Death of a Swinger

This is an excerpt from an obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:

“In the Tarzan film series, whose golden age spanned 1932 to 1948, Cheetah was said to have appeared in the films made between 1932 and 1934, as a comic and sympathetic animal sidekick whose intelligence sometimes seemed to rival that of his human co-stars, Johnny Weissmuller (who played the titular jungle lord) and Maureen O’Sullivan (who portrayed his civilized love interest, Jane).”

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, one of the New York television stations regularly aired old Tarzan movies on weekend afternoons—as well as Bowery Boys flicks and an array of Three Stooges shorts. Having spent many an hour utterly absorbed in this intellectual wasteland, my only quibble with the New York Times’ tribute to the chimpanzee who died of kidney failure last Saturday at a Florida primate sanctuary is its employment of the qualifier “sometimes.”

While I loved Weissmuller as Tarzan, it was clear to me even as a little kid that he’d been tapped for the role for his rugged good looks and athleticism—he’d won five Olympic gold medals in swimming in the 1920s—rather than his acting ability. When Weissmuller said things like “Tarzan hungry,” one suspected he merely was subbing his screen name into a declaration he might just as easily have made at the studio commissary. Tarzan of the Apes may have swung on vines across what then was Rhodesia, but that didn’t make the guy playing him a Rhodes scholar.

Maureen O’Sullivan was a beauty who convincingly employed many more syllables than did Weissmuller, but she wasn’t exactly the Dame Judi Dench of her day, either. She had this way of making life in the jungle sound like one big tea party, and seemed as likely to thrive in the wild as might such current-day survivalists as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

So let’s recap: Here I was, spending copious weekend hours watching B actors in various mid-century screen roles flee elephant stampedes, utter lines even Damon Runyon wouldn’t have touched and gouge out each other’s eyes. Cheetah the chimp, meanwhile, stood proud (if not tall) in the jungle, commanding the screen while making figurative monkeys out of every bloodthirsty crocodile, rapacious European and pissed-off tribesman he encountered. So, of course Cheetah riveted my attention. (So much so, in fact, that I never once asked myself why an ambling chimp went by the name of a speedy cat.)

Cheetah had presence. He always was the smartest primate in the forest, and not just given the scant competition. He was a leader and a problem solver who suffered fools gladly only in the sense that he showed many teeth while loudly mocking them and doing back-flips at their expense. Man, I loved that chimp. Of course, back then I didn’t think about the ethics or morality of people using animals for human entertainment. (This youthful lack of conscience also came in handy while I was delighting in the TV antics of Mr Ed and Arnold Ziffel.) All I knew was that Cheetah seemed to be a higher evolution of primate than were the schoolyard bullies who spent the 1960s calling me Captain Hook, or the adolescent girls who uniformly deemed me manifestly un-dreamy.

But until this week I’d assumed that Cheetah had shuffled—or perhaps swung—off this mortal coil decades ago. He’d starred in films made decades before I was born, after all, and I’m not exactly young myself. Why, even Tarzan—Weissmuller—had died way back in 1984, several months shy of the 80th birthday that Cheetah is thought to have reached before he finally passed away on Christmas Eve.

Eighty! I’m no primatologist, but that struck me at first reading as a stunningly long lifespan for a chimp. Indeed, what I’ve been reading in the past 24 hours is that chimpanzees typically live 35 to 45 years in captivity, where they’re protected from tropical diseases and predators if not the danger of being bored to death. I can’t claim to know what Cheetah’s life really was like or what he thought about it, but Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, where he’d lived since “around 1960,” made it sound like his long retirement had at least been as entertaining, active and sustaining as are those of his shuffleboard-playing, Early Bird Special-flocking human counterparts.

