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.

I forgive you, Rex.

Anyway, I was unsurprised and quite relieved when I found out that evening that they didn’t need me any more. Rex had had a word. And that, folks, was the end of that.

2 Early Memories

Once upon a time in a land far, far away…or quite far away, anyway. It’s eighteen hours even if you get a direct flight from Vegas. And there’s nothing much there now anyway except some farms and red mud. Don Google-Earthed it. Once upon a time I was a little prince in a magic kingdom. I can’t remember anything before my memory of Stroheim, as if that was the thing that shook my consciousness awake. He fell out of a fig-tree chasing after a blue-tailed monkey. Thump went Stroheim, and I was off and running, once upon a time—but let me tell this straight, dearest humans. You must know how it ends…

There was Mama and me and my sister, and we lived in the forest below an escarpment with about twenty others, whose names I’ll have to change. I slept high up in a nest of leaves that Mama would prepare in the crook of a branch, with Victoria curled round me and Mama round her. In the mornings Mama would take us across the stream to fish for termites. Victoria would ride on her back and I would cling underneath. The water was cold and fast-flowing and pressed against me as we crossed but I always felt safe. And when we climbed into the trees and moved through the canopy, Victoria would climb behind us on her own, following Mama’s soft hoots.

When we got to the termite mounds, Mama would strip a twig and insert it into one of the holes, leaving it in long enough for the termites to clamp their mandibles on to it. You were supposed either to crunch them off one by one or slide them through your mouth in one go, or just mop them up with the back of your wrist. You’ve seen it on National Geographic. Me and Victoria were too young for termites and I liked it very much when she copied Mama and groomed me, or held me up by one leg to dangle upside down.

What else did I like? Figs, moonfruit, a big yellowy-green fruit that fizzed when you ate it, passionflower buds, Victoria, Mama, holding on to Mama’s hair to ride her, being suckled by Mama, playing with Frederick, Gerard and Deanna, the taste of the leaves that Mama would chew into a little sponge to dab up fresh rainwater, the flashing orange on the heads of the turacos, dreams of the escarpment and, most of all, rain dances. I didn’t like termites, palm-nuts, the faces of baboons, the tree that had killed Clara, the smell of the python we chased after, Marilyn, whom Mama had to fight, young males charging at Mama if we were on our own, nightmares, the mewling of leopards, Stroheim.

You’ve never seen a rain dance, have you? They were us at our best. For hours beforehand you’d feel the electricity building in the air. You’d climb up into the lower canopy to escape the humidity, and it would slither up the trunk behind you. So you’d climb higher, until finally you’d be perched in the topmost branches, high over the rest of the forest, panting and sticky with moisture, too tired even to reach for one of those fizzing yellowy-green fruits whose name, dammit, escapes me.

From across the forest you’d hear the low coughs given out by other tree-climbers. No birds. No insects. Only our low, muffled coughs, echoless in the wet air. Then the first pant-hoots: the long low hoots, the shorter higher breaths. Mama and the others in our tree would respond with their own hoots, counting themselves in, and then the pants would climb higher, flowering into screams, and the screams would link into a continuous long chorus, and as the rain began to leak a few drops Mama would start pounding on the trunk, shaking the branches, like she was trying to wake the tree up too, and you could hear us all through the forest, drumming up the storm. And over it all, our alpha, Kirk, summoning us to gather for the dance.

We’d climb down from our tree and follow his call through the forest. In my memory it’s always dusk as we sight Kirk, walking upright at the apex of a long-grassed ridge and howling in the strengthening rain, looking terrifying up close, twenty times my own size. He seems to be coaxing the thunder towards us, reeling it in. The other grown-ups, like Cary and Archie, are quieter but also in a trance and visibly shaking. The thunder swings through the upper canopy, approaching in huge, looping leaps until finally it’s upon us, above us, all over us, and the air suddenly turns into rain.

The mothers clear themselves and us children away into the sloe trees to watch. We’re absolutely rapt. Kirk, illuminated by lightning, charges down the ridge at an astonishing speed. Then Cary, who’s clever, discovers rocks can be made to bounce up and smack satisfyingly into the foliage. Cary can always do certain things Kirk can’t. Archie is smaller than the others and finds a branch to whack against a tree-trunk, leaving a series of white scars. They are our heroes, and Victoria and I are too enthralled by it all to eat our sloes. And soon, as it always is, the wicked thunder is faced down and slinks off, cowed by our vigour, sent on its way with a kick by the youngsters, like Stroheim and Spence, who are pelting down the charge-route in imitation of Kirk. The rain falls as applause and we drink it up. Mama and Victoria and I share out sloes between us.

