by Cheeta
Within a couple of minutes, Bo, Johnny and I were driving very fast down Rockingham Avenue on the way to Cedars-Sinai, and I never saw the place again. He must have gone back there two or three more times but never when she was there. The pool house never got converted. The whole damn house of cards just collapsed like a house of cards.
I’m ashamed. I feel ashamed, and that should count for something, shouldn’t it? But it was a very unhappy marriage, and what I later learned about Beryl’s vindictiveness and disregard for her own children’s welfare … well, it’s documented elsewhere. She might as well have eaten them herself. Much later, apparently, she married a very nice man called Königshofer, and was reasonably happy for a time, although I heard that she drank.
I was reminded of that day with Beryl recently, when Don took me out visiting at the Palm Springs Eldercare Center.
“Oh, Don,” said the old lady we were sitting with, “don’t I get enough of the darn monkey?”
This was Don’s mother, who says crazy things from time to time. She claims, for instance, that she didn’t vote for Obama in November because he stole the nomination from her beloved Hillary. She says she voted for McCain—how crazy can you get? A lifelong Democrat on Bush III’s side? That’s just insane. Nobody in Palm Springs voted for McCain except Don’s mom. A number of people were pressuring Don to get me to campaign for Obama, but he’s told them it would be undignified and tacky, and animals should be above politics. Besides, I am above politics: I haven’t got a vote. Don didn’t vote for anyone, because he thinks they’re all as bad as each other.
The fact that Don’s mom occasionally says crazy things can come in handy sometimes, though. Six months ago she was around at the Casa de Cheeta for lunch on the deck. She and Don weren’t talking much—they have a selection of silences they like to work through, like cheeses—and it was a classic holding-something-back one that she broke.
“When I arrived earlier, Don,” she said, “Cheeta was smoking a cigarette in the garden.”
Don carefully laid down his utensil. I thought, Oh, shit. That’s that, then. If Don knew about my smoking there would be, to be brutally realistic, no possibility of ever enjoying a cigarette again. He’d find the stash in the flowerbed and I’d be screwed. It had to happen some time, but what unbelievably bad fucking luck, I was thinking. I put on an expression of perhaps overdone unconcern.
“Did you? OK. Hey, you know we sold over twenty paintings this week?”
“I’m not being mad, you know. He was sitting there smoking. Holding the cigarette upright and puffing away.”
“Mom, I’m sorry. But I really shouldn’t reinforce here. Look, how in the world could Cheeta possibly be smoking? Where would he get cigarettes? Where would he keep them? Think about it.”
Oh, you’re lucky, Cheeta, very lucky.
“Oh, God, oh, God, how can this be happening?” she said, and smashed her plate on the decking. “Fucking fucking fuck! Fuck! Why is this happening to me?”
Don’s mom has a very great deal of straight gray hair and a nose like a raptor’s, which Don hasn’t inherited, and she can be very frightening indeed when she’s having her troubles. I scooted back as fast as I could manage. Not so very fast, these days: I trundled back. Poor old Don was trying his best to soothe her but he knew the signs as well as I do, and in these moments she was liable to say hurtful things to him. That’s why family caregiving just isn’t a good idea if you can possibly afford another option. It can be tremendously distressing for the nonprofessional caregiver and those around them. The language you hear! The poor woman was swearing at her son, denigrating him horribly.
“Don’t touch me. I don’t need your help, Don. I’m not a monkey, you useless fuck. Why are you such a useless fuck, Don? Why do I never get to see my grandchildren? Where are my grandchildren?”
“Mom, you don’t have any grandchildren.”
Don’s mom had to laugh. Oh, boy, did she have to laugh at that! “I do know that. I’m not being crazy. I was just being horrible. I meant, ‘Where are my grandchildren?’ You know.” She was subsiding. “I was just being unkind. Oh, God, I was sure I saw Cheeta… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Don, I’m so sorry.”
And so was I. One way or the other, I seem to have made a habit of hurting women. She was fine again, though, and stayed to watch a bit of TCM with us in the den: Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo. There’s nothing like a classic movie in a situation like that: the humans were crying their eyes out.
An interesting question for me, though: where are my grandchildren? There’s young Jeeter, of course, who lives with us at the Sanctuary. Ex-showbiz, used to be a pretty good performer. He’s not a bad chimp, Jeeter, even if he is going through that rather wearying late-adolescent stage at the moment. Nearly killed me, actually, in 2004. But the rest, God knows where they are, or how many there are of them. If I engendered forty or fifty children at RKO, then I could have hundreds—I could have thousands of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are about ten thousand chimps in sanctuaries around America. OK, I’m a comedian, not a mathematician, but it raises the question, how many of them might be mine? A hundred? Half of them? Are they all me? Is it basically just me in a cage all over America?
