Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

Me Cheeta

The Autobiography

James Lever

To D

‘A movie star is not quite a human being.’

MARLENE DIETRICH

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Note to the Reader

PART 1

1 Inimitable Rex!

2 Early Memories

3 Sailing Away!

4 America Ahoy!

5 Big Apple!

6 Big Break!

PART 2

1 Movie Madness!

2 Hollywood Nights!

3 Happy Days!

4 Latino Tornado!

5 Funny Man!

6 Little Feet!

7 Domestic Dramas!

Chapter 8

9 New Challenges!

PART 3

1 Stage-Struck!

2 Slowing Down

3 Jane’s Law

Filmography

Index

About The Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Note to the Reader

Dearest humans,

So, it’s a perfect day in Palm Springs, California, and here I am—actor, artist, African, American, ape and now author—flat out on the lounger by the pool, looking back over this autobiography of mine. Flipping through it more than reading it, to be honest: the whole Lifetime Achievement idea of an autobiography makes me a little nervous. The—what’s the word?—the valedictory aspect to it. I’m in fine health, I’m producing some of the best paintings of my career, I’m in no obvious danger of being killed, but I’ve seen it happen too many times to too many of my fellow greats. The book comes out and, next thing you know, they’ve disappeared.

Or, as Johnny once told me, ‘Soon as they start calling you an Immortal, you start worrying about dying.’

I think Sports Illustrated had recently made Johnny one of their ‘Fifty Greatest Immortal Sportspersons’ or something like that. This was an evening in the early eighties at his lovely home overlooking the Pacific in Playa Mimosa, Acapulco. He had health issues at the time and people couldn’t stop giving him Lifetime Achievement awards. They came at him like diagnoses. And even Johnny Weissmuller, who was so unfailingly upbeat and so reliably delighted by trophies, who’d been inducted into so many Halls of Fame and festooned with so many honours over the years, was finding it difficult to raise any joy about his new Immortal status. After all, it wasn’t like it was any kind of a guarantee. He and I both knew for a fact that several ‘Immortals’ we’d once palled around with were now dead. ‘Past a certain point in your life it’s all awards,’ he added, ‘for things you can’t remember doing.’

Well, over the last few years I’ve started to notice similar, vaguely ominous, signs around me. I’m not a superstitious creature but, on the Palm Canyon Drive ‘Walk of Stars’, just round the corner from here, they’ve already got a star with my name on it, between two guys I’ve never heard of. There’s a campaign bubbling away to get me a proper star on the real Walk of Fame—at 6541 Hollywood Boulevard, no doubt, between Johnny and Maureen O’Sullivan. The ideal jungle family together again, and rid of the Boy at last. So, any day now I expect the arrival of a slab of wet concrete and a delegation from Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater asking for my handprints, though they’ll have to live without a signature. (Roy Rogers, I’m pretty sure, signed Trigger’s name for him beside the pair of hoofprints that Trigs left, and I think it was the same arrangement with Gene Autry and Champion, the other Wonder Horse. But in truth, if Grauman’s do decide they want my handprints, I’d be pretty surprised if Johnny was there to do the same for me. Anyway. Most of the time I don’t even think about it.)

So it’s my hope, dear reader, that you’ll think of this book as more of a hello than a goodbye. If anything, my real worry is that it’s somewhat premature.

My original title was My Story So Far, as a sort of charm against the idea that it represented a final statement. But unfortunately Donny Osmond had already used that, along with a whole bushel of athletes and childhood-abuse survivors. Then I decided that My Life So Far would do equally well, but Jane Fonda had bagged it. And, let’s face it, in the context of Jane’s life, the title sounds like a threat. So I figured that, what the hell, I’d plump for My Life. Simple and classic and modest—and, I came to realize, already taken dozens of times. As was My Story. Also My Autobiography, to my irritation, by Charlie Chaplin, so that was out. It’s bad enough that people mistakenly think any of my routines owe anything to the bewilderingly overrated Chaplin, shallowest of the great silent clowns. (Motion Picture Herald, March 1942: ‘The chimp Cheta [sic] is well handled and provides pic with some decent laughs via antics that almost make you think of Chaplin.’) Furthermore, The Story of My Life also turned out to be gone. Similarly My Life Story and In My Life. And My Lives. And My Lives and Loves. Likewise, as I soon found when tentatively attempting to branch out, My Life in Film, A Life in Film, My Life in Movies, A Life in Movies, My Life in Art and My Life in Pictures (unbelievably that goddamned Chaplin had snaffled that one too).

