Me Cheeta (25 page)

“Tarzan, Mawani,” (some pet name) she murmured, “before I go…” (good start) “… please listen. I know now how right you are. Please try to forgive me. Please…” And she faltered, seeing what she had done to his face, how she had vandalized his brow with mistrust.

For a second, my heart leaped, and I jumped to my feet on Emma’s neck. He might have been too good for this world, but his jungle lore would be telling him that a leopard can’t change its spots. Cornered, desperate and unscrupulous to the last, she pulled the oldest trick in the book—she fainted. His enormous
inarticulate heart brimmed at her weakness. He went to her and took her in his arms and her victory was complete.

So the dream concluded, with everything forgiven and all reunited, sighs and laughter: a complete fucking tragedy. In a couple of hours I’d be back washing dishes in the Casa Felicitas, with the Boy doing his homework and the Dad of the Jungle coming to grips with the lawn.

Once, I don’t know why (we were all a bit mulled), Lupe and he and I found ourselves walking down a street just behind Sunset Plaza Drive at four o’clock in the morning in search of the Continental. Outside each of the gates of the low-alpha-level houses, like a symbol of a still-untouched day, was a bottle of milk. Lupe’s day had started forty-eight hours ago, and she got hold of the idea that the milk ought to be delivered to people’s doorsteps— “Why ees the meelkman lazy? He should throw the meelk right onto the doorsteps, like the leetle paper-boy!” So she started delivering the milk, sailing the bottles through the predawn to shatter on the porches, and Johnny was too awestruck with laughter and love to stop her. They started to alternate bottles, then switched to one side of the street each, odd Lupe and even Johnny, until he finally picked her up and carried her to the Continental, not so much to call a halt as to parade her.

We put her to bed, stuck a mop and bucket in the trunk, bought a crate of milk and returned to Sunset Plaza Drive, where Tarzan and Cheeta spent the morning mopping up a couple of dozen porches, apologizing and signing autographs. That was the way it happened. I’m not quite sure if the story has a point, except to
show that he was a naughty boy
and
a good boy, but she was just a wicked child. Perhaps you’d rather he hadn’t thrown the bottles in the first place? But I prefer it that two things happened rather than nothing.
Life
, you know? Life adhered to him. The other point of the story is that he loved Lupe Vélez.

Tarzan Finds a Son!
came out in June 1939, and within two weeks his complicated divorce from Lupe was made final. Jane might have annexed the escarpment, but in Hollywood he was now as free as a… as free as a human. For the first time, there was nobody to steal his attention or time away from me, a fact I relished during the ten minutes between his telling me “Hey, sport, guess what? I got divorced since I last saw ya!” and introducing an indistinct and very young woman standing on the porch of an unfinished house in Brentwood next door to Joan Crawford’s as “My beautiful bride!”

Yes, I’ll always treasure those Golden Minutes, as I think of them.

He’d met Beryl Scott, his fourth “lifetime partner,” on the golf course at Pebble Beach during a pro-am, which enabled Red Skelton to cause much merriment at their reception by referring to her as the only “birdie” Johnny’d picked up that whole day! With a name like that, you’d expect her to be a movie star, but in fact she was the daughter of a wealthy rug merchant from San Francisco. She already had a career of her own as a Socialite, but she claimed to be willing to sacrifice this for the sake of the family Johnny wanted to build with her. I learned this that same afternoon, as she confided it to
la
Crawford over some stiff ones at the poolside “nook.” Johnny was doing lengths of breast stroke, his head high out of the water in the famous style he’d originally developed in an attempt to stay clear of the excrement floating in the Chicago River.

“Aaah, this is civilized, isn’t it?” Beryl kept saying. “These midges absolutely seem to adore me,” she added, murdering one and not even eating it. “They don’t like Johnny at all, but they love me.” This was the exact opposite of the truth, I felt.

“That’s Max Factor, isn’t it, my dear? You’ve certainly hit it off, the way I do my lips. A lot of girls get it wrong because they don’t have Max around to help.”

“Max didn’t, uh, I mean to say, I’ve never actually met Max.”

“You can do this afternoon, if you like, between a quarter of four and ten after, if that’s convenient for you.” Joan gazed down like a sea eagle at Johnny, salmoning away happily in his new pool. Beryl’s face, I thought, was bafflingly characterless: the only thing I could seem to keep in focus was in fact the Crawfordesque “hunter’s bow” of her lips. “And then I’ll let you get on with starting that family of yours. Is he your first? Fuck, I mean, not husband.” “Um, nooo, of course not,” said Beryl. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“Well, you’ve done the easy bit. But this town’s awfully hard on marriages. Get that family started now and you’ll always have something in the bank should the weather turn stormy, God forbid. Get something banked.”

