It arrived to a mighty roar from the critics who are hailing it as the last great inside account of Hollywood’s golden age. Me Cheeta purports to be the autobiography of Tarzan’s chimpanzee pal who is still alive at 76.

There was only silence, however, about who really wrote it even when it was longlisted last month for The Guardian’s award for first-time authors.

The publisher, Fourth Estate, insisted it had simply stumbled upon the simian equivalent of a Jonathan Swift.

For weeks, there has been much chattering on the literary grapevine as to the ghostwriter’s identity. Martin Amis, Will Self and Gilbert Adair, the author of unauthorised sequels to Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, have all been mentioned as primate suspects.

Craig Brown, the critic, plumped last weekend for Christopher Douglas, who co-wrote I, An Actor, the spoof autobiography of a venerated thespian.

Cheeta wields a sharp pen. He writes that Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane opposite Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, was a “harmless old trout” who “couldn’t even act affection for animals”.

The chimp at first describes Rex Harrison, his co-star in his last film Dr Dolittle, as “that marvellous light comedian”, then pours poison on him as a “universally despised, impotent, alcoholic” who tried to murder Cheeta by getting him to fall out of a tree.

If Marlene Dietrich was a good German, writes Cheeta, “then the bad ones must be absolutely f****** terrifying”.

Not that the author was available for interview. “Of course, he’s running scared. He’s a monkey. He’s hiding in the corner of his cage,” said a spokesman at Fourth Estate last week.

Today The Sunday Times can reveal his true identity. The author of Me Cheeta is James Lever, the Oxford-educated son of a High Court judge. Far from being a Hollywood insider, he was a schoolboy in Bolton when Weissmuller died in 1984.

Lever, 37, was commissioned to ghostwrite the book last year after Nick Pearson, 43, his publisher at Fourth Estate, read a newspaper report about a 75th birthday party for Cheeta.

The chimp lives in pampered retirement like many a Hollywood star before him in Palm Springs, California. He is in the record books as the longest-living nonhuman primate in the world. He watches television, makes abstract paintings, which are sold to benefit animal charities, and leafs through books. He has yet to learn how to write one.

Lever, a book editor, said: “I had gone to see Nick Pearson to pitch a book about the 2012 Olympics on behalf of another author but I could see his eyes were glazing over. At the end of the meeting he said it would be a terrific idea to do an autobiography of Cheeta. He wanted to see the book among all these other books on the shelves to expose the idea of the modern celebrity autobiography. Almost all of them are ghost-written, bland and anodyne.”

Lever, who has helped other authors into print, wrote Me Cheeta in three months after reading more than 30 Hollywood memoirs written by stars of the 1930s and 1940s.

“Often these are astonishing, score-settling memoirs from an era before stars had people to massage the reality,” he said. “The most heartbreaking is one written by Weissmuller’s son about his father, who never had an enemy but ended up a destitute and broken man. It is a filial love song and it stimulated my book.

“Memoirs in aggregate don’t tell a lie and nobody has a bad word to say about him. That’s why Me Cheeta is really an unrequited love story between Cheeta and Johnny Weissmuller.

“When I was a kid it seemed like Tarzan and Jane were for ever on the escarpment and would live there for ever. They had a paradise in their grasp. Every day it seemed there was a film on television and it added to the beauty of it.”

The secret behind Me Cheeta was not supposed to emerge until next year. Lever said: “We had wanted to keep the anonymity going until the book is published in America in February. We didn’t want to spoil it for readers there and we wanted people to say is it Will Self or whoever.”

Pearson said: “I have been looking to publish a celebrity memoir for many years. It was my idea and it started out as a stunt, but in the process I have stumbled across an amazing new writer and I am sure this will be the start of a long literary career.

“It has been a brilliant publishing experience. But I have spent most of the last year and a half terrified that Cheeta would die. I bullied James because I wanted to get the book out while Cheeta is still alive.”

Back in Palm Springs, Dan Westfall, Cheeta’s guardian and spokesman, said he was still awaiting a visit from the ghostwriter. “The book gets some things wrong,” he said. “Cheeta is a happy chimp. I have lived with him for 17 years, having inherited him from my uncle, who used to train him for Hollywood movies, but I do not think he was ever as badly behaved or foul-mouthed as he appears in this book.”

Additional reporting: John Harlow in Los Angeles

How we loved it

It will subtly change forever the way we think not only about Hollywood but also about our own species - Lynne Truss, The Sunday Times

Me Cheeta may well be the finest Hollywood memoir ever written Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday I challenge anyone to find a more salacious, foul-mouthed and entertaining memoir - Richard Grant, Telegraph Magazine

. . . Probably more truthful than most accounts [of Hollywood] - Philip Hensher, The Spectator

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