Me Cheeta (17 page)

Niven, floppy with booze, was unscathed. So was Jackie, thrown clear and onto his feet. Len and Chet sustained injuries they managed to drink their way through over the course of that afternoon. I was flung through the air, twirling lazily over the mashed Chevy, over the herringbone bricks of the terrace and the urns of pansies and geraniums, over Sylvia’s elegant white hand holding down her wide-brimmed hat, the sticks of charcoal lying on her sketchbook, where Doug’s face was taking shape, unshocked as yet by the whole thing. And as I rotated and awaited death, my whole life passed before my eyes.

And you know what? It wasn’t a precious moment—the whole thing was poisoned by the fact that I knew I was about to die. It hit me—with more force than the stucco façade of Doug and Sylvia’s house was just about to—how terrible and pointless it would be to live life thinking that death wasn’t just a danger to be continuously outwitted, but an
inevitability.
And I so wanted not to die! How would Tarzan and Jane cope on the escarpment? For a long, bitter moment I sailed over the herringbone bricks, over a little ironrailinged terrace and through the open windows of the Fairbankses’ master bedroom, making a splashdown on an extravagantly soft king-size bed—in which, four years later, poor dear Doug was cruelly snuck up on by his heart and killed while he slept.

Well, Niven is well known for embellishing his anecdotes—absolutely notorious for it. “Your stories lose nothing in the telling, David,” as a skeptical listener (I won’t name him, to spare his blushes) once grumbled after yet another phantasmagorical punch line at one of Lionel Atwill’s weekly sex parties up at Pacific Palisades.

“No, but yours do,” Niv responded.

However, it’s a question of taste, really—for my part, it spoils a good story if you can’t believe it really happened like that. Niv would doubtless tell you that “After a silence, Doug looked us up and down and said, ‘Sylvia, tell Cook we will be six for lunch’” or “I exited the vehicle and fixed Doug with my most apologetic expression: ‘Bit tricky to park, your car.’” But of course it wasn’t like that.

I scampered dizzily off the bed and out onto the little terrace to see Doug and Sylvia and the pointlessly barking dog rushing toward the wrecked Rolls, which the two dwarfs and a bleeding Johnny were exiting in various degrees of unsteadiness. Niven was rather groggily complaining to Doug that “It’s a bit tricky to park, your car.”

Johnny could stand, thank God. He could speak. He was saying, “Oh, no, no, no, no, where’s Jackie? How’s Jackie? Is Jackie OK? Len, are you all right? Chet?”

I must add, for the sake of strict accuracy, that over the top of the whole scene was the sound of one of the tour guides who plagued the dreamers’ houses on a daily basis inaccurately describing through a loudspeaker to a busload of day-trippers the lives that were lived behind the creeper-clad walls. Very faintly, a metallic voice was in the middle of a description of the unhappy ending of Doug’s marriage to Mary Pickford: “… tragically the fairy tale couldn’t last, and what seemed like an ideal union was doomed to…”

“Oh, thank Christ, Jackie!” said Johnny. “He’s OK. Oh, thank God.” Jackie was padding swiftly away through the shrubs, looking kind of mournful, almost tearful, as cats can after a shock. “Look, he’s fine, he’s moving fine… Chet, you’re… Where’s Cheeta?”

Jumping up and down and windmilling my arms above my head, I gave my most resonant pant-hoot and let it curdle into a shriek of delight. I’m here! It’s me, Cheeta! The faces of the humans on the drive turned up toward me and I gave them a backflip of joy and, what the hell?, stood on my hands. I could see that Johnny was OK—a small cut on his hairline bleeding more than it really meant. Oh, lucky, lucky,
lucky
me. It’s hard to die when Mr. Tarzan is around.

“Jesus Christ, Johnny, we are
lucky
men,” said Niven.

But Tarzan was already responding to my pant-hoot with an immense yodel,
“Aaaahhheeeeyyeeeyyeeeyyaaaahhhheeyyeeeyyeeeaaaaaah
…” before laughter overtook him, then Niv, the dwarfs and finally the Fairbankses.

And then Doug said the immortal words, “Sylvia, tell Cook we’ll be six for lunch.”