So a year later, three months behind Joan’s schedule (and Joan was a stickler for schedules, allotting as she did forty-five minutes for sexual intercourse each afternoon), Tarzan found another son. Johnny, he was called. During that period, he was working with Esther Williams in the Aquacade up at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco Bay, and Beryl moved back there to have the child.

I didn’t see him at all over the course of that year, but I was run off my feet anyway, what with having to wake up, eat, defecate and occasionally move across my cage at MGM. I went on the wagon
and quit smoking, allowing myself to slip up only when I was outside the cage. I cut down on my American food and tried to eat a little more healthily. I went out for lunch with Niv, and to a couple of orgies up at Lionel Atwill’s. I even had a dozen or so children of my own during an enjoyable trip out to Luna Park with the unchanging Gately. (Not once, ever, did my coach crack a smile.) And whenever I saw L.B. slaloming between the Rebs and the Cossacks and the pirates down the passageway in front of our cage, I tried to get across to him my wish that he should loan me out to another studio if there was no Tarzan picture imminent. I wanted to “work,” but the great alphas had very little interest in what their stars wanted. L.B. was deaf to my pant-hoots, showed no sign of hearing me, and I began to chafe again at the whole Dream Factory way of doing things.

“It’s a gilded cage,” John Huston, that animal-lover
par excellence
, once told me and Evelyn Keyes. “Glamour, glamour, glamour, and underneath—control, control, control.” He wasn’t wrong; and during my layoff I began to recall just how many times I’d heard fellow dreamers talk about “escaping” Hollywood. I think, what with the escarpment having changed so, and Johnny being out of town, I went a little mad for a time.

It was in this mutinous frame of mind that I accompanied Errol Flynn and John Barrymore up to their house on Mulholland Drive in the spring of 1940. Flynn wanted me to do him a favor and help him out with some prank involving the WAMPAS girl he’d left asleep under the mirror attached to the ceiling of his bedroom. I was to take his place, so that when the starlet woke, I would be snoring beside her in lieu of, etc., etc. To help me into character and calm any performance-related nerves, Errol and John kept urging me to take another nip of Canadian Club—they were practically pouring it down my throat—so, I’m sorry to say, I can’t remember how the evening or the prank panned out.

In fact, it was late the next day when Errol woke me, brushing aside my embarrassed attempts to apologize for the vomit and excrement I’d left on his sheets—too much of a gentleman to mention it—and carried me down the slope behind the house toward some low buildings where a number of humans were congregated. Stables and garages, I saw, as we neared them.

“Chris!” Errol shouted. “Chris!” A young man detached himself from the crowd pressed under the stable’s eaves. “Drive this thing back to Metro, wouldja? They’ve been calling me about it all day.” Typically generous of Errol to arrange transport for me, but at the same time I remember the plunging dismay I felt at having to return to the “gilded cage.”

“Just ten minutes, Mr. Flynn? They’re starting up in here.”

“What, already? Shit, what time is it?” Flynn said. “Oh, fuckin’
Christ
, don’t let me be too late….”

We pushed through the crowd of humans into the depths of the stable where, in a recess in the floor, a huge alpha-male dog was rolling over and over; no, it was two dogs, rolling over and over in a blur and a spray of blood. Poor Errol, who was so famously distraught after those two hundred horses had died during the Warner Brothers’ charge: he could hardly forgive himself for not getting there in time. You might ask—why didn’t someone intervene? Surely the swashbuckling Flynn…? Or Barrymore, who was at the front of the crowd, or Frank Borzage? Well, this wasn’t the movies. You weren’t there. There was no chance that any of the humans could do anything to save those dogs from themselves. They tried to get as close as they could but the dogs were in a trance of death, untouchable, dragging entrails and veins and still berserking, and the humans could do nothing but stand there, impotently hollering, and let Nature take its terrible course. It took a long time. Neither dog could be saved.

It shook me up, all right. How many times did I need reminding that I was one of the lucky, lucky few that the Project had been able to save? This dream of yours, to keep the animals of the world from destroying each other: it was too easy for some self-absorbed and pampered star like me, lolling away his days inside his Hollywood bubble, to forget about the real world out there. The question is, what’s in it for you? Or is it just part of what it means to be human, to protect and serve us? Anyway, let’s remember Errol like that, at his most debonair, before drink and drugs and a pathological sex addiction founded on misogyny turned him into the pathetic shell of a man he later became, too palsied even to be able to hold without spilling the drinks that were killing him.

I never again grumbled about my contract with Metro. L.B. was tireless in helping explain things to stars who had similar misgivings (which we all did at some point: actors!). He had an arm pretty much permanently around a dreamer’s shoulder, clarifying how they’d be nothing if not for him, how if they couldn’t play by his rules then it might not be possible to play at all, how important that new picture was with an expensive divorce coming up. Even Johnny needed a bit of guidance, and you often heard him quote L.B.’s advice back: “Who the hell do you think you are, you bum? Lillian Gish? Get it through your head—you’re Tarzan! You’re never going to be anybody but Tarzan! I’m not going to put you in any other pictures ever, you understand? So I don’t want to hear any more horseshit about ‘acting lessons’! Tarzan
not act!
Or I can get Buster Crabbe for half the price and nobody’ll know the difference, and you can go back to selling swim trunks.”

He was paying Johnny $2,500 a week, and if he wasn’t working between Tarzan-Cheeta pictures, then it was merely sensible for MGM to loan him out (at $5,000 a week) to Billy Rose for the Aquacade. So twice a day, seven days a week, four hundred miles
away, amid forty-foot fountains and cascading “aqua-curtains,” he and seventy-two Aquabelles, the fifty-strong Fred Waring Glee Club Chorus, various Olympians, comedy divers, English Channel-swimmers, breath-holders and that inexcusable slander-ess and ingrate Esther Williams, the “Million-dollar Mermaid” (or “Two-bit Dugong,” as I know her), all dedicated themselves to the praise of water, the element that hated me, that turned me away.

I heard little fragments around the commissary. Three months after little Johnny was born, Beryl sued for divorce. She claimed she never saw her husband, which I thought was pretty rich considering she must have been seeing him several times a month. But I knew from Lupe that an annual accusation of “extreme cruelty” was part of the give and take of every marriage. Beryl wasn’t out of the picture yet.

The summer of ’41 we were back together for
Tarzan’s Secret Treasure
, which wasn’t, as I’d initially hoped, some Gaboni maiden Tarzan had become involved with on his trips away from the Happy House, but a seam of gold the Boy had discovered on the escarpment. His mother’s son in every respect, the Boy was intrigued by “civilin… civinil…” (aww, ain’t it cute?)

“Civilization, dear.”

“Tell me some more about civilization, Mother!”

“Oh, they have airplanes—houses with wings that fly and they carry people through the air. They go faster than anything
you’ve
ever seen.”

“Faster than Tarzan?”

“Mm… faster than Tarzan, faster than the wind. But just you forget about civilization, darling.” Tarzan had arrived and she was having to rein in. “Our world here is far more lovely and exciting than the outside world, I promise you.” Thus Mark Antony manipulated the mob on the steps of the Capitol.

Naturally the Boy was soon off with a gold nugget or two to buy an airplane and inadvertently bring doom in the form of white men crashing down over us once again. Ho-hum. What the hey? We needed something to shake us up, anyway—the new
al fresco
dining area was like the fried-chicken table at L.B.’s fiftieth birthday/Fourth of July clambake. It was almost impassable with ostrich eggs, smoked wildebeest hams, catfish caviar and fruits of the forest. We’d installed a refrigerator the size of a Gaboni hut under the cold spring and had a new bain-marie system in the hot spring. But this is what happens when the love goes, when there is more time than love. What happens? The consecration of
lunch.

Mmm, this is wonderful… how’s yours?

I knew that something was wrong from the cars. The faithful old Continental had disappeared and been replaced with three different cars, which he alternated as if he wasn’t quite comfortable in any of them. I’d never heard him express reverence for an automobile—he didn’t really understand or even like anything that wasn’t alive in some way—and the cars I took to be his inarticulate attempt to express something: happiness, perhaps, which he’d never needed to state before. Or unhappiness? How could you tell what was meant—other than that if you were speaking in
cars
something was already wrong? I noticed another couple in the car pool as we rolled up to a house four times the size of the Brent-wood home a couple of weeks into the dreaming of
Secret Treasure
This was up on Rockingham Avenue, out by Mandeville Canyon—nice address. Looking down from the mansion’s terrace, it was Johnny’s domain as far as the eye could see. The lawn that rolled your eye down to the inevitable rectangle of turquoise was as densely iridescent as a hummingbird’s breast. If you watched very closely you could see the dents left in it by the gardeners’ footsteps
disappear slowly back into its sheen, like the marks of fingers on a human arm. The pool house and its chaises, the tennis and badminton courts, the young maze and the gazebo all waited at the lawn’s end with a doggy kind of servility, looking forward to being filled with memories. Turn your head, and blazing a trail to the summerhouse was an avenue of maples and exactly a dozen copper beeches, which Clark Twelvetrees had had transplanted there as a gift to his wife Helen before he drank himself to death in bitterness at her success.