Well, to return to my memoir of love and art set against the turbulent backdrop of the Second World War…. By the time we started work on 1945’s Tarzan and the Amazons, I could no longer kid myself that the dream of the escarpment was still alive. The dream was over, the truth was out: we were just a bunch of actors in a series of increasingly terrible films. Now, supposedly, we were in no danger. Even if Amazons and its 1946 follow-up Tarzan and the Leopard Woman were only second features—B’s, really—we were still being watched by hundreds of millions of humans on five continents. The received wisdom at RKO was that we could churn them out indefinitely.
I begged to differ. Slapping my hands against the crown of my head and backward-somersaulting in frustration and anxiety, I begged to fucking differ. One day soon, I worried, somebody was going to say: “This is too silly, too boring, I just don’t believe you.” The fan mail would fall below acceptable thresholds and we’d be doomed.
Rin Tin Tin—younger readers, you must have heard of Rinty!—Rin Tin Tin was a German shepherd pup rescued by (who else?) humans from a bombed-out town in France at the end of the First World War, brought to America and turned into an enormous star by Warner’s. Rinty was huge. He was bigger than me. Think of Lassie and cube it. He was known, you older humans may remember, as “The Dog That Saved Warner’s.” His pictures in the early twenties were so popular he kept the whole damn studio from going bankrupt—a pity in a way, since that meant another forty-odd years of the psychopathic Jack Warner. Well, you can go and visit him if you like, in the dog cemetery in Paris where he now lies. “Killed by the coming of sound”—that’s the other phrase you hear attached to Rin Tin Tin. 1927, The Jazz Singer; 1931 The Lightning Warrior, Rinty’s last; 1932, dead. If it could happen to Rinty, it could happen to me. You haven’t ever heard of him, have you, you younger readers? Have you? Younger readers? You know, I do hope I’m not talking to myself here.
Perhaps I worried too much. I was doing some of my best work. I was the last great remaining practitioner of silent screen comedy—I am the last great remaining practitioner of silent screen comedy!—and I was garnering more plaudits than ever. “Again the best thing in it is Cheta the chimpanzee” is highlighted on Variety’s review of Tarzan and the Amazons in the den.
More importantly, and kind of bewilderingly, she was back. The war was over, the Nazis defeated, and Jane returned from England in a spanking new beret and twinset outfit. The Boy and I said nothing, but Tarzan’s embarrassment about needing a new sexual partner was so strong that we had to go through an elaborate charade that this upbeat blond American woman called Brenda Joyce was actually his old Jane returned from nursing soldiers in Mayfair. We were old enough to be told the truth, I thought. Hey, you get lonely, you have needs
, it’s only human. Or perhaps the shame of having lost his one true love to “civilization” was too deep even to broach. Whichever it was, we respected him enough still to play along. Sure it’s “Jane,” Tarzan, sure it is. There was always this threat of loneliness on the escarpment that never went away. Loneliness and boredom—those were the ever-present threats.
As for Brenda—I mean, “Jane”—she fitted right in. “Ooh, if I’ve asked Tarzan once I’ve asked him a hundred times!” she complained, when our shower-bath broke during Tarzan and the Leopard Woman. “Tarzan, I’ve practically begged you to fix that shower and here you just sit! You’ve let the whole place go to rack and ruin….” Oh, yeah, he knew his type at least. So we defeated the Leopard Woman and helped the Amazons and foiled the Huntress (Tarzan and the Huntress, 1947) and it did seem as if there was a possibility that I’d been wrong and RKO was right, that we could keep this going, living on the memory of what we once were, solving jungle mysteries among the glazed, unrealistic citizens of Arcadia forever.