I love rain dances. When I grow up, I think, I’m going to be in them.

We were the only ones in the forest who made art or fashioned tools, the only ones who co-operated, the ones with the most sophisticated and highly evolved culture. We thought there was nobody like us. And our queen was Mama. My mother was the queen of the world.

She was extraordinarily beautiful, and not only in her children’s eyes. I know now how to describe her coat: it was the colour of Coca-Cola refracted through ice, a deep black harbouring a secret copper, and yet there was also, especially when she sparkled with rain, a faint blue nimbus around her as if she were coolly on fire. Broad-backed and not tall, she had a low centre of gravity and huge hands and feet, which meant that even the way she moved was serene. Her eyes were direct and emitted a soothing amber light. She’d lost only a few teeth and the tatter in one of her ears she wore kind of rakishly, a concession to imperfection, like the abscess on her upper lip. Kirk held sway over us, but it was Mama who shored him up, and calmed Cary and the other rivals, did the grooming and reconciling and generally stopped everyone killing each other.

Forgive the boasting but it’s true. She was respected and loved where Kirk was merely feared. It was Mama to whom both Kirk and Cary came screaming for reassurance. She was always two steps ahead. She could figure out how a squabble between Cary and Archie over Marilyn would lead to Veronica being battered by Kirk. She gave Marilyn a real dressing-down when she ate Veronica’s baby, Jayne. We even used to visit with Stroheim’s crippled mother Ethel, since Mama realized it would do the nervous Stroheim good if his mother could rise a little up the hierarchy. She endured the beatings she had to take with grace and was pretty handy in a ruck.

I remember riding her on our patrols, led by Kirk across the stream and through the ravine guarded by Clara’s tree, six or seven of us in single file through the deep grass—so deep only I, sitting on Mama’s back, could see above the blades—and down again into the forest of moonfruits and figs where our territory overlapped with that of the hostiles who roamed the other side of the escarpment. We would fall silent, grinning nervously, and I’d feel my mother’s hair bristle scratchily erect beneath me. Here, the thrashing of a branch might mean a baboon or a battle. I’ve never seen a hostile properly—I find it difficult to believe in them. Hostiles to me are black blobs who answer our calls from the ridge on the horizon. We listen an enormous silence into existence. Above us white-faced monkeys pitter-patter through the canopy; turacos flash their orange crests. Now there’s something in the silence. Everyone touches each other. We’re all here. Phew! Keep calm, everyone. We certainly do seem to need to give each other a hell of a lot of reassurance all the time. Everyone OK? And immediately there’s a pant-hoot from ahead of us and a tree quivers and a male hostile drops to the ground with a crack of branches.

We panic. Kirk and Cary are on their feet and hooting. I find myself squashed into Mama’s back as Spence and Stroheim scurry behind her, frantically embracing each other, her, me, anything. If only Kirk had a stick or some rock or something! But it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s not a hostile, only old Alfred, who used to roam with us and now lives on the other side of the escarpment. We never do meet hostiles. Still, you can’t be too careful.

But I remember this incident because Stroheim, his nerves too taut, came barrelling out from behind the shelter of Mama’s legs, screaming, and caught Alfred with a kick on the side of the head just as he was turning his back to be groomed. Everybody else panicked again, but Mama was there first, to sink her teeth into Stroheim’s arm and hustle him away from the maelstrom he’d nearly created. Give her an awkward social situation and she always blossomed. She was the one who coaxed the sulking Stroheim down from his tree to join in the general grooming session everybody needed after all that. It was Mama who kissed and cradled him, nuzzled the wound (not serious) in his arm and meticulously picked over every inch of his back while Stroheim pretended that that was the least he deserved.

His problem was that he just couldn’t act to save his life. Ricocheting downwards between the branches of the fig tree as that blue-tailed monkey scampered away, poor old Stroheim was already, before he hit the ground, composing his features into an expression of wholly unconvincing unconcern. Breaking his ribs? Sure, that was what he’d been meaning to do—potential alphas liked nothing better!

