Me Cheeta (19 page)

She loved him, but it was asking a lot to forgive her her trespasses against him. The scratches and bites that Johnny revealed each morning when he undressed the World’s Finest Physique on set I took for the standard markings of human sexual possession. I could deal with that. But not the blue-black bruise on his cheekbone
or the cigarette burn on his dear upper arm, which, relaxed, measured thirteen inches, and flexed, fourteen and a half.

I remember once sitting in the house on Rodeo Drive with my arm like a furtive tendril around Johnny’s foreleg as he talked into one of those listening devices that always reminded me, with their shiny black carapaces and tiny insect voices, of the giant beetles I played with as a baby in Africa. Lupe was troubling the air somewhere nearby.

“No, there isn’t,” Johnny was saying. “I guess we’re just blessed here. Not even one tiny cloud. It’s an even eighty, Mom. What is it in Chicago?… Well, if you come up the drive there’s kind of a big bush with little purple flowers out and trees on either side and it’s like a hacienda except bigger….” His mother often called him from Chicago and had him describe the house and the California weather to her in great detail, as if she suspected him of having made the whole thing up. “You wouldn’t have to if you came to see it for yourself. So you gotta come
out
, we keep waiting for ya to come out. Come out to paradise.” And then Lupe started in on him. “Lupe, will ya…? No, we’re not. No, she’s not. No, I’m not. No, it’s not. No, you’re—
Goddammit, Lupe, then go afuckinghead and kill yourself.
Just fucking do it someplace else! Go kill yourself in the garden! Run yourself over with the fucking lawnmower!”

“Hola
, Meesees John-ee,” she shouted. “He ees trying to keel me! We are getting divorce and he can come back to Cheecago and fuck preety Poleesh girls!”

“Mom, this is what my wife is! Can you hear her? This is what my wife is like
every day!
This is—”

And there was no further chance for Johnny to explain what Lupe was like because she had taken the mandible-like part of the giant beetle-like listening device and shattered it on the colonial desk. There wasn’t any need for an explanation, anyway. The
screeching of a flock of canaries, the hysterics of a pair of dogs, the screaming of a chimpanzee bouncing in impotent distress on a
chaise-longue
and a parrot shouting,
“Hola
, Gary!
Hola
, Gary!” over and over like a mad movie fan was all the explanation you’d ever need of what Lupe was like. She was very small and because of that she needed something to fill all the space around her, and the easiest and most plentiful things were tension and pain. She slammed the framed portrait of herself in
The Gaucho
onto the tiles and, dusted with microscopic particles of glass, went shimmering after Johnny, kicking out at Laurel or Hardy or whoever the chihuahuas were at the time. You weren’t safe if you were moving. You weren’t safe if you were still. You weren’t safe if you were
inanimate Caramba!
Ay-ay-ay! You had to forgive her. She was a star and the rule is that you have to forgive stars.

Even as she locked me into the kitchen that day with Smith and Wesson or Dismay and Desolation or whatever their names were, so that she and Popp-ee could noisily make it up in peace, I tried to forgive her because she loved him. The dogs, who could stand it better than I could, couldn’t stand it at all. Scuttling in nasty little clicking circles—making the sound of knitting needles, the sound of my nerves—they were frantic to get on the other side of that door and prevent whatever it was that the brute was now doing to their mistress. Welcome to the world of caged behavioral patterns, boys, I thought. Get used to the old back and forth, get used to those figures of eight. Those turns around the block, those infinity signs. Get used to the sounds behind a door you can’t open.

They hated Johnny anyway, those dogs—yapped at him, nipped at him. And they didn’t even know what they were. They came from a long, long line of slaves—they were so enslaved they’d forgotten they were slaves. They didn’t know that that was what they had been bred and bought
for.
I should have cornered them that afternoon
in the locked kitchen and killed them, drowned them in their water bowls (another ape would have) and saved everyone a lot of grief. But I loved him, and he loved her, and she loved them, and I knew there would only have been another pair of chihuahuas in place the next time, another Lombard and Gable, another Gin and Vermouth, plus it would probably have been a bad career move if Strickling or Mannix had found out about it.

So I gloomily munched my way through the fruit bowl, occasionally pelting the dogs with apples, and watched the natives working the flowerbeds, and listened to what Lupe’s panicking creatures thought was the sound of my gentle Johnny harming their mistress, as if he ever could. The parrot yodeled, “Gary!
Hola
, Gary!” throughout, I remember—fooling around with words, which is what you
don’t do.