*  *  *

Johnny loved to give the jungle call, I think, because his voice was the one imperfection his body had. He’d caught his throat on a picket fence in an accident back in his Chicago boyhood, performing, amazingly, an imitation of Douglas Fairbanks in
The Mark of Zorro.
His voice was a high and reedy shock in normal conversation. Add to that the fact that Thalberg was desperately keen to stop the escarpment becoming polluted with words, and would send urgent notes to the set after he’d seen early rushes:
We don’t need any more dialogue for Johnny. Less dialogue. More action. So
you could see why Johnny was a little self-conscious in speech and liked to bust out into that yell. As a boy he’d been teased about his voice; as an adolescent he’d been told to shut up and swim by his coaches; as a young man representing America at the Olympics he’d been warned not to say anything undignified or out of place. And now he was being paid $1,250, rising to $2,000 a week with bonuses, not to say anything at all. The yell was the one thing he could do that was commensurate with his body, that expressed what he was really like: happy, beautiful, young, untroubled, inarticulate.

It was his authority that made others so happy to be around him. He’d had to go looking for a father—you often heard this story; it was his article of faith—and had met a swimming coach named Bachrach at the Illinois Athletic Club when he was fifteen. “Big Bill” had changed his life, become his proper father over five years of training for the (humans only) Olympiad in France. All he ever had to do was what Bachrach told him to do, and life was simple. The authority was something he’d voluntarily submitted to because he knew he needed the discipline. So he wasn’t the kind of human who spent three-quarters of his waking life chafing against alphas, or fretting about how to keep the betas in order: he was a
born alpha who was happy to let other alphas dominate if they wanted to. Alphadom was so easy, it wasn’t worth getting into a scrap about. I don’t know. I’m a comedian, not an anthropologist.

He was a big kid who loved everyone. The first time he met Jackie he rapped him on the nose with his knife handle, and Jackie gave him a lick of love on his shoulder that took a week to heal. Another time, we were up at the Lakeside playing a round of golf. The other course, the Californian Country Club, at that time still barred non-human sports-creatures. (There are still courses in America, believe it or not, where Don would be refused entry if he were to arrive with me.) But at the Lakeside we could hack away to our hearts’ content. “How’s-a-boy, Cheets. I’ll take a seven,” Johnny would say, if I was caddying for him, and give the signal that we’d worked on. I’d hand over the appropriate club or, OK, my best shot at the appropriate club, it wasn’t a damn cabaret act, and Johnny would make the white ball dematerialize with a waft of his wand.

He was, I believe, considered a very talented golfer, on account of his very beautiful hands, which directed his clubs with the same gentle will he used on animals. Holding himself for perhaps a slightly vain half-second too long at the end of his follow-through, he looked exactly like one of the little golden figurines that topped the trophies he won so many of: he looked no less golden. Beautiful hands, with big half-moons on his cuticles, and I thought his handwriting beautiful too. Unlike the name-patterns scrawled by other stars on menus and publicity photos, every letter of Johnny’s signature was clearly legible, a series of patiently formed loops. In the forties, when he was living up in Mandeville Canyon, I remember knocking a book called I think something like
The American Civil War: A History
off of his La-Z-Boy recliner and seeing how the white margins were filled with this unmistakable pattern of his. “Imp,” he’d written repeatedly, or “remember,” or “reason for war,”
and although he wasn’t in the house at that moment, I could sense the familiar motions of his hand in those round, careful curves, and it felt like he was stroking me.

But this isn’t a book about Johnny Weissmuller. Lunch at the Fairbankses’ was a perfect description of the prevailing realities between the seven alphas and us dreamers.

“Gentlemen, I think it’d be wise of us to keep our damn traps shut about this for a day or two,” Doug said. “If Hedda or Louella finds out that you wrote off your Sportster while you were with Niv, and before lunch, some conclusions might be drawn that wouldn’t go down at all well with L.B. And Goldwyn definitely doesn’t need to know anything about your drinking habits, David.”

“I don’t have any drinking habits,” said Niv, drinking in his habitual manner.

“You’re doing
Charge
with Flynn and the de Havilland girl, aren’t you? You don’t want to give Sam anything over you at this point.”

Doug started outlining some complex plan for towing the cars away at night, separately, paying off the auto wreckers and so on. That was what it was like in the Golden Age. It was bizarre—we were naughty children playing naughty games in a nest of spies who would tell on us if they ever caught us. And if an alpha turned against you, he could punish you, and the cameras would no longer pour soul over you and bang went your immortality. So we were playing for our lives. And possibly that was what made our dreams so damn good. The alphas were geniuses in their way.

