Me Cheeta (15 page)

“Who cares about the Catholic League of Inanity?” said George. “And that awful little Breen.
We
have seen it,
we
know it’s not smut. It’s your finest moment, Maureen. You’ve made a poem in light, Maureen! Bravo!”

“It’s not me,” said Maureen quietly.

“Oh.”

“Um. It’s a swimmer, Jo McKim. My career … I couldn’t very well, could I? And it’s so…”

“No, no, quite right. Very foolish of me. Unthinkable, really—oh, look,” said George. Dietrich’s silence was audible over everybody else’s. “Cheeta’s trying to steal your dress! Very amusing.”

Johnny removed his right hand from my belly and reached it
around Maureen’s shoulders. We returned to the dream. With the Tarzan and Jane subplot removed, it became an intensely moving story about my braving the jungle to save Tarzan. It’s essentially a buddy movie, as I’ve said,
Tarzan and His Mate
, concerning a chimpanzee’s love for a human, and it finishes with my saving the day by summoning the now recuperated Tarzan to come to Jane’s aid. Basically, I’m back and forth all over the jungle like a guardian-angel-cum-messenger-boy, fixing the mess the humans have got themselves into. Infinitely more heroic than anything I’ve ever done in reality, of course.

But as I watched myself dodging back and forth, weaving the sundered Tarzan and Jane back together and the whole story came crashing down in an apocalypse of natives, elephants, lions, cannibalism and death, I felt Maureen’s hand steal around the back of my neck. “Always is just beginning,” said Jane on the screen, and the dream closed with the music rising and me capering about on what I remembered as a lump of plasterboard but which in reality was an elephant’s back, hooting my happiness. The End. And in the screening room, Maureen and Johnny and I were all nestled together, like Mama and Victoria and me in a nest. Like a real family.

I was in pieces. So was Johnny. Gibbons was embracing Conway. Dietrich was saying, “My little Kater vill adore it, at least.”

“A hit! A palpable hit!” George was shouting over and over. He rushed to Maureen to apologize for “my base stupidity. I could tear my tongue out. You were absolutely marvelous. The whole thing… I’m in tears!”

Let’s leave
Tarzan and His Mate
‘s precise place in those Top Ten Greatest Movies of All Time countdowns to the list-makers, those hierarchy maniacs. Comparisons are odious, anyway, in art. Lombard’s screening room was thunderous with applause, and the
three of us (later to be described in publicity stills as “the two stars of the picture, and Cheeta”) rose and turned to face it—an Africa of crocodiles, zebras, leopards, white hunters and natives all saluting our dream. I thought, They’ll never kill me now. Always is just beginning.

Under pressure from a fusillade of backslaps, Johnny surrendered me to Claudette. “Good work,” she muttered, as tight with a compliment as she was with a nickel. She passed me gingerly to Basil Rathbone, who called me a “scene-stealer.” Very special human beings crowded around, praising me, acknowledging that, although I was a chimpanzee, I was one of their own.

Many marvelous, life-enhancing friendships began for me that night, I think it’s fair to say, although my memory is a little besmirched by the glutinous Brandy Alexanders John Barrymore kept pouring down me. At some point, I tried to reprise the overhead-fan trick I’d learned in Manhattan, and I think it was Wallace Beery (who was a trifle rough-hewn but not at all “the most sadistic man I’ve ever met, a cruel and worthless drunkard,” as Jackie Cooper, the child star, described him. I’m sure that Jackie can recall other sides to Wally, too!) who switched on the fan at the wall. The room began to revolve at a nauseating pace. But either my shrieking or the intervention of George (“Good God, man!”) made him stop, even though I was getting some big laughs, and I tottered into the kitchen with him, where Dietrich (who always ended up in the kitchen at parties: she was a great cook, Marlene, before her descent into alcoholism and delusion—she loved to disable men by overfeeding them) was deep in conversation with the leopard-spotted Mercedes de Acosta.

“Marlene, dearest,” George said, “Jack is drinking again with Barrymore in the billiards room, and he’s in floods of tears. I had a soupçon of a suspicion it might have something to do with
you. In
the meantime, would you protect this poor animal from the depredations of Beery?”

Mercedes was about to protest, but Dietrich stopped her. “No, no, no, that’s quite all right, George.”

I wanted to leave them and return to Johnny, but Dietrich grasped me by the hand and I obediently trotted along with her and Mercedes, as they began a “little exploration” of Lombard’s house. I was rather touched to see that the previous owner had absolutely covered the place with memorials to animals who had obviously meant a lot to him. The walls above the staircase we ascended were covered with the preserved heads of various species, presumably much-loved pets who had passed on.

“Baby,” said Dietrich, opening a heavy oak door, “wonderful one! You know I would never hurt Jack deliberately? Otherwise I wouldn’t give a fig for what those people think. Moonbeam.”