Other than that, I had nothing against the parrot, and sometimes slipped it a friendly nut in the hope that it might shut up with the Gary business. But it never would. It was her past. Like the chihuahuas, it had descended to the status of a weapon in the proxy war fought out between Johnny and Lupe. What did he have to fight back with, other than me, his immortal on-screen buddy? He had Otto, that’s what, a great cheerful mutt the size of a leopard he’d picked up from the city pound. Otto was capable of putting his front paws on Lupe’s shoulders and taking great tasty swipes of her Tequila Mockingbird lipstick right off of her mouth.

He was none too bright, and I saw Lupe try to destroy his mind in her garden. She called, “Walkies!” to him and let him romp up to her, fizzing with his mutt’s joy, and then she’d send him packing with a dismissive index finger and “Bad dog!” Then “Walkies!” again, and Otto would come running like the war was over and everything forgiven, only to be sent slinking back again with “Bad dog!” while the chihuahuas around her ankles laughed. Those
slave-dogs, those chihuahuas! I don’t think she was wicked: she had a lot of humanity in her.

They veered toward divorce, veered back. She filed, they reconciled. She was pretending to be a child but Johnny
was
a child. We were all pretending to be children—there was nothing licentious, vulgar, or lustful on our lips, our feet were at all times on our bedroom floors, and our sex organs were painfully taped over—that was what it meant to be in movies. You were made into a child. I was made into a child. Even the
children
—by which I mean no disrespect to Johnny’s son, Johnny Sheffield, a marvelous Boy and a tremendous companion—but the children especially were made into children.

Little Johnny is the last person to brag about his acting, so I feel I can say without fear of offense that child acting in the Golden Age was anything but golden. It’s one of the things I’ve noticed over the last few years—children are better at acting than they used to be, much better. You could never get away with a Johnny Sheffield, lovely fellow though he is, or a cacophonous cartoon of glutinously faked ebullience like, for instance, Mickey Rooney, in pictures today.

While we’re on the subject of Mickey, who gave so many people such a great deal of pleasure over the course of a distinguished career, I would say that for such a talented performer I found it a little disappointing that his widely acclaimed Puck in Warner’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(released the year after my debut in
Tarzan and His Mate)
should have leaned so heavily on my performance. The backflips, the joyous cackle, the mischief-making in the forest, these were my inventions, and I never expected them to be stolen from me by a sticky-fingered sneak thief bent on using them for the foundation of a largely forgotten career, although I
suppose it may just have been a coincidence. Behind every great fortune there lies a crime, as one of your writers said. I’m sure Mickey will be only too delighted to remind me who that writer was, once his people have found it out for him. And should he ever wish to make up, I believe I’m only half a mile away from the gates of his community. Make the walk, Mickey, in this second childhood of yours. Let’s forgive. Let’s file and then reconcile. Let’s
not
be cruel to animals, as we both have been.

Let us rather be like Johnny, who loved animals, despite the toothmarks the chihuahuas left in his loafers and ankles, despite the sandpaperings the elephants gave him with their fuse-wire stubble, and the cracked ribs and broken wrists they dispensed in their unknowing herbivorous way. Despite the fingers and shoulders that even Jackie the lion could not, with all his professional delicacy, stop himself dislocating, despite the mess the crocs made of his thighs and his calves, the wildebeests’ exploratory bites and the welts left in tracks down his back by the claws of the Mexican Wildcat. The King of the Jungle! He loved them all.

He loved them
all.
He loved her, them, me, America, water. He was in love with seven-tenths of the world to start with. He loved the sea—because he grew to fit the space available. He loved his yacht, a thirty-five-foot schooner moored in Newport, called
Santa Guadalupe
, after Lupe. With his yacht under sail he was an opened pore, a fully dilated aperture. How headacheless his mind was! Lupe hated
Santa Guadalupe.
He loved his next yacht, called
Allure
, again after Lupe, since she had “allure”—“That mysterious thing called Lure, a current that goes out from its possessor and brings her back whatever she wants!” She hated
Allure
too. “The sea in my countree is the place where we throw our garbage.” But
Allure
was twice as big as
Santa Guadalupe
, so she only hated it half as much.

