Me Cheeta (13 page)

It was on the second or third morning of filming, when I was still getting used to Hollywood’s habit of tossing out casual miracles, that we first met the ape-actors. A squadron of humans was strolling through the Toluca Lake set, laughing and smoking and holding their heads under their arms. Up to the neck they were gorillas.
Gately summoned Frederick and me out of the live oak we were fooling around in to introduce us, at which point cigarettes were discarded (always a side benefit of the movie-set—the long butt) and the sweating humans disappeared beneath their gorilla heads and began to mimic us. You had to take these bewildering things in your stride. Was there some cross-breeding program at MGM perhaps, an attempt to engineer the perfect human-simian actor? If there was, it wasn’t going very well, because, though I would never normally criticize another actor, these guys were
hopeless.

“It’s more of a rolling movement, working up from the spine, Leslie,” one of the apes said, “and then you straighten your arms for the pound. Like so—” and he and the other apes began a classic earth-thumping display ritual, directed at the two of us. Naturally, we mimicked the humans back—as we’d learned to do under Mr. Gentry and Gately—but no rewards were forthcoming, possibly because they didn’t think we
were
mimicking them. They mimicked us back, atrociously; and we mimicked them, rather well.

“Leslie—you’re rocking back but you’re not moving your hands enough. Vic—excellent. Look at Vic, Les, see how he’s got the weight forward. Do as he does. That’s super, Vic.”

But it wasn’t. Leslie didn’t want to do as Vic did—he wanted to watch Frederick and me, because Vic looked … he looked about half as convincing as Stroheim, is how he looked. No, it was just embarrassing, watching these very very slow, unthreatening and totally out of scale impersonations of ourselves. Where were the teeth and the bristling fur? That was why Thalberg was a wonder, I later understood. He’d seen these chumps in
Tarzan the Ape Man
and immediately grasped that he had to order in some professionals. Hence us. Hence
Forest Lawn.

A human trying to act a chimpanzee is somehow pathetic,
whereas a chimpanzee trying to act a human is funny because… well, why
is
that? Something to do with aspiration. You think we’re pure and want to be us. We know you’re not pure, but we still aspire to be you. That’s the tragedy at the heart of our, or some would say my, comedy, and a little more profound than anything in my esteemed colleague the Utopian dolt, satyromaniac, cradle-snatcher, self-mythologizer and (need I say it?) sentimentalist Charlie Chaplin’s
Weltanschauung
, to use a term rather typical of Charlie’s own self-consciously showy autodidact’s vocabulary. With his three fucking Oscars. The difference between us, Charlie—the crucial difference between us—is that nobody has ever once called my work “dated.” Must get off Chaplin.

The leader of the group of ape-actors stood up and removed his head as Jack Conway approached, trailing a little retinue of betas behind him. Before directing, Conway had been a silent actor, which was perfect for handling Johnny. He used to crack Johnny up singing dirty Irish ballads on his ukelele while Maureen smiled thinly along. Two of Chaplin’s Oscars were “honorary” by the way, meaning “not for real.” Now one of Conway’s retinue beckoned us over and informed us that they were ready to do the real version of the Mary shot. Mary was a rhinoceros from Hamburg I’d spent most of the morning watching Johnny ride whoopingly around the set’s main clearing.

“I feel we’ve really improved our kinetics, Mr. Conway,” said the ape-leader, “really getting more of a ‘chimps’ feel.”

“Yeah, well, we already got the process shot, so this is just for luck. OK, now who’s Cheeta’s mother?”

I thought, What? They’re not really going to do this, are they?

As I mentioned earlier, the emotional high point of
Tarzan and His Mate
is the death of my mother under the hoofs of a rhinoceros. I don’t particularly enjoy discussing my work for the simple
reason that sometimes it’s just too painful. Acting can ask that of you. It asked it of Davis, of Swanson, of Monty Clift. In the end it asked it of Johnny.
Look in the mirror
, it asks. And it’s a strange, strange fact that the single most moving moment in all eleven Weissmuller-Cheeta Tarzan pictures is the moment of my debut, as I numbly attempt to cope with the loss of my mother while Jane twitters away. There’s Tarzan’s betrayal by Jane in
Tarzan Escapes
, but it doesn’t carry quite the same charge. It’s not death, which had no place on the escarpment.

MGM had rescued me, rehabilitated me, coached me and returned me to a perfected jungle, and now they buried my mother for me.

