Me Cheeta

by Cheeta

  From Bagandi to Palmeria the epidemic raged, infecting the humans. It took the light out of their eyes, the joy out of their gestures, the very life from them. They were listless and stupid-seeming, like animals too long in rehab. They went through their motions without conviction or interest. It was like a Palm Springs sky—I’m doing a lot of skyscapes at the moment—blue in the morning, and the next time you look, it’s gone all hazy and colorless. What could I do? I was immune—the disease only attacked humans—but there was no cure, or hope for one. All I could do to help was provide a bit of life around them. While the Case of the Missing Mango or whatever it was dragged incoherently on I scurried around like a maniac, using cigars, fruit, capuchin monkeys, cobras in baskets, musical instruments, binoculars, fishing rods, whatever came to hand, in a desperate attempt to keep morale up, since I had a nasty feeling that the moment I stopped the whole thing might just collapse out of sheer pointlessness.

  A long time ago, when Tarzan was young, I’d been there to help him through when he was lonely. Now I was there to stop him from dying of boredom. Look at the DVDs and you can see for yourself. Look in my eyes, and you’ll see that there’s still a spark of life there, holding on, while all around me it’s just… draining away. Look in my eyes and you’ll see I’m the only one who still believes in it. And you want to ban real animals from the screen, do you, Dr. Goodall? Well, I come from the school of acting that says you have to mean it.

  Worse, I began to worry that the same kind of thing was happening to my human friends in Hollywood. Out on the town with Johnny, Bo Roos and the other cocktail-circuit regulars, I felt the same weird lessening in them. We told more jokes, we drank more, we bet more, we were sweller, broader (all that booze), more similar, more numerous, more American, more settled, had more to protect, more to lose. We seemed less surprised at the world. We knew what was going to happen more. It was only a touch of the Arcadian epidemic, to be sure, but it was there, I thought, an invisible smog that lay over “Bo’s boys”—Johnny, Fred MacMurray, Frank Borzage, Red Skelton, Duke and the rest of the gang we par-tied with at the Tropics on Rodeo Drive, or Cocoanut Grove, or Don the Beachcomber’s, or Christian’s Hut on Catalina Island, or the Pirate Shack, or all those other Hollywood nightspots that kept trying to tell you you were in paradise.

  And in the mansion on Rockingham Avenue, when I finally got to return there for a spot of caddying, the invisible smog lay thickest, the pauses were longest, the sense of aimlessness strongest.

  “How were the girls, darling?” Johnny might sally.

  “Oh, the usual… Phyllis is moving,” Beryl would riposte.

  “Phyllis is moving? Where?” he countered, quick as a flash.

  “I told you,” she topped him.

  “Did you?” he noted wryly.

  “Yes, I did. To West Hollywood,” she promptly retorted.

  “Oh, yes, because of the thing with the basement,” he teased.

  “What thing with the basement?” she inquired archly. “You said they had a thing with their… Oh, sorry, Phyllis,” he came back.

  “Who’s got a thing with their basement?” she quipped.

  “I don’t know,” he flashed. And, well, there was no way back from that!

  Yet even with Red Skelton scintillating away—“Hey, I was reading my marriage certificate this morning: I was hoping I’d find an expiration date!;” “Tell me something, Johnny boy, why did the Mexican push his wife off the cliff?”—even with the sort of prompting to complain about wives which was almost instinctive among that crowd, I never heard Johnny once criticize Beryl in public. He knew that if he started, he’d never be able to stop. I think because his own father had walked out on him, he couldn’t bear the idea of doing the same to Johnny Jr. and Baby Wendy. So he stifled his resentment and made the best of his unhappiness and the two of them continued together in the smog, politely, distantly, lifelessly, lovelessly.

  I had no intention of interfering. I’m endlessly told that I’ve made millions of people happy, but on the other hand, you can’t make someone happy. You can’t stick your oar in and think it’s a magic wand. If I did eventually rescue him from his marriage, it was really more by accident than design.

