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.”
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