“Roll ’em!” shouted Conway, and the awkward human lumbered out in his ludicrous gorilla, or should I say “chimpanzee,” suit to enact his travesty. Repeatedly he scrambled across the gap between the trees to distract the rhino from Maureen, whose ankle was trapped in a root. Mary was a trouper but she was a rhinoceros, for heaven’s sake, and you can’t expect a wild animal to be able to nail it first time around. Repeatedly the human labored through his somersaults, removing his head after each take to remark on how hot it was inside a chimpanzee. As he went through the motions, he began to tire so that his flips took on some of the quality of the movements Mama had made as she tried to rise and wriggle away from the blows, and his weary performance inadvertently conjured her onto the escarpment. I was watching her die over and over again. Stroheim was shrieking with excitement to see such fun.

But this time, Tarzan, King of the Jungle, Lord of this Wild Domain, swung on a vine into the dream and enacted justice. He dispatched Mary—no animals were harmed during the making of the motion picture, don’t worry, apart from Cedric Gibbons perhaps, and Maureen—and took my mother’s body into the upper canopy
of the forest. He laid her to rest in a mummy-cloth of twigs and vines. Goodbye, Mama.

Gately led me over to Maureen and the ape-actor’s body. Looking down at my dead mother I couldn’t help but sob, and wring my hands, and seek Johnny’s human eyes and Maureen’s human touch. I’d never had a chance to mourn her. Maureen embraced me tentatively. “She’s gone, little Cheeta. And there’s nothing you can do, nor I, nor anybody.”

Yeah, yeah, the hurt will die down. But that was the start of my career, right there, the moment when I was finally slotted into the destiny that had all this time been delicately prepared for me. For me, Cheeta.

Poor old Vic, Leslie and their impresario, though, were rendered extinct. After my debut, Metro never regressed to the use of humans in monkey suits. Was I a pioneer, the true inventor of simian thespianism? That’s not easy for me to say. It’s not easy for anyone to say, actually, “simian thespianism.” But they called it the Golden Age because the movies had
soul
, and a collection of pixels, each distinct hair waving lightly in the digital wind, will never start coming to terms with its mother’s death on camera. And that’s what CGI is, Don—it’s back to the men in monkey suits. That website again: www.noreelapes.com

Yes, it was an absolute scandal, Professor Goodall, how much fun we had in the process of dreaming a movie that gave pleasure to millions. Frederick, Stroheim, the other two and I lived in a luxurious shelter crisscrossed with branches, ropes, ramps and wriggling iron in the back lot at Culver City. Every morning Gately would take us up to the escarpment to dream away the days. We’d drive down the Ventura Freeway out to Thousand Oaks in his Chevy Camper pickup and wait among the assistant directors and antelope for Maureen, who was always a little late on set.

Johnny was invariably early, and would converse and play-fight among the betas, without any distance or pulling of rank. Most mornings, I would compel him with my gaze to come over to where Gately sat on the Chevy’s fender, with me twanging away on my tether like a heart on a jumprope. A spring into the crook of his biceps, a hand into his wavy tortoiseshell hair (a little sticky with pomade), a good-morning kiss and my head tucked like a violin under the angle of his jaw. “Why, how’s-a-boy, Maureen,” Johnny would say, before detaching me, or “Touchdown! And Weissmuller for the extra point…” and pretend to kick me. If I tried to wow him with a series of backflips, he’d take off his jacket (he was always impeccably dressed) and ambulate around on his hands. It was Tarzan who taught me that trick—seriously. “See you on set, sport,” he’d say, bounding away.

Maureen so obviously detested us chimpanzees, but at least she tried to be professional about it. It was rather touching in a way. She was small and intense, and her frequent-use smile was essentially a fear-grimace. For all her sisterly griping about her co-star, it was Johnny who could detonate the brief explosion of her real smile. The other thing you immediately smelled about her was the low level of her sexual scent—she easily deflected Johnny’s undiscriminating desire and converted it into a permanent mock exasperation. “Johnny! You damn kid! Ooh, if I had a rock!” and so on.

Maureen had been to finishing schools in London and Paris; Johnny was a Chicagoan. She was civilized; he wasn’t. She could talk; he couldn’t. She was always, like certain animals you saw in the forest, checking that she had an exit route; Johnny was always where he wanted to be. You sensed strongly how frightened of chaos and excess she was, how grounded it made her feel to pass around the little iced cakes she’d baked at home, while Johnny
and the carpenters carefully sawed three-quarters of the way through the legs of her canvas-backed folding chair.

A record of those first days on the escarpment can never capture the laziness and freedom of it, all those languorous smokes and long swinging sessions, the basking and the lolling. To my delighted surprise, it turned out that most of the time spent on a movie set consisted of waiting. But let me quote you a few entries from the diary I wish I’d kept: