by Cheeta
“The whole thing’s impossible, John-ee. I’m always going to run away, you understand? But you have to keep running after me.”
She wanted a man to run after her. But then she despised men who ran after her. I know, I know… she was a lot of work, Lupe Vélez.
“I’m not a fucking pet, Lupe. Would you run after me?” “Like your monk-ee, John-ee. You bandeet. You feelthy desperado. You wanted man.”
She exposed his erect sexual organ, and Johnny made some demurral about me, and with a warning forefinger I was deposited in the scrub while they mated with a swiftness that was impressive for a pair of humans. I wasn’t possessive of him, ever—I just wanted him to be happy.
Afterward, I crept back and leaned against him, and he shifted around so that his body provided shade for Lupe and me both. We sat there for a long while, grooming each other, saying very little, and waving at the occasional inquisitive car. Well, this was the sort of thing Photoplay magazine was referring to when it hinted at TROUBLE IN TARZAN’S TREEHOUSE. “Why,” it would ask, flirtatiously, “did Johnny Weissmuller’s salad end up adorning Lupe Vélez’s coiffure last week in Cocoanut Grove?” Why? Because nobody can bear things to end, I guess, no matter how bad it gets.
Trouble in Tarzan’s treehouse… after a dose of Lupe it was a relief to be back in the real world of the escarpment. Gately would chauffeur me, and sometimes an extra or two, to Sherwood Forest or the Malibu Creek State Park, where the cigarette butts were as abundant as the fruit, the animals and the humans mingled harmoniously under cloudless skies, and there were no clothes between Johnny’s skin and mine. Aaah, “work!” I threw myself into it.
Instead of Conway there was now a man named John Farrow to interrupt the dream with “Roll ’em” and “Print it.” Maureen listened with a peculiar expression, to the poetry he’d recite, which, for me, had nothing on Johnny’s crowd-pleaser about the girl from Des Moines, and I saw that something had happened to her: Maureen had grown up. She had a way, almost indiscernible to the human eye, of delaying her reactions so that you were made to witness a parody of an internal life. If someone called, “Maureen!” she would swivel her head only after a second or two to the speaker. Lost in thought, you see, that old alpha pursuit. If she was standing when she turned, then her body would swing around in four separate stages: hips—chest—shoulders—head.
This was all a clever power-display: a beta is more afraid of predators, and by consciously slowing her natural reaction times she was implying a higher position in the hierarchy. Her smile was no longer a fear-grimace but a steady and sustainable display of the organism’s health—its flawless teeth, its bright pink gums. She had new hair and a one-piece mini-dress instead of her jungle bikini and kept banging on about some wolf in England that could write. Big deal. Could it act and paint as well? Johnny had somehow gone from being her bothersome big brother to her pesky kid brother. The only complaint the Hays Office could have made about Maureen now was that her wholesomeness was so unappetizing she looked like an advertisement for the other side.
It was always the trouble with Jane—she had a fatal attraction to time. She had a capacity for boredom that always made her susceptible to her old addiction to London. And, sure enough, this dream (Tarzan Returns, it was called) seemed to tell the same old story as before. Instead of Holt and Arlington, it was handsome Captain Fry and Jane’s cousins Rita and Eric who arrived on the escarpment full of the joys of England. Had Jane learned anything from Tarzan and His Mate? No, she was compelled by her fate, as were we all, and we reenacted the cycle of temptation, betrayal and reunion. But now it wasn’t quite so easy. I thought, How many times can we keep doing this before Jane ruins everything? She just didn’t seem to get it. For instance, Jane had Tarzan construct a new shelter to replace our old nests. When I say “shelter,” it was pretty much a re-creation of Juanita del Pablo’s attractive Moorish-influenced bungalow on Benedict Canyon Drive, but up a tree You had to hand it to her—it was the smartest residence on the escarpment. Now all we needed were some neighbors with a slightly smaller one.
