Me Cheeta (31 page)

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. Tele
vision 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:

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….

This went on for about a month—I can’t really remember that much of it. Eventually the director, a man named Robert Florey, decided that in the continuing absence of the main set, he’d like at least to get a pick-up of me. I would be wearing a straw hat and cutoff calico shorts, strumming a turtle-shell guitar in a specially constructed miniature canoe. At last we were starting, and with such an intriguing premise, too!

It was a muggy morning when we drove out to the location, a flat, weed-choked area on the bank of an estuary near Caleta. There were half a dozen of us—it was a second-unit shot, really—packed tight inside an airless truck for an hour, and by the time we arrived I needed a Coco Loco very badly. I’d spent the previous evening on board the yacht of the president of somewhere or other, the Dominican Republic maybe, or Cuba, something like that, and there’d been a protracted champagne fight with shaken bottles, jets of it hosing the señoritas’ dresses into transparency. I’d helped mop it
all up. And it really was an ugly morning: the sky was one single light-gray blaze—every shadow was reluctant.

My “trainer” was a man named Merrill White, who’d worked with the capuchin monkeys on
Huntress
, and who sort of half knew what he was doing. There was a bottle of tequila in the truck and it took him a hell of a long time to grasp that I wanted it. I clambered into my shorts, which were already damp from the humidity. They needed to be adjusted. White withheld the tequila from me, though it was a textbook case for a reward, and I snapped at him. I didn’t want to seem immodest, but I wanted to communicate to him that for the last two or three pictures I’d been pretty much keeping the whole thing afloat single-handed. And having worked with Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway, I didn’t rate Florey very highly either. Neither Florey nor White would even
have
a job if not for me. That wasn’t pulling rank so much as a simple statement of fact. Florey saw White giving me a capful of tequila and kicked up a stink about it.

“Bob—it won’t fucking do anything if I
don’t
give it a drink.”

“Just get it in the canoe, willya? This was supposed to take half an hour. Where’s the guitar?”

“They get like this,” muttered White. “As they get older, they’re harder to handle.”

“Smell
it. It stinks of stale white wine. It’s drunk.”

I might have been drunk but the canoe was a joke, a piece of matchwood with a match for an outrigger, designed to drown any thespian animal that set foot in it. I wanted to say: I am an animal and I am about to be harmed in the making of this motion picture. White was holding a capful of tequila temptingly near the canoe’s unrealistic bowsprit. I would love more than anything to be able to swim, I tried to communicate to him, but I can’t and that canoe is murder.

“Come on, monkey,” White was pleading. “Come and get your shot.”