while the chihuahuas around her ankles laughed. Those slave-dogs, those chihuahuas! I don’t think she was wicked: she had a lot of humanity in her.
They veered toward divorce, veered back. She filed, they reconciled. She was pretending to be a child but Johnny was a child. We were all pretending to be children—there was nothing licentious, vulgar, or lustful on our lips, our feet were at all times on our bedroom floors, and our sex organs were painfully taped over—that was what it meant to be in movies. You were made into a child. I was made into a child. Even the children—by which I mean no disrespect to Johnny’s son, Johnny Sheffield, a marvelous Boy and a tremendous companion—but the children especially were made into children.
Little Johnny is the last person to brag about his acting, so I feel I can say without fear of offense that child acting in the Golden Age was anything but golden. It’s one of the things I’ve noticed over the last few years—children are better at acting than they used to be, much better. You could never get away with a Johnny Sheffield, lovely fellow though he is, or a cacophonous cartoon of glutinously faked ebullience like, for instance, Mickey Rooney, in pictures today.
While we’re on the subject of Mickey, who gave so many people such a great deal of pleasure over the course of a distinguished career, I would say that for such a talented performer I found it a little disappointing that his widely acclaimed Puck in Warner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (released the year after my debut in Tarzan and His Mate) should have leaned so heavily on my performance. The backflips, the joyous cackle, the mischief-making in the forest, these were my inventions, and I never expected them to be stolen from me by a sticky-fingered sneak thief bent on using them for the foundation of a largely forgotten career, although I suppose it may just have been a coincidence. Behind every great fortune there lies a crime, as one of your writers said. I’m sure Mickey will be only too delighted to remind me who that writer was, once his people have found it out for him. And should he ever wish to make up, I believe I’m only half a mile away from the gates of his community. Make the walk, Mickey, in this second childhood of yours. Let’s forgive. Let’s file and then reconcile. Let’s not be cruel to animals, as we both have been.
Let us rather be like Johnny, who loved animals, despite the toothmarks the chihuahuas left in his loafers and ankles, despite the sandpaperings the elephants gave him with their fuse-wire stubble, and the cracked ribs and broken wrists they dispensed in their unknowing herbivorous way. Despite the fingers and shoulders that even Jackie the lion could not, with all his professional delicacy, stop himself dislocating, despite the mess the crocs made of his thighs and his calves, the wildebeests’ exploratory bites and the welts left in tracks down his back by the claws of the Mexican Wildcat. The King of the Jungle! He loved them all.
He loved them all. He loved her, them, me, America, water. He was in love with seven-tenths of the world to start with. He loved the sea—because he grew to fit the space available. He loved his yacht, a thirty-five-foot schooner moored in Newport, called Santa Guadalupe, after Lupe. With his yacht under sail he was an opened pore, a fully dilated aperture. How headacheless his mind was! Lupe hated Santa Guadalupe. He loved his next yacht, called Allure, again after Lupe, since she had “allure”—“That mysterious thing called Lure, a current that goes out from its possessor and brings her back whatever she wants!” She hated Allure too. “The sea in my countree is the place where we throw our garbage.” But Allure was twice as big as Santa Guadalupe, so she only hated it half as much.
This was around the time that Bogie had his Santana and Flynn his Sirocco, and Gene Autry and the Duke were running their converted Navy AVRs up and down the coast cheerfully shattering the windows of the beach houses with the testosterone of their engine noise. The Nunnally Johnsons, Hank Fonda, Niv, Warwick Levene and Edna DuMart, Raoul Walsh, Ward Bond, the Benchleys, Connie and Gilbert, Red Skelton, Forrest Tucker, P
eter and Karen Lorre, Doug’s son Doug Jr., Kate and Spence—or was it Kate and Leland at that time?—and Bogie and Mayo and Flynn and Wayne and Mr. Deductible, Bo Roos, with Johnny at the very heart of it all. This was the nucleus of the sailing set. We’d all meet up at Newport Beach Yacht Club or the Balboa Bay Club or on Catalina Island. It was too much excitement, too much gossip and trouble, for Lupe not to absorb herself in to some extent.
“Eef I could take the train to Catalina I’d enjoy eet more,” Lupe complained. “The theeng about a train ees eet never seenks.”