Lupe killed herself. Johnny’s divorce from Beryl stretched on forever in an undisentanglable wrangle over money. W. C. Fields was killed by his liver. Johnny bought a hotel called Hotel Los Flamingos in Acapulco, Mexico, with Bö Roos. Our President was killed by a wasting disease, but there was another one. Johnny made his one non-Tarzan attempt at Paramount, a flop called Swamp Fire. Television was on the horizon. Johnny began to develop quite a serious drinking habit. The Zippy the Chimp books started to appear and sell in the thousands. Johnny’s divorce stretched interminably on and on. Nothing much happened with me—for commercial reasons, I’m playing down the sitting-around-for-years-doing-nothing aspect of my life in this memoir. Then, one day early in 1948, Johnny introduced me to a tall, rather attractive blonde no older than his first wife, “Legs” Lanier, would have been when he’d married her in 1930, or Bobbe in ’31, or Lupe in ’33, or Beryl in ’39.
“Cheets! Come here and say hi to Allene. I got my damn divorce through so we’re gonna get married right away!”
Yes, I’ll always treasure that Golden Second, as I think of it. We were in Acapulco, in the lobby of the Hotel Los Flamingos. We were there because RKO had links with a Mexican studio, and Bo’s Los Flamingos idea had been such a hit that le tout Hollywood had taken to flying down on the six-hour flight from Los Angeles to this little port to fish, watch the high-divers at La Quebrada, drink the unbelievably addictive Coco Locos that Los Flamingos served up in hollow coconut shells and copulate with each other.
Le tout Hollywood was the usual suspects—Skelton, MacMurray, Wayne, Ward Bond, Frank Borzage, Rita and Orson, the awful Crosby, Rock Hudson, dangerous Lana Turner—and this meant that Los Flamingos never made a cent, since it was permanently filled with non-paying friends. Bo’s idea was brilliant in a different way—if you traveled to Mexico to check on an investment you had down there, the cost of the whole trip was deductible. Everybody was buying fractions of beach bars and flying down to “check on their investment.” You’d say it as you raised the glass to your lips: “Just checking on my investment.” Furthermore, the young Mexican government was falling over itself to encourage film companies to come and shoot under their romantic skies, on their sun-kissed beaches. Come and shoot any old trash—and the whole thing can be a tax break!
Thus was born Tarzan and the Mermaids, which Lesser decided was going to be something more than any old trash. The series needed a fillip, a reinvention, and Acapulco was going to provide the setting for Tarzan’s most spectacular adventure yet—on the lost island of Aquitania! The water kingdom.
So we were in the lobby of the Hotel Los Flamingos. Stuffed marlins were curving on the walls between the wooden wheels of old yachts. The Pacific, incentivized to be blue, was visible through the big adobe arch of the entrance. The girl stood with her hands neatly together, holding the strap of a leather bag: the posture of the bride on the top of a wedding cake. Johnny was wearing a hideous señorita-motif short-sleeved shirt and filling the place with happiness. He just never, never changed. I loved him. I’ll always love him.
I do realize I may have given the impression that I saw Johnny a little more often than I actually did over the years. Outside filming, I guess I’d only seen him on average a couple of times a year. Filming could go on for months, of course, but I was often not needed on the set. He was very fond of me and didn’t like the idea of my being cooped up. When one of the out-of-focus figures outside the mesh diamonds of my shelter resolved itself into him, it always hit me like a miracle. But I didn’t expect us to go around together all the time. He was a different fucking species. That was the way it was. I loved him and he… he quite liked me.
I took his hand and hopped up around his waist, hugged an arm around a shoulder, and held out my hand to Allene. There wasn’t anything about her I could find fault with: we ruffled each other’s hair.
“I never seem to stop meeting movie stars!” she said. “I’m a big fan, Cheeta. Out of the four of you, I think you’re probably the best.”
Johnny thought this was hilarious. They both did. Love beams. Love beams. It’s a centrifugal force. All I’d ever wanted was for him to be happy. At last, I thought, leaning over and kissing his bride-number-five-to-be, at last he’s found himself a nice, sensible girl, who’s also quite an astute film critic. He’d finally Found the Lady. Congratulations.
The difficulties Mermaids had to overcome are part of Hollywood lore. The first was that there wasn’t a script, the second was that nobody could quite make up their mind whether they were vacationing or not. Always with half an eye on the Project, the humans spent a lot of their time assiduously clearing as many predatory fish from the sea as possible—the rest of the time they acted like they were on vacation. When were Tarzan and I and “Jane” actually going to get down to dreaming the thing? The only thing we knew about the story was that the Boy had followed his mother to “civilization” and was being educated somewhere in England: “Hey, this crigget’s a heckuva slow game, fellas. Try it like this.” Sock it to the Limey bastards, Boy. “A century in twenty-two balls, Charters? Don’t be absurd….”
