“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.
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