Despairing somewhat, I thought it might be terrifically daring to begin something with ‘American…’ or ‘Hollywood…’ before discovering that everything begins ‘American…’ or ‘Hollywood…’. Cheeta Speaks came to me as a revelation while I was dozing in this very chair, as did the realization that another great clown, Harpo Marx, had used it up.

Switching tack, I cast around for something a little more descriptive of my story: Wonderful Life seemed just about perfect for the five minutes I thought it was mine. Ditto Survivor, A Survivor’s Story, Memoirs of a Survivor and, the one I really wanted most, From Tragedy to Triumph. It turned out that there are whole libraries of books called From Tragedy to Triumph. And not a single one called From Triumph to Tragedy, I noticed, as if human life only ever proceeded in the one direction, at least in autobiography.

These were meant to be the first words of my literary career. Those humans who thought the very idea of my writing an autobiography was laughable would have been thoroughly confirmed by the sight of me struggling through a series of sleepless afternoons, incapable of producing so much as a single letter. Maybe they were right—actors should stick to acting. My respect for writers, whom I’d silently sneered at throughout my career when presented with another psychologically incoherent script for Tarzan or Jane or me, went through the roof.

Writing was hard! It seemed like there had just been too many human lives, and words were no longer capable of coping with them. Words were wearing thin with all those human lives using them up, and always the same lives, moving confidently away from tragedy towards triumph. Who could possibly, I thought, want another memoir by anyone? Let alone yet another ex-movie star’s reminiscences? How presumptuous to assume that a celebrity’s hoary old Hollywood war-stories could be of interest to anyone but himself!

At this low ebb, my dear old friend the utterly inimitable Kate Hepburn came to the rescue. Kate had had no such difficulties with the title for her own autobiography. What was the subject? Me, Kate had decided, ‘A book all about me, by me. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be called Me.’ Now, Kate has her Connecticutian sense of entitlement, which helps her march unblushingly up to anything she wants and take it, but I couldn’t accept that she had permanently vacuumed up the title Me. What about the rest of us? Enough—surely somebody else could call their book Me as well as Kate Hepburn, or ‘Katharine of Arrogance’, as she was rather unfairly known during the time we were closest. So, after nearly a month of work, I had my beginning. Me. I even had a perfect vision of the cover, which the publishers will mess with over my dead body: Me, and then my name in a different font, and that terrific photo which…well, you’ve already seen it for yourself. Left to right—Barrymore, Gilbert, Bogie, Bacall with the ice-creams, me, Garbo doing the rabbit ears behind my head and I think that’s Ethel Merman’s drink I’ve just knocked over. Don’t I look young?

I was delighted with this breakthrough—who says chimpanzees have no business writing memoirs?—though keenly aware that unless I managed to up my rate from an average of one letter a fortnight, the whole project might turn out to be a bit of a long haul. In fact, the next two words—the dedication—represented a moderate acceleration in that they took only three weeks of agonized wrestling.

I took a break and returned to my painting—a series of nostalgic jungle-scapes that hardly stretched me. I wanted some time to reassess. What was I writing this book for? The ostensible reason was the one proposed by my dear friend and housemate Don, in partnership with Dr Jane Goodall, the charming and still attractive (though frequently wrong-headed) English naturalist. That is, I would use the story of my life to help their campaign against the cruelties perpetrated on chimpanzees and other animals in the name of screen entertainment. Of course, I love Don and respect the eminent and attractive Dr Goodall, and will certainly do what I can to assist No Reel Apes, as the campaign is snappily known. But it seemed to me that something about this conception of Me was still blocking me off from the story I really wanted to tell.