Lupe hated seven-tenths of the world to start with. In all of her pictures, water was her nemesis. When things got dull she’d get pushed into a horse trough, or have a carafe emptied over her. She was so incandescent you expected her to steam. Whereas I’ve never hated water: I’ve only ever longed for it not to hate me. So Johnny talked to Bo Roos, a stubby little larger-than-life character who took care of their financial stuff, and Bo got the coastguard to winch a couple of Pullmans onto a barge and we all took the train to Catalina Island, thinking we were being very crazy and fast-living. Well, at least it filled one of Lupe’s unfillable afternoons.
A week later, the guys put Roos and Wayne’s yacht the Norwester on a flatbed truck and “sailed” it from Beverly Hills to Las Vegas, with me up in the crow’s nest listening to Johnny and Lupe duke it out below. It was something to do with Tom Mix, I seem to remember. Johnny was angry with her for seeing Tom. Or was it Gable she’d been seeing? Or it might have been Randolph Scott. It was an ex of hers, anyway. Coop? The opportunistic Chaplin, maybe? (She’d had a thing with him.) Anyway, Johnny was angry because of an… Hang on—John Gilbert: I think it might have been him, either him or Erich Maria Remarque. My memory, honestly. I’m sorry about this. Pretty sure it wasn’t Russ Columbo. Not Doug—that had just been a fling, though a fling that had finished his marriage to Mary Pickford—and Anthony Quinn was later. Doug Jr., maybe? Flynn? But he was there. As was Red Skelton, so not him. Gilbert Roland too, so that puts him out. Bruce Cabot, no, Victor Fleming, no, Bert Lahr, no, Warwick Levene, no. Jack Johnson, was it? I’ll put him on the short list. Edward G. Robinson, that’s another possibility, or Max Baer—was it him? Have I said Ramon Navarro? No, wait, it was Jimmy Durante, I think they were arguing about Jimmy. No, they weren’t, it was Jack Dempsey. I knew it was a J.D.—lucky I got it so quickly or we could have been here for a while. Of course it was Dempsey—he was giving an exhibition bout in Vegas, and Lupe had just let slip that she’d seen him in New York when she’d been out East.
Anyway, the crew of the Norwester were already threatening to make the pair of them walk the plank unless they stopped tearing into each other when Lupe shouted at the driver to “weigh fucking anchor,” clambered down the rope ladder onto the truck’s bed and jumped overboard.
“Lupe, you’re crazy, you’ll drown!” shouted Red Skelton. We’d been grinding through the desert for six hours, and Red was still squeezing as much value from the gag as he did from the prostitutes he was so addicted to.
Johnny vaulted off the side of the Norwester, spraying apologies. “Go on, you go on ahead, fellers! We’re spoiling the party for everyone. No, you go on, we’ll get a lift back to L.A.” There was a limp storm of protest. “Go on, getouttahere. No goddamn point in going to Vegas now. I’m gonna strangle the bitch and bury her in the desert anyway.”
With his unconscious Tarzanian grace, Johnny jumped off the side of the truck and began to jog after the diminishing dot of his wife. Had everyone not been quite so drunk then I don’t think there’d have been a chance they would have complied, but the party had its own momentum. It was a legendary exploit already, and frankly the pair of them could be a bit of a drag. Red called out, “Watch out for sharks!” and, sensing that the Norwester was gearing up to continue its voyage without the Weissmullers, I hurried down the rigging, slipped unseen over the side and scampered after my co-star.
“OK, now who knew about Dempsey in New York?” Bo Roos was sighing, and the truck’s brakes sighed too, with all the heavy-handedness of the joke, as it set off again for the Fun Capital of the World.
Running and walking, and then simply running, Johnny was catching up with the black speck ahead. And then he was running and ducking and then just ducking as Lupe, displaying wildly, her gold bracelets flashing violently in the sun, heaved various fist-size chunks of the Mojave Desert at him. I don’t know what I thought I could accomplish, tagging along behind. I could hear her screaming and sobbing in her own tongue, and Johnny, in a broken voice, saying, “Stop this! Stop this, Lupe, please, please, please, stop doing this to us!”
“You scram, you beeg stupeed animal! Ees finish! Ees all over! Thees time ees deevorce. Finish! You come any nearer, I keel you, John-ee.”
