Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

by James Lever

In 1984, Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood's greatest Tarzan, passed away. His coffin was lowered into the ground to the recorded sounds of his famous jungle call. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, followed him in 1998. But their co-star Cheeta the chimpanzee, the 'World's Funniest Animal', lives on. At seventy-six, he is by some distance the oldest chimp ever recorded.

Now, in his own words, Cheeta finally tells his extraordinary story.

Plucked from millions of hopefuls in the jungles of Liberia, Cheeta became an international screen icon from the moment of his debut in 1934's Tarzan and His Mate. He went on to star in a further nine Tarzan pictures, and later in Doctor Dolittle with the appalling Rex Harrison, before his battles with substance abuse forced him into early retirement. He now lives happily in Palm Springs where he has re-invented himself as a globally acclaimed abstract painter.

We are privileged indeed that such a legendary entertainer should grant us intimate access to the lives of the most glittering stars. Well aware that no animal has ever been successfully sued for libel, Me Cheeta is packed with fascinating revelations about a lost Hollywood. Funny, moving and searingly honest, this is the greatest celebrity autobiography of our time.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Animals, Film, Novels, Contemporary, Media Tie In

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Humanity, I salute you!" said he, Cheeta, in his own introductory "Note to the Reader" of this, his autobiography.

He wrote this in 2008 at age 76, after he had long outlived Tarzan (dead in 1984) and Jane (1998).

Whereas humans write their autobiographies to crow about themselves and their accomplishments this chimpanzee--one of the greatest animal actors of all time (think Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and King Kong for competition)--wrote this one to extol humanity, Hollywood, and the actors and actresses whom he had met from Marlene Dietrich to Sean Penn. This is also about the greatest love of his life--Tarzan--and his tragic pool-to-forest-to-riches-and-to-rags life story.

Yet humanity does not seem to love him back. Many here at goodreads gave this poor ratings, mocking its apemanship, saying that it isn't really funny. How condescending! Just because he's a chimp then he can't do anything in a serious tone anymore? What is comical about Tarzan's first wife, Lupe "Mexican Spitfire" Velez, drowning herself in a toilet bowl? Or about Charlie Chaplin's serial womanizing? Or of Tarzan's many marriages and divorces, his wealth disappearing in a smoke, his great body, in old age and sickness, becoming like a scarecrow with wet towels hanging on it?

The only autobiography written by a chimpanzee, how can this not be amazing? I remember my father and sister enjoying those black-and-white Tarzan reruns on TV. For sentimental reasons, and in kindness to animals, I'm giving this five stars!

[Karen· · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story narrated by an animal is a premise that would probably make most people roll their eyes and groan in horror at the whimsicality of the idea. But if you agree that an outsider’s view is often the most clear-sighted, then surely what could be more ‘outside’ than a narrator who is not even a member of the human race? And indeed Cheeta does bring a fairly Darwinian sensibility to the jungle that was Hollywood in its glamorous heyday. “What does any organism ever do except – survive?” An amusing spoof memoir, Me Cheeta contrasts the corruption and sleaze of the dream machine with the innocent fantasy of the Tarzan movie world. Cheeta is fairly sure that he was the main reason why those films were entertaining: Jonny Weissmuller’s physique, perfect as it was, would not suffice to carry the movie, and Cheeta is most uncomplimentary about Maureen O’Sullivan’s thespian qualities, and indeed, her character. The novel throws up some interesting questions: what was that narrative about in those Tarzan films? Anti civilisation, pro primitive, natural man? But primitive, natural man was not allowed to follow any natural instincts, he was given a mate, yes, but there’s not the slightest hint of conjugal relations, and a child can only appear by accident, saved from a plane crash. As paradoxical as the age. In the end the story is curiously moving, Cheeta’s transparent adoration of the alpha male, Weissmuller, is doomed to be thwarted. Cheeta goes through the indignities of ‘substance abuse’ and thankfully, at the end finds someone who’s willing to give him his insulin injections and buy him the paints he needs to do his abstract art. This is probably of more interest to people who at least have a faint touch of the movie buff around them, but provides fodder for the general reader too. And a laugh, can’t be a bad thing.

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I genuinely didn’t know what to expect of this book. It is, after all, the fake memoir of a chimpanzee. But having breezed my way through I think it’s both a spoof of and a tribute to the scandalous ‘reveal-alls’ of Hollywood’s golden age. Cheeta casts his eye across the sordid shenanigans with similes that are sometimes wittily Chandleresque and other times hilariously bitchy.

The strongest portion of the book is when Cheeta is hanging with Johnny Weissmuller in 30’s Hollywood (the beginning and ending are dull in comparison with the glorious middle). Johnny is the hero of the tale, but there are also encounters with David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks, Marlene Dietrich and even William Faulkner. Some of the stories and the one-liners are actually laugh out loud funny, all of them are scurrilous. Though it has to be said, Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Rooney emerge particularly badly from the whole affair.

All in all, much better than any book purportedly written by a chimp should be.

