"Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood"

"Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood" works on several levels. It's a wildly entertaining, catty Hollywood gossip fest, faux-memoir, and, most significantly, a cunningly subversive pro-animal rights piece that makes a noble effort to portray the wrongness of exploiting wild animals in show biz and other venues. It also happens to be on the longlist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

When I first heard about this book, allegedly written by the 70-something chimpanzee Cheeta of the Tarzan films, I thought it was probably a joke, another one of those cutesy books attempting to persuade the reader that entertainment is a great career choice for wild animals. So for a while I was reluctant to read it, but changed my mind after checking out some reviews and an interview with its human author.

"Me Cheeta" is written by a mythical chimp who, beginning in the 1930s, acted in all the Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller and Lex Barker. In reality, the book is a tongue-in-cheek look at Old Hollywood authored by a British homo sapien named James Lever. It was only recently that the truth about Cheeta came out (before this book was published), when a journalist named R.D. Rosen discovered that the Cheeta living in an eponymous Palm Springs, California sanctuary with animal trainer Dan Westfall, who claimed he was THE Cheeta of the Tarzan films, may have never acted in a movie at all. One of the methods Rosen used to figure that out was to compare ear shapes of the Tarzan chimps in photos and film. Unfortunately, the man who cared for this particular Cheeta and knew the truth about him and all the other Cheetas, animal trainer Tony Gentry, had passed away, taking his Cheeta secrets with him. In reality, as in all movies involving trained animals, there were a number of chimps used in the Tarzan movies, often more than one per movie. Sometimes Cheeta was just a kid dressed up as a chimp.

But it takes nothing away from the book to know the truth about Cheeta, because it amuses the reader with outrageous stories, some clearly apocryphal, about the idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes of Hollywood film stars of yesteryear. The author makes Cheeta a bit of a libertine: an enthusiastic drinker, smoker, comedian and party animal. In more serious moments he draws a line between what he considers his relatively privileged life as a chimp stolen from Africa and trained to do tricks in films, and the even darker fates of most lab, zoo, film and circus wild animals. He includes tongue-in-cheek observations, e.g., humans are the happiest animals he's ever known, and unlike other animals, they really "love" their fellow animals (which is, I guess, why they love to exploit them for entertainment purposes).

Cheeta talks about the infamous wild animal importers Henry Trefflich Senior and Junior, who were responsible for so many apes and monkeys being taken from Africa from the 1930s onward, animals that ended up in research labs, zoos, circuses, advertising, movies and TV. He confesses his fear of being banished to an animal lab if he doesn't keep up the quality of his performances.

Cheeta also alludes to the killing of 200 horses during the filming of "Charge of the Light Brigade". He reminisces about Clyde, the orangutan who appeared with Clint Eastwood in "Every Which Way But Loose", and who was trained with the help of mace and an axe handle, beaten regularly to make him docile, and killed with yet another ax handle for "stealing" donuts on a movie set. And, last but not least, the very public poisoning and electrocution of the chronically abused Coney Island circus elephant Topsy by Thomas Edison. Topsy had killed a few of her incredibly cruel keepers, and Edison was competing with George Westinghouse in a turf war over the merits of direct versus alternating current. What better way to best your rival than to kill a recalcitrant elephant to prove your way is better?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg where the abuse of animals in entertainment is concerned.

The good news is that the American Humane Association now oversees animal use in all films, but, as Cheeta wryly observes, the statement "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" is a lie, because animals all over the world are being tormented and killed 24/7.

Even if it were true that this particular incarnation of Cheeta is the longest-lived chimp in history (it's been estimated by Rosen that he was born in 1960, not in the early 1930s, which makes him only about 50), that says more about the quantity than the quality of his life. Show biz chimps have rough lives, often spent on the road, imprisoned in cages, dressed in human clothes and treated as a dumber form of human rather than the highly intelligent animals they are in their own right. Like many captive elephants and primates, the Palm Springs Cheeta has been encouraged to become a painter in an attempt at enrichment activities, to prevent terminal boredom and also to make some money for the upkeep of the sanctuary.

Sadly, it's virtually impossible to return chimps raised by humans to the wild and leave them to fend for themselves. First of all, they're so used to humans, and in many cases think they're humans themselves, that they've been known to walk right up to poachers who then have an easy time hacking their hands and feet off for trophies or killing them for bush meat. So the best that can be done for these former pet and show biz chimps, if there's a space for them, is to be moved to an animal sanctuary, as with the Palm Springs Cheeta , to live out their lives as best they can in a twilight zone that is neither wild nor domesticated. But more often than not, when they get to be too old and dangerous, or too sick, they're unceremoniously packed off to an animal research lab, city or roadside zoo, canned hunting business, or circus, where their lives are severely circumscribed and often brutally painful and mercifully brief.

This book leaves you with a bittersweet feeling about all those Cheetas and the life that was forced on them as young chimps by Hollywood movie executives, who apparently had no problem exploiting them and other wild animals for money. They clearly had no interest in the personal needs of these animals. A group called "No Reel Apes" headed by Dan Westfall and primatologist Jane Goodall is striving to eliminate the use of apes and monkeys in films. And an ongoing movement to give the chimp character Cheeta a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is something I support, if only because the thousands of animals in entertainment who've lost their own lives in order to lighten the lives of humans deserve recognition. Clearly, technology like computer-based animatronics is the humane wave of the future in Hollywood.

www.primatepatrol.org/learn_more/chimp_collaboratory.pdf (detailed report by chimp experts on chimps and other nonhuman primates in entertainment and why it's a bad idea)

http://www.cheetathechimp.org/ (the ersatz Cheeta's current digs)

www.gocheeta.com (campaign to get Cheeta a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame)

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104 (video of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant)