Me Cheeta

by Cheeta

  “It’s a gilded cage,” John Huston, that animal-lover par excellence, once told me and Evelyn Keyes. “Glamour, glamour, glamour, and underneath—control, control, control.” He wasn’t wrong; and during my layoff I began to recall just how many times I’d heard fellow dreamers talk about “escaping” Hollywood. I think, what with the escarpment having changed so, and Johnny being out of town, I went a little mad for a time.

  It was in this mutinous frame of mind that I accompanied Errol Flynn and John Barrymore up to their house on Mulholland Drive in the spring of 1940. Flynn wanted me to do him a favor and help him out with some prank involving the WAMPAS girl he’d left asleep under the mirror attached to the ceiling of his bedroom. I was to take his place, so that when the starlet woke, I would be snoring beside her in lieu of, etc., etc. To help me into character and calm any performance-related nerves, Errol and John kept urging me to take another nip of Canadian Club—they were practically pouring it down my throat—so, I’m sorry to say, I can’t remember how the evening or the prank panned out.

  In fact, it was late the next day when Errol woke me, brushing aside my embarrassed attempts to apologize for the vomit and excrement I’d left on his sheets—too much of a gentleman to mention it—and carried me down the slope behind the house toward some low buildings where a number of humans were congregated. Stables and garages, I saw, as we neared them.

  “Chris!” Errol shouted. “Chris!” A young man detached himself from the crowd pressed under the stable’s eaves. “Drive this thing back to Metro, wouldja? They’ve been calling me about it all day.” Typically generous of Errol to arrange transport for me, but at the same time I remember the plunging dismay I felt at having to return to the “gilded cage.”

  “Just ten minutes, Mr. Flynn? They’re starting up in here.”

  “What, already? Shit, what time is it?” Flynn said. “Oh, fuckin’ Christ, don’t let me be too late….”

  We pushed through the crowd of humans into the depths of the stable where, in a recess in the floor, a huge alpha-male dog was rolling over and over; no, it was two dogs, rolling over and over in a blur and a spray of blood. Poor Errol, who was so famously distraught after those two hundred horses had died during the Warner Brothers’ charge: he could hardly forgive himself for not getting there in time. You might ask—why didn’t someone intervene? Surely the swashbuckling Flynn…? Or Barrymore, who was at the front of the crowd, or Frank Borzage? Well, this wasn’t the movies. You weren’t there. There was no chance that any of the humans could do anything to save those dogs from themselves. They tried to get as close as they could but the dogs were in a trance of death, untouchable, dragging entrails and veins and still berserking, and the humans could do nothing but stand there, impotently hollering, and let Nature take its terrible course. It took a long time. Neither dog could be saved.

  It shook me up, all right. How many times did I need reminding that I was one of the lucky, lucky few that the Project had been able to save? This dream of yours, to keep the animals of the world from destroying each other: it was too easy for some self-absorbed and pampered star like me, lolling away his days inside his Hollywood bubble, to forget about the real world out there. The question is, what’s in it for you? Or is it just part of what it means to be human, to protect and serve us? Anyway, let’s remember Errol like that, at his most debonair, before drink and drugs and a pathological sex addiction founded on misogyny turned him into the pathetic shell of a man he later became, too palsied even to be able to hold without spilling the drinks that were killing him.

  I never again grumbled about my contract with Metro. L.B. was tireless in helping explain things to stars who had similar misgivings (which we all did at some point: actors!). He had an arm pretty much permanently around a dreamer’s shoulder, clarifying how they’d be nothing if not for him, how if they couldn’t play by his rules then it might not be possible to play at all, how important that new picture was with an expensive divorce coming up. Even Johnny needed a bit of guidance, and you often heard him quote L.B.’s advice back: “Who the hell do you think you are, you bum? Lillian Gish? Get it through your head—you’re Tarzan! You’re never going to be anybody but Tarzan! I’m not going to put you in any other pictures ever, you understand? So I don’t want to hear any more horseshit about ‘acting lessons’! Tarzan not act! Or I can get Buster Crabbe for half the price and nobody’ll know the difference, and you can go back to selling swim trunks.”

