Me Cheeta (16 page)

Yes, some of those women were sexually presenting themselves to Johnny, but the swimming lessons were, on his side at least, about swimming. He was introducing them to the love of his life, after all.

It was only many, many years later, on a flight back from Acapulco, that I heard the story of the
Favorite:
a two-story excursion boat that ferried passengers between the various parks on Lake Michigan’s North Shore. One late afternoon in the summer of 1927, it was hit by a sudden squall. Johnny was on the shore less than half a mile away, taking a break from training with his brother Pete. By the time they’d rowed out to the
Favorite
, it had sunk. The
captain was sitting on the pilothouse roof, which still protruded from the lake, smoking, in shock. He couldn’t swim! Johnny and Pete dived to save who they could. The water was black but the people’s faces shone out white in it, and they dived down and came up with bodies, passing them into the care of the people now arriving in tenders and dinghies. They kept diving, bringing up the dead bodies, twenty of them, thirty of them, and eleven of those bodies were returned to life with artificial respiration and “pulmotors.” Johnny and Pete delivered eleven citizens of Chicago back to life. But all the dead, except one, were women and children.

So there was nothing lecherous about him then, despite the dense smog of female human sexual desire almost visibly rippling the air around him. He was turning something that was death for them into what it was for him, which was life. Or that was what was happening with the ones who weren’t just
pretending
to be unable to swim. “It’s hard to die when Mr. Tarzan’s around,” as that marvelous performer Barry Fitzgerald put it so beautifully during his famous “fever monologue” in
Tarzan’s Secret Treasure.
And, to be sure, so it was.

All over America children were fending off death with Johnny’s help. You humans had recently developed a way of refining the impurities out of flour, allowing you to bake healthier “white” bread, and Johnny was on the packaging of these super-nutritious loaves, encouraging youngsters to protect themselves against disease by eating plenty of the new food. His campaign against death took him onto the boxes of Wheaties breakfast cereal, promoting its HEALTH-GIVING GOODNESS and handing you the KEY TO VITALITY. And then there was the twelve-year-old boy, Bob Wheeler, who must have been almost as happy as Mayer and Thalberg were when Johnny, in August 1934, pulled his unconscious body from the waves near the Santa Monica municipal pier and
resuscitated him. “You’re Tarzan!” were Bob’s first words on returning to life.

It was hard to die when Johnny was around. When I plunged through Harold Lloyd’s algae-veiled ninth green, he was the one who held out a three-wood to me while the other golfers split their sides. I count that as saving my life. Plus there was the time I was posing for photographs behind the wheel of Doug Fairbanks’s open-top Rolls-Royce and accidentally knocked the hand brake off. Johnny was the one who vaulted in to halt the car as it rolled down the driveway. It’s true that the accident itself would hardly have proved fatal, since Doug’s driveway curved and the car’s trajectory would surely have been stopped by the statue he had of three humans murdering a couple of snakes. But if I’d wrecked his Rolls, Doug would have killed me.

Poor old Doug was fifty by then, and spent most of his days working out with a trainer and masseur called Chuck, or nakedly shuttling from his steam bath to a kind of mirrored tent in the garden in which he liked to do himself to a turn. His body still twanged with a weary vigor, but his face looked like San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. “Johnny, you fucking crazy fool,” he’d laughed just before I knocked the hand brake, “if your ugly monkey damages my beautiful automobile, I’ll fucking kill it. This car requires an artist behind its wheel. It must be handled like a…” Doug went on describing the beauties of the Rolls (he was a disgusting Anglophile) but I was no longer listening. It was the first time anybody had called me Johnny’s monkey. In fact, it was my excitement at this that caused me to dislodge the damn brake.

Perhaps it was the incident with the Rolls that prompted Johnny to start my driving lessons. Everybody knows that not being able to drive in Los Angeles is a social death sentence, and he seemed to think it important that I should master the basics. These consisted
of sitting on his lap and depressing the bulb of the horn with one hand while manipulating the wheel with the other. After a period of experiment, we decided to restrict ourselves to the horn (I’m not a natural driver, but I certainly caused fewer fatalities among pedestrians than did certain other MGM stars of the Golden Age).

So Johnny would swing by the MGM zoo every so often around five o’clock, usually with a friend in tow—Jimmy Durante, Errol Flynn, Ramon Navarro, David Niven, of course, who wasn’t yet a star although it was just a matter of time—and we would drive down to Sunset and pull up opposite the Hollywood High School for Girls. When the girls, who seemed pretty much like adult females to me, came pouring out through the gates, I was to sound the horn while Flynn or Niv or Ramón and Johnny flattened themselves on the sidewalk and watched the girls’ reactions from under the car’s chassis, moaning about jailbait and San Quentin prison.

