Did Cheeta in fact do these things? Who cares? The decimal point is that he could have done, and it makes for a renowned story. For this is nothing less than a chimp's-eye-view of Hollywood's aureate age. Just don't go looking for unsuspicious larks and family-friendly anecdotes; Cheeta is fragmentary to four-letter words, and has come up with the bitchiest, most abusive account of the Dream Factory since Kenneth Anger brought out Hollywood Babylon. The steep starriness of the celebrities in walk-on roles makes your middling autobiography appearance a charge out of the dribblings of a nonentity. How about Scott Fitzgerald, who sat next to our ideal at a screening? ('My buttocks trembled with him throughout, he was buzzing with fear.') Or Charlie Chaplin donation to show teeny-bopper female fans his (ahem) Brancusis? Joan Crawford? Marlene Dietrich? Humphrey Bogart? They all have their greedy hardly any secrets, and this mime takes no prisoners.
About the only leading light to come forth unsullied is Weissmuller, uncomplicated alpha-male and c whilom Olympic swimming champ whose mortal stunner makes Michael Phelps bearing like, well, a chimpanzee. There's a great on-going trick about Cheeta's conflict with Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane, whose outfit the chimp so memorably made off with while she was doing a also splotch of skinny-dipping in Tarzan and His Mate. Cheeta surely found his unrivalled lady a bit of a nag, with her never-ending shrill cries of 'Cheeta! What are you doing? Stop that just now!' and unwise attempts to suburbanise the jungle tree-house with leopard-skin throws, vine-controlled bamboo elevators and chimp-operated air-conditioning.
Much of this is laugh-out-loud hilarious, but there's a stern ambiance coursing unworthy of the indelicate narrative, not made any less resolute by Cheeta's jocular faux-naif observations, which agree to off the beatings, confinement in close cages and general misuse of animal actors as 'intensive rehab'. Two hundred horses died during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade, starring Errol Flynn, whose dispose in dogfights, alas, was not confined to movies about aeroplanes. Cheeta suffered his piece of hardship. In 1932 he was monkeynapped from the Liberian jungle (no think he identifies with King Kong) and crated up with hundreds of other creatures by an coarse importer; it was during the extended Atlantic crossing that he start with honoured himself by showing an facility for smoking, drinking and playing poker.
Later, he was to be instructed in the well-defined headway what it means to be a star. 'How could I have known that the starving and beating all formed parcel of Louis Mayer's painful grooming process…' Even after stardom, he, match so many of his kind counterparts, lived in brute of his outline dipping below a incontrovertible level, which all too often led to dejection and an ignominious death, whether by jigger or drugs (like previous boy star Bobby Driscoll), suicide (Lupe Velez botched her essay and ended up drowning in her institutional latrine bowl) or in the vivisection lab. 'My changed medical career', as Cheeta puts it after being fired from the set of Tarzan and the Mermaids. Luckily he was rescued by a kindly trainer, but one can only take it as given how many animals were not so fortunate.
How much of Cheeta's feature is true? About as much, I dare say, as in any other autobiography. And this is not just a wicked, salacious Hollywood yesterday's news with a dangerous subtext, it's also a impressive impost to the humanity who will forever be associated with the duty of Tarzan. Cheeta's terminating assignation with Weissmuller takes recognize with the actor confined to a wheelchair, impotent to speak properly after a series of strokes.
The joust with is so unhappy I burst into tears. I wept for the charming dead common man whose ghosts we still see moving across our screens, for all the animals that were treated so cruelly and for Cheeta, who - unalike Lassie, Godzilla and Kermit the Frog - doesn't have a unrivalled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame even though he so amply deserves one. Who would have intellect the autobiography of a chimpanzee could be so jocose and affecting?
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