Just released in Britain and set to hit the U.S. early next year, Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood is a "humorous" memoir in which Tarzan's simian sidekick reflects back on his starlit career. Reviewing the book, Lynne Truss writes that, while funny, it also manages to use Cheeta's story to illuminate something real and even poignant about life in Hollywood. What did the monkey do out there? “What does any organism ever do except - survive?” writes Cheeta. “In this business, if your profile ever drops, you're dead." Cheeta, Truss points out, "views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms...modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was talent." And he is not without his opinions regarding his collegaues. “For three decades I think I ‘phoned it in' a bit. It happens to actors. Look at De Niro.”
Me Cheeta belongs to a long, honorable line of literary works composed in the voice of an animal, from Don Marquis's "archy" (the cockroach whose work never employed capitals, because he composed it by jumping on the keys of an old-school typewriter and so couldn't use the shift key) to Millie, the springer spaniel who wrote a disappointingly toothless tell-all memoir of the first Bush administration. (Millie's ghostwriter, Barbara Bush, apparently felt that she had failed to delight the nation sufficiently by giving us her children to lead us.) Now that you mention it, though, it seems almost odd that there haven't been more books by movie stars who had one foot in Hollywood and one in the wild kingdom. Lassie, Benji, Flicka, Babe, Asta, George Steele--surely all of them had stories to tell. While the ghost writer of Me Cheeta has had to go a long way on guesswork in presuming to know what's in Cheeta's head, especially regarding his hero-worship of his most famous co-star, Johnny Weismuller, the book does use the actual career of the best-known and most durable Cheeta, a chimpanzee whose off-screen name is (or used to be) Jiggs, as its base. Born in Liberia in the wild, Jiggs made his first screen appearance in Tarzan and His Mate (1934), the second and arguably the best of the Weismuller movies. He graduated to the role of Cheeta in the next installment, Tarzan Escapes, and hung in there for another ten Tarzan pictures. He also took on other roles, perhaps most notably that of Chee-Chee in 1967's Doctor Dolittle. It's been reported that on Dolittle the chimp, now older and wearier and alienated from the ways of '60s Hollywood, was cranky and difficult and prone to lashing out, but that he was still a lot more fun to be around than Rex Harrison. After Dolittle, Cheeta/Jiggs retired, a decision that may have been influenced by the release of Planet of the Apes and his discovery that he was now losing parts to Roddy McDowell. Now living at a Palm Springs primate sanctuary, he entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 1996, when at 64 he officially became the oldest living chimpanzee known to man. Chimps in the wild don't usually get a shout-out on their b-days, but Cheeta, like many movie stars of his generation, is actually older than his "official" age, since his recorded birth date actually refers to the day he entered the United States after being uprooted from his jungle home.He turned 76 last spring. He is said to watch a lot of TV.