Returning to my text, which remained stalled at a word-count of three, I attempted to press on into the acknowledgements section, the part writers often refer to as ‘the hardest page of the book’. Or actors do, anyway. And here I had my inspiration: I was lolling in my tyre, where I do most of my best thinking, struggling with those tricky little questions of who to put in, who would have to be left out, how to make each message of gratitude sound personal and different, who ought to come first and, more importantly, last, when I realized that it was pointless trying to pick out individuals. Without Hollywood, without humanity as a whole, I wouldn’t be here to write these words. Without you I’d literally be nothing. The whole book ought be an acknowledgements section!

This was the book I wanted to write. No matter how dark the subject, or how painful the memories, or how tough times occasionally became, no matter how appalling and oafish the behaviour of certain people, such as Esther Williams, Errol Flynn, ‘Red’ Skelton, ‘Duke’ Wayne, Maureen O’Sullivan, Brenda Joyce, I would write without bitterness, name-calling or score-settling. I would celebrate what has been a lucky, lucky life, and try to find the good in all those tremendous characters it has been my privilege to know. This would be a book written in gratitude to and with love for your whole species, and everything you have done for animals and for me. A thank-you. A book of love.

And having made this decision I found that the whole thing just came tumbling out. You are my reason for writing this book, all of you, and Johnny, and of course the fact I’ve learned over seventy years of survival in movies and theatre: that if your profile ever dips below a certain level in this industry, you’re as good as dead.

Humanity, I salute you!

Cheeta

Palm Springs, 2008

PART 1

1 Inimitable Rex!

On my last day in motion pictures I found myself at the top of a monkey-puzzle tree in England, helping to settle a wager between that marvellous light comedian and wit Rex Harrison and his wife, the actress Rachel Roberts, and thinking, This is gonna look great in the obituaries, isn’t it? Fell out of a fucking tree.

This was in ’66, during a day off from filming my supposed comeback picture, Fox’s disastrous megaflop Doctor Dolittle, with Dickie Attenborough and Rex. We were in the grounds of some stately home in the charming village of Castle Combe in County Wiltshire, some time after a heavy lunch.

Rex was convinced that the tree would puzzle me. Rachel thought I’d be able to work it out. Arriving at the terms of the bet had not been easy. How exactly was I to demonstrate my mastery of this cryptic plant?

‘You ought to let it start at the top, and then it’s got an incentive to climb down,’ said Lady Combe. Servants were ordered to fetch a ladder. She was delighted at the success of her party. ‘This is exciting. Is it always so much fun with you film folk?’

‘Now then, Cheeta,’ said Rachel, holding a pack of cigarettes very close to my face. ‘You see these Player’s? They’ll be waiting at the bottom for you. You understand? Yummy cigarettes. Don’t you dare let me down.’

‘Darling, I’ve just had rather a splendid idea,’ said Rex. ‘Why don’t we forget the money? If the monkey makes it you can sleep with Burton, if he’ll have you, and if it doesn’t, then I can divorce you but you have to promise not to kill yourself.’

‘Getting windy, Rex?’

‘Au contraire, my sweet. Let’s call it two thousand.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Combe. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘Yes,’ said Rex. ‘Your cellar is atrocious.’

Rex and I had had a number of differences on set, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to see between a couple of stars pushing a script in different directions. Far from being the coward and sadist Rachel frequently described him as, Rex was, somewhere beneath the caustic exterior he had designed to conceal his vulnerabilities, a good man and a very special human being. Nonetheless I’d been upset to have every one of my off-the-cuff contributions vetoed. This interminable ‘Talk to the Animals’ song had already taken us a week. Perhaps I was a little rusty—I’d not worked in pictures for almost twenty years—but Rex had nixed every one of the backflips or handstands I’d been trying to liven it up with. So I was pretty keen to get this tree climbed. Plus I wanted the cigarettes—and, anyway, I wasn’t about to be outwitted by a tree.

