Me Cheeta: The Autobiography - James Lever

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lid from one of his silver dishes and dangling a handful of writhing black strands in front of Captain Mannicher. All the men displayed and wept with laughter. There was something terribly strange and not very human about them at that moment, as if they had gone slightly mad.

      Not able to stand any more of it, I knuckled outside with a couple of bananas and gingerly dropped down to the deck, keeping an eye out for the death-snake. Away across the Atlantic, I noticed that some of the stars had formed themselves into a thick cluster in a way I’d never seen before, all crushed together like a broken-up moon.

      Day came slowly. Mr Gentry, Earl and Julius came up on deck for coffee and descended into the holds again. Nobody had any news of the death-snake. But now I saw that, where the star-cluster had been, there was a solid grey mass, high and steep like the escarpment in the forest. It didn’t move, and when I looked again a while later, it still hadn’t moved. It was, surely, the other bank of the river!

      Captain Mannicher and members of the crew began to walk cautiously around the deck now, each of them holding a long piece of wood, scouring the the planking with their gazes. I shuffled over and held out an arm to DiMarco, and he allowed me up into the crook of his elbow. ‘All your fuckin’ fault, kid,’ he muttered soothingly. ‘We’re stuck here until we kill it or it kills us. You bad chimp. No America for you.’ I was very grateful for the consolation, the human touch.

      We moved slowly round Forest Lawn while the grey mass stayed where it was and I suddenly noticed that DiMarco was unaware that the death-snake, blacker in daylight, was pouring itself out of the grille of a bent-over kind of funnel thing about ten paces ahead of us. It noticed us, though. Opening its terrible, terrible black mouth again it slid towards us, veered away towards Mannicher (’It’s the—the—the fucking thing!’ he managed to get out) and held its position, switching its head from side to side as if uncertain whether to go for the captain or DiMarco and me, scenting the air with its tongue. It didn’t look disoriented by its surroundings at all. It looked like it was spoiling for a fight and simply couldn’t decide which opponent was nearest.

      So there was America and there was me. And between us, Death.

      We were the nearest. DiMarco was slow to see it, and by the time he did, it was gathering speed across the gap. They’re fast, black mambas, you’ll remember from Discovery, and they like to strike high. Two or three feet of its body was raised above the ground as it rippled over the planking. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ breathed DiMarco, because he could see that any chance of outrunning the thing had already gone in the previous second. He must also have seen the awful black of the inside of its mouth. And it flowed up into the air, four, five feet off the ground and still rising as it struck, and we were suddenly tumbling down on the deck with the heavy body of the snake whipping over us.

      It was one of my fucking discarded banana skins that DiMarco had stepped on, we later worked out. It had taken his legs from under him just at the moment of the mamba’s strike.

      Captain Mannicher and the crew ran over to the snake as it sprawled, somewhat surprised, or as surprised as a snake can ever look, and momentarily vulnerable. A couple of them managed to jam its head down against the deck with their wooden sticks and, with a long knife, Mannicher decapitated it.

      And still the snake’s head and half a foot of its body continued to slither on towards him, and we watched it, pleading with it to die so that we could go to America.

      It did. But, to this day, I retain a loathing for two things in particular. (Three, if you count Mickey Rooney.) I fear snakes. And I cannot stand the taste of bananas.

      That was 9 April 1933: my official date of birth, if you look at the website. The day of my arrival on American soil. As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration.

       5 Big Apple!

      I’ll always have a soft spot in my already well-tenderized heart for New York, and not only because it’s generally agreed that some of my very best work, including the now classic ‘hotel-room sequence’, can be found in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942). The last of the truly great Tarzan pictures, New York Adventure was built around the simple but brilliant conceit of getting the Boy out of the goddamn way (he’d been kidnapped, or something). Without Johnny Sheffield there to muddy everything up, the central Tarzan-Cheeta-Jane relationship was free to return to its original clarity. I like to think I managed to make a reasonable job of the opportunity.

      I don’t know whether I’d go so far as the New York Times reviewer—‘Cheta (sic) the chimpanzee who well-nigh steals the picture runs amok in a swank hotel boudoir, shakes hands with astonished clerks, causes havoc with hat-check girls, babbles over telephones and even makes wise-cracks nearly as intelligible as Tarzan’s…More than anyone, the monkey turns the Tarzans’ excursion into a rambunctious simian romp’—but the truth behind that ‘picture-stealing’ performance, and the real reason I quote from that review, was that I was simply playing from life. The famous nightclub sequence with the hat-check girls? That was for real. All I had to do was dredge up my memories of a little spree I’d had in Lower Manhattan, the summer of 1933. By then I’d already spent several months in New York. Rehab. But right from the get-go America seemed to be some sort of paradise.

      The morning we docked was spent overseeing the unloading of the stock into smaller mobile rehab units. I was touched to see how delighted the dock-wallopers along the pier were by the sight of the rescued animals, crowding round the shelters, offering bits of food and cigarettes, calling and waving. If not quite on the same scale as, say, Gloria Swanson’s reception on her return from Paris with crowds strewing gardenias and roses in the path of America’s Sweetheart (while she secretly nursed a near-suicidal guilt over the child she’d just aborted in order to stay on top), Forest Lawn nonetheless received a welcome that, I think, would have satisfied even my old friend the great MGM publicist Howard Strickling. It was a very moving moment, and confirmed everything I’d suspected about humans—they were the happiest damn things I’d ever seen in my life. And they loved animals.

      ‘Sonofabitch, this goddamn Depression,’ Mr Gentry muttered inexplicably, as the longshoremen manoeuvred the shelters about. Christ, I thought, if they’re like this when they’re depressed…‘Soon as Earl gets this lot sent off to Trefflich’s you know what I’m gonna do, DiMarco?’

      ‘You’re gonna quit with the poisonous snakes.’

      ‘I might do that. And I might take a walk down to the corner of Fulton and Church where I hear a little place called the White Rose Tavern has opened for business. And I suggest we make a Noble Experiment on our first legal drinks in the United States of America.’

      ‘We takin’ the Cheater, boss?’

      ‘The Cheater of Death? Sure we are. Gentlemen, I propose we embark on a little stroll.’

      Which was what Julius, DiMarco, Mr Gentry and I did. Now, I don’t know whether or not April 1933 was some sort of an economic peak in American history—I’m an entertainer, not a historian, never claimed to be one—but it seemed to me like you humans must have been going through a quite mind-boggling period of success. Over the course of that first awestruck walk I saw lines of men and women patiently attending huge vats of steaming soup, not shoving or fighting for it as we’d have done, but respectfully observing a hierarchy that extended back down the street for hundreds upon hundreds of humans. They also had a miraculous system of circular receptacles on the trails beside the streets, into which humans would toss scraps of food for other humans to discover and relish. Even in the gutters there could be found pieces of exotic fruits, which I saw several humans scoop up and savour! New York wasn’t, good grief, a ‘jungle’, as it’s so often described—the forest, now that was a jungle, with its everyday infanticide and cannibalism: there were no leopards, no snakes here, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself!’ was the boast I would keep hearing. And I thought I began to understand why Forest Lawn had been refused entry to America while the death-snake was

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