Instead of having to climb up to the new shelter, Jane had Tarzan install a vine-controlled bamboo elevator and Emma the elephant was called into service as a sort of elevator-operator-cumconcierge. Also, instead of making that laborious vine-swing all the way down to the river to drink, we could now simply utilize our Jane-designed bamboo-section water-elevator. We merely had to wait for Jane to winch up the bamboo sections, which dipped into the water hole beneath, use the ladle to decant the water into an earthenware carafe, then pour it from the carafe into a bamboo mug—and say goodbye to crocodile-interrupted drinking misery! It certainly saved time, which I needed a lot more of now that I had to keep the dirt from getting tracked in onto the new zebra-skin rug. And Tarzan created all of this because he loved her. Because, although the sweet, dear, lovesick man didn’t properly understand it, he was engaged in an unwinnable war against Jane’s boredom—her time-disease.
Oh, we had a ball dreaming it, for sure. It was “a happy set.” Despite Jane’s “improvements,” it was still our escarpment. People have this idea that film work must be all glamour and fun, yet actually on the whole, they’re absolutely right. As a moviegoer you might see, for instance, me and Johnny sitting on a tree branch spying out Captain Fry’s camp: I’d sling an arm around his shoulders and whisper in his ear, he’d ruffle the back of my neck and we’d drop back down into the undergrowth and that would be that. But in reality we’d get to spend half the afternoon cuddling up on that branch.
We were simply having too good a time of it. Twenty times I’d nuzzle up to him, twenty times we’d drop down into the grass together. The same with stroking his head as he lay under the baobab, almost inconsolable after another of Jane’s betrayals, or wrapping my arms around his neck for a brief vine-swing. The finished picture wouldn’t tell you how compelling, almost addictive, we found it to do these things, how long we took doing them. “Takes,” we called them. We were taking things out of the present, and the more times we did it, I guess the more indelibly we were engraving it into the dream.
“Print! Jesus fucking Christ, we won’t forget that shot in a hurry,” John Farrow might exclaim, in an ecstasy of artistic satisfaction, after the last take had been captured. Unable to tear himself away, he would linger over my scenes with Johnny or Maureen longer than he ever did with the purely human stuff. “Twenty-eight takes! Gately, this monkey … it’s like working with Swanson!”
Well, come on now, he was exaggerating. As an actor, though, I did like to throw in something to make every take a little different.
Most days Johnny brought Otto to the set, but that was OK. He made a terrific target to pelt with fruit from the lower branches, since he never could figure out where the missiles were coming from. And there was all the usual fun. If Maureen was engrossed in a conversation over lunch about Indian philosophy or poetry with Farrow, it was all the easier for Johnny and me to add a few pellets of my monkey chow to her plate of mixed vegetables. “Oh, for the love of Mike, grow up, Johnny!” I remember her saying on that occasion.
She couldn’t get through her skull what Johnny and I instinctively understood: that the essence of the escarpment lay in not growing up. Johnny’s struggle against the whole pernicious idea of it was more courageous than anyone’s. “Aren’t you a little old to be doing that?” she’d say, as Johnny staggered by under the assault of a rubber vampire bat, or set about organizing a party to winch up the bamboo elevator to see what would happen if you dropped it on a watermelon. Always this obsession of hers with time, when we had all the time in the world. In fact, Tarzan Returns was such a happy shoot that in the end they stretched it out to more than double its scheduled length.
Captain Fry was reminiscent of Tony Gentry. He had the same otter-slicked hair and the same vocation—he was dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of animals. While cousins Rita and Eric worked on Jane with the usual stuff about England and Mayfair and cream tea
s on the South Downs, and some transparently unlikely gobbledegook about an inheritance, Fry went about his work accommodating the various creatures of the escarpment in their shelters. It was an honest misunderstanding but of course this was the escarpment where, as Tarzan pointed out, the animals didn’t require rehabilitation, and relations between Tarzan and Fry cooled.
Nonetheless, Jane was hell-bent on hosting a lunch party for the visitors. After all, she’d been waiting two years for an opportunity to use her fired-earth dinner service. It did not go well. Instead of sitting down to a mound of fruit or monkey chow, I was banished to the kitchen while the humans fussed around with Jane’s seating arrangements and admired the hardwood cutlery. Stunned, I complied. She only had two friends—Tarzan and me—and I didn’t get an invitation to her lunch party? But, of course, I wasn’t a friend, I was the air-conditioning.
“Cheeta, you wouldn’t mind turning that fan on for a while, would you?” Jane crooned in an elsewhere kind of voice.