Nothing that he did convinced. Whenever the big lummox did manage to catch a blue-tailed monkey he was somehow never able to keep it in the mêeés that ensued, and his supposedly indifferent saunter towards the empty fruit trees was heartbreaking to see. And acting was so very important, so central to everything we did, because of the hierarchy. Acting big, acting injured to save yourself from worse, acting unconcerned to avoid conflict, acting yourself into a credible rage. Stroheim hadn’t played enough as an infant because Ethel’s withered leg isolated her—but he was huge for his age. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be, so his acting was hopeless. Since human beings have both a mother and a ‘father’, you should be able to imagine it easily enough. How, if the two things that made you are constantly fighting, it can just rip you apart.

But we only had mothers, who would build us nests from leaves, and soothe us when we whimpered in our sleep, dreaming of the bird that was red, blue, green and gold at the same time; or the escarpment, where I always imagined there was a paradise of figs, tended by wiser, gentler apes than us. Our mothers woke us by blowing in our faces. They were always with us, only abandoning us for a moment to climb an awkward tree and shake down fruit for us. I can remember waiting and waiting in the grass for what must in fact have been only a minute while Mama shook away at the branches of the tree above me, and how, out of the canopy, came dropping one of those fizzy yellowy-green fruits…whose name now drops from an obscure branch of memory into my beautiful home here in Palm Springs, gently rotating as it falls. Wild custard apples.

I was a little prince, whose mama was the queen of the world, and then everything changed.

In ’39 or something, I remember being at this theme party in Marion Davies’s beach-hut—you could have fitted a beach inside it—with Nigel Bruce, the English actor you’ll remember as Basil Rathbone’s sidekick, an excessively slow-witted Dr Watson. The theme was Movie Stars. Wallace Beery had come as Rudolph Valentino. Joan Crawford had come as Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple had come as Joan Crawford. Gloria Swanson had come as Gloria Swanson. W. C. Fields had come as Rex the Wonder Horse. Rex hadn’t been invited. Champion the Wonder Horse had come as Rin Tin Tin. Nobody had come as Charles Foster Kane. And Nigel Bruce, who was a friend of Johnny’s and had arranged to borrow me from MGM, had come as Tarzan. He wore a loose pinkish body-stocking on which were printed leopardskin shorts. Nigel was an absolute brick and had furnished me with a cigar so that if anyone asked he could tell them I’d come as Groucho Marx. I strained at Nigel’s hand, convinced I was bound to see Johnny somewhere in the ballroom. I swore I saw him, thought I saw him again, caught a glimpse of bare flesh and leather that turned out to be a Red Indian, and then saw him again…

It was just a pity for Nigel and for my misused heart that Melvyn Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, George Axelrod, Louis Calhern, F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least two of the Hearst sons and Myrna Loy had all come as the King of the Jungle. Some were in body-stockings with the seams showing, some stripped down to impressively authentic loincloths: all of them (apart from Fitzgerald, who had accidentally left his in a cloakroom) accompanied by leashed chimpanzees, mostly obtained on day-release from Hearst’s zoo at San Simeon. And, meanwhile, Johnny was nowhere to be seen. But then again, how was I to know what to look for? He might have been blacked up as Al Jolson or masked as the Phantom of the goddamn Opera.

But I’m getting off the point, which is that the unifying theme behind all of Marion’s beach-hut parties was Drunken Sex. I ended that night in one of the little cabañas that were dotted around the grounds, watching my new friends Ronald Colman, Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Harry F. Gerguson, a.k.a. ‘Prince Michael Alexandrovich Obolensky Romanoff ‘ of Romanoff ‘s restaurant, and about half a dozen other very special but not so famous human beings copulate en masse and thinking, Bonobos. They’re like a bunch of fucking bonobos.

I was gloomily perched on a Louis Quatorze dressing-table which had doubtless once stood in the Palace of Versailles, yawning into my bottle of Canadian Club while my colleagues toiled through their biological necessities at inordinate length, when I became aware that a note was missing from that alluring olfactory chord of urine, vomit, fungal infection, menstrual blood and sweat that characterizes any human gathering. Not one of the six or seven women was ovulating. It wasn’t necessary, I brooded, for dear Paulette to remove Paul Henreid’s phallus from her mouth, which still sported its packing-tape Charlie Chaplin moustache, and for her to hiss over her shoulder at the labouring Colman, ‘Don’t fucking get me pregnant, Ronnie, OK? Come on my ass.’