I’d grown used to little Johnny and was surprised to find myself missing him, a little (let’s not go over the top here), but I thought this represented a promising new direction for us. I was itching to get started on the new picture, full of ideas and a rekindled enthusiasm. You could even bill it as… let me see if I can do this:
TARZAN and CHEETA
(plus “Jane”)
Together again without the Boy!
in the All New, etc., etc.
It could really work. I was buzzing. For instance, I wanted to rescue him again. In Tarzan and the Huntress, for the first time, I hadn’t been able to rescue him. There ought to be a big rescue sequence in Mermaids, I thought. Also, I’d worked out an extremely amusing bit of business with a Coco Loco that I wanted to include, where I would pour one over somebody’s head. There was another thing I’d have to get in somehow, where I would snatch a priest’s hat, and a quite brilliant gag where I’d be eating a mango and drinking some tequila, would see something very odd (I don’t know, a mermaid?), do a double-take, look suspiciously at the tequila, look suspiciously at the mango… and then throw the mango away! They’d be able to do it in the editing room.
And day after day went by, with sets being built, dismantled and built somewhere else, or script problems, or disputes with the extras (everybody in Acapulco wanted to be in the picture). Day after day was spent steaming on a beach at the end of a rope watching the lucky humans cool themselves in the water. At night, Johnny, Allene and I, various crew members and friends from out of town would head off to La Perla, the restaurant on the clifftop where the divers performed their show, and prepare ourselves for the torrent of drinks that came our way.
We were literally the toast of the town, or Johnny was. Acapulco had been waiting for Tarzan to perform his own dive off the cliffs, but it was, fortunately, well known locally that RKO’s
insurers had forbidden it, so he was continually being asked for a Tarzan yell instead, and every yell produced another round of Coco Locos, or Piña Coladas, or something else where the fruit juice tried to kid you, like Mickey Rooney, that it was good and wholesome, while all the time underneath it, the booze was a cesspool of depravity. Johnny was getting so many requests to do the Yell he was losing his voice, and as a consequence, we were drunk all the time.
I grew irritable on the sun-kissed beach, waiting on a nonexistent script and trying to fend off a hangover in ninety degrees of smashing sunlight while the humans refreshed themselves by swimming. I was involved in a number of incidents with crew members although, happily, tensions would always be smoothed over later—or dissolved in booze at any rate—at La Perla or Los Flamingos or one of the little bars that served nothing but tequila and lemon in the coves around Caleta. The nights were fun, and Acapulco’s color and vibrancy are an enduring inspiration for my artworks (though I think I’m moving beyond color into a purer, formal approach). And Allene was a charming companion—my new best friend. She’d met him on the golf course, and they’d fallen in love when he taught her how to swim, of course, in the pool at the Fox Hills Country Club. It transpired that she’d loved him since she was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, watching him stride around on distant fairways, tossing his club up and catching it as he went. (She remembered me. The time he’d brought a chimp to caddy for him!) She loved the backflip, was wowed by the walking-on-hands trick, didn’t complain too loudly at the booze-squirted-through-straw trick. But she was a light drinker and she and Johnny would be among the first to cry off, no matter how hard I’d beg him to stay for just the one more. No, he was trying to keep in shape. Without his restraining hand, things would get a little wild. I rode a donkey one night, wearing a sombrero wider than the span of my arms; I ended up in a brothel with some princess from the Dutch royal family; I slept on the beach. Our catchphrase was “We’re not here on vacation, you know!” Yeah, the nights were fun. The days, with the booze tap turned off and the endless waiting in the hammering sun, were just painful interludes before the next night. On the beach I kept thinking, I need to move into the shade, before realizing I was already in the shade. I couldn’t stop losing my temper: there was no Gately around, who understood the way I worked (cigarettes, withheld or granted: a system that had run perfectly for ten movies). The catering was atrocious, the menagerie was really a shed around the back of Los Flamingos, and nobody seemed able to tell you when we would begin dreaming, if ever. It was as if we were finally getting our comeuppance for Amazons and Leopard Woman and the rest of them, I thought. Nobody’s taking it seriously any longer. I need to work! Crew members approached me at their peril. In the evenings at La Perla, we were all friends again and they’d encourage me to sample another Coco Loco, or egg me on to lob a few limes around the terrace, drop a glass or two off the clifftop or, why not?, have a quick one or two off the wrist in front of Grace Kelly. And then the day again, intently watching the skull of the sun creep toward the merciful cirrostratus yardarm in the Mexican sky….