She had insisted on Tarzan installing the fan when the treehouse had, how surprising, proved to be infinitely less cool than our old nests in the canopy. It was a wheel of dried msuba leaves operated by another pulley. Jane had never been known to operate it, of course, and there were few other forest creatures with the necessary dexterity, so it was I, dear old Mrs. Cheeta, who had to crank it. And, not wishing to cause a scene, I did.
Jane popped her head around the kitchenette door, waggling the sort of index finger that must have made Mia Farrow chalk the days off until her sixteenth birthday. “Don’t you dare let that roast burn!”
I made no comment. She was referring to the vertical spit that hung in front of the clay oven, on which Tarzan impaled the hunks of wildebeest that we’d previously air-cured. Jane cherished the idea of a little “rotisserie,” so the spit was commissioned and a nook constructed above the chimney for me to perch on as I turned the meat. If the fire hadn’t been going full blast, I wouldn’t have had to get the fan going, would I, I was thinking, while Jane babbled melodiously on in the dining room about the “awful savages” you got around these parts. Oh, yes, Maureen, ebsolutely frightful! And have you seen their cutlery? But she seemed happy, at least, and I rotated the fan and the spit for her, multitasking, because it was so painfully obvious how desperate she was for this party to go well.
Once the roast had been served, I was to enter with the table water in a hollowed-out gourd. I took Tarzan’s “Eat now!” as my signal and made my way into the dining room, where Jane was still chattering on about the natives. “I dare say they’d be well enough pleased if we were to clear orf and leave this whole happy hunting ground to them…. Oh, thank you, Cheeta!” (This “thank you” for the guests’ benefit.)
Duty done, I helped myself to a slice of mango, seeing as I hadn’t had any lunch myself yet.
“No, no, now, greedy!” she said, handing me one of the smaller segments instead. “Here. Take this outside. Go on!”
Take it outside? Oh, yes, to avoid getting juice on the leopard-skin throws. I mean, you know the type: television shows her recurring throughout all human history, co-opting dinosaurs or robots into her dystopia of domestic bliss. Thank God TV hadn’t been invented back then, or she’d have had the lot of us running around the clearing for an hour after dinner, doing classic scenes from National Geographic to help her relax.
How had it come to this? It was like the time I’d had supper with Joan Crawford’s poodle Clicquot. We had to eat off bone china plates, and if Clicquot spilled a crumb Crawford would extract a tissue from the heart-shaped pocket of his red-velvet monogrammed jacket and tskingly clean it up. Not a fun evening. For Tarzan’s sake, I made no comment, only accepted my sliver of mango and bipedaled back to the kitchen with as much dignity as I could muster.
“Her table manners aren’t all they should be!” she twinkled to the cousins and Captain Fry.
And I’m afraid the little tinkling-bells laugh with which she accompanied her statement was more than enough for this punkah-wallah. Since when had our jungle idyll become dependent on table fucking manners? We never used to have table manners because we never used to have a fucking table. “The scratch and grunt school of Method acting” was for some years the tag used by lazy critics in charting the influence of my work on the young Marlon Brando, you’ll remember. Imagine Stanley Kowalski dealing with Blanche Dubois and you’ll understand how I felt toward Jane at that moment. I’m not proud of myself. It was unprofessional. But momentarily I lost control and, hurling the mango to the spotless sisal-grass floor, I’m afraid to say that I tried to rip her poised little fucking throat out. In fact, I succeeded merely in getting in a glancing nip through the surprisingly tough hide of her calfskin dress before Gately, who was always silently haunting the corners of the dream, strode up and brought the ugly-stick down on my back and shoulders more times than seemed strictly commensurate.
You won’t see that sequence in Tarzan Escapes, as the film was retitled for its 1936 release. It didn’t fit the dream. But if it hadn’t been for Johnny, things could have turned out a lot worse. “That’s enough, Gately. Let me calm it down. It trusts me,” he said, and at the sound of his voice, I came running, as I always did. In the cradle of his arm I was calmed, stroked down from my fury, and it was easier for us all to agree on a convenient white lie about my having been “frightened” by something.
