by Cheeta
I was about to make a truly irrevocable mistake. In an unreachable corner of my mind there was a trace memory of something maddeningly similar—an infant plucked from a shattered plane, us staring down confusedly at it, its trusting smile, its apelike eyes. It made me think of my dear, wise Tarzan. It was something I wanted him to remember—where he came from. It was a compulsion. I couldn’t stop. With soft hands I carried the bundle through the canopy toward the treeless zone that had developed around the Casa Felicitas. Even then it might have been all right—Tarzan was utterly perplexed by the baby, which was already testing out its hierarchical role with a marathon demonstration of power-display screaming. I thought, Fine, it’s been an interesting diversion, an amusing anecdote, let’s chuck it away now or get it on the rotisserie spit. And then Jane came in, with an armful of freshly cut flowers.
Why we needed the flowers when we lived in a forest I can’t tell you. Now there’d be no flowers in the place she’d got them from. Maybe the next time we were down there I could take these ones back, brighten the place up a bit! Fucking idiot! Marriage to Farrow had finally extinguished any last flicker of fun in her—Jane was now about as effervescent as a gin and tonic left all winter in a shuttered summerhouse. Her hemline was down half a foot; her hair had become anti-erotically complex, and her eyes… her eyes were tunnels. They saw the baby and nothing else. She went white with triumph. You see—and I don’t think there’s any way I can avoid the subject—Tarzan wouldn’t give her a child. And for all that Jane had designed off-putting twin beds for them in the zebrahide-and-leopard-skin-themed master bedroom, it was a child she craved.
There were two ways things could go on the escarpment. Either we would never grow up, like Fred and Ginger or Stan and Ollie, like the Marx Brothers or Flash Gordon or Sam Spade, like Roy Rogers and Trigger, like Cary and Kate—we could do that and live forever—or we could give in to Jane’s time-disease and throw it all away. And he was weak. The King of the Jungle was weak because he was an orphan, because he’d never had a father to topple. There was no father to get out from under, so alphadom had come too easily to him, as a gift from his body. He was wide open to tough girls like Jane: they went at him like a herd of elephants at a Gaboni hut. Sure, he loved children. He made children want to be his sons. All his life he was surrounded by wannabe sons (I was one). But I don’t think he was ever that set on being a father.
Jane brushed past him toward the power-displaying infant. “Tarzan! What on earth are you doing?” she said, flowers forgotten. “There, there, now, Jane will look after you! Where will we get it some milk? I suppose coconuts will have to do. Hurry, Tarzan, the poor little thing’s hungry!”
“Tarzan eat now!” Tarzan commented.
“Tarzan. You go and get those coconuts right now!”
It was beginning to dawn on me what I had done. The terrible error I had made. I heard Otto give a faint sad woof from some spectral lawn.
So, we ascertained that the child’s parents were dead, and within an hour I was being testily ordered down to milk Gladys the antelope. “Be careful!” Jane hollered, as I got in the elevator, the milk slopping around in the hollowed coconut as Emma wearily tugged on the “up” vine. Be careful, how useful is it to say “Be careful” when I’m obviously being careful, I mean just how much more perfect an example of the pointless violence of human communication do you want than telling me to be careful when I’m already being careful? I was thinking, or something similar, as I stepped out of the lift. Don’t bite her. Whatever you do, don’t bite her, just give her the milk. Survive, survive, survive… I saw Tarzan at work building an ostrich-feathered crib. I was his best friend, his constant companion, his brother. I was his uncle, his shoulder to cry on, his partner in crime, his go-to guy. I was his tutor, his helpmeet, his sidekick, his rescuer. I was all of these things in a female form. I was his everything, before Jane showed up. I was his son.
And now I was the humble household Negro, wearing an expression of nothing, nothing at all, as I shuffled up to hand his wife a coconut and await my instructions. That expression, that look of benevolent vacancy? That’s acting. Inside, I was thinking, What have I done? Come around and surprise me and Don one day and we’ll stick the DVD on for you. I’ll be in and out, unable to watch, unable to tear myself away. But the film historians among you may care to note that Tarzan Finds a Son! was released several months before Hattie McDaniel’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
I don’t know why I said that Chaplin’s honorary Academy Awards were “not for real.” If anything, such an award is worth more than a standard Oscar. In a sense, they’re a tremendously generous recognition by the Academy of past mistakes, a way of apologizing for overlooking you at the time. An honorary award is a way of saying, “We took you for granted. You were right. Have this with our humblest apologies, Kirk, or Sophia, or Groucho, or Edward G., or Michelangelo, or Cary.” You’d be surprised who gets missed. On the other hand, it’s an obvious “thanks, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out” kind of superannuation tool, as with Mickey R.’s award in ’83. I don’t honestly think Mickey would dispute that assessment.