“Moonglow,” said Mercedes.

“Moontan! Wonderful one! We’re in Africa tonight. I feel the hot voodoo rising.”

“Moonstroke. The wind is hot off the dunes….”

“The emperor’s wife has banished all her eunuchs to be alone with the newest slave in her husband’s harem. Only an ape from the deepest jungle looks on. Is the ape turning you on, wonderful one?”

“Yes, that… do that… Aren’t you clever, Marlene? I only worry that Tarzan must be looking for it, dear one.”

I was wandering about the room checking for any food, or maybe a half-drunk and forgotten Brandy Alexander.

“Weissmuller?” Marlene said. “Isn’t he
magnificent?
But a child, an American child from Chicago who loves his mother….Do you know, I think he’s been nursing that same highball all evening?”

“Don’t stop. Moondrop.”

“I’m not stopping. What do you make of the Irish girl? As an actress, I mean. In person she seems to me… mmf… virginally repressed.”

“Well, it wasn’t her, was it? Don’t
stop. Stop talking.
Under water. Which was the only bearable bit in it. The rest was just cheese.”

“Yes, well, I knew it wasn’t her, of course. George… mmmf… George told me all about it yesterday at Lakeside. He knows the stand-in very well, apparently. Oh, you slave-girl! You wicked
beast.”

Incidentally, during this conversation, Marlene and Mercedes were stimulating each other’s sexual organs. You can well imagine how bored I was watching them, and I managed to work out the door handle—I was getting good at doors—and scamper off to look for Johnny.

I greeted Gable, who was discussing different storm-window installation techniques in the atrium, skipped around Clara Bow, slumped across the corridor crying softly to herself, and went out of the French windows onto the lawn, where John Barrymore was wiping the vomit from his shirtfront. The glamour of it all was intoxicating. I had a hunch I might find Johnny in the pool, so I descended the slope toward the lamps of the pool house. It had been a long night.

Behind the pool house the firefly lights of Los Angeles disappeared into a black ocean so far below us that I suddenly saw that at last here I actually was, on a real escarpment high above a plain. It was a nice feeling so I stopped to savor it, with the smells of eucalyptus and wild sage, the twitterings of the birds and monkeys in the little zoo. Lucky,
lucky
, what a lucky life it’s been!

There was splashing coming from the pool, but as I knuckled up to it, I saw by the kicked-off heels and silver dress folded on a chaise that it wasn’t Johnny in the water. It was Maureen. I gave her a
pant-hoot to say hello and bipedaled up to the marble edging. Maureen shrieked and recovered herself. “Oh, Cheeta, dear, you gave me a shock!” She continued to glide from side to side, naked, luxuriating in the water. “Come on in!” she said. “Or, no, you can’t, can you?” She disappeared under the surface and came up laughing, spraying water from her nose. “You don’t know what you’re missing! Wonderful, the feeling of the water! You know, Cheeta, I’ve never dared to go skinny-dipping before! Never!”

The silver dress lay on the chaise and I thought something like, It’s the dress that tempts her away from the jungle. If she learned to live without it, the three of us could stay on the escarpment together forever. Or maybe I just thought, Johnny likes that, I’ll show it to him. Whatever, I snatched it up and scurried up the lawn, with Maureen’s voice trying to order me back. “Oh, Cheeta, that isn’t funny. Cheeta, I’ve got nothing on. Give it to me, Cheeta. Give it to me!
Give it to me!
Oh, why does everybody
hate me?”

Jane and I, we just never quite … We were fated somehow not to get along. It was just one of those things where all the good intentions in the world can’t stop you taking things the wrong way, or mistiming jokes, or picking the wrong moment. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. It was the dress’s fault, maybe—the dress started it. It took quite a long search to find Johnny, so that by the time a little delegation, including Marlene and George, had formed to return the dress to her, Maureen was sneezing and sniffling and had to be coaxed out of the pool house by Johnny, who insisted on driving her home with us. He dropped me off first.

You heard things about the alphas’ powers of life and death over their employees. Adolph Zukor was “a killer.” Harry Cohn “put more in the cemetery than all the rest of them combined.” Jack Warner killed his
brother
—“Harry didn’t die,” Harry’s widow said. “Jack killed him.” But as long as your fan mail maintained its numbers, you were basically OK. That was the key to the hierarchy: the quantity of letters you managed to harvest from America each week. Over the years to come I would never dip below fifty, which was less than Rin Tin Tin’s had been but more than Rex the Wonder Dog’s, thank God, given what happened to Rex.

Each of my letters, by the way, received the same stock response and mimeographed fingerprint in reply, in which I confided that I was “having a swinging time up on the escarpment with Tarzan and Jane. I’m getting up to all sorts of monkey business out here in Hollywood and looking forward to a slap-up banana dinner at the Brown Derby tonight! Thanks again for your letter, and I hope you’ll join Johnny and Maureen and me for our next adventure, monkeying around in Darkest Africa!” which struck me as a worryingly easy-to-decipher fraud. Some of my public were surely
going to suspect there was
something
fishy about those letters, weren’t they? Maybe not. I was a star, and stars have strange powers.