How I envied them, these humans who, like bonobos, didn’t confine sex to the times when conception could happen. That, I suddenly saw, made all the difference in the world. How happy they looked! How easy and gay the scene was! How much fun—no matter how comically, almost endearingly, protracted. (Not to boast, but I used to pride myself on never taking longer than fifteen seconds over a female’s pleasure, managing on several memorable occasions, with sparkling technique and due consideration for my partner, to get it down to less than two or three.) There in my bourbon fug on the Louise Quatorze table I was wondering why the hell it couldn’t have been like that for us. Why did it all have to be hierarchy, and possessiveness, and blood and shoving?

I guess love has its mysteries. Thanks to good old National Geographic and Discovery, which we have on pre-select in the den, I’ve puzzled out a few things I didn’t know then. At the time I didn’t have a clue why, when Mama began to swell, everything turned into such a circus. Why it was impossible for the three of us to go anywhere without a wake of screaming males, their hair up like iron filings, bipedalling around in a delirium of insecurity and violence? When Mama was actually mating with Kirk, Cary, Lon, Archie, Stroheim, Spence, Mel or Tom—those were the relatively quiet interludes, lasting for a good ten seconds at a time. But the rest of the time we just walked in a forest of out-thrust penises, which was always one misplaced gaze away from going up in flames. We tiptoed gingerly through a minefield of erections.

The tension between Cary and Kirk was a constant scream in our nerves. And every flare-up had to be followed by the long reconciliations we needed, reconciliations that increasingly ended in fresh fights that had to be reconciled. Everyone was either fighting or reconciling all the time. (We used to have some neighbours like that in Palm Springs until, thank Christ, she kicked him out.) Spence had had a finger broken by Cary, who had a wound in his shoulder from Kirk, who was carrying a fractured ankle after a tangle with Lon and Cary. And Mama couldn’t help because she was the flashpoint. Her sumptuously taut vaginal swelling, twice the size of her head, was a blazing beacon of division. When Mama presented for young Spence, Kirk clamped Spence’s foot between his teeth and hurled him away with a wrench that ripped off a toe. He out-ranked him, so fair enough, I guess.

Around the time that Mama’s swelling was approaching its height, Cary killed a pair of colobus monkeys, and with the others occupied by the feast, Mama slipped away with us down to the stream to drink. Archie knuckled out of the trees with a greeting of quiet pant-grunts and Mama, he and Victoria groomed each other for a while, then Archie crossed the stream, shaking a branch to make us follow. Mama swung me on to her and we set off behind him: I lay straddled on her back, looking out for the many-coloured bird or marmosets or turacos in the canopy. Victoria knuckled along quietly after us, holding a termite-stick she’d made out of a msuba twig, and Archie led the way, impatiently shaking branches at us if we lagged behind.

When we tried to turn back, he came hoot-screaming and charging out of the shadows, and I tumbled off Mama’s back as she went sprawling under his impact. He grabbed her by the leg and dragged her down the slope, kicking and pummelling her, then stalked back past us with his hair bristling and sat down, waiting for her to stop screaming and come to him, which she did. She had to: she had us to look after, you see. He apologized with kisses and caresses, and groomed her for a while before we set off again. This was the beginning of what National Geographic refers to as a ‘consortship period’. Discovery calls it ‘Honeymoon in the Trees!’

Where did Archie take us? Over the hills and far away. Past the place where we’d met Alfred, through strange forests of moss-covered trees to the higher ground beside the escarpment, where the clouds clung and little groups of banded mongooses scurried around, carrying frogs in their mouths. We nested in a giant msuba beside a termite mound, and Archie kissed Mama’s wounds and groomed her and apologized for hours and mated her again and again. Next day Mama and Archie took Victoria and me termite-fishing, and as a special treat Archie showed me how to make a termite-fishing stick.

Mama hardly played with us because Archie was all over her, and if we tugged at her fur while she was being penetrated, she’d wave us off to play elsewhere. Victoria taught me how to climb. Archie on the other hand was having a ball—constantly either guzzling termites, in his horrible lip-smacking way, or mating. I tried a bit of mongoose and didn’t like it. It rained all the fucking time.

I remember, too, one evening near the end of the honeymoon, how we were surprised by the cries of a strange animal from far, far away. The distant hoots of the hostiles had died away at dusk, and then came these other cries—sudden pops, like sharp thunderclaps. Little sequences of these long-echoing thunderclaps, out of a stormless sky, far away but loud. Pop, pop, pop. Pop pop. In six months, I’d be sucking on a Lucky Strike and making prank phone-calls in a tavern in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. So. What happened was this.