Speaking of Mickey, Don had parked me in front of the 1000 Greatest Oscar Moments of All Time the other night when I realized that Mickey had in fact won an Oscar before—an Academy Juvenile Award. They stopped giving them in the early sixties. A separate category for non-adult humans seems like a pretty reasonable idea, don’t you think? But the Academy is such an august and well-run institution that I’m sure they’ve got it in hand.
Anyway, they grow up fast, don’t they? In the blink of an eye, the baby was a slightly pot-bellied, tousle-haired six-year-old called Boy. Six years of “Not in here!” and “Be a dear and get the milk in, would you?” and “Off, Cheeta!” Six years of serfdom settling like dust on me, six years of creeping marginalization all edited away into a single soothing modulation from gurgling bald alien to chubby boy a-swing on a vine. The kindness of editing.
The kid himself was OK. He wasn’t going to be winning the Academy Juvenile Award any time soon, but I became quite fond of him in a way, protective, even. His other name was, of course, Johnny—“Little John,” as opposed to the big one—and he was a tough little thing, I’ll give him that, didn’t cry too much when I tested him out with the occasional nip. But there was nothing of Tarzan in him. He was an unmagical foundling, an all-American man-cub with a laugh like a slap. He bullied the animals he could and mocked the rest from a safe distance. I was under no illusions: give him a few years and I’d be nothing more than his pet.
It goes without saying that he loved Johnny. We’d play Hollywood Frisbee together, like a real family, zipping the lid of a 35mm film can back and forth with me in the role of the piggy, clutching at air. Or gin rummy, another game I’d never been able to master, on account of how enjoyable the cards were to snack on. His catchphrase was “Ha ha ha!” shouted rather than laughed. “Ha ha ha, look at Cheeta!” Look at Cheeta, the long-suffering family retainer, usurped as the maker of mischief, sitting sucking a Chesterfield and wringing his hands with frustration while Johnny teaches the Boy to swim in Lake Sherwood, squirting him once, twice and, third time around, himself. “Ha ha ha, do it again!” No, don’t do it again, I was trying to communicate, with my hopping and cheeping and my shaking wrists. Come on out and have a drink with me. Get in the Lincoln and let’s go down to Lakeside for eighteen holes, or stop off at Chasen’s for a sharpener before turning some heads at the Cocoanut Grove (where plaster palm trees, from whose wire fronds bread rolls could be dropped, grew high above the diners). Instead he went to Silver Springs in Florida with the Boy to shoot their underwater scenes, which would later be intercut with shots of me fretting on a river-bank. It’s obvious if you watch the dream that it’s a dream of separation. You can tell that although the ape and the two humans seem almost within touching distance, they’re three thousand miles apart.
And now here came o
ur visitors, toiling up the escarpment with the Gaboni at their heels as usual. This time they were the Boy’s distant relatives—Austin and Mrs. Lancing, wise Sir Thomas and unscrupulous Sandy the hunter. There was the usual wrangling about inheritances and so on, a repeat of our excruciating lunch with Captain Fry (“It’s such short notice, I haven’t got a thing in!” Jane twittered) and then Jane dropped her bombshell. The Lancings were right, the Boy should go back to civilization. “I know what it’s like back there,” she said, in her “urgent” voice, her head tilted to one side as it seemed permanently to be these days. “You’ve no way of imagining the things that civilization can give him! Things we never could give him here!”
This was “civilization,” remember, a place I have rarely heard any human describe with anything other than the greatest contempt. You only ever use the word with a pair of quotation marks, like tweezers, so your fingers don’t have to touch it. It’s famously difficult to define exactly. It sort of means the dark flip side, the negative, of human society. I’ve heard people describe things like the atom bomb, or a trash can in a national park, as “civilization,” with those disdainful, shrugging quotes. Whatever it is, we were lucky in Hollywood, which was a “civilization” -free paradise. And we don’t, touch wood, have any of it in Palm Springs. (Don’s hatred for “civilization” is an ever-burning flame: he loathes it tirelessly.) And of course it was the dirtiest word on the escarpment, after “guns.” But now the Housewife of the Jungle felt she’d concealed her yearning long enough and was praising it openly!
