Me Cheeta: The Autobiography
The incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood.As heard on Radio 4, starring Jon Malcovich and Julian Sands.The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. His coffin was lowered into the ground to the recorded sounds of his famous jungle call. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film Tarzan finds a Mate, has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs. At the incredible age of seventy-five, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded.Now, in his own words, Cheeta (aka Jiggs) finally tells his extraordinary story.He was just a baby when snatched from the jungle of Liberia in 1932, by the great animal importer Henry Trefflich, who went on to supply NASA with its 'Monkeys for Space' programme. That same year, Cheeta appeared in Tarzan the Ape Man, and in 1934 Tarzan and His Mate, in which he famously stole the clothes from a naked O'Sullivan, dripping wet from an underwater swimming scene with Weissmuller. Other Tarzan films followed until Cheeta finally retired from the big screen after the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison, whose finger he accidentally bit backstage while being offered a placatory banana.Cheeta tells it all, a life lived with the stars, a monkey stolen from deepest Africa forced to make a living in the fake jungles of Hollywood. He tells us too of his journey beyond the screen: his struggle with drink and addiction to cigars; his breakthrough with a radical new form of abstract painting, 'Apeism'; his touching relationship with his retired nightclub-performing grandson Jeeta, now a considerable artist in his own right; his fondness for hamburgers and his battle in later life with diabetes; and, through thick and thin, carer Dan Westfall, his loving companion who has helped this magnificent monkey come to terms with his peculiar past.Funny, moving, searingly honest, Cheeta transports us back to a lost Hollywood. He is a real star, and this the greatest celebrity memoir of recent times.
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Me Cheeta
The Autobiography
James Lever
To D
‘A movie star is not quite a human being.’
MARLENE DIETRICH
Table of Contents
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.
