Me Cheeta (34 page)

Celebrity was—has always been—where the real opportunities lay. Nero the Great riding his Great Dane and Little Pierre in his Batman outfit at the St. Louis Zoo, Zippy (on TV now), J. Fred Muggs, Mr. Moke, Mata Hari, the Marquis Chimps… I was cheered to see us making inroads in conspicuous positions in the media. And as for the sciences—as for young Ham… you have to remember the tension and suspicion that existed between the Soviet Union and the States in the late fifties and early sixties to appreciate just how important the Space Race was. Who would make it first, human or chimpanzee? It was a blow when a
dog
got up first, and an immense relief when she died, after several days, of starvation, dehydration and, who knows?, madness and terror.
Ham kept his focus, through those difficult days when it seemed like a bunch of rhesus monkeys might leapfrog everyone (they were killed, too, by suffocation), and on the last day of January 1961, he triumphed. Not just for himself but every one of us. It’s wonderful to be loved by you, dearest readers, but it’s even better to feel like you’ve earned
respect.
Poor old Gagarin trailed in anticlimactically sometime in April. You beat us to the moon, so we’ll call the whole thing a tie.

Meanwhile the Project continued apace, of course. Humans were taking it ever more seriously, and I was pleased to see that
finally
a few of us were now being officially recognized as “endangered.” At first it was a trickle, sure, but you can’t hold that sort of thing back once you’ve started; you can’t deny what’s in front of you. With laudable speed, species after species was recognized as “endangered.” That’s right: get ’em out of there! Get ’em in shelters now!

But “endangered” didn’t seem to be doing the job. Stronger terms were needed, and soon the same animals were reclassified as “seriously endangered,” then “critically endangered.” Well, it helps, perhaps, but people see through these PR terms. Even the safest of us are supposedly “critically endangered” now. I mean, according to Don,
humans
are critically endangered. It seems over the top to say so: death lurks, sure. But you don’t need to be told. You don’t need someone like
Don
going around stating the bloody obvious all the time, do you?

In 1973 we were still out on the circuit but the fallow periods between residencies were getting longer and longer and Doozer and I were spending a lot of time in the yard out back of Mr. Gentry’s house in Barstow, California. My big “comeback” with
Dolittle
had come and gone. Mr. Gentry’s center part was now a casualty
of history and had been overrun by a mob of gray hair. Humans were wearing their clothes much more in the loose style we entertainment-industry chimps have always favored. Burgers were bigger (good), cigarettes had irritating little cotton filters (bad, but you could rip them off), and I was losing it. I don’t know how it happened, but one day I just couldn’t do backflips anymore. Same with the walking-on-hands trick. The spring had just upped and offed. One small plus was that the “real movie Cheeta” stuff seemed to have been more or less permanently abandoned, and I wasn’t jabbing my eye out on my past every ten minutes.

Anyway, we were in Las Vegas, where the Immortals congregate, because Mr. G. was making a personal call on a promoter who was interested in what remained of the act. I was there in a purely PR capacity, but Reception had requested I remain in the car, which I took as kind of a bad omen for the meeting.

So I was sitting there in our beloved old Datsun, thinking about the time that we’d missed out on the
Norwester’s
Voyage to Vegas because of his row with the late Lupe Vélez. Yeah, little Lupe, with her metallic arms flashing bolts of light across the desert. Lupe had said, “She really loves you, doesn’t she?” and he’d said something like “I guess so,” but in an embarrassed way that I thought implied reciprocation. I had a little list of lines or moments like that in my head, a list beginning to fall apart at the folds. No, the list had already crumbled into half a dozen smaller separate squares, with bits of writing missing where the creases had been. The list included “I always thought Cheeta was pretty funny, I guess” at Chaplin’s and “Cheeta’s one of my best friends, aintcha, Cheets?” (to Norma Shearer at Sardi’s) and “Wait, we can’t go without Cheeta, it won’t be any fun” (Christian’s Hut, Catalina: to general party) and “Much as I dearly love you, Cheeta…” (I’d been masturbating and accidentally overshot onto Jayne Mansfield’s lap,
and then, in trying to calm her down, had somehow managed to tip gazpacho over her) and the embrace on Beryl’s terrace, and, oh, lots and lots of other Classics.