“Boy stay!” Tarzan demurred.
This presented me with a dilemma. As far as I was concerned, a dozen years at one of the great private schools in England could do the Boy nothing but good, and then he’d be going up to Christ Church and with any luck, the next time we’d see him on the escarpment he’d be trying to fund a coup backed by Maoist Gaboni rebels. But that was as foolish a dream as Lana Turner’s daughter Cheryl’s hope that her stepfather Lex Barker would stop raping her. If the Boy went to England, Jane wouldn’t wait on the escarpment for a biannual visit. She’d be off, and she’d take Tarzan with her.
So, I didn’t want the Boy to leave. Neither did he, of course. “Boy stay!” It was an impasse. And now, with glycerine tears and her head practically diagonal with wishful rationalizations, Jane’s long-folded bud of opposition finally flowered into full betrayal.
It had to—she just was not capable of allowing her will to be balked. She couldn’t stop. She sawed through a vine and left Tarzan stranded at the bottom of Koruva grotto, a deep limestone basin worn by a waterfall on the far side of the escarpment, enabling the Lancings to take the uncomprehending Boy with them.
Gibbering with glee, just about rubbing my hands with it, I seized on her mistake and knuckled across the escarpment to the grotto to fulfill my destiny—the Redeemer of Tarzan and Thwarter of the Great Betrayer, Jane. But I was somewhat put out, when I arrived at the lip of the gorge and set about locating a suitable vine, to be interrupted in my struggle by the Boy. He’d managed to escape, dammit. While he organized a party of elephants to convert an old lightning-shafted tree into a ladder, I contributed by impotently capering around the grotto’s edge. It was a team effort.
It turned out that the Gabonis, bless ’em, had, as ever, captured the white men. This meant that, as ever, they were about to have their village stampeded by elephants. What they needed was a moat or something. How many times could they keep rebuilding their village and not learn the lesson that skimping on anti-elephant defense was false economy? It needed discussing—the elephant in the room of Gaboni society was the fact that there usually was an elephant in their room, standing on them. I mounted Emma and followed the heroic little busybody (who had been propped on a darling junior-size elephant calf of his own) over the Gabonis’ flattened palisade and into their village, feeling kind of detached from the whole chaotic spectacle. Nothing mattered any longer, really, amid the dust and the splintered huts and wounded Gabonis, other than the one crucial question. Could Tarzan bring himself to not forgive her?
“Tarzan, Mawani,” (some pet name) she murmured, “before I go…” (good start) “… please listen. I know now how right you are. Please try to forgive me. Please…” And she faltered, seeing what she had done to his face, how she had vandalized his brow with mistrust.
For a second, my heart leaped, and I jumped to my feet on Emma’s neck. He might have been too good for this world, but his jungle lore would be telling him that a leopard can’t change its spots. Cornered, desperate and unscrupulous to the last, she pulled the oldest trick in the book—she fainted. His enormous inarticulate heart brimmed at her weakness. He went to her and took her in his arms and her victory was complete.
So the dream concluded, with everything forgiven and all reunited, sighs and laughter: a complete fucking tragedy. In a couple of hours I’d be back washing dishes in the Casa Felicitas, with the Boy doing his homework and the Dad of the Jungle coming to grips with the lawn.
7
Domestic Dramas!
Once, I don’t know why (we were all a bit mulled), Lupe and he and I found ourselves walking down a street just behind Sunset Plaza Drive at four o’clock in the morning in search of the Continental. Outside each of the gates of the low-alpha-level houses, like a symbol of a still-untouched day, was a bottle of milk. Lupe’s day had started forty-eight hours ago, and she got hold of the idea that the milk ought to be delivered to people’s doorsteps— “Why ees the meelkman lazy? He should throw the meelk right onto the doorsteps, like the leetle paper-boy!” So she started delivering the milk, sailing the bottles through the predawn to shatter on the porches, and Johnny was too awestruck with laughter and love to stop her. They started to alternate bottles, then switched to one side of the street each, odd Lupe and even Johnny, until he finally picked her up and carried her to the Continental, not so much to call a halt as to parade her.