  He was paying Johnny $2,500 a week, and if he wasn’t working between Tarzan-Cheeta pictures, then it was merely sensible for MGM to loan him out (at $5,000 a week) to Billy Rose for the Aquacade. So twice a day, seven days a week, four hundred miles away, amid forty-foot fountains and cascading “aqua-curtains,” he and seventy-two Aquabelles, the fifty-strong Fred Waring Glee Club Chorus, various Olympians, comedy divers, English Channel-swimmers, breath-holders and that inexcusable slander-ess and ingrate Esther Williams, the “Million-dollar Mermaid” (or “Two-bit Dugong,” as I know her), all dedicated themselves to the praise of water, the element that hated me, that turned me away.

  I heard little fragments around the commissary. Three months after little Johnny was born, Beryl sued for divorce. She claimed she never saw her husband, which I thought was pretty rich considering she must have been seeing him several times a month. But I knew from Lupe that an annual accusation of “extreme cruelty” was part of the give and take of every marriage. Beryl wasn’t out of the picture yet.

  The summer of ’41 we were back together for Tarzan’s Secret Treasure, which wasn’t, as I’d initially hoped, some Gaboni maiden Tarzan had become involved with on his trips away from the Happy House, but a seam of gold the Boy had discovered on the escarpment. His mother’s son in every respect, the Boy was intrigued by “civilin… civinil…” (aww, ain’t it cute?)

  “Civilization, dear.”

  “Tell me some more about civilization, Mother!”

  “Oh, they have airplanes—houses with wings that fly and they carry people through the air. They go faster than anything you’ve ever seen.”

  “Faster than Tarzan?”

  “Mm… faster than Tarzan, faster than the wind. But just you forget about civilization, darling.” Tarzan had arrived and she was having to rein in. “Our world here is far more lovely and exciting than the outside world, I promise you.” Thus Mark Antony manipulated the mob on the steps of the Capitol.

  Naturally the Boy was soon off with a gold nugget or two to buy an airplane and inadvertently bring doom in the form of white men crashing down over us once again. Ho-hum. What the hey? We needed something to shake us up, anyway—the new al fresco dining area was like the fried-chicken table at L.B.’s fiftieth birthday/Fourth of July clambake. It was almost impassable with ostrich eggs, smoked wildebeest hams, catfish caviar and fruits of the forest. We’d installed a refrigerator the size of a Gaboni hut under the cold spring and had a new bain-marie system in the hot spring. But this is what happens when the love goes, when there is more time than love. What happens? The consecration of lunch.

  Mmm, this is wonderful… how’s yours?

  I knew that something was wrong from the cars. The faithful old Continental had disappeared and been replaced with three different cars, which he alternated as if he wasn’t quite comfortable in any of them. I’d never heard him express reverence for an automobile—he didn’t really understand or even like anything that wasn’t alive in some way—and the cars I took to be his inarticulate attempt to express something: happiness, perhaps, which he’d never needed to state before. Or unhappiness? How could you tell what was meant—other than that if you were speaking in cars something was already wrong? I noticed another couple in the car pool as we rolled up to a house four times the size of the Brent-wood home a couple of weeks into the dreaming of Secret Treasure This was up on Rockingham Avenue, out by Mandeville Canyon—nice address. Looking down from the mansion’s terrace, it was Johnny’s domain as far as the eye could see. The lawn
that rolled your eye down to the inevitable rectangle of turquoise was as densely iridescent as a hummingbird’s breast. If you watched very closely you could see the dents left in it by the gardeners’ footsteps disappear slowly back into its sheen, like the marks of fingers on a human arm. The pool house and its chaises, the tennis and badminton courts, the young maze and the gazebo all waited at the lawn’s end with a doggy kind of servility, looking forward to being filled with memories. Turn your head, and blazing a trail to the summerhouse was an avenue of maples and exactly a dozen copper beeches, which Clark Twelvetrees had had transplanted there as a gift to his wife Helen before he drank himself to death in bitterness at her success.