And as my rage subsided, I found that for the first time on the escarpment, I was frightened of something. Not Gately, or the leopards or the Gaboni or Mary the rhino, but the possibility I had managed to bury at the back of my mind for two years: that if Mayer or Thalberg didn’t like what they were seeing, or if the moviegoers no longer believed in our dream, or if Maureen turned against me, or if I just didn’t make ’em laugh like I had in Tarzan and His Mate, then the research center would always be happy to take me in, along with all the rest of Hollywood’s rejected. “Oh, yeah, I used to be a star. Used to be very close with Johnny Weissmuller. But it’s more rewarding working in medicine.” Don’t ever forget it, I told myself. This business is your life. Time might go by but Death never loses interest in you.
Stardom was my shelter, and without it, I could easily end up at the bottom of the H of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, with the British actress Peg Entwistle, or in an unmarked grave with Florence Lawrence, the “Biograph Girl,” who could do nothing to stop herself swallowing a cocktail of cough syrup and ant poison after the work dried up. Or I might end up being prodded and shaken by two children exploring the stairwell of a New York tenement building as the ex-child star Bobby Driscoll had, or on one of the foothills of the city dump with Rex the Wonder Dog. Stardom protected you against these dangers, and only the seven alphas of Hollywood could give it to you. Why antagonize them? Remember what happened to Maurice the lion? I thrashed in Johnny’s arms and he let me down gently so that I could make my way across the dining room to rest a conciliatory hand on Maureen’s thigh. I thought, From now on, I’m only gonna touch the little idiot when no one’s around.
The humans settled back to their lunch. But the fizz had rather gone out of the party. With profound hypocrisy, Jane was now objecting to Captain Fry’s idea that Tarzan himself be brought back to England. Tarzan could make a fortune, could make mountains of money “lecturing on wildlife.” “Money?” Johnny said uncomprehendingly. He and I never had the faintest clue about money. All that sort of thing he left to his friend Bo Roos.
“No, Tarzan, you don’t understand,” Cousin Eric tried to assure him.
“Of course he doesn’t understand!” Jane burst out, rising to her feet. “I hope he never does!”
And then it all came pouring out—she was off to England, was going to leave Tarzan, but “only for the time it takes the moon to make three safaris,” she claimed. Yeah, yeah, and Garbo was always going to go back to John Gilbert, and Jayne Mansfield was always going to go back to Mickey Hargitay. How stupid did she think he was? Why couldn’t Tarzan come with her? Because, and Jane h
ad a well-thumbed little stump speech on the subject, “In civilization he’d be a… a sort of freak. He could never tolerate it, or if he did, that might be worse!”
In which case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—and feel free to picture me as Charles Laughton here, or Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, perhaps, rounding on my heel with an index finger spiraling into the air—in which case, Miss, uh, Parker, or will “Jane” do? In which case, Jane, why are you trying to bring civilization to the escarpment? Hypocrite! Liar! She had even taken to wearing a pair of calfskin bloomers underneath her dress, for propriety’s sake, for fuck’s sake.
And the terrible thing was that he loved her so. The guy was totally broken up about it. It was Lupe all over again. Or as Bobbe Arnst told Photoplay in 1932, dolefully folding her ten-thousand-dollar check from Mannix into her purse next to the IOU for her lost soul, “I guess marriage can’t ever be the victor in Hollywood.” And Johnny’s face was an index of the purity of his system. Grief rose to its surface in a pure form; his face didn’t filter his despair. His suffering was written all over his brow, and his brow was like a continent you hoped would never be visited by those tall ships. It broke your heart. People have forgotten, or they failed to see it at the time—and you may doubt my objectivity but: don’t—for two or three pictures, Johnny Weissmuller was a great, great silent movie star, a transmitter of joy, a transmitter of sorrow.
And in his despair, he was wide open to Captain Fry who, I now realized, was not an animal rehabilitator but a cad of the first water. Fry had an iron shelter into which he was able to fool the love-addled King of the Jungle. It was a situation tailor-made for the natural climax of any Weissmuller-Cheeta picture—my daredevil rescue of my partner. I evaded the usual lethargic predators, enlisted the help of Emma, got him out of there, watched the Gaboni capture the white men, the elephants stampede the Gaboni village and so on and so forth and none of it seemed quite the same as it had been. I could bust Tarzan out of Fry’s cage, but what about the one Jane was building around him? Her terrible Casa Felicitas?