But the French call them ‘monkey’s despair’. From a distance, each limb had appeared invitingly fuzzy, furred like a pipe-cleaner, or Rex’s arteries, but as soon as I grasped it I discovered that the thing was made entirely out of horrible spiky triangular leaves, more like scales. Unfortunately, Rachel had already ordered the ladder to be removed and I could do nothing but cling to the crown of the tree, slapping my head with one hand and communicating via some screaming, which required little translation, that I was perfectly happy to let Rex have the money.

‘Don’t make such a fuss, Cheeta! It’s just getting adjusted,’ Rachel assured the little crowd, as I tried cautiously to inch down that torture-chamber of a tree for her. But it really was impossible. The French were right. The English name had led me to believe that the tree would be no more than some mildly diverting brainteaser, the chimpanzee equivalent of the Sunday crossword—but this was a ‘puzzle’ only in the sense that being violently assaulted by a plant is, yeah, a somewhat puzzling experience. Fucking typical English understatement.

‘I rather think,’ Rex commented, ‘you owe me two thousand pounds.’

‘Don’t go off half-cocked, darling, like you always do…It’s only been up there a minute.’

Jesus, was that all?

‘Don’t be absurd, you drunken bitch. It’s stuck.’

‘You’re not welching me out of this one, Rexy-boy,’ I heard Rachel say. ‘I never expected it to start climbing right away. You just hold your damn horses.’

‘Now, Rachel, please, it’s perfectly clear the poor animal’s in distress,’ I heard another voice interject. Oh, brilliant: Dickie. ‘The pair of you should be ashamed. Lady Combe, can we please please please get that ladder back up? This is quite frightful!’

‘You touch that ladder, Lady Whatsyourface,’ Rex said, ‘and I promise you, there’ll be tears before bedtime. Nobody touch that bloody ladder! My pathetic shell of a wife is making a point. Dickie, do piss off and stop blubbering.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ said Rachel.

‘You’re welcome, darling,’ said Rex.

They weren’t all that much fun to be around, Rex and Rachel, it does have to be said. I’d never liked the goddamn English anyway, with their razor-wire elocution, their total lack of humour and their godawful pedantic spelling. I clung on, cheeping in distress and swaying eighty feet above the ground. This had all begun a week ago, as we were embarking on Rex’s endless song, which I don’t think he believed in any longer. He regularly punctuated ‘Talk to the Animals’ with violent outbursts of animal-related abuse. He was failing to cope with the toupee-munching goat, the parrot that kept shouting ‘Cut,’ and the general incompetence of the inexperienced English animals, and he was beginning to take it out on me. ‘I don’t mind the bloody ducks and the sheep,’ he’d complained, after we’d abandoned shooting for the day again, ‘so much as this monkey trying to upstage me all the time.’

This was distressing to hear. I’d been lucky to get the job after two decades of stage work and it was important to keep my costar happy. I accepted Rachel’s half-offered cigarette and demonstrated one of my old standbys, the amusingly raffish side-of-mouth exhalation. But Rex was unappeased.

‘And now it’s pinching your fags,’ he said, ‘or did you do that deliberately? Is it that time of the afternoon already?’

‘What an absolutely irresistible charmer you are, my sweet,’ said Rachel. ‘I was just thinking how much it resembled you, though it’s still got all its own hair, hasn’t it? I expect it can still get it up, too.’

From this point onwards, Rachel began to refer to me as Little Rexy—‘Ooh, look! Little Rexy’s smelling his own poo!’—and would then make references to my superior intellect, charm, personal appearance, talent, virility and odour, which of course were the last things the universally despised, impotent, alcoholic, cruel, vain, brittle, snobbish and mephitic but still, under that carapace of protective acerbity, very gentle and insecure human being Rex needed to have rubbed in.