Cheetah enjoyed finger-painting and football, Cobb told the Times, leaving ambiguous whether he used a brush or his actual finger, or whether he liked to tackle opposing players on the gridiron or just watch the games on TV. I personally like to think Cheetah had kept himself mentally young by retaining some of the impish, chimp-ish aggression he’d shown on movie sets. My favorite anecdote comes from actress Mia Farrow, daughter of the late Maureen O’Sullivan. Farrow tweeted yesterday, according to the Times, that her mother invariable referred to Cheetah as “that bastard” because he “bit her at every opportunity.”

But perhaps Cheetah had mellowed in his decades away from the cutthroat movie business. Debbie Cobb characterized the senior chimp she knew as having been “very compassionate” and “in tune to human feelings.” She told the Times that he “always was trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day.” Supposedly Cheetah had been “soothed by Christian music,” so it could be that he absorbed those messages and even prayed for the souls of those who had pocketed his residuals and omitted his name from marquees while hyping a dimwitted ex-jock.

It’s all anthropomorphizing, of course. But “primate sanctuary” makes it sound like Cheetah at least got to spend quality time around his own species. Presumably he wasn’t caged and had room to ramble. Florida’s climate would seem to be to a chimp’s liking. His human caretakers’ hearts undoubtedly were in the right place. He might indeed have taken a shine to Cobb and others. He may genuinely have adopted finger-painting and football with the same zeal that you and I might have devoted to ass-scratching and feces-throwing had the tables been turned.

I'm reminded of that old saw about how a monkey, given a typewriter and enough time, might produce Shakespeare. Not likely. But chimps are apes, and as such they’re smarter than the average monkey. Cheetah was wily enough to parlay an impressive film career into a long and seemingly cushy retirement. I like to think he enjoyed his life. At any rate, I feel compelled to thank him for having enriched mine. If there’s an afterlife for any of us primates, I hope he’s finally received his SAG card and is grabbing a bite with his old pal Weissmuller. Either that or taking a bite out of Maureen O’Sullivan.

Hitchens, Havel, Holidays

Did you miss me? Hello?

Today, a grab-bag of thoughts as Chanukah continues, Christmas looms and the new year stands poised to make this one history.

Update. Remember how, back in January, I wrote about how I was going to read 20 books in 2011—and how, even though my retention stinks and I might not at this point be able to give you complete synopses of each book, I’d at least be able to list every title, because I’d be writing them all down?

Not even close. I read less than half of that number of books. And I can’t be more precise because I forgot to record most of the titles. Early in the year I read an interesting biography of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. During the summer I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, about what happens to the human body in zero gravity. (I’ll pass on space tourism.) I could swear I read a few other books, possibly even some fiction. But I can’t prove it.

I got to thinking about this earlier in the month, when Christopher Hitchens died. His obituary in the Washington Post was packed with great quotes that made me think I ought to buy everything he ever wrote. All of which would be new to me, because I’m not sure I’ve read so much as a single essay of his. I’ve long known of him by reputation, of course—as a dissolute but brilliant contrarian, and an atheist only too happy to publicly debate believers, including his own brother. I like how he called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, took the decidedly minority view that sainted Mother Teresa had been a “fanatic, fundamentalist and fraud,” and expressed gratitude that strangers would pray for his recovery from cancer, but also disgust at the notion that he might undergo a death-bed conversion.

In fact, this was the final paragraph of the Post article: “‘I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire,’ Mr Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in October 2010, ‘who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.’”

It probably goes without saying that I’ve never read a word of Voltaire, either. Or of the magazine output of Alexander Cockburn, a one-time colleague of Hitchens’ at The Nation who once trashed his former co-worker as “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic and cynical.” Somehow all of that attracts me to Hitchens even more. I’d like to think I’ll get around to reading him posthumously in 2012. History and the literal stacks of tantalizing but unread books already at home make the prospect unlikely, however.

