Me Cheeta (32 page)

The little waves lapping against the canoe looked glutinous; the whole river seemed half swamp. I was not getting through to them: the shoot was a shambles; the catering was a joke; not in a million years was I going to fall for this tequila/pushed-in-canoe trick; you don’t call someone who’s worked with Irving Thalberg the “M”-word on set; and I don’t do water anyway. I was a star; they were… well, have
you
ever heard of them?

“Come on, little monkey, come to me,” White coaxed.

He just wasn’t getting it. The tequila wasn’t a reward, it was a necessity, and I’d had a paltry two capfuls all morning. I was an immense international superstar, to spell it out, and… where was the respect?

“Ooh ooh ooha ooha oohaa aah aah aah aahaa aahha-aaahha-aahhha-eeehuh-eeehhuh-aahheeeeeeEEH!” I pointed out, “EEEEH! AAHEEEEEEEEEH!AAHHEEEEEEEEEEEE! WAAAAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAAAH!” I added. “AAHHEEEEEEEEEWAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAH!” I concluded, emphasizing my point of view with hand and facial gestures and by throwing my ridiculous guitar to the ground and stamping on it. Sometimes with bad directors it’s the only tactic, to lose your temper. Like, what part of “AAHHEEEEEEE-WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” did he not understand?

“Jesus, Bob, what can I do with it? Look at it.”

“Uh. Wait. I tell you what we can do to fix this,” Florey said. At last, a bit of thought, a bit of
direction.
“We can get Sol to airfreight another one down this evening, right? Tell him to talk to—what’s his name? Gately. Get another one out here by tomorrow morning, and we’ll call this morning a wipe. Light’s not right, anyway.”

What?

That’s right. One lapse. One moment (Maureen apart) of less
than perfect professionalism in fourteen years and they fired me. I was “too old” at seventeen, I had a “problem with alcohol” though I spent most of the year on the wagon, I was “too difficult to work with”—I, who would do it for a cigarette. We drove back to Acapulco and Merrill arranged for me to be transported by freighter to Los Angeles.

That “No animals were harmed during the making of” thing—I don’t believe it. I’m not talking about Clyde the orangutan in the
Every Which Way But Loose
pictures being beaten to death by his trainer with a crowbar (though that did happen, and they still got their disclaimer), I mean that somewhere in the forests, during the making of your film, somewhere in the seas, animals are being harmed all the time. “Many millions of animals were continually harmed during the making of this film” would be more accurate. It should go on the final credits of every single motion picture, just so you don’t forget the way the world really is. Many millions of animals are always being harmed, so what does one more matter? But I was harmed. I was terribly harmed in the making of
Tarzan and the Mermaids.

I was returned to the Selig Park zoo. I thought I was going to die. I could have killed
myself
—why had I been such a fool? I waited for an intervention from Johnny, or Gately, or Lesser. Or maybe Johnny Sheffield. Even Maureen could testify that I showed, by and large, an impressive professionalism. I waited for news that my replacement hadn’t been able to play the part, for news that test screenings had gone so badly they would have to reshoot, for news that the picture was to be pulled because of the number of complaints. And every day I waited for a couple of humans with their hands in their pockets to stroll up to my shelter, make a mark or two on a clipboard and give me a lift to work on the first day of my new medical career.

If you’re a star, Hollywood is a playground, and if you’re not, they’re right, it
is
a jungle. It’s a town of heartless bottom lines and harsh decisions and betrayals so ugly that from time to time the very earth beneath it shudders in contempt, like its teeth have been set on edge.

All through 1948 I waited, desperate to conceal from my keepers that I was losing weight, that I was having difficulty digesting even the mushiest, woolliest slices of apple, grateful that they never examined us too closely. If they had been paying attention, truly, I think I would have been gone. Knowing nothing at all, but suspecting everything, I slowly ate myself away. I imagined that if you bit into my flesh it would taste like Maureen O’Hara’s—it would be bitter. Was Johnny in the Aquacades? What reason might there be for his not coming? How was
Tarzan and the Mermaids
doing? Just how funny was this replacement of mine? How close were they? They call it a slump: all I did that year was slump. I slumped in my straw and tried to eat and look as bright as I could manage when any keepers came around.