Well, I happened to be running through this list when, by an incredible coincidence, Mr. Gentry flopped back into the Datsun, sighed deeply, and said, “What a waste.” This meant another three hours on the Interstate back to Barstow, which was fine by me. I wasn’t doing anything. “You know who’s working at Caesar’s Palace, though?” he said, pulling out of a long, weary U-turn. “Your old co-star. You want to stop and say hi?”

Yes, Maureen had been divorced by John Farrow and was now working in the Palace under the name of “Jane Parker,” as an escort offering correction to the older gentleman who found the English accent a turn-on. She was scarcely making enough to keep the casino sweet, though, and dealt Quaaludes and various uppers, just
kidding
, just kidding you there…. Maureen was in fact in Scottsdale, Arizona, a contented widow and grandmother who enjoyed doing summer stock on the East Coast and the occasional TV cameo back here, and who was, even as we turned the Datsun around, mixing the first drink of the afternoon in preparation for her daily telephone marathon with her seven children. Maureen had got what she wanted.

But her old on-screen love was working in Caesar’s Palace as a greeter, along with Joe Louis. The sub-duty manager put a call through but he wasn’t in his room. He guessed he could be anywhere. They could try the Tannoy. No, Mr. Gentry didn’t think it mattered that much. The sub-duty manager wanted to help and did it anyway. He was quite taken by the whole thing, and annoyed by our bad luck. “Nine times out of ten, you’d have caught him.” Normally the countess would be here, but she’d gone back to Cheviot Hills for the week with her daughter. The countess? Mr.
Weissmuller’s wife. It really was incredibly bad luck we’d missed him: he could only be playing golf. The sub-duty manager’s name was Chris Jehlinger, by the way. He was delighted to meet a legend of the silver screen: he’d grown up with me. I wasn’t normally so badly behaved, Mr. Gentry apologized.

We could call around the golf courses, or he might be out with friends, Chris admitted. He really wanted to help. Maybe it was the air-conditioning that was upsetting Cheeta. Mr. Weissmuller had been working at the Hotel for three months. He sure was a friendly guy, he was a riot when he and Joe got together. Still giving that yell, yes, sir. There was a picture in the Imperial Lounge, if we wanted to see it. There I was, in silvery light on a nest of twigs, holding his hand and Maureen’s, looking like a minister on the verge of uniting in matrimony a couple about whom he has grave doubts.

Chris suggested we wait at the pool bar and have a drink on Caesar’s before going back to Barstow—after all, he might well come back at any moment. Cheeta was going crazy, he was probably looking forward to seeing his old pal. He was excited by the picture, was what it was. He definitely seemed to recognize it, didn’t you think? Mr. Weissmuller had had these terrible business difficulties the last few years. Yes, that was true, he’d been bankrupt. His business manager—Chris wasn’t sure of the details exactly, but certainly it was sad and just went to show. The hotel was pleased to be able to help him. He was a fine man and what had happened was a scandal. You get some sharks in Hollywood. The biggest thing was his daughter’s death. Chris had absolutely loved the movies as a kid. Bo Roos, that was the guy, exactly. Chris would make sure that Mr. Weissmuller was aware where we were the moment he came back—Mr. Weissmuller started at eight thirty, so he ought to be here by seven, seven thirty? Five hours? No, we had to go, Mr.
Gentry said, he didn’t like driving at night. Cheeta was just being silly now. We could always come back some other time.

Never have I regretted not having bothered to learn American Sign Language so much. Some chimps can sign you stuff like “love friend sad stay stay stay car no heart pain big stay stay stay” but I’m not one of them. No, not “heart,” I don’t think they actually use “heart.” What did I think would happen, though? That I could offer him consolation? Bring his daughter back? Indict Bo Roos? What did I possibly think could happen other than half an hour of awkward interaction between two washed-up old has-beens?

On a sunny Saturday morning in the fall of 1975, just outside Flagstaff, Arizona, I
did
bump into an old colleague. It was the last tour we ever did, and we’d pulled over at a little roadside zoo to do a quick meet-and-greet, and there, next to a sign directing you to the zoo’s biggest draw—a series of footprints left by a brontosaurus—was Stroheim. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t even see me. The notice saying
Do not feed the animals. Do not introduce anything through the bars
had gained fresh underlinings and exclamation marks in a still unbleached black, as if after the fact of some unfortunate incident. He was mad. In the sweat-darkened stripe across his concrete floor you could see the map of his insanity: his insane tos and insane fros. To the delight of a thickening crowd, he was masturbating away with the zestlessness of the classic twenty-a-dayer, seeing nothing, inside or out. His baldness was worse, almost complete. Poor, poor Stroheim… children were shaking my hand—“Hey, monkey! You found a buddy?”—and not quite understanding my protests and squirmings, Mr. Gentry hustled me away, down toward the vanished dinosaur where I was re-engulfed by the ice creams profferred at me from all sides like microphones. I felt all done in with feeling for him,
as if he were my brother. My brother, who couldn’t act to save his life.