Johnny set aside an hour five mornings a week to respond to his letters. His fans were mainly women and boys. He loved the company of men, and the company of animals, but women and boys were the two types of human over whom he had special powers. They sought the space under his arms, the shelter under his eaves. He reminded you of one of those trees in the forest that would suddenly flare white or pink as a particular species of butterfly mobbed it. He’d be on the beach at Santa Monica, where he worked three shifts a week as a volunteer lifeguard, and
phwoomph!, he’d
go up like one of those trees in a blossom of boys and fluttering women. I know because Mayer sent Maureen and me down there for publicity shots with him. The three of us would sit in the speedboat MGM had donated to the lifeguard squad, TARZAN emblazoned on its side. It was a scheme of Howard Strickling’s, of course.

Since
Tarzan and His Mate
, Maureen’s fan mail consisted pretty much exclusively of demands that she rid motion pictures of her presence, that she
bury her shame
in a convent and leave the screen to
more wholesome
role models like Mary Brian or Loretta Young, no matter that it was not actually her muscular bottom or Grecian groin that had caused all this distress. Nor indeed that Loretta was a byword for hypocrisy around town, and “Why are there so many churches in Hollywood? Because every time Loretta sins she builds one” was a standard industry joke.

It was cruelly unfair to Maureen. I’m a chimp, I’ve seen some real sex-beacon tushes in my time, and believe me, that ass wasn’t giving out any signals. She was one of the most buttoned-up girls in Hollywood, and the heartland of America thought she was worse than Jean Harlow.

So, Strickling figured that a cheerfully frolicking Maureen in a
virginal white swimsuit would reassure the Catholic League of Decency of her essential wholesomeness while at the same time enabling him to grab a few surreptitious cheesecake shots of her legs. Even better, she and Johnny could help save American lives by demonstrating swimming and life-saving techniques. Maureen was cast as what she was—a girl in danger of drowning—and Johnny would tirelessly arrow himself into the swell to rescue and resurrect her, clearing her airways and breathing wholesomeness back into her to keep her career alive, while I hopped up and down at a safe distance from the surf, the only animal on the beach that really couldn’t swim.

Women and boys he loved especially because he could teach them to swim. With a woman resting her abdomen on the insides of his twelve-and-a-quarter-inch forearms, an eight-year-old boy diving off his head and the Pacific Ocean washing around his shoulders, he was so happy he’d spill over into a Tarzan yodel.

Aaahhheeyeeyeeyaaahhheeyeeyeeyaaah!
I am!
I am!

I watched him—in Santa Monica Bay, in Lake Sherwood, shaded by magnolias in the Black Sea pool at the Garden of Allah, resting on the lane lines in the rectangular pool at the Hollywood Athletic Club, sprayed by the artificial waterfall at Merle Oberon’s sculpted jungle-grotto swimming hole. I watched him from the sides of all the pools of Hollywood introducing women and boys to water. “Everybody can swim,” he’d say. Everybody but me, that was, dry as a bone and overdressed in my Coca-Cola-colored fur, rattling the shaft of a beach umbrella in frustration.

After an hour by any pool he had a sixth sense of who hadn’t swum and who was never going to. Often he’d glide to the edge and squeeze an amazingly accurate squirt of water from between his clasped palms at the lonely or sullen or fractious kid, or whoever it was, then submerge and glide away again. A couple of minutes later
he’d repeat the squirt, letting himself get caught this time. “Wasn’t me, it was this whale in here. Whyn’t you come on in and see for yourself? You don’t
like
swimming? I’m gonna squirt you for that.” And then he would squeeze out of his hands another squirt of water, but backward this time, into his own eye. “Aaargh! Hey, kid, how would you like me to teach you to swim properly? Imagine you’re in a boat, and a real whale comes along and sinks it—are you just gonna drown? Or are you gonna save your life by swimming to that lifeboat over there? Go get your trunks, kid, and I’ll show you how to win the Olympics.” There were always children like this around the sides of Hollywood pools, oddly self-sufficient children well-practiced at occupying themselves with the funny papers, on too-familiar terms with the pool waiter and hotel manager. “Let’s see how much you’ve learned,” Johnny would say afterward, tossing them in high arcs of screaming glee into the water. Their mothers wouldn’t have liked it, but where were their mothers? Not there, anyway, where the children and the young females were, buoyed up by the arms of the Adonis of the Jungle, practicing the six-beat-per-cycle leg-kick of the Weissmuller Crawl. “I feel so embarrassed, but I saw you with that little boy and I thought if
he
can, and I wondered if you would…”