James Lever - Me Cheeta - The Autobiography

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.