Jane and me. I’ve made no secret of my love-hate relationship with technology—meaning that I love such old-school pleasures as electricity and indoor plumbing and hate pretty much all forms of social networking save that so-last-century “innovation” known as e-mail. I seem to have very few allies on this front who are younger than 80. You can imagine my excitement several weeks ago, then, when the celebrated, world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who’s merely 78, was quoted as saying this when asked if she “keeps up” with technology:

I definitely do e-mails. I take my laptop. I do my writing on it. I will not have a BlackBerry.

I have a cell phone, but I don’t know the number. I use it simply to call somebody if I need to. The cell phone is never on. The cell phone is not part of my life. Someone does a blog for me. I don’t tweet and Twitter. When people ask me to join their Facebook, I delete it.

Jane, my BFF! If I had a cell phone, it, too, would never be on! I don’t tweet or Twitter, either! (But if I might tweak you a bit, my chimp-loving gal pal, I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing.) I’ve got a laptop! When people ask me to “friend” me on Facebook,” I delete the requests, too! (Neither am I LinkedIn. You, Jane?) So, OK, I do write my own blog. But not with any frequency, Girlfriend! And my readership is miniscule!

Sure, Jane might argue that she’s too busy trying to save species and promote global environmentalism to spend time gabbing on the cell, sending gossipy texts or posting boozy photos on Facebook from her occasional pub crawls across Nairobi. But hey, my plate’s pretty full, too. I’ve got all these books to consider reading, for one thing.

Dead heads of state. I feel compelled to write something about the near-concurrent recent deaths of former Czech president Vaclav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Some essayist somewhere commented about how the two men’s leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. I’ll say! Havel was a dissident playwright and poet turned politician who was criticized for being too dreamy and impractical. Kim, meanwhile, claimed power as his birthright and wasn’t exactly known for his light touch. Yet if news footage is to be believed, whose death is it that’s really cranking up the waterworks among the local populace? But to Havel’s credit, he, unlike Kim, never starved and brainwashed his people into thinking he was All That.

This is going to shock you, but I’ve never read any of Havel’s plays or poetry. While I admire his creativity and courage as a thorn in the regime’s side in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its patron governments, I’ve always heard Havel’s writings referred to as “experimental” and “avant-garde.” I have enough trouble understanding stuff that’s relatively straightforward. It’s not lost on me that one of Havel’s best buddies was Frank Zappa, whose music and comedy carry the same descriptions as Havel’s oeuvre, and whose insightfulness and alleged brilliance always escaped me.

I was reminded the other day, via the Onion’s AV Club arts and entertainment Web site, that Kim’s death seems certain to influence future scripts of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock. When last season ended, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks) the cable news-host wife of Alec Baldwin’s studio-exec character Jack Donaghy, had been kidnapped by Kim Jong Il. (This prompted dim diva Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski, to ask, “Kim Jong Il? Who’s she?”) So, what’s next? Will Avery be implicated in Kim’s death? Or, might the suddenly fatherless Kim Jong Un—the so-called “Great Successor”—seek solace in the arms of the shanghaied (wrong country, I know) American?

I love 30 Rock. I also recall that one bit had Kim Jong Il paired in a cop buddy movie with Tracy Jordan, the idiot man-child played by Tracy Morgan who’s famous for saying things like, “A book hasn’t given me this much trouble since Waldo went to that barber pole factory” and “I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.” The brilliance of the buddy-film gag is that the real Kim Jong Il by all accounts was a Hollywood movie nut who—who knows?—might have skipped the entire tyrant gig in Pyongyang for one shot at action-film stardom. It’s one of those “If only people had bought Hitler’s paintings” kinds of thing.

Makes you think, right? OK, not really. But still.

You are where you eat/shop. David Wasserman, the US House editor of the Cook Political Report, recently wrote: “In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel—a record 45-point gap. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won 58 percent of counties now containing a Whole Foods and 26 percent of those now boasting a Cracker Barrel, a 32-point difference. And in 1992, Gov Bill Clinton won 60 percent of Whole Foods counties and 40 percent of Cracker Barrel counties — a mere 20-point margin. This growing divide signals shifts in the electorate.”