We put her to bed, stuck a mop and bucket in the trunk, bought a crate of milk and returned to Sunset Plaza Drive, where Tarzan and Cheeta spent the morning mopping up a couple of dozen porches, apologizing and signing autographs. That was the way it happened. I’m not quite sure if the story has a point, except to show that he was a naughty boy and a good boy, but she was just a wicked child. Perhaps you’d rather he hadn’t thrown the bottles in the first place? But I prefer it that two things happened rather than nothing. Life, you know? Life adhered to him. The other point of the story is that he loved Lupe Vélez.
Tarzan Finds a Son! came out in June 1939, and within two weeks his complicated divorce from Lupe was made final. Jane might have annexed the escarpment, but in Hollywood he was now as free as a… as free as a human. For the first time, there was nobody to steal his attention or time away from me, a fact I relished during the ten minutes between his telling me “Hey, sport, guess what? I got divorced since I last saw ya!” and introducing an indistinct and very young woman standing on the porch of an unfinished house in Brentwood next door to Joan Crawford’s as “My beautiful bride!”
Yes, I’ll always treasure those Golden Minutes, as I think of them.
He’d met Beryl Scott, his fourth “lifetime partner,” on the golf course at Pebble Beach during a pro-am, which enabled Red Skelton to cause much merriment at their reception by referring to her as the only “birdie” Johnny’d picked up that whole day! With a name like that, you’d expect her to be a movie star, but in fact she was the daughter of a wealthy rug merchant from San Francisco. She already had a career of her own as a Socialite, but she claimed to be willing to sacrifice this for the sake of the family Johnny wanted to build with her. I learned this that same afternoon, as she confided it to la Crawford over some stiff ones at the poolside “nook.” Johnny was doing lengths of breast stroke, his head high out of the water in the famous style he’d originally developed in an attempt to stay clear of the excrement floating in the Chicago River.
“Aaah, this is civilized, isn’t it?” Beryl kept sa
ying. “These midges absolutely seem to adore me,” she added, murdering one and not even eating it. “They don’t like Johnny at all, but they love me.” This was the exact opposite of the truth, I felt.
“That’s Max Factor, isn’t it, my dear? You’ve certainly hit it off, the way I do my lips. A lot of girls get it wrong because they don’t have Max around to help.”
“Max didn’t, uh, I mean to say, I’ve never actually met Max.”
“You can do this afternoon, if you like, between a quarter of four and ten after, if that’s convenient for you.” Joan gazed down like a sea eagle at Johnny, salmoning away happily in his new pool. Beryl’s face, I thought, was bafflingly characterless: the only thing I could seem to keep in focus was in fact the Crawfordesque “hunter’s bow” of her lips. “And then I’ll let you get on with starting that family of yours. Is he your first? Fuck, I mean, not husband.” “Um, nooo, of course not,” said Beryl. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“Well, you’ve done the easy bit. But this town’s awfully hard on marriages. Get that family started now and you’ll always have something in the bank should the weather turn stormy, God forbid. Get something banked.”
So a year later, three months behind Joan’s schedule (and Joan was a stickler for schedules, allotting as she did forty-five minutes for sexual intercourse each afternoon), Tarzan found another son. Johnny, he was called. During that period, he was working with Esther Williams in the Aquacade up at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco Bay, and Beryl moved back there to have the child.
I didn’t see him at all over the course of that year, but I was run off my feet anyway, what with having to wake up, eat, defecate and occasionally move across my cage at MGM. I went on the wagon and quit smoking, allowing myself to slip up only when I was outside the cage. I cut down on my American food and tried to eat a little more healthily. I went out for lunch with Niv, and to a couple of orgies up at Lionel Atwill’s. I even had a dozen or so children of my own during an enjoyable trip out to Luna Park with the unchanging Gately. (Not once, ever, did my coach crack a smile.) And whenever I saw L.B. slaloming between the Rebs and the Cossacks and the pirates down the passageway in front of our cage, I tried to get across to him my wish that he should loan me out to another studio if there was no Tarzan picture imminent. I wanted to “work,” but the great alphas had very little interest in what their stars wanted. L.B. was deaf to my pant-hoots, showed no sign of hearing me, and I began to chafe again at the whole Dream Factory way of doing things.