  I believe I’ve already mentioned that mole-gassing, slug-suffocating, rat-decapitating Beryl didn’t like animals. Plenty of animals were harmed during the making of Beryl Scott’s home and wardrobe. She had no tolerance for spiders or moths or a panicking bat (“a rat with wings”) trying to escape from her mansion of misery—and, of course, she had a particular aversion to critically acclaimed world-famous primates. Any rats without wings had long been exterminated from Rockingham Avenue, but she maintained her vendetta with a permanent scattering of traps. She claimed to be afraid that rats would attack the babies, to which I’d counterclaim, without meaning to sound at all critical of some very dear human friends, that fewer children of Hollywood marriages have had their lives destroyed by rats than by mothers.

  These rat-traps were the only thing I’d ever heard him lose his temper over with her. “Our house is full of traps, Beryl,” he once said, poetically, having found one in the cabinet where the Triscuits and little cans of olives were kept. “I can’t keep track of where they are!”

  “Well, you have to keep moving them so the mice don’t work it out!”

  “I can’t work it out, how the hell are the mice gonna figure it out?”

  “Don’t raise your voice at me, please, John.”

  “I’m sorry. But they’re only mice.”

  “Mice and rats. They spread disease and are a danger to children,” Beryl said, making them sound like Joan Crawford. “And you eat too many Triscuits.”

  It was also her main line of attack against me—that I, muchloved family entertainer, was liable to get so drunk or forgetful that I would just flip out and decide to eat her children.

  “It’s too big for you to control, John. If it should decide to go for either of them, you wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s Cheeta! He’s not gonna ‘go’ for anything, are you, Cheets? You’re just being silly.”

  “Am I? It went for Maureen O’Hara, didn’t it?” Johnny and I said nothing. “You always told me it bit Maureen O’ ’Sullivan. It attacked Marlene. It went for Joan right in front of me.” Yeah, yeah, you can always make something sound bad if you’re determined to. “And there’s that terrible story about what it’s supposed to have done with Dolores del Rio.”

  “That’s complete bull, and you know it.”

  That story is complete bull, incidentally. What really happened between Dolores and me was much more complicated, and rather beautiful, but I shan’t be discussing it in this memoir.

  “Don’t swear, John, please. I’m just not comfortable if the children are in the garden at the same time as the chimp. That’s reasonable enough, isn’t it?” Her top lip was still overbrimmed by its hunter’s bow—sometimes, post-Crawford, it seemed as if the mouth of every woman in Hollywood was bridling at something distasteful. That apart, I could never remember her face. I was surprised she could remember her own face and wondered whether in fact she couldn’t, and that was the reason for the hunter’s bow. “And I think it’s asking for trouble to feed it beer,” she added.

  So, if I was to be allowed over at all, I couldn’t smoke (and this was the forties!) or misbehave and had to be chaperoned at all times in case I became a slobbering baby-eating monster from the jungle of doom. Listen, I’ve had chances galore to eat human babies, and I’ll take a Taco Bell Beef Combo Burrito any time. Or, better, if Don’s feeling flush, a Big ‘n’ Tasty Happy Meal. So don’t flatter yourselves.

  The last time I saw her I guess she must have been a few months pregnant with their second daughter, Heidi. Johnny and Bo Roos picked me up from Selig Park and drove me over. They had business to do with the pool house: renovations, a conversion, something or other intended to make money. What with the Gaboni gardeners, the nurses whom little Johnny and
Wendy were coming to know better than they knew their mother, and all the decorative minerals, cars and mole-exterminators needed to fill the abyss of marital unhappiness, the Mansion of Misery gobbled down money as eagerly as Esther Williams did the male sexual organ.

  I liked Bö Roos. He was a good pal to Johnny, a rotund, nattily mustached, center-of-the-room sort of guy who referred to his clients as his “kids.” He kept the kids on an allowance to stop them bankrupting themselves, lent them money himself when they were short, tried to get as much as he could out of their pockets and safely invested in real estate, and deducted their whole lives against income tax. So they didn’t even have to think about money, the kids signed for everything and Bo dealt with the bills and delivered lectures on fiscal irresponsibility when necessary. Like me and most actors, Johnny had no idea what money really was, but Beryl did, and did not appreciate being kept on a leash. That’s why I liked Bo: she didn’t.

  Well, anyway, Johnny and he were talking about converting the pool house, and I was getting a little bit restive down there since my contributions were limited to cheeping and tugging at Johnny’s hand. I’m a comedian, not an architect.