Then they’d pile back in and we’d drive another quarter-mile down Sunset to the gate outside the theater of Earl Carroll’s Vanities, where an illuminated sign informed you that “Through These Portals Pass the Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” and repeat the procedure as the girls arrived for the evening show. Johnny would reward me with potato chips, Flynn with nips from his fifth of bourbon, Niv with smokes, but I sensed they were disappointed in the responses I was getting.

“My dear fellow,” Niven decided, “if our act is to have any true
elan
, then we have to give Cheeta something to work with.”

The next time I saw Niv he had engineered a little contraption out of two shaving mirrors and a stick. Now Johnny was able to lie out of sight on the Chevy’s front seat, gingerly steering the car with one hand on the underside of the wheel, the other holding Niven’s periscope. Lying the other way, Niven was using his feet to control the pedals. I was standing on Johnny’s head with one hand resting
on the top of the wheel, the other honking the horn and a cigar (Niven’s prop again) between my teeth. Like this we would pull rather shakily away from the curb. The effect was unsatisfactory, like a palsied lecher beating a guilty retreat, and besides, Johnny and Niv couldn’t see the girls’ reactions.

This was when Johnny hit upon the idea of using a couple of old colleagues of his from
Tarzan the Ape Man
, the first Tarzan picture, a sort of preliminary sketch for the triumphs to come. Chet and Len were the first two dwarfs I had ever met. Years later, during the period when I decided to concentrate on stage work rather than movie roles, I would come to know a number of dwarfs, and Chet and Len were pretty typical of them—aggressively sexual, extremely bibulous (they were
all
drunks), cynical, quarrelsome and very loving toward animals.

Chet squatted in the well of the driver’s side, operating the pedals, and Len, small enough not to have to lie sideways to steer, could lean back in the seat and, using an improved periscope, direct the Chevy unseen and in comfort, with me standing on his thighs and driving, and Weissmuller and Niven waving regally from the back. And all of this was just to attract the attention of some sexually receptive females.

In fact, unless I specifically inform you otherwise, every single action performed by an adult human male in this memoir can be thought of as an attempt to attract the attention of some sexually receptive females. “Impressing the ladies is an arduous task,” as the narrator’s always saying on
Animal Planet
, with that little chuckle I’ve come to dread when sex turns up. “Perhaps no creature has a more elaborate courtship display than the bower bird.” No creature? That’s a joke, right? You can’t think of one? Clue: as part of its elaborate courtship displays this species has invented telephones, moving pictures, cars, music, money, organized warfare, tiger-skin
rugs, alcohol, mood lighting, speedboats, mink coats, cities and poetry. So, please, no sniggering at the bower birds’ attempts to get laid.

But Niv and Johnny had gone far beyond trying to turn the heads of a few of Earl Carroll’s showgirls by now. We went up to Mulholland for a test-drive and found that Len was both utterly nerveless and sure-fingered, and I bombed around the drive’s long curves, honking away, at something close to the Chevy’s top speed. This had the makings of something. In fact, we decided that what we really needed was Dietrich’s Cadillac, which was so long that her chauffeur, Briggs, was seldom in the same county as his employer, and which was known as “the Most Beautiful Car in America.” Yes, the Most Beautiful Human Being on Planet Earth looking at the Most Beautiful Girls in the World from the Most Beautiful Car in America, chauffeured by an ape. Poetry. And it could stand further improvement, Johnny argued. It wouldn’t necessarily be overdoing things if we drove over to Griffith Park Zoo and picked up Jackie the lion, who was really quite tame. His trainer was a drunk and a curmudgeon, but always in need of a few bucks. Yeah, Jackie, everyone agreed, Jackie would round things out nicely, leaning out of the passenger window, his mane streaming in the breeze, with me working the horn. Jackie and Cheeta—a dream team.

Dietrich, however, would never lend us her Cadillac. But what about Fairbanks?
Fairbanks!
Fairbanks’s open-top Rolls! Now this was approaching some kind of perfection!