We were on our way back to our old territory when we came across Kirk, lounging between the roots of a msuba in a shaft of sunlight that illuminated a haze of golden flies. He’d been stuffing himself with passion-fruit and his front was matted with juice and seeds. And then I saw the white bars of his ribs and all the turmoil in there and understood that the seeds were flies and the juice was Kirk’s blood. Archie darted towards him, then away, and Mama barked feverishly at the air and pounded the earth on all fours. Victoria raced back and forth, blindly, very fast, cheeping, and I realized that something very bad was happening. Archie darted up to Kirk in his cloud of flies, lifted his hand and let it drop. He recoiled and did it again. Kirk’s hand did nothing—and still I didn’t really make the connection that he was dead, like a bushpig or a blue-tailed monkey could be dead. It was too hard to grasp: Kirk, our heroic rain-dancer, our thunder-conquering king!

We moved on, quickly, without grooming, and Mama’s hair wouldn’t stop bristling beneath me. Death was still sticking to us: I became frightened because I thought I’d done something very wrong and was going to be punished for it. It hadn’t been me, I wanted Mama to understand. It was a leopard—or maybe he’d fallen out of a tree, like Stroheim! We crossed the stream back to where we’d been when Mama’s swelling started, and the feeling of Death forded the water with us. It climbed up among the empty nests of our old roosting-tree and slept beside us too, and when we woke we saw another adult male, whose name I didn’t know, caught in a tangle of branches high above, gnawed by the baboons or leopard that had left him where he was hanging and much more dead than Kirk.

Even Victoria and I knew it then, I think. What else could have done this if not the hostiles? All we knew about hostiles was that they were hostile. In fact, it was absolutely typical hostile behaviour, if you thought about it. Mama climbed to the crown of a custard-apple tree and pant-hooted in four directions, but got no answer: the whole forest seemed to be teeming with death. At a fast trot she led us up one of the deep-grassed ridges that spoked off from the escarpment and gave a view of the canopy below. But there were no black blobs moving in the tree-tops, no chains of dots leaving a wake through the long-grassed slopes; neither friends nor enemies. And then, where the ridge flattened and was reabsorbed by the forest, at last we heard a long, low hoot from ahead, and though Archie bristled, I recognized the voice as Spence’s.

Poor Spence was limping. Fucking hostiles, I remember thinking (my translation). He gave another weak hoot and tried to move towards us out of the trees and down the ridge, but wasn’t really able to. He whimpered and tried to lift his arm to show us, and Mama set me down in the tall grass and scampered up towards him, followed, after a nervous grin, by Archie. Victoria pitter-pattered after them, through the skeins of mist that scudded over the ridge. She caught up, and just as the three of them got to the edge of the trees, Spence suddenly disappeared and the hostiles came screaming out of the long grass towards them. I saw Cary drop down from the dark interior of the forest-edge, followed by more adults, and Stroheim.

Archie was engulfed in a tide of bristling black and that was the last I saw of him. I never saw Victoria again: the last I remember of my sister is the sight of her catching Mama up. I fled back down the ridge the way we’d come, suddenly capable of running, and when I fell, I looked back up the ridge and saw Mama running towards me, and a couple of hostiles—except they weren’t hostiles, of course, but Cary and Spence, who used to feed me bits of moonfruit—running shoulder to shoulder with her. She fell, or was tripped, and then Cary was stamping on her, and others were catching up. From the tall grass I watched her try to rise. Stroheim nipped in and out, capering with excitement, but I didn’t see him strike. It didn’t even occur to me to try to rescue her. I just took off down the side of the ridge where the slope was so steep I could almost fall down it into the upper canopy of the trees below.

I blundered through a maze into the lower canopy where I was hidden, and blundered on until I had to stop and rest in a little cradle of branches. After a while, there didn’t seem to be much reason to go anywhere: Mama was my only home, and she would find me if she could. So I didn’t move, except once to fetch some leaves when the cradle began to hurt. I breathed and slept and didn’t grow hungry, and let the rain fall on me as it fell on everything else.

What happened to us, dearest humans, was nothing special. I suppose Cary must have staged a coup against old Kirk, and then against his two other main rivals. But who cares? It was just politics. Sooner or later, every creature that lives in a forest has to learn that there’s only 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’.

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