There were different ways to play the game. Joe Cotten famously took a direct route when Hedda printed a slander about his supposed one-night stand with Deanna Durbin on the Universal lot. Joe had been working late and spent the night in his dressing room rather than trekking back to his wife in Pacific Palisades, and
Deanna had done the same thing after driving her husband to the Burbank airport. They bumped into each other for an early breakfast in the commissary, but Hedda suggested it had been a midnight tryst. Joe informed Hedda that if anything was printed, then the next time he saw her he would kick her in the ass, which he duly did, to tumultuous applause at a reception for the Vice President of the United States in the Beverly Hills Hotel. His rage was so complete, righteous and public that, of course, it has always been assumed that Hedda had perpetrated a grievous untruth. This was a quite
brilliant
move by Joe, who was a compulsive cheat, and whose penetrations of the wholesome but sexually insatiable Deanna had for several hours disturbed the rest I was trying to snatch in a neighboring catalpa tree after a—long story, I was drunk—late-night assignation with a female of my own at the Universal petting zoo. Good on you, Joe! One of the best. Though I do worry that my readers may have some difficulty quite placing your name. Maybe a footnote, what do you think? “Cotten, Joseph: solid supporting actor of forties and fifties, never quite comfortable in leads.”

On the other hand, if you became embroiled in some real difficulty, or committed a wrongdoing so villainous that it couldn’t be dealt with by one of the Dream Factories, then Strickling and Eddie Mannix, or whoever your factory possessed, would be a tremendous help to you, straightening out the necessary paperwork and helping witnesses get their statements absolutely crystal clear. If the inimitable Joan Crawford, a very special human being whose love for animals was so exemplary, had, for instance, appeared in a one-reel pornographic film in the 1920s called something like, say,
The Casting Couch
, then Mannix wouldn’t have hesitated to burn down the Bakersfield house of the owner of the last remaining copy—with the owner in it, probably! Of course, Joan would never have
made such a film. And if she did, where’s the proof? That kind of support you only get from true family.

It was all win-win: you needed to keep your profile high with pictures; they would give you seven in a row and, if necessary, a personally tailored nutritional support regimen to help you optimize your performance. Judy Garland wouldn’t be the force she is today if she had not been assisted with a bespoke program of therapy and wellness supplements to help her complete the early masterpieces that made her immortal.

So, really, where else could we be but paradise? What were we
doing
, drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon after a superb lunch at which Sylvia had pressed some bananas on me with a flourish and made rather a snippy observation when I declined and opted for the steak
tartare
and a cigarette. She was an absolute brick, though, Sylvia, and I just didn’t see in her that bloodcurdlingly shallow and avaricious gold-digger everyone tells you she became after Doug’s death, when she was briefly and lucratively married to Gable. What were we
doing
, pleasantly drunk in the sparkling pine-scented Californian afternoon with almost a whole day ahead of us, waiting on the lawn for Hedy Lamarr’s chauffeur to take us around to Constance Bennett’s house on Carolwood Drive for some martini-sharpened conversation with William Faulkner and a couple of sets of tennis on her private court? Could it be that we were having a hell of a good time? That this was the very happiest a higher primate could be? That this was
heaven?

“Woman beautiful. Tarzan play quick set,” Johnny said to Connie as we arrived at the Carolwood Drive house.

Sometimes during introductions, or when he was otherwise slightly self-conscious, Johnny would seek shelter in Tarzan’s language, I’d noticed. And Connie Bennett was so tall, white, blonde and perfect that his Tarzan act was an audible blush at her
consternating beauty, dappled under the magnolias there, fresh as a daisy from her success in
Bed of Roses.

“Johnny!
Johnny!
You are a certified crazy two-fer-a-nickel Chicago, Illinois, loon, Weissmuller.” She’d said the right thing. Johnny enjoyed being called crazy, since he wasn’t really at all.

“When I used to sleep under the El, Connie,” Johnny said, mock-tough, “I used to say, ‘Somewhere on Park Avenue there’s a girl who’s lying awake and thinking of me
right now.’
” He wasn’t at all bad at precursor sexual displays. I had one hand in his and I lifted my other to seek out Connie’s and swung between them for a moment or two, as if we were a family. She suddenly thrust out her other hand.