Meanwhile, he was oscillating between this rather threatening fantasy of buttonholing various exotic creatures on obscure subjects and straightforward abuse of animals. ‘If this unspeakable fucking shit of a goat touches my hairpiece again, I’ll rip its throat out,’ he’d say, in his inimitably crusty manner, and then he’d be off again, wearing his ‘gentle’ face, with his unlikely plan to set up a multi-species salon—

I’d expatiate on Plato with a platypus

On sex I would talk man to manta ray

I’d discuss dialectical materialism with a micro-organism

I’d enquire of an echidna if Picasso were passé…

and on and on. I mean, this song of Rex’s was endless—

Oh, how I yearn to yack with yaks in Yakkish

Or interrogate a fruitbat about Freud

I’d like to natter with some gnats in Gnattish

I’d harangue orang-utans about the Void…

Ostensibly a beautiful dream, it missed the point. Nothing needs to be said. There is no need for humanity to put its love for animals into words, no need for further explanation or apology. We understand each other perfectly. And, besides, Rex’s idea raised the nightmarish possibility of animals having to participate in the sort of ‘sophisticated’ discussions the unbelievable Chaplin used to host in Beverly Hills, with unfortunate fauna being hounded for their opinions on the latest Eugene O’Neill, etc. Jesus, that poor fruitbat, I thought. If Rex got on to Freud, he’d be there all night, hearing about how bizarre it was that so many of Rex’s girlfriends had killed themselves, or tried to: I saw Rex touring the remaining forests of the planet fretting to unwary wildebeest at the waterhole about, for instance, his failure to call an ambulance when his lover Carole Landis killed herself with Seconal because he wanted to keep the affair quiet. Then rounding on some warthogs and screaming that they were shits who didn’t have half the money or talent he did.

Belatedly I understood the full horror of the situation. It had been my co-star Rex who had made the suggestion that I accompany the other leads to Combe Hall. It was he who had floated the swattable second-serve of a notion to Rachel that ‘If the monkey’s so much cleverer than I am, then surely it should be able to climb that tree…’

Or was I being paranoid? Ask Carole Landis if I was being paranoid. Oh, what larks!

I heard Dickie snivelling eighty feet below (’This is all very upsetting!’) and Rex cleverly setting up his mentally ill wife to take the blame (’Satisfied darling? Shall we bring it down yet?’). I swayed above them all on the boneless branches that bit my hands and feet and looked out over the pretty fields of County Wiltshire. I watched the shadows of low, flat-bottomed clouds pass across the rain-spoiled wheat, like paranoid fantasies through Veronica Lake’s vodka-sodden mind, and saw them dissolve into a grey mass, becoming a black line at the horizon, reminding me of an unfortunate snake I once knew. England—where chimps meant tea. Somewhere out there was Jane, if she was still alive, tough as old boots, crow-footed but trim, and ferocious about the rents. Maybe Lady Combe was Jane? And Boy, too, who’d ended up in England. He was probably somewhere across the fields—a part-time film producer with his hand between the thighs of the bit he was taking down to see Ma in the MG.

I once knew a man who did talk to the animals. All he’d ever needed was a single word.

Well, in attempting to inch closer to the trunk where the branches were thicker, I jabbed my palm, lost my grip, tried again and grasped nothing. I fell. Ho-hum. Death. I had no business being here anyway. You hear a lot of crap on the Discovery Channel, these days, about animals making a comeback. Take it from me: don’t bother, you can’t ever come back. It was a terrible movie and I wasn’t any good in it. I descended and bumped into my first ever memory on the way: Stroheim! Hadn’t thought about him in years!

I carried on plummeting through the tree’s interior and, though I had no say in it, my fall was broken by several instinctive grabs, not so painful at speed. It must have looked pretty good, I imagine, as I looped at lightning pace in three or four swings through the branches to land on my feet—ta-dah!—by the pack of Player’s. The audience in the garden was startled into the first real applause I’d heard in a long time. I, of course, looked nonchalant and helped myself to a cigarette. What do you think about that, Rex?

He looked like a guy who’d just lost two thousand ‘quid’, to utilize a little Limey-speak. But he was only a weakling and a bully and a near-murderer, scumbag, self-pitier, miser, liar, ass and oaf on the outside—who isn’t? Somewhere on the inside there was a decent human being. Oh, all right: Rex Harrison was an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me—but still, you have to try to forgive people, no matter what. Otherwise we’d be back in the jungle.