  “Sorry, Bo. Stop being a pest, Cheets, willya, for one minute?” he said, a little testily.

  I obediently wandered off across the lawn where Johnny Jr., who’s dead now, was toddling along on his own. I remember it was a super-vivid day. Helen Twelvetrees’s copper beeches were blazing red, the lawn was achingly green, the sky was as purply blue as a black grape, and little Johnny was just golden. I knuckled over toward him and he toppled over onto his backside. What was so infuriating about Beryl’s prohibition was that she never suspected how much pleasure I might glean from Johnny’s children, how much the funny fat wrists of his son might twist my heart.

  We looked at each other—he had his father’s eyes, without doubt, and the same unclouded gaze. He held my stare equably and I extended a hairy black-fingered paw to touch the child’s blotchy cheeks, fascinated by the smoothness of him, his juicy density. It was time—he did look good enough to eat. Dear little thing. A memory skittered like a blue-tailed monkey just out of my mind’s fingers: of a helpless infant and a circled crowd of us apes looking down on it, wondering what to do. Had I made that up? Where had it come from?

  At this moment, a scream—the maximum scream she was capable of—came from the Mole-Gasser on the terrace, followed by a smaller scream from a nurse reading a paperback book on a plaid blanket fifty yards away, and I was soon being chased around the lawn and loudly slandered. She had told Johnny how many times? She had expected better from Bo…

  “But nothing happened, dear. You ought to have seen Cheeta with Johnny Sheffield when he was a little lad. He likes children.”

  “Will you allow me to talk, John? I’ve had just about enough of this darn monkey,” Beryl said, not knowing what she was saying, what tender feelings she might be trampling on. “I don’t want to see it in the house again. You only bring it out so you can pretend you’re Tarzan, anyway.” She wouldn’t look at me. Johnny Jr. was screaming. “This is the last time. All right?”

  “All right,” Johnny said. “Me sorry.”

  “Just put it in the back of the Ford until you’re done with Mr. Roos,” she said, with perhaps half a hope that I might bake to death inside the car.

  “No, we’re done down there,” Bo said. “We’ll go up to the terrace and keep an eye on him.”

  Suddenly I was something that needed to be kept an eye on. So the two of them sat talking human complexities on the sun-trapping terrace with a bowl of Triscuits and a crate of beers, while I polished off a couple in an attempt to calm my panic. “All right,” he’d said. I paced around on the leash of their peripheral vision, unjustly traduced, wrongly accused, and thinking, Where is this going to end? If she can ban me from the house, can she tell him it’s time he grew up and stopped taking a chimpanzee out on the town? “All right,” he’d said. After Jennifer Jones had finished working with John Huston on We Were Strangers, she gave him a female chimpanzee as a wrap present. Huston’s wife, Evelyn Keyes, hated it. She gave him an ultimatum: “John, either the chimp goes or I do.” “Honey… I’m afraid it’s you,” Huston said. (God bless you always, John. He was a famously Herculean contributor to the Project, tirelessly working to make whole swathes of California safe for the deer and rabbits that mountain lions preyed on.) But Huston liked hurting women almost as much as he loved animals: it was more of an irresistible joke than anything. “All right,” Johnny had said. In less than half an hour, Bo and he would be finished. I mooched over to the table and filched another couple of cold ones from their crate. Survive, survive, survive. Oh, sure. How? Think. The reason the Mexican pushed his wife off a cliff was tequila.

  Quietly, on cushioned knuckles, I slipped away into the dark, into the house of traps, purple-edged suns exploding in my vision, three-quarters blind. The last time I’d been inside, there’d been a rat-trap lurking behind the trophy-laden piano, and there it was still, on the off-chance, perhaps, that the mice hadn’t worked it out yet. What mice? They were all dead. I fished the trap out with delicate chimpanzee hands and, holding it with the reverence I would reserve for an honorary Oscar, should I ever be so fortunate as to receive one, moved on three limbs toward the walnut-paneled cocktail cabinet. Inside, from bottom to top, a couple of shelves of cut glass, a couple of shelves of the hard stuff, a shelf of humidors and cigar boxes and, highest of all, the usual miscellany of mixers with stained labels, rejected liqueurs, coasters, ice buckets, cans of olives, cans of nuts and a box of Triscuits. I clambered up with toeand finger-tips, pushed the Triscuits to the back of the shelf, and as gently as Laurence Olivier handled the madness and depression of Vivien Leigh—no, even more gently than that—I deposited the trap in front of it. It was terribly alert, unbreathing, like traps must be. I closed the walnut door and insinuated myself back into the sunlight.