From the mid-seventies into the eighties I lived in Barstow with Mr. Gentry. Life was quiet. I was biding my time, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was biding it for.

Our stage work had dried up, not helped by a large-scale shift in human attitudes toward chimpanzees and animals working in entertainment. Supposedly, we were no longer funny. I was more than happy to admit that I was long past my best, though I worried for the younger chimps. (On the other hand, I thought, if chimps aren’t picking up major leads any longer, then so much the better for my reputation. My
oeuvre
would grow in stature as the years went by!) There were the occasional appearances at parades, or for educational purposes at high schools, so it wasn’t a total withdrawal from the entertainment industry. But I knew that as an actor, I was finished. I’d been finished since
Dolittle.
I’d been finished since
Tarzan and the Huntress
, when I was age fourteen. The older I got, the more it struck me that what I really was was a child actor.

In Barstow, I was part of the family. Actually, I
was
the family. I ought to mention here that there had been a Mrs. Gentry, but Mr. Gentry and she had had their problems. She claimed that he was more attached to his animal colleagues than he was to her, and she probably had a point. So, there were just the two of us. I watched a lot of television, avoiding old classics when they came on, was amazed by the coming of videocassettes, which were such fun to tug apart that the inevitable scolding was worth it. I fooled around in my tire, ate and slept and did my best not to think about the past.

I’d made a decision in ’73 in Las Vegas. Yearning after the past was going to finish me off. From now on I would stamp down on those thoughts, like you stamp on the flames still springing up from a forest floor after a fire. I was just going to think about the
present and bide my time. So I thought about the present, and by the time I was no longer yearning after the past all the time, I started worrying about the future.

Since ’74 I’d put on quite a bit of weight myself. I heard the tree my tire hung from giving sarcastic creaks whenever I labored up into it. But Mr. Gentry was really letting himself go. He didn’t exercise, he drank in the evenings though he only had me to keep him company, and he’d never smoked enough. He may have been pining for Mrs. Gentry. Clambering up around his neck was no longer advised because of his back, touch football ceased completely, and one afternoon his nephew came over to help convert the downstairs rumpus room (or “the dump”) into a bedroom. As soon as stairs become the enemy, something’s seriously amiss. “I’m going to end up in a wheelchair at this rate,” he told his nephew. He had none of the positivity I encounter in my visits to the hospices—the positivity I’m increasingly convinced is the key to immortality.

“I don’t want to hear any of that talk,” said his nephew. “You could lose a few pounds, is all. You give me a pen and paper and I’ll write you out a menu planner, right? Things you can’t have, things you can….”

“Listen, Don,” Mr. Gentry said, “I’m not gonna last forever, and I don’t want to spend my life worrying about what I eat, OK?”

So that was the first time I met Don. He was as skinny then as he is now, but he had a hell of a lot of long, unhealthy-looking hair, especially around the back of his head. He came over to Barstow from Palm Springs more and more frequently, to help with things that Mr. Gentry could no longer manage, like fixing a cage door I’d busted or carrying in the big sacks of monkey chow with which we stocked the pantry every quarter. I must say, I found Don ever so slightly annoying at first: he loved to play touch football with me, and as he did, he’d talk to me about movies. “Hey, what’s it like,
being a big star?,” “How’d you get your break, Cheets?,” “You got a number I can reach your agent on?”

Don was an actor too, but he was finding it hard to get anywhere, let alone into pictures. He wasn’t quite sure of his direction in life, I could tell from snippets of conversations between him and Mr. Gentry. Mr. Gentry would talk about Mrs. Gentry and feed me my post-supper cigarette, and Don would talk about acting and disapprove of my cigarette. Don thought L.A. was a jungle, filled with the usual vultures, crocodiles, jackals and sharks that always got mentioned when people were feeling negative about Hollywood. The two of them agreed that it was a worthless place filled with crooks and cheats and always had been; then they put on a classic movie. I scurried off because I feared sighting some of those old familiar faces.