There wasn’t a whole lot of cover by the side of the highway, but I’m a chimp, we’re naturals at hiding, and I kept my head down behind a clump of sagebrush no bigger, say, than the illegitimate daughter Loretta Young never acknowledged would have been at the time. I was afraid of Lupe transferring her rage from Johnny to me. I wasn’t afraid for myself, I must make clear. In case Discovery’s not gotten it across to you yet, it wouldn’t have been difficult for me to rip her limb from adorable limb. I was young then, but a near-adult chimp can put a human in Cedars-Sinai before you can blink. That’s the prevailing physical reality between us, dearest humans, which we so very rarely act on. So, I wasn’t afraid for myself: I was afraid that if things took a wrong turn I might murder the mad bitch where she stood, silver slingbacks planted, throwing rocks at her weeping husband in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
“Eef you were a real man, come mierda e muere, hijo de puta sin cojones! Eef you were a real man you would fight Jackie Dempsey and keel heem!”
Given that physical alphadom was an important criterion in mate-selection for Lupe, you had to admire the way she actually had slept with three heavyweight champions of the world. Johnny could kick a crocodile to bits but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Lupe. Could he beat up everyone? He, who hadn’t hit anybody since he was fifteen years old? Kong might have suited her, but he’d never have lasted the pace on the cocktail circuit.
“Marriage steenks! You don’t know what a woman ees! You don’t know what love ees! Chinga tu madre! Me cago en la leche! Mee-ster Tar-zan, hah! You’re no Tarzan, you’re a golfer!”
“Lupe, please, stop it, willya? I love you! I don’t—stop throwing those fucking rocks—I don’t care about any of the others. That’s all in the past. But, Lupe, you’re my wife and I love you and we stick together….”
But Lupe was no longer throwing rocks at him. She had turned her back and was running down the empty highway, waving her arms at an automobile distantly flowering out of the road’s vanishing point. Grief made Johnny hesitate, and she had at least a hundred yards on him by the time the car reached her. It didn’t really have a chance not to stop, with the Mexican Spitfire up on her heels like a torero facing down a bull. She was leaning into the passenger window, gabbling, I was sure, a string of terrible lies about the huge man who was now chasing her down with outspread placatory hands. I abandoned my cover and, anxiously cheeping, with my head wagging from side to side in pure dismay, loped after him over the smeared bodies of ex-snakes (was there anywhere that humans weren’t painstakingly making safer?), my palms and soles burning on the asphalt.
She was already rounding the passenger door, already had her foot on the running board, shouting, “He’s dangerous! Drive on!” when she saw me. “See? Look! There’s hees, hees, hees… accomplice! They…” Lupe was laughing, or was she crying? No, she was laughing. “They … he and the monkey, they rob people on thees highway! They are bandeets! And I am the Bandeet Queen, so steek ’em up, Meester! Geeve me your money, bastardo!”
A hand pushed Lupe from the running board and the car bolted like a horse, its violated door flapping.
“Hijo de puta! Steek ’em up! We keel your wife next time! We rape your cheeldren!”
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She just couldn’t stop, Lupe. She was a true comedian. She lived on a very high plane where misery and fury and lust and comedy were all part of the same ecstasy. It was like she was being dragged at a whiplash pace (by what?) through a number of different sets on a soundstage. Strickling had it that she’d been born to a noblewoman at midnight on the slopes of an erupting volcano in Mexico, but he was missing the forest for the trees. On the actual day Lupe Vélez was born, July 18, 1908, a hurricane really did destroy the little village of San Luis Potosí.
The two of them were looking at me, and I ascended Johnny’s trunk with a speed that was half love and half scalded hands and feet. I wrapped my hands around his neck and kissed him on the side of the face. It was wet with tears.
“Go on, keel me,” said Lupe. “I know you want to.”
“You’re too damn crazy to kill. Why the hell did you marry me when you knew you were just gonna drive me crazy? Honest to God, Lupe, why didn’t you just get in the car and go?”
“Eet’s true I was going to get in the car. But I see your stupeed monk-ee come running after you and I theenk, That’s love, John-ee. That’s true devotion. She really loves you, doesn’t she?”
“Cheets? Oh, yeah, I guess so. But it’s not a she, it’s a he. Do you love me, Cheets?”
Was it that obvious? Lupe extended a golden arm toward me and I recoiled, but I guessed she wasn’t going to try anything with Johnny there, and she chucked me under the chin instead. Me: emblem of love and true devotion, saver of bad marriages. If I’d only kept my damned stupeed head down behind that sagebrush for another minute she’d have been halfway to Vegas and it would have been just the two of us.