The breeding was the worst. I was a popular choice for breeding with females, but I had somehow lost my … I want to stress that before 1948 I had been an
extremely popular
choice for mating among a large number of attractive, fertile, high-status females and I had lost… I had lost my … I had been very stressed and depressed, and the breeding sessions were difficult. Keepers looked on while you performed to make certain that you’d given the female a damn good inseminating. Not to add to the pressure of the whole thing, but it was an opportunity for them to gauge your health, and as much as you can hoot and wave your arms around and take great lusty sniffs, there’s no disguising whether you’re bluffing or packing. It wasn’t impossible; it was never easy.

I was depressed, all right? It wasn’t like Jean Harlow’s husband.
Or Rex Harrison. Time passed and every hour it was a relief that nobody came and a little blow that nobody came. More time passed and it wasn’t really either a relief or a blow—it was just gray unhappiness all the time. There was one hope I had, and I had to display my teeth at the irony of it. My hope was this: the hurt will die down eventually. It has to, otherwise none of us could stand life. It is
so hard
to love someone who doesn’t love you.

They say there are no real seasons in Los Angeles. Neither are there any real seasons in zoos—no mating seasons, no molting seasons. But at the Selig Park zoo, you could tell what seasons there were more easily because of the changing colors of the Santa Monica mountains behind the giraffe house. In the “winter” the mountains showed themselves a touch lighter. And the winter of ’48/’49 was strange, with rainy days or days of cloud so low you could no longer see the mountains. The wind blew, to everyone’s amazement. It grew so cold that I and the other animals took to making burrows in our straw, and I didn’t mind it at all. I was on the side of the weather; I wanted to see how low it could go; I thought, Come on, more, bring it on. It felt right to me, as if the world was as sick of it all as I was. Me and the world, the both of us, through with it. And, unbelievably to others, it kept growing colder. The keepers, jammed in their caps, hunched in their collars, had never known anything like it.

On the coldest day yet, the wind stilled itself and a remarkable thing began to happen—you’ll have to take my word for it, or I guess you can check weather reports: very slow white rain began to fall. It was soft ice; it melted when it hit the earth. “It’s snowing!” the keepers were yelling. They loved it. “It’s fucking snowing in Los Angeles!” I didn’t know it then, but it was the only time I’d ever see snow in my life. (I’m not counting the ridiculous Palm Springs Winterval Gatherings to which Don drags me every Christmas.)
The keepers were so delighted by it—they scooped it up and threw it down each other’s necks. They wanted to share the bounty with each other. With the atmosphere of a very special treat being granted (which it was) and a kind of formal ceremoniousness, we (two baboons, myself, two other chimps) were led out from our shelter on leashes so that we could walk through the falling snow. It was, I had to admit, fun to be out in, to see the prints made by your hands and feet, to pick it up and throw it or run and slide across it. I had to admit it was kind of interesting, the feeling of the cold on your paws, the way it melted on your fur. It wouldn’t make me a star again or bring Johnny to me or even get me a cigarette, but it was, in itself, something reasonably OK, I had to admit.

It was almost exactly a year since that day in Caleta, and Jane’s Law had given me its first little crumb. When you’re starving, you don’t turn up your nose at a crumb of comfort.

The snow was still on the ground, diminished and dirtied but still just about there, a few days later when a couple of humans with their hands in their pockets strolled across its dips and craters toward my shelter, one holding a clipboard.

“Which one is it?” one of them asked. “No, wait, don’t tell me. Hey, kid. Hey,
Jiggs”
It was Tony Gentry, diminished and dirtied a little, but still center-parted, still slightly more alive than the standard human, still spiffy. “Hello there, Jiggs. Or are you still actually Cheeta?”

Difficult question, under the circumstances, Tony. I am
the artist formerly known as
Cheeta.

No, come on, buck up. What am I talking about? Today is the first day of the rest of your life. You’re
Cheeta
, for Chrissakes, pull yourself together.

Me Cheeta, Mr. Gentry. Me still Cheeta.

