James Lever - Me Cheeta - The Autobiography

‘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?