  I’d not been missed. I sank a refreshing lager or two for my nerves and sidled over to the table to savor a snack. “Cheets, come on,” Johnny said. “Don’t be greedy. Leave some for the rest of us.” He pushed the bowl of Triscuits away from me with his beautiful hand. Long fingers with big cuticle half-moons; I brushed them as I snatched the bowl back and guzzled the remainder of the biscuits. They tasted like dust.

  “You little trash can!” he said half admiringly. “Sorry about my co-star’s manners. Oughta be ashamed of yourself, Cheets. I’ll go get us some more.”

  “No need, no need, I’m fine.”

  “Go ooon, I can’t drink this without.”

  “We’ve gotta be going in a minute if we’re gonna catch Merle.”

  “Well, it’s good to have some out anyway. And I know somebody else around here who might fancy another one or two.” Johnny patted my head as he got up: I felt the wooden Illinois State Athletics Club ring he wore rub against my skull. There was still time to stop him, but you know, she was only after his money in the first place, and she didn’t like animals.

  Dearest readers, gentlest jailers, sweet humans: I’ve lived longer than any chimpanzee has ever dreamed of living because of you. There are thousands of us in sanctuaries all over America, rehabilitated, well fed, unthreatened by death, because of you. Not all of them has someone like Don to keep their diabetes in check with twice-daily jabs, to keep their stress levels down, to keep them occupied and stimulated and frame their reviews. But there are thousands of Jennas and Myras and PJs out there, chopping up fruit, measuring dosages. It’s all thanks to you.

  And if you’re talking about animals rather than just chimps, the mind boggles at the numbers you’ve saved and the even greater numbers you’re trying so desperately to save. Rats with wings, rats with tusks, rats with horns, rats with beaks, rats with fur striped for camouflage, rats with iridescent breast feathers, rats with baleen plates, rats with ingenious echo-location systems, rats with speckled flanks and transcontinental navigating powers, rats with shells, rats with antlers, rats with
crests, rats with manes, rats with retractable tongues, rats with iconic dorsal fins, rats with miraculously buoyant and heat-conserving fur the color of lemon ice cream: all these rats and many, many more you try so hard to cup delicately in your hands and usher to safety. To show deliberate cruelty to a human being, to hurt those gently cupping hands—and, yes, I’ve had a couple of regrettable tiffs with fellow-actors, but that was just Hollywood—would be unthinkable enough. But to hurt the gentle hands of the best of humans, whom I loved and worshipped, was not easy to do. You understand? I’m using understatement here. But I didn’t have any option. Don’t judge me too harshly, gentle readers: I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I don’t judge you harshly.

  Well, anyway, it was even more horrible than I’d expected. He came out of the french windows already screaming, and I thought at first that the trap had actually taken his fingers off, there was so much blood flowing from the armpit where he’d hidden his hand. Even in the worst rows with Lupe, I had never seen Johnny raging like this. The argument started out unbelievably bad and got worse. She had the servants lined up and interrogated to no effect. At one point she blamed me.

  “Isn’t it possible the monkey moved it?”

  Bo stuck up for me. “It’s been here all the time, Beryl. Look, it’s finished off six bottles of beer, see? How could it have been gone?”

  He shouldn’t have got involved. Beryl began letting fly with dark hints about what her bridge group had “heard” about him and the Beverly Management Corporation, and the whole thing lurched into a deeper nastiness. Bo was a thief, she was a bitch, Johnny was a fool, I was a violent, dirty, smelly animal. It cleared the air all right. With a raised and clawed right hand, she bore down on me where I was hunched on the terrace-table and I leapt, still holding the beer I’d been soothing my anxiety with, into her helpless embrace. The more she scratched and tore at me, the tighter I clung, and the tighter I clung (Johnny’s baby between us) the more conciliatory and loving I seemed, and the more unfair, the uglier her hatred for me appeared.