Me Cheeta: The Autobiography - James Lever

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the hierarchy and alphadom and the constant dance of death. From the termites to the turacos to the marmosets and pythons, from the mongooses to the leopards and the apes, every one of us, every second of every day, was simply trying to pass on its death to another. Even the bushpigs at their mothers’ teats, stealing milk from their brothers and sisters, and the trees and the grasses, too. Everything that lived, murdered. We were meant to be the best of all creatures, the paragon of the animals, and we also were mired in it. I watched the turacos around me stab the caterpillars and kept thinking there had to be something—one thing—that wasn’t hostile to its bones. But everything was steeped in death: all creatures great and small.

      I stayed in my tree for what seemed a long time; a day and a night, and a day, and a night, and a day. I heard the turacos’ chicks screaming for their caterpillars; I watched the many-coloured bird alight and fly off and wondered whether I might become a bird now that I meant never to go to ground again. I heard hooting and barking close by; I watched Cary make the leap from the foliage of the sloe tree next to me. I saw the way the branch gave as he landed and the way he eased through the ribs of the tree towards my cradle. And only when he was almost upon me did I realize I wasn’t reconciled to it: I didn’t want to die. To my surprise, I wanted to survive.

      There was no chance that I could out-climb Cary, and I waited until my branch was quivering with his weight, then dropped back down into what I had once thought was my own little princedom. Then I was running again on watery legs, and I thought the worst that could happen was that I’d be chased off and could maybe find Mama or Victoria before the leopards got me. But I saw that closer to me than Cary, and even more frightening, was Stroheim. He was almost hopping with exultation at the way his world had suddenly become a whole lot simpler. Big dumb Stroheim, who later, by the way, went on to a nothing-much career in Hollywood. In fact, MGM used to loan him out to RKO, where he’d occasionally crop up in tenth-rate Bs, bullnecked, horse-faced and bald, staring into the camera with a kind of George Raft aura. If you just wanted an ape to sit there and not bump into the furniture, then he could do a job for you. He was no worse than a stuffed one, you could say that much: he breathed perfectly convincingly. Sorry, I digress. Where was I? Of course—about to be murdered by an extra. I felt Stroheim’s fingers missing my heels, and then catching them, and then, as we skated over a slippery slick of leaves, he was on top of me and then horribly around me and Cary was skidding into us as we both fell together. So it was in a ball of enemies—a sort of writhing bolus like you see snakes make—that I died and began to ascend to heaven.

      I was shot up towards the canopy, towards the sky. I rose faster than you can fall. I understood that I would become a bird—it all made sense. A many-coloured bird was what you became when you died. And then we sagged to a halt and hung, the three of us, still tangled in our ball of hatred, denied entry to the next stage of life.

      About a foot from my face I saw an ape, white-faced, complexly coated, smiling. This, I would later discover, was Mr Tony Gentry, whose funeral in Barstow, California, 1982, would be such a solemn affair that I ended up playing a few of my favourite atonal noodles (not yet available on CD, but there are plans) on the organ to cheer everyone up a bit.

      ‘Got three!’ shouted the ape. ‘Three of them, having a little play together!’

      Humanity. Thank God for you.

      We were lowered to the ground, separated, and gently ushered into wooden cubes. Kind hands urged us inside our chambers; gentle voices urged us to eat. I saw old friends in other chambers—my old playmates Frederick and Gerard. And others: the innocent and the guilty alike. I was pretty sure we were still alive, though it did seem equally likely that we were all dead and in another world. But I didn’t see Mama, or Victoria.

      Two mind-bendingly peculiar days later, we were sitting in a monsoon in a town that Don’s pretty sure used to be called Kigoma, an old West African term that translates as ‘Salvation’.

       3 Sailing Away!

      When I think back to my last day in Africa, I can’t help but remember something Maureen O’Sullivan said to me at the very beginning of my career. ‘There, there, Cheeta. The hurt will die down. It has to. Otherwise none of us could stand life!’

      Maureen’s rather breezily delivered comment, by the way, was an attempt, some fifty minutes into Tarzan and His Mate, to offer consolation on the death of my on-screen mother. My on-screen mother who had just been impaled on the horn of a stampeding rhinoceros while saving Jane’s life! She said it briskly, in her trademark sing-song, which made it seem as if she was bucking me up after a surprise omission from the lacrosse First X rather than helping me come to terms with a bereavement she herself had caused. I’m getting off the point but if Maureen’s daughter, Mia Farrow, had been fatally gored while saving my life, I’d have been straight round to hers with an apology I’d at least have tried to make sound sincere. (Though—dare one say it—that would have been one hell of a popular rhino in Hollywood.)

      But that was Maureen all over, I’m afraid. She couldn’t even act affection for animals although, to be wholly honest and give the harmless old trout her due, it was probably just me she disliked. To be wholly, wholly honest, I don’t think she ever recovered from the downgrading implied by that title. Not Tarzan and Jane, you’ll note, or Tarzan and His Wife, but Tarzan and His Mate. That is, a buddy movie built around the electric chemistry of the Weissmuller-Cheeta double-act. A bitter pill for Maureen to swallow, that title, but there, there, my dear, the hurt will die down. Actually, had she and I ever been able to communicate, that’s exactly what I should have told her when she was, yet again, sobbing and swearing at me after I’d gotten in another good nip to her flank—’There, there, Maureen. The hurt will die down!’ See how she’d have liked that for consolation while she was wailing at the crew to fetch her bandages and iodine!

      Forgive me, I really am getting off the point. For the record, Maureen and I certainly had our ups and downs, I won’t deny it. But there has always been a strong professional respect between us, and I think we both cherish our relationship, which has always been the healthier for a bit of teasing.

      My point is: those are wise words, no matter how poorly delivered by however atrocious an actress. The hurt will die down. It has to. Otherwise none of us could stand life. And never mind that when the hurt doesn’t die down you have to go ahead and stand it all the same. What Jane said remains true—call it Jane’s Law. Pain has its own long-term interests at heart. Like a virus too smart to kill off its host, it ebbs, dies down and, to our own great surprise, we live through it. Just as, for instance, my dear friend Ronnie Colman lived through his hideous wreck of a divorce from Thelma Raye and went on to marry my colleague Benita Hume, a more than adequate Cousin Rita in Tarzan Escapes. Or, in fact, just as Benita herself lived through that dreadful period after poor Ronnie’s lungs killed him: she picked herself up from the floor and married George Sanders. Or, indeed, just as George in his turn lived through it when bone cancer killed his poor beloved Benita. Lived through it, that is, until of course he eventually couldn’t stand it any longer and killed himself in a fishing village near Barcelona on a spring day in 1972, leaving behind him a note calling the world a ‘cesspool’. Sorry, not a good example. Jane’s Law does have these occasional tragic exceptions.

      Anyway, that last day, sitting in a monsoon on the dock at Kigoma, I was frighteningly underweight and probably still in shock. A nagging voice kept telling me I wasn’t out of the woods yet. But I could already feel my grief and pain beginning to die down. I was younger and less vulnerable then. I had an immi-grant’s resources. I was damn well going to live through it.

      It wasn’t just that we’d been rescued, though that was, of course, a miracle in itself. There was also the astonishing care that was taken over our rehabilitation, which I like to think was down to Irving Thalberg’s legendary attention to detail. We had no way of knowing this at the time, but on the dock that day in Kigoma there was a collection of apes, monkeys and other creatures that MGM scouts had selected from among literally millions of hopefuls to play in Metro

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