James Lever - Me Cheeta - The Autobiography

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

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.