The idea is that Cracker Barrel, the home-style restaurant chain that trades on comfort food and nostalgia, is synonymous with Republicans and conservatism, while Whole Foods, the high-end organic grocery stores, bespeak liberal Democrats who’ve got the money to spend on fancypants grub. There’s much to all that, but I personally am not crazy about either chain, even though politically I should be in the tank for Whole Foods.

What I most dislike about Cracker Barrel is its history of discrimination against gays. But also, the food’s not very good. And it’s the kind of place where people bring their noisy kids and then smack them in public. I’m sure concealed handguns are quietly welcomed there, too. Put it this way: I’d think twice before publicly backing “Obamacare” in that place.

But Whole Foods, too, gives me a pain in the ass. Everything’s expensive, and try finding a box of Lucky Charms or a selection of celebrity-gossip magazines. The place is always crowded, and every one of its theoretically carbon-neutral shoppers seems to have a huge, honking SUV parked in the frighteningly jammed parking lot. Everybody is glued a cell phone, and would rather run you down with their cart than pay any attention to where they’re going.

I don’t suppose I’m contributing to electoral analysis of the Cracker Barrel-Whole Foods divide by simply griping about both establishments. But I enjoyed that.

Christmas music. As I noted at around this time last year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas I listen to a ton of holiday music, on the radio and CDs. My car dial often is tuned to WASH-FM, which switches to an all-Christmas-music-all-the-time format during this period. Among my favorite CDs this season is one of country artists doing Christmas songs. It includes “The Christmas Guest,” a schmaltzy and wonderful recitation by the late great Johnny Cash about an elderly widower who fruitlessly awaits God’s promised visit on Christmas day while instead taking in three forlorn wayfarers who show up at his humble door. Spoiler alert: It turns out that God had disguised Himself as those wayfarers! So, he really did show up, and the old guy passed the hospitality test with flying colors. (Never mind that you’d think the Almighty might lighten up a little on the fealty thing on December 25. It’s a holiday, for His sake!)

Anyway, as often happens when I hear various versions of the same songs about 20,000 times in a compressed period, I’m stuck by certain peculiarities in the lyrics.

Perhaps no Christmas song is more peculiar than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” in which a child is privy to his mother’s seemingly adulterous cuckolding of his father with the fat bearded man in the red suit. If you listen to the words, mommy doesn’t just kiss Santa, she tickles him under his beard, too. And that’s just what the kid sees in a fleeting glance! Where else is mommy kissing him? And why is all this foreplay presented as innocent fun? The song’s last line is “What a laugh it would have been/If daddy had only seen/Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” A “laugh”? Do you think it’d really have been a laugh? This is America! If daddy sees that, I see him pulling out a handgun and wasting the bitch and the home-wrecking old elf, Christmas cheer be damned! You know what I see? Sing it with me: "I See Junior with PTSD."

Then there’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which begins by assuming everyone knows the names of eight members of Santa’s sleigh-pulling team, but, after naming them, asks, “Do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?” Isn’t that entirely ass-backwards? To the contrary, Rudolph's is the name everybody already knows—the acknowledged “most famous reindeer of all.” Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask, “Do you recall how there are a bunch of other reindeer whose names escape us at the moment? One’s Donner, right—like the party?” But then, I suppose the song would lack something as “Rudolph’s Posse, the Eight Anonymous Reindeer.”

Finally, what are we to make of the notation, in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”? Who the hell associates Christmas with scary ghost stories?! I mean, name one, other than A Christmas Carol. And even that tale isn’t particularly scary unless you’re Ebenezer Scrooge. Or maybe unless you, like me, felt a little spooked as a kid when that bony skeleton hand pointed at Mr Magoo’s grave in the old animated version.

So, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little pre-holiday potpourri. Happy holidays! Drive safely. Maybe bring a book on your travels. And don’t listen too closely to those Christmas song lyrics. They’ll drive you crazy.