  Helen Twelvetrees—no? No idea? And that’s a name I once told myself no one would ever forget. Over the course of the thirties, Helen’s profile declined dramatically (though it was still a while before she’d be killed by a handful of sleeping pills) and she had to give up the house—to Charles Laughton and his wife Elsa (The Bride of Frankenstein) Lanchester. But with Elsa refusing to bear Charlie’s children on account of his homosexuality (though the inimitable Maureen O’Hara always claimed Elsa’s own litany of abortions was the real reason) Charlie was thrown into despair and the Laughtons moved on, leaving the Weissmullers to inherit this little slice of paradise, so richly steeped in Hollywood memories.

  “Tarzan bring Cheeta! Meet real-life Jane!” Johnny shouted across the terrace, to where Beryl was sitting playing bridge (a sort of female variant of bluffing or packing) with other young females under a tasseled umbrella. I contributed a brief pant-hoot. Beryl waved an acknowledgment. “Go fix yourself a stinger, darling,” she said, though I was already on the linen-draped bar trying, essentially, to communicate the same thing. “I’ve met Cheeta, remember? The day it attacked Joan?” Well, hardly, I thought.

  “Well, hardly,” said Johnny. “Joan frightened her, was all. Him, I mean. Hey—what’s the definition of a Jimmy Cagney love scene?”

  “What?”

  “When he lets the other guy live!” Johnny staggered gut-shot across the terrace toward the tight smiles of the bridge players. thought it was funny. “My wonderful wife,” he said, kissing her nothingy-brown macaquelike hair.

  “My wonderful husband,” she said.

  After a while he said, “I thought maybe I’d hit a few balls.”

  “Well, we’ll watch you. Keep an eye on that left arm!”

  “Left arm straight. Shoulders relaxed like a pendulum. Mmm, these stingers are good!”

  “Yes, aren’t they heavenly? Rita’s specials. Keep that chest opened. Soft hands, hard wrists. Three hearts.”

  “Okay, coach.” Johnny demonstrated a swing and held the follow-through. “Aaaaahhheeyyeeeyyeeaahheeyeeyeeeaaaaaah” he added apologetically, for my benefit, I think. I came running, anyway. Not because I particularly yearned to practice short irons with him, but because at that moment, for the first—though not the last—time, I felt that he needed me.

  Did I ever mention that he loved Lupe Vélez? Whatever I thought of the adulterous canicidal bitch, I’d never doubted that he’d loved her, just as she, in her own tormented way, had loved him. It had never crossed my mind to be jealous or to wish her away, because she was capable of making him happy. But here with Beryl there wasn’t anything—there was just… nothing at all. I knew it after two minutes on the terrace, because I’m a chimp and I could smell it; and I can read the language of human bodies. I could, in the days when the humans I met were standing up rather than lying in hospital beds, read that bent left arm, those unrelaxed shoulders, those closed chests. I could read the sexlessness of Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck’s marriage in Barbara’s quick tense wrists, the pathological compulsion to deceive in Esther Williams’s laugh, the deep sense of intellectual inferiority that Kate Hepburn’s face was continually, heroically, trying to conceal. Actually, what am I talking about? Anybody could read those things! But there was something stolid in Beryl’s movements that told an observant eye how dull she found her own body. It was like the cautiousness of age. He had married somebody he couldn’t play with. And that was all Johnny ever really wanted: someone he could play with. I knew how his hands itched to pick up ankles and wheelbarrow-race women or boys or even other adult males across the seventeenth green. I knew how his feet itched to creep up behind humans unaware of his presence, to lift ’em off their feet in a bear hug. He wanted someone to climb him while he held their shoes high above their head. He could sublimate it into sexual intercourse, but all he ever really wanted was to play.

  Beryl liked to play bridge. Her other sports, I’d come to learn, were canasta and pinochle. The high point of their non-sexual play together would have come on a Pebble Beach fairway within the first ten minutes of their relationship, I guessed, and would have consisted of Johnny enfolding her from behind, reassuring and warm, demonstrating with his huge hands folding over hers certain aspects of a good swing. Looking at Beryl, you might suppose that’d be the high point of their non-non-sexual play too. She’d have giggled a lot during her tutorial, and Johnny would have mistaken her nervousness for a sense of humor, or at any rate, it would have done to cover up the fact that she had even less of a sense of humor than Chaplin or Red Skelton—some kind of absolute zero of humor.