The saddest thing about being a great artist, I think, is the question of immortality. We may live forever (touch wood!) but our works slowly fade away and are forgotten. I don’t really expect
Tarzan and the Amazons
to last. I expect to see even
Tarzan and His Mate
die out of the world. Yes, it will. And I’ll probably outlast this book. Yet I do have—ah, dammit, I know you’ll say I’m as crazy as Garbo toward the end. I’ve been doing some paintings of the American landscape lately and I harbor a sneaking hope that one or two of these pieces might last as long as me. I think they’re the best work I’ve done in
any
medium. If you give a million monkeys a million paintbrushes and some top-quality art materials then one of us, one day, is going to paint you
Sunflowers
or
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
, or maybe even an original. I just hope it’s going to be me. I know I’ve got a long way to go technically, but I’ve got a lot I want to express, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? An artist has got to have something he desperately wants to say, something he desperately lacks.

Don supplies the paint (water-based poster), provides me with the right working environment and handles the commercial side via our website. And business is absolutely booming at a hundred
and fifty bucks a canvas.
Dolores del Rio Sleeping on a Sheet, Santa Monica, No. 134
went for two hundred. So did
Study of Don in Comical Barbecue Apron.
And Dr. Goodall bought
“Duke” Wayne with Mexican Waiter in Headlock
for two fifty at a charity auction. To be quite honest, the fees my artworks command are keeping us all going at the Casa de Cheeta. Jeeter, young Daphne and dear little Squeakers, the orangutans, Maxine the cheeky young macaque, and Don: all depend on my going to the kitchen table in the morning and finding that inspiration again. With the streak I’m on at the moment, they don’t have to worry about a thing.

It’s the failures that drive me on, I think, and the need to get across something I can’t seem to articulate any other way. I try to take the grief and loss (the wound that every artist must possess) and mingle them with the gratitude and love I feel toward humanity, toward that dog wheeling on its side in next door’s yard, toward the midges throwing their clever shapes of fists and hourglasses above the pool, toward everything that
isn’t
lost. I try to show that the grief is the lining of my joy. I want to paint the bottomless ocean of absence that lies underneath the perfect day. One day I’ll nail it, and then we’ll be able to afford to get Don’s mom some permanent nursing at the Eldercare Center.

So I’ve been doing Mr. Gentry recently or, rather, the landscapes we traveled through, the succession of cars and trucks we grew to love and then discard, the litter on their dashboards that would slide over and fall out at corners, the flattened grass outside the venues, the shy kids turning away from me into their laughing mothers’ fronts. I remember our long-serving flyers and playbills; my ever-changing costumes; the collapsible car I drove from ’57 to ’64, until it collapsed. And I remembered whole panoplies of marvelous colleagues: Doozer and Goofy and Bingo; Kong and Katie, with whom I worked for umpteen years on and off whenever we were in
the south; the inimitable Pepsi; that absolutely
filthy
Carol from Florida (hi, Carol!); four-fingered Mungo from Amarillo and his performance-related gnawing anxieties; Fidel, who was such a talent on the mouth-organ, though his repertoire was limited to “The Tennessee Waltz;” Caruso, a unicyclist of genius and a tremendous friend until we fell out over a female in the parking lot of a diner in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Pamela and Boggle, Hyacinth and Fudge and the rest of the cast of an absolutely riotous re-enactment of
Show Boat
that we staged for a couple of years on the Missouri River in Sioux City, Iowa (which was followed in ’56 by a somewhat short-lived
Mutiny on the Bounty
, with me in the Charles Laughton/Trevor Howard/Tony Hopkins role and not shining); Brad the lion, Don the seal, Rock the sea
lion
, Chip the mynah, Buzz the penguin and his whole crew, Mary-Lou the pony, Happy the gorilla, Happy the elephant and Happy the little polar bear.

I could tell you some stories about life on the road, but the code is that what goes on in those lockups and motel rooms, tents and pens stays in those lockups, etc. As for the “work,” there’s an idea that stage work is more rewarding than performing in movies, but I could hardly disagree more. Stage work is the very definition of something that’s not going to last. And maybe you could say there’s something personal in that. Without my motion-picture partners, I seemed to lose some of that compulsion to invent. Somehow I could no longer manage to come up with those little flecks of off-the-cuff genius that distinguish my best film work. There wasn’t the context of the escarpment to make it matter—maybe that was it. I lacked motivation. For three decades I think I “phoned it in” a bit.