Me Cheeta (20 page)

“OK, now who knew about Dempsey in New York?” Bo Roos was sighing, and the truck’s brakes sighed too, with all the heavy-handedness of the joke, as it set off again for the Fun Capital of the World.

Running and walking, and then simply running, Johnny was catching up with the black speck ahead. And then he was running and ducking and then just ducking as Lupe, displaying wildly, her gold bracelets flashing violently in the sun, heaved various fist-size chunks of the Mojave Desert at him. I don’t know what I thought I could accomplish, tagging along behind. I could hear her screaming and sobbing in her own tongue, and Johnny, in a broken voice, saying, “Stop this! Stop this, Lupe, please, please, please, stop doing this to us!”

“You scram, you beeg stupeed animal! Ees finish! Ees all over! Thees time ees deevorce. Finish! You come any nearer, I keel you, John-ee.”

There wasn’t a whole lot of cover by the side of the highway, but I’m a chimp, we’re naturals at hiding, and I kept my head down
behind a clump of sagebrush no bigger, say, than the illegitimate daughter Loretta Young never acknowledged would have been at the time. I was afraid of Lupe transferring her rage from Johnny to me. I wasn’t afraid for myself, I must make clear. In case Discovery’s not gotten it across to you yet, it wouldn’t have been difficult for me to rip her limb from adorable limb. I was young then, but a near-adult chimp can put a human in Cedars-Sinai before you can blink. That’s the prevailing physical reality between us, dearest humans, which we so very rarely act on. So, I wasn’t afraid for myself: I was afraid that if things took a wrong turn I might murder the mad bitch where she stood, silver slingbacks planted, throwing rocks at her weeping husband in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

“Eef you were a real man,
come mierda e muere, hijo de puta sin cojones!
Eef you were a real man you would fight Jackie Dempsey and keel heem!”

Given that physical alphadom was an important criterion in mate-selection for Lupe, you had to admire the way she actually
had
slept with three heavyweight champions of the world. Johnny could kick a crocodile to bits but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Lupe. Could he beat up
everyone?
He, who hadn’t hit anybody since he was fifteen years old? Kong might have suited her, but he’d never have lasted the pace on the cocktail circuit.

“Marriage steenks! You don’t know what a woman ees! You don’t know what love ees!
Chinga tu madre! Me cago en la leche!
Mee-ster Tar-zan, hah! You’re no Tarzan, you’re a
golfer!”

“Lupe, please, stop it, willya? I
love
you! I don’t—stop throwing those
fucking rocks
—I don’t care about any of the others. That’s all in the past. But, Lupe, you’re my
wife
and I love you and we stick together….”

But Lupe was no longer throwing rocks at him. She had turned her back and was running down the empty highway, waving her arms at an automobile distantly flowering out of the road’s vanishing point. Grief made Johnny hesitate, and she had at least a hundred yards on him by the time the car reached her. It didn’t really have a chance not to stop, with the Mexican Spitfire up on her heels like a
torero
facing down a bull. She was leaning into the passenger window, gabbling, I was sure, a string of terrible lies about the huge man who was now chasing her down with outspread placatory hands. I abandoned my cover and, anxiously cheeping, with my head wagging from side to side in pure dismay, loped after him over the smeared bodies of ex-snakes (was there anywhere that humans weren’t painstakingly making safer?), my palms and soles burning on the asphalt.

She was already rounding the passenger door, already had her foot on the running board, shouting, “He’s dangerous! Drive on!” when she saw me. “See? Look! There’s hees, hees, hees… accomplice! They…” Lupe was laughing, or was she crying? No, she was laughing. “They … he and the monkey, they rob people on thees highway! They are bandeets! And I am the Bandeet Queen, so steek ’em up, Meester! Geeve me your money,
bastardo!”

A hand pushed Lupe from the running board and the car bolted like a horse, its violated door flapping.

“Hijo de puta!
Steek ’em up! We keel your wife next time! We rape your cheeldren!”

She just couldn’t stop, Lupe. She was a true comedian. She lived on a very high plane where misery and fury and lust and comedy were all part of the same ecstasy. It was like she was being dragged at a whiplash pace
(by what?)
through a number of different sets on a soundstage. Strickling had it that she’d been born to a noblewoman at midnight on the slopes of an erupting volcano in Mexico,
but he was missing the forest for the trees. On the actual day Lupe Vélez was born, July 18, 1908, a hurricane really did destroy the little village of San Luis Potosí.

