Reliability, a problem in all autobiographical writing, has plagued upper primates in recent years, with supposed memoirs by James Frey and Margaret Seltzer, and false-fictions by J. T. LeRoy, among the more infamous cases. In the past there was the case of Jerzy Kosinski, who claimed that his 1965 novel The Painted Bird was in essence a true story, only to have his very authorship of the text put in doubt. Cheeta, animal actor and alleged author of Me Cheeta, died recently having entered Guinness World Records as the longest-lived non-human primate ever. Given his long and celebrated life, he would seem a natural memoirist. In the end, though, perhaps death will prove to have mercifully spared the aged chimp the humiliations suffered by Frey and the pseudonymous LeRoy (actually a female human called Laura Albert) and the darker fate of Kosinski, who took his own life.

That is not to say that there isn’t much to enjoy in Me Cheeta. Cheeta worked during the Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking, appearing in many Tarzan movies and showing up as late as 1966 in Dr Dolittle with Rex Harrison, about whom our refreshingly candid narrator has not a good word and quite a few bad ones to say (“a weakling and a bully and a near-murderer, scumbag, self-pitier, miser, liar, ass and oaf”). About acquaintance with co-stars Maureen O’Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller, we can take Cheeta at his word.

Weissmuller is a beloved friend and mentor, O’Sullivan a snob and prig. The detailed relatings of bacchanals wherein Cheeta, uncaged by Weissmuller and welcomed to the party scene at estates owned by Douglas Fairbanks, Constance Bennett and Carole Lombard, are amusing and irresistibly randy, if harder to swallow. Despite the plausibility of references to Peter Lorre’s morphine addiction, Marlene Dietrich’s lesbianism and the prevalence at parties of what is coyly referred to as a “homeopathic remedy” or “star-powder” (Bennett rubs some of the stuff on Cheeta’s lips and then between her breasts), nothing convinces us that Cheeta was actually present. Such stories of Hollywood excess have always circulated. And given the chimp’s repeated confessions of a fondness for Martinis, one wonders how clear his memories would be had he been around in the first place.

The story opens conventionally and believably enough, with a Dickensian relation of childhood paradise sliding suddenly into hardship. A caring mother feeding termites to her children, sessions of grooming and monkey business, with hints of trouble to come, as when one chimp in Cheeta’s tribe eats another’s baby. A world-view is formed early on. Alpha males struggle for hegemony, and territories are guarded fiercely. “Everything that lived, murdered”, is the author’s pithy summation of life in the jungle. Not an exaggeration when you have watched inter-tribal warfare, intra-tribal treachery, and your mother getting stomped to death. Human capture – a wild chase leading to a sprung trap – becomes this young primate’s salvation. Cheeta’s early misreading of his captors’ behaviour (a simian naivety later, unconvincingly, disavowed) construes abduction and enslavement as a kind of protective custody, where cages are “shelters, where the raging alphas could never get at us”. A brutal training ground, where the rod is not spared, becomes a “rehabilitation centre”:

"humans recognized how traumatized most of the animals were by their experiences in the jungle because we were all subjected to a lengthy period of complete rest and relaxation. This consisted of almost permanent darkness, coupled with a total lack of potentially distressing or dangerous social interaction, and strictly no exercise."

Cheeta may have his tongue in his cheek. Certainly any ape capable of observing that “They came at him like diagnoses”, in regard to the awards his beloved co-star Weissmuller received at the end of his life, has wit. Writing chops are abundantly evident as well, as when Cheeta’s failure to master playing card manipulation is characterized as never having elicited “the full banana of approval”. And it is hard not to admire this chimp’s psychological acuity. Here he is on his over-refined leading lady, Maureen O’Sullivan: “She was always, like certain animals you saw in the forest, checking she had an exit route”. And on humanity in general: “every single action performed by an adult human male in this memoir can be thought of as an attempt to attract the attention of some sexually receptive females”.

The great ape’s species-sensitivity is often commendable, as when an objection is voiced to golf club exclusivity (“The California Country Club . . . at that time still barred non-human sportscreatures”). But all the elevated thoughts and fine writing are marred by the occasional snarky aside about dogs (“They came from a long, long line of slaves”) and a plethora of inside jokes laboriously squeezed in (“as foolish a dream as Lana Turner’s daughter Cheryl’s hope that her stepfather Lex Barker would stop raping her”). It’s standard stuff for performers of secondary standing: a tendency to name-drop, exaggerate and fabricate. Ultimately, Me Cheeta takes things too far. The book would have been twice the fun at half the length. You will note the absence of such puffery in memoirs of true leading lights like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, or for that matter of the need for a memoir at all.

Cheeta
ME CHEETA
The autobiography
306pp. Fourth Estate. £16.99.
978 0 00 727863 3

Mark Kamine was Assistant Production Manager on The Sopranos.

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