  I had never seen him look alone before. At full tilt I sprang off the bar and knuckled across the terrace, leaped to his waist and wriggled up into the violin-space under his chin. He lifted his stinger high above his head, playfully, where I couldn’t quite get at it, and with his left hand he smoothed my fur. “Ah, Cheets, Cheets,” he said, switching his drink from right hand to left as I got close to it. “Ain’t I the luckiest guy in the world?”

  From over the wall, as if to affirm this, came the voice of the tour guide—“Twelve after four! Bang on schedule!” said Beryl—gently enveloping us like the mist from a crop-spraying plane.

  “… the Hunchback of Notre Dame himself and the Bride of Frankenstein: Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Today it does service as one heck of a luxury treehouse for Tarzan himself, Olympic gold medal-winning swim champ Johnny Weissmuller, and his very own real-life Jane.” All of us on the terrace held ourselves still to listen: we formed an idyllic tableau. “Johnny and his glamorous wife Beryl were blessed last summer with a little Boy of their own, and decided they needed a Jungle Hut big enough to…”

  Yeah, that was just about right, I thought, as Johnny pitched a bucket of Top Flites toward me across the liquid lawn, which Beryl had already warned him not to allow me to defecate upon. “His very own real-life Jane” was just about right. At Rockingham Avenue we might as well have been back on the escarpment, bowed under Jane’s tyranny, with everything clenched and perfect and simply marvelous; where everything was in its right place and the two empty-eyed adults were so desperate to assure each other of what a paradise they had.

  On the escarpment itself, where we might as well have been on Rockingham Avenue, I was seriously beginning to wonder whether Jane was having a breakdown of sorts.

  “Jane like Tarzan?” he asked one afternoon, handing her a propitiatory orchid after another marathon lunch.

  Cleverly she evaded the direct response he was craving. “What woman wouldn’t like a husband who brings her orchids?”

  “There’s a whole valley of orchids just across the river,” the Boy jeeringly observed.

  “I know, darling, but out in civilization they don’t grow that way,” she tinkled. “You have to be very rich to have them. You don’t realize what a very wealthy man your father is.”

  “Who—Tarzan?”

  “Yes. He has everything any man could want. Everything.”

  She just wouldn’t lay off with the propaganda—drip, drip, fucking drip, like she was trying to mesmerize him. And, silly me, there I was thinking that Miriam Hopkins had had a point up at Atwill’s when she had guided Fernando Lamas’s sexual organ into her anal tract and breathed, “That’s what you men really fucking want, don’t yo
u?” In fact, I remember very well the list of the things Fernando went on to claim that he wanted, all of which he persuasively emphasized were “normal—what any man would want.” I’m prepared to bet my entire stash of cigarettes that Jane was not providing these up at the Treehouse of Tidiness. Dutifully, slightly behind the beat, he picked her up and swung her around.

  “Tarzan have Jane.”

  “Ooooh! Akhahahkhahka!” she said. Transcribing Jane’s laugh isn’t easy—it tinkled like base metal. “Ooooh! You have Jane, all right, and you’re going to have me in a thousand pieces in a minute if you’re not careful!”

  !?, I was thinking. Like: !? The escarpment had stopped being a dream some while back; by Secret Treasure it had become a fullblown nightmare. I tried to keep my head down and show a bit of loyalty, but Jane’s ever-vigilant hostility toward me had now given birth to a new strategy—no matter how faithful or stoic I might act, she had me typed as a “naughty” chimp, a mischief-maker.

  For example, I’m struggling toward the dining area with a couple of hard-boiled ostrich eggs still steaming from the hot spring. Because I can’t hold both of them at once I’ve got one on my head and I’m trying to nudge the other across the lawn with my feet. “Now, Cheeta,” gesturing with a knife, “you bring those eggs over here and no monkey business! No monkey business, Cheeta! Now, come on, do you hear? Hurry up!” What the hell did she… what “monkey business”? You’ll have to watch it yourself, I guess. Or: I’m enjoying a grape during a brief break in my duties. “Cheeta! You’ve had enough grapes! Come on, help with the dishes!” The unfairness, the lack of logic, the drip, drip, fucking drip…. “Take the dishes down to the river and wash them. And don’t break them!”