The two of them were looking at me, and I ascended Johnny’s trunk with a speed that was half love and half scalded hands and feet. I wrapped my hands around his neck and kissed him on the side of the face. It was wet with tears.

“Go on, keel me,” said Lupe. “I know you want to.”

“You’re too damn crazy to kill. Why the hell did you marry me when you knew you were just gonna drive me crazy? Honest to God, Lupe, why didn’t you just get in the car and go?”

“Eet’s true I was going to get in the car. But I see your stupeed monk-ee come running after you and I theenk, That’s love, John-ee. That’s true devotion. She really loves you, doesn’t she?”

“Cheets? Oh, yeah, I guess so. But it’s not a she, it’s a he. Do you love me, Cheets?”

Was it that obvious? Lupe extended a golden arm toward me and I recoiled, but I guessed she wasn’t going to try anything with Johnny there, and she chucked me under the chin instead. Me: emblem of love and true devotion, saver of bad marriages. If I’d only kept my damned stupeed head down behind that sagebrush for another minute she’d have been halfway to Vegas and it would have been just the two of us.

“The whole thing’s impossible, John-ee. I’m always going to run away, you understand? But you have to keep running after me.”

She wanted a man to run after her. But then she despised men who ran after her. I know, I know… she was a lot of work, Lupe Vélez.

“I’m not a fucking pet, Lupe. Would you run after me?” “Like your monk-ee, John-ee. You bandeet. You feelthy desperado. You
wanted man.”

She exposed his erect sexual organ, and Johnny made some demurral about me, and with a warning forefinger I was deposited in the scrub while they mated with a swiftness that was impressive for a pair of humans. I wasn’t possessive of him, ever—I just wanted him to be happy.

Afterward, I crept back and leaned against him, and he shifted around so that his body provided shade for Lupe and me both. We sat there for a long while, grooming each other, saying very little, and waving at the occasional inquisitive car. Well, this was the sort of thing
Photoplay
magazine was referring to when it hinted at TROUBLE IN TARZAN’S TREEHOUSE. “Why,” it would ask, flirtatiously, “did Johnny Weissmuller’s salad end up adorning Lupe Vélez’s coiffure last week in Cocoanut Grove?” Why? Because nobody can bear things to end, I guess, no matter how bad it gets.

Trouble in Tarzan’s treehouse
… after a dose of Lupe it was a relief to be back in the real world of the escarpment. Gately would chauffeur me, and sometimes an extra or two, to Sherwood Forest or the Malibu Creek State Park, where the cigarette butts were as abundant as the fruit, the animals and the humans mingled harmoniously under cloudless skies, and there were no clothes between Johnny’s skin and mine. Aaah, “work!” I threw myself into it.

Instead of Conway there was now a man named John Farrow to interrupt the dream with “Roll ’em” and “Print it.” Maureen listened with a peculiar expression, to the poetry he’d recite, which, for me, had nothing on Johnny’s crowd-pleaser about the girl from Des Moines, and I saw that something had happened to her: Maureen had grown up. She had a way, almost indiscernible to the human eye, of delaying her reactions so that you were made to witness a parody of an internal life. If someone called, “Maureen!” she would swivel her head only after a second or two to the
speaker. Lost in thought, you see, that old alpha pursuit. If she was standing when she turned, then her body would swing around in four separate stages: hips—chest—shoulders—head.

This was all a clever power-display: a beta is more afraid of predators, and by consciously slowing her natural reaction times she was implying a higher position in the hierarchy. Her smile was no longer a fear-grimace but a steady and sustainable display of the organism’s health—its flawless teeth, its bright pink gums. She had new hair and a one-piece mini-dress instead of her jungle bikini and kept banging on about some wolf in England that could write. Big deal. Could it act and paint as well? Johnny had somehow gone from being her bothersome big brother to her pesky kid brother. The only complaint the Hays Office could have made about Maureen now was that her wholesomeness was so unappetizing she looked like an advertisement for the other side.

