Many points are so beautifully made in this excellent spoof of a Hollywood
memoir that it is honestly hard to know where to start. But one could
usefully begin with Cheeta's incisive contribution to the “infinite number
of monkeys” theory of probability. It's all very well hypothesising about
those monkeys and typewriters, he says: isn't it time for human beings to
look around? “You've had a million humans, at least, writing away for much
longer than a thousand years, and only one of them ever managed to produce
the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Only one! Well, well, what's the big
deal?”
Books that are narrated by animals (or even randomly typed by one famous
chimpanzee) tend to divide opinion from the outset. I know this because I
often recommend Caroline Alexander's Mrs Chippy's Last Expedition - a
cat's-eye view of Shackleton's Endurance as it cracked and broke under the
pressure of polar ice - and I've seen a lot of people's eyes roll back in
their heads at the sheer whimsicality of the idea. But sometimes an animal's
viewpoint is illuminating, surely? In Mrs Chippy's case, here are men in
extremis, trying to keep calm. The presence of the cat reminds them of their
humanity. Similarly, look at the great shrieking jungle that was Hollywood
in its heyday, and who better to understand it than a grizzled old showbiz
chimp with an in-built Darwinian perspective? “What does any organism ever
do except - survive?” writes Cheeta. “In this business, if your profile ever
drops, you're dead.”
What we have here is a showbiz memoir from a star whose gilded cage was no
metaphor; who views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms. It's a
brilliant idea. Naturally, as befits the memoir genre, Cheeta defines
himself as an actor (“I'm a comedian, not an intellec- tual”). Naturally,
too, modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great
middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian
thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an
animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was
talent. In common with every other showbiz memoirist, he claims never to
read his reviews; he then quotes them extensively. He mentions several times
that he never won an effing Oscar. He will recall a great star such as Rex
Harrison by first calling him “that marvellous light comedian”, then getting
down to the more interesting truth (“universally despised, impotent,
alcoholic”), before coming properly out with it: “an absolutely irredeemable
c*** who tried to murder me”. And, like many another stellar memoirist, he
can't resist a vicious sideswipe at a fellow thesp. “For three decades I
think I ‘phoned it in' a bit,” he confesses. “It happens to actors. Look at
De Niro.”
What justifies the whole enterprise is that the screen myth of Tarzan is
rooted in the tussle between innocence and experience. A plane crashes in a
jungle, and a human baby is raised by apes to know nothing of the corrupted
world beyond - where the gang-rape of starlets is covered up by studio
hoodlums, for example, and where Mary Astor (“dear, sweet Mary Astor”) is
secretly addicted to the erect male sexual organ. In every Tarzan movie,
visitors try to lure Tarzan back to “civilisation”, but he resists. What
drives this book is the way Cheeta - an animal within the civilised world; a
civilised soul in a bestial one - clings for sheer life to the notion of
humankind's innate nobility. Basically, he jumps into our arms and clings
on. Despite all he's seen of debauched Hollywood mating rituals, despite
snorting cocaine from the naked breasts of Constance Bennett, Cheeta still
believes in the superiority of humans, personified in the great Johnny
Weissmuller, the gentle “alpha” giant he adored. “Johnny Weissmuller was a
great, great silent-movie star - a transmitter of joy, a transmitter of
sorrow. You looked at him and thought - the rest of us? We're just beasts.”
This is a hilarious book, packed with well-aimed Swiftian turds (“Everything
was dream-sharp and sparkling, like Beverly Hills in Cary Grant's
LSD-inflected eyes”; “If Marlene Dietrich was a ‘good' German, I thought,
then the bad ones must be absolutely f***ing terrifying”), but what stands
out from it is Cheeta's enduring love for his humble Tarzan: it brings out
the pity in both their stories. Cheeta, the gurning chimp; Johnny, the
beautiful human - well, neither of them had a choice about working with
Maureen O'Sullivan, did they? Cheeta recalls seeing Louis B Mayer bullying
Johnny, “Who the hell do you think you are, you bum? Lillian Gish? Get it
through your head - you're Tarzan! You're never going to be anybody but
Tarzan!” And it is like seeing a trainer strike a defenceless animal with a
crowbar. Towards the end of the book there is a heartbreaking reunion
between the two ageing co-stars, contrived by others for profit, and I can
only say, I'm glad a movie of this book is impossible, because it would be
absolute agony to watch.
Nowadays, Cheeta lives in Palm Springs with a companion, Dan, who gives him
insulin injections and generally protects his existence. While other stars
have died on the scrapheap (including Johnny), Cheeta has lived on. He
paints pictures; he writes books; he rehearses his Oscar acceptance speech;
he continues to insist that he never had sex with Dolores del Rio. Me Cheeta
is a terrific book; the only thing one could possibly lament is the absence
of a comma in the title. Vivid, funny and clever, it will subtly change for
ever the way we think not only about Hollywood (and actors' memoirs) but
also about our very species. I have no idea who really wrote it, by the way
(the publishers are keeping that to themselves), but I'm fairly confident
that an infinite number of untalented people could not have achieved it by
accident - or not in less than a million years, anyway.
Me Cheeta: The Autobiography
Fourth Estate £16.99 pp320
Available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £15.29 (inc p&p) on 0870 165
8585 or here