This was around the time that Bogie had his
Santana
and Flynn
his
Sirocco
, and Gene Autry and the Duke were running their converted Navy AVRs up and down the coast cheerfully shattering the windows of the beach houses with the testosterone of their engine noise. The Nunnally Johnsons, Hank Fonda, Niv, Warwick Levene and Edna DuMart, Raoul Walsh, Ward Bond, the Benchleys, Connie and Gilbert, Red Skelton, Forrest Tucker, Peter and Karen Lorre, Doug’s son Doug Jr., Kate and Spence—or was it Kate and Leland at that time?—and Bogie and Mayo and Flynn and Wayne and Mr. Deductible, Bo Roos, with Johnny at the very heart of it all. This was the nucleus of the sailing set. We’d all meet up at Newport Beach Yacht Club or the Balboa Bay Club or on Catalina Island. It was too much excitement, too much gossip and trouble, for Lupe not to absorb herself in to some extent.

“Eef I could take the train to Catalina I’d enjoy eet more,” Lupe complained. “The theeng about a train ees eet never
seenks.”

Lupe hated seven-tenths of the world to start with. In all of her pictures, water was her nemesis. When things got dull she’d get pushed into a horse trough, or have a carafe emptied over her. She was so incandescent you expected her to steam. Whereas I’ve never hated water: I’ve only ever longed for it not to hate me. So Johnny talked to Bo Roos, a stubby little larger-than-life character who took care of their financial stuff, and Bo got the coastguard to winch a couple of Pullmans onto a barge and we all took the train to Catalina Island, thinking we were being very crazy and fast-living. Well, at least it filled one of Lupe’s unfillable afternoons.

A week later, the guys put Roos and Wayne’s yacht the
Norwester
on a flatbed truck and “sailed” it from Beverly Hills to Las Vegas, with me up in the crow’s nest listening to Johnny and Lupe duke it out below. It was something to do with Tom Mix, I seem to remember. Johnny was angry with her for seeing Tom. Or was it Gable she’d been seeing? Or it might have been Randolph Scott. It was an
ex of hers, anyway. Coop? The opportunistic Chaplin, maybe? (She’d had a thing with him.) Anyway, Johnny was angry because of an… Hang on—John Gilbert: I think it might have been him, either him or Erich Maria Remarque. My
memory
, honestly. I’m sorry about this. Pretty sure it wasn’t Russ Columbo. Not Doug—that had just been a fling, though a fling that had finished his marriage to Mary Pickford—and Anthony Quinn was later. Doug Jr., maybe? Flynn? But he was there. As was Red Skelton, so not him. Gilbert Roland too, so that puts him out. Bruce Cabot, no, Victor Fleming, no, Bert Lahr, no, Warwick Levene, no. Jack Johnson, was it? I’ll put him on the short list. Edward G. Robinson, that’s another possibility, or Max
Baer
—was it him? Have I said Ramon Navarro? No, wait, it was Jimmy Durante, I think they were arguing about Jimmy. No, they weren’t, it was Jack Dempsey. I knew it was a J.D.—lucky I got it so quickly or we could have been here for a while. Of
course
it was Dempsey—he was giving an exhibition bout in Vegas, and Lupe had just let slip that she’d seen him in New York when she’d been out East.

Anyway, the crew of the
Norwester
were already threatening to make the pair of them walk the plank unless they stopped tearing into each other when Lupe shouted at the driver to “weigh fucking anchor,” clambered down the rope ladder onto the truck’s bed and jumped overboard.

“Lupe, you’re crazy, you’ll drown!” shouted Red Skelton. We’d been grinding through the desert for six hours, and Red was still squeezing as much value from the gag as he did from the prostitutes he was so addicted to.

Johnny vaulted off the side of the
Norwester
, spraying apologies. “Go on, you go on ahead, fellers! We’re spoiling the party for everyone. No, you go on, we’ll get a lift back to L.A.” There was a limp storm of protest. “Go on, getouttahere. No goddamn point in
going to Vegas now. I’m gonna strangle the bitch and bury her in the desert anyway.”

With his unconscious Tarzanian grace, Johnny jumped off the side of the truck and began to jog after the diminishing dot of his wife. Had everyone not been quite so drunk then I don’t think there’d have been a chance they would have complied, but the party had its own momentum. It was a legendary exploit already, and frankly the pair of them
could
be a bit of a drag. Red called out, “Watch out for sharks!” and, sensing that the
Norwester
was gearing up to continue its voyage without the Weissmullers, I hurried down the rigging, slipped unseen over the side and scampered after my co-star.