Once Doug had been persuaded, after lengthy negotiations, to allow Johnny and Niv to borrow the Rolls (“Not you, if you don’t mind, David, you’ve had a couple already, haven’t you?,” “Not at all, Doug. I’m merely on scintillating form,” “Have a cigar instead. And get her back in time for lunch”), we drove it carefully out of the gates to meet up with the two dwarfs, who were waiting with Jackie
around the corner. The plan was to stop by Joan Crawford’s house, which was just down the road, then Mayer’s, and then look in at Summit Drive, where we could visit Chaplin, David Selznick and Ronnie Colman, before making a leisurely procession down the length of Hollywood Boulevard and into legend.

Dearest humans, gentle readers, you’re an easy crowd. Even without my own little touches (golf visor and cigar), Jackie and I would have been a hit, just because we were animals. I have to be honest here. If I’ve been fortunate enough to make a few people laugh along the way, and maybe even make them think a little, my own hard work and talent have played their part. But most of my success, perhaps, or much of it… some of it, anyway—let’s say a
fraction
of my success, ten percent, we can agree on that—can be put down to my simply being an animal. No other species loves other animals the way you do.

I suppose that the more I was getting out and about in Hollywood, the more I was getting to see your love for animals. Everybody shared their mansions with dogs; everybody had aviaries; there were horses and snakes and turtles; there was a zoo in Luna Park and one in Griffith Park. There was an ostrich farm up on Mission Drive, right next to the California Alligator Farm, where the alligators were so adored that young adult humans would kidnap them on an almost nightly basis.

I was beginning to realize the scale of the whole project. How many
Forest Lawns
had there been? On the walls in several of my fellow stars’ lovely homes, you would often see photographs that showed your host next to the carcass of some violent marine predator. Since a mass rescue of fish was impossible on the same scale as with us land-dwellers, humans were obviously removing as many of the more dangerous predators as possible from the sea to protect the majority of smaller fish. And then there were the white horses
on whiskey labels and camels on cigarettes and big-eared mice in the movies and all the rest of it.

I mean, when Strickling wanted to promote Mae West’s
It Ain’t No Sin
, he hired a couple hundred parrots to perch in theater lobbies around the country and recite the picture’s title, which, unfortunately, the Hays Office nixed at the last moment as too suggestive, forcing a change to
I’m No Angel.
But the birds went on and sang,
It ain’t no sin, it ain’t no sin.
They were the Parrots That Couldn’t Be Gagged. Nobody remembered the picture, but you couldn’t go to a party for weeks without people toasting those parrots.

And if the Dream Factories rated your work, you could get away with anything. When Emma, the queen of the MGM elephants, seriously disagreed with her trainer on the set of
Tarzan Finds a Son!
, she picked him up with her trunk, threw him down and broke his back. She wasn’t even put on suspension. The other elephants took their cues from Emma, so the studio closed ranks and blamed the trainer, just as they had when Gable ran over a woman called Tosca Roulien on Sunset Boulevard in September ’33, for which John Huston took the rap. Oops. Well, I’ve mentioned it now, and as the inquest showed, Mrs. Roulien was at fault, stepping without looking into the torrent of traffic that famously chokes Sunset at two in the morning. On the other hand, Maurice the lion was never seen again after he mauled dear old Charles Bickford during the filming of Fox’s
East of Java.
He may have been an animal but he just hadn’t done enough to keep his profile high. That was always, always the key to surviving.

Anyway, once the six of us had loaded ourselves into the Rolls, and Niv had installed the smoking cigar between my teeth, Johnny was overtaken by conscience about Doug. Fairbanks was simply the biggest practical joker there was in Hollywood. He would feel
betrayed when he found out what we’d done with his car without including him.

“We can’t possibly leave him behind,” Johnny said. “We have to have Doug.”

So we set off back through Doug’s tall gates and down his drive, with me honking the Rolls’s distinguished English-accented horn to alert the old King of Hollywood to our approach. And there Doug was, descending the steps at the front of the house with his three-hundred-pound English bull mastiff, Marco Polo, bouncing along behind him, and the floppy-hatted pale Lady Sylvia, his distinguished English wife, peering out from the portico at our racket. Unfortunately the joke-shop cigar that Doug had palmed off on Niv exploded violently in my face at that moment, causing me to panic and kick Len in the head rather forcefully. We swung across the lawn, accelerating, since my panic-stricken lashing-out had sort of jammed Len’s body against Chet’s, trapping him against the pedals in the well. Niven was shouting, “Jump!” and Johnny, “Left, Len, left!” as we veered back onto the drive and were brought to a sudden and horribly percussive halt by Johnny’s beloved Chevy, which was parked meekly on the gravel driveway in front of the house.