It was always the trouble with Jane—she had a fatal attraction to
time.
She had a capacity for boredom that always made her susceptible to her old addiction to London. And, sure enough, this dream
(Tarzan Returns
, it was called) seemed to tell the same old story as before. Instead of Holt and Arlington, it was handsome Captain Fry and Jane’s cousins Rita and Eric who arrived on the escarpment full of the joys of England. Had Jane learned anything from
Tarzan and His Mate?
No, she was compelled by her fate, as were we all, and we reenacted the cycle of temptation, betrayal and reunion. But now it wasn’t quite so easy. I thought, How many times can we keep doing this before Jane ruins everything? She just didn’t seem to get it. For instance, Jane had Tarzan construct a new shelter to replace our old nests. When I say “shelter,” it was pretty much a re-creation of Juanita del Pablo’s attractive Moorish-influenced bungalow on Benedict Canyon Drive, but up a
tree
You had to hand it to her—it was the smartest residence on the
escarpment. Now all we needed were some neighbors with a slightly smaller one.

Instead of having to climb up to the new shelter, Jane had Tarzan install a vine-controlled bamboo elevator and Emma the elephant was called into service as a sort of elevator-operator-cumconcierge. Also, instead of making that laborious vine-swing all the way down to the river to drink, we could now simply utilize our Jane-designed bamboo-section water-elevator. We merely had to wait for Jane to winch up the bamboo sections, which dipped into the water hole beneath, use the ladle to decant the water into an earthenware carafe, then pour it from the carafe into a bamboo mug—and say goodbye to crocodile-interrupted drinking misery! It certainly saved time, which I needed a lot more of now that I had to keep the dirt from getting tracked in onto the new zebra-skin rug. And Tarzan created all of this because he loved her. Because, although the sweet, dear, lovesick man didn’t properly understand it, he was engaged in an unwinnable war against Jane’s boredom—her time-disease.

Oh, we had a ball dreaming it, for sure. It was “a happy set.” Despite Jane’s “improvements,” it was still our escarpment. People have this idea that film work must be all glamour and fun, yet actually on the whole, they’re absolutely right. As a moviegoer you might see, for instance, me and Johnny sitting on a tree branch spying out Captain Fry’s camp: I’d sling an arm around his shoulders and whisper in his ear, he’d ruffle the back of my neck and we’d drop back down into the undergrowth and that would be that. But in reality we’d get to spend half the afternoon cuddling up on that branch.

We were simply having too good a time of it. Twenty times I’d nuzzle up to him, twenty times we’d drop down into the grass together. The same with stroking his head as he lay under the baobab,
almost inconsolable after another of Jane’s betrayals, or wrapping my arms around his neck for a brief vine-swing. The finished picture wouldn’t tell you how compelling, almost addictive, we found it to do these things, how
long
we took doing them. “Takes,” we called them. We were taking things out of the present, and the more times we did it, I guess the more indelibly we were engraving it into the dream.

“Print! Jesus fucking Christ, we won’t forget that shot in a hurry,” John Farrow might exclaim, in an ecstasy of artistic satisfaction, after the last take had been captured. Unable to tear himself away, he would linger over my scenes with Johnny or Maureen longer than he ever did with the purely human stuff. “Twenty-eight takes! Gately, this monkey … it’s like working with Swanson!”

Well, come on now, he was exaggerating. As an actor, though, I did like to throw in something to make every take a little different.

Most days Johnny brought Otto to the set, but that was OK. He made a terrific target to pelt with fruit from the lower branches, since he never could figure out where the missiles were coming from. And there was all the usual fun. If Maureen was engrossed in a conversation over lunch about Indian philosophy or poetry with Farrow, it was all the easier for Johnny and me to add a few pellets of my monkey chow to her plate of mixed vegetables. “Oh, for the love of Mike, grow up, Johnny!” I remember her saying on that occasion.

She couldn’t get through her skull what Johnny and I instinctively understood: that the essence of the escarpment lay in
not
growing up. Johnny’s struggle against the whole pernicious idea of it was more courageous than anyone’s. “Aren’t you a little old to be doing that?” she’d say, as Johnny staggered by under the assault of a rubber vampire bat, or set about organizing a party to winch up the bamboo elevator to see what would happen if you dropped it
on a watermelon. Always this obsession of hers with
time
, when we had all the time in the world. In fact,
Tarzan Returns
was such a happy shoot that in the end they stretched it out to more than double its scheduled length.

Captain Fry was reminiscent of Tony Gentry. He had the same otter-slicked hair and the same vocation—he was dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of animals. While cousins Rita and Eric worked on Jane with the usual stuff about England and Mayfair and cream teas on the South Downs, and some transparently unlikely gobbledegook about an inheritance, Fry went about his work accommodating the various creatures of the escarpment in their shelters. It was an honest misunderstanding but of course this was the escarpment where, as Tarzan pointed out, the animals didn’t require rehabilitation, and relations between Tarzan and Fry cooled.