[Christina Stind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, this is what the title says. Cheeta, the chimpanzee from the old Tarzan movies, wrote his own autobiography - although it's as much about Johnny Weissmuller as it's about Cheeta.
Cheeta tells his life story from he was a young chimp captured in Africa, his movie career until his time as an old, retired chimp spending his time visiting hospitals and the like.
For me, this was a strange book. I enjoyed the intro note where Cheeta talks about his problems arriving at a title since all the good ones was already used and how he finally settled on Cheeta inspired by Katherine Hepburn's autobiography Me: Stories of My Life.
But then the real book started and throughout it, I had problems with Cheeta's voice. I felt it switched between being naive and sarcastic in a way that just didn't work for me. The book is in some ways written in support of the 'No reel apes' campaign (a campaign trying to stop the use of apes and monkeys in movies). But at the same time, Cheeta did enjoy his movies, the dreams as he calls them, and he enjoyed his cigarettes, drinks and drugs...
No ape, if your campaign has it's way, will ever again have the opportunity to enjoy a career in showbusiness, with all its attendant delights? You're just going to take that hope away from the hundreds of thousands talented young apes who'll suddenly find themselves with no parts whatsoever to go up for? For nine-tenths fo the apes you meet, acting, or the long-term survival strategy of celebrity in general, represents their best chance of an escape from the grind of everyday existence. (p. 141)
Another example is a time when he's hanging out with Errol Flynn and where Flynn is going to watch a dog fight - and where Cheeta thinks that Flynn wants to stop the fight and save the dogs and we of course knows that Flynn and his friends were the ones making the dogs fight...
I do get that Cheeta is an unreliable author in the way that he views his life and time in showbusiness as mostly good while we as readers are aware that it wasn't good at all because we can read between the lines and therefore see that Cheeta was abused, neglected and mistreated in every way. But his voice just didn't quite work for me.
However, this book still had it's enjoyable passages. I liked reading about Johnny Weissmuller and his relationship with Cheeta as well as all the other Hollywood stars from the 30s and 40s (David Niven, Errol Flynn, John Barrymore, Marlene Dietrich, Maureen O'Sullivan ...), I liked being reminded of the fantastic old Tarzan movies with the one and only true Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. And Cheeta's life story is interesting - and interesting enough for me to google a bit after finishing the book.
It turns out that there's not one Cheeta - Cheeta was played by several different chimps and the Cheeta in the book as well is pieced together by several different chimps. I actually believed in there being only one Cheetah and I thought the facts in the book was correct - and now I of course doubt the whole thing... It does seem, however, that the Johnny Weissmuller facts are true and he comes across as a very sympathetic man. And the last time Cheeta and Johnny meet each other is heart breaking and beautiful.
But overall I'd expected more from this book.

[Mark Sohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acidly sharp 'Memoir' written by Hollywood's most famous Chimp; seen from Cheeta's perspective, the stars of the silver screen are exposed as the cheats, schemers and general low-life that the public never suspected; actual scandals and gossip pepper the pages. Gradually, however, the book turns to the theme of animal abuse by Hollywood and it is heartbreaking in parts. The book is laugh out loud funny, however and although inaccurate (You mean Chimps CAN'T write?) - in real-life 'Cheeta' was played by several hapless animals - overall your heart will be warmed. Get this book!.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really funny, satirical take on the Hollywood memoir. The novel is written from the point of view of Cheeta, the chimpanzee who starred in ten Tarzan movies during the 1930s and 40s. Cheeta chronicles his journey from the jungles of Liberia to his later life in a Sanctuary for former TV/Movie primates, and everything in between. Though he is, of course, a chimp, the novel is written as though he were a major (human) movie star working during the peak of the Hollywood Studio System, and his detailed accounts of the drinking, parties, and general debauchery he and his fellow stars engage in are very entertaining, yet quite insightful. His anecdotes involving such stars as Esther Williams, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, and David Niven are oh-so-bitchy but absolutely HILARIOUS, and underneath it all we get a strong sense of the sheer amount of research the author has conducted into the lives of the stars under the Studio System. While laughing at the absurdity of many of the events Cheeta chronicles, we're also hit with the feeling that this account is probably a very accurate reflection of Hollywood lives during that time.

This book is most suited to those who know a lot about the Golden Age of Hollywood and/or are familiar with the usual format of Hollywood autobiographies. I think you'd miss out on a lot of the book's wit and effectiveness if you weren't familiar with the stars of the 40s and 50s, and felt that I would have appreciated this book a lot more had I a) known who Johnny Weissmuller was; b) seen any of the Tarzan movies; or c) read an autobiography of one of the old stars (eg. Kate Hepburn, Errol Flynn).

Nonetheless, the book is beautifully written, extremely funny, very, very clever, and a very entertaining read!

[Graceann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazon is being quite slow with uploading my review, so here is the text in it's raw form:

Cheeta, the star of eleven feature films with the best Tarzan there ever will be, Johnny Weissmuller, tells us what it was like in Hollywood during the Golden Age.

While Me Cheeta is hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny in many sequences, there is a serious message under the chuckles; he was removed from his native habitat, along with thousands of other animals over the years, for the sole purpose of entertaining humans (in a particularly frightening episode, he is almost sent to a lab). He, with tongue firmly in cheek, refers to this as being "rescued," but it's left to the intelligent reader to make the distinction.

Cheeta describes partying with David Niven (or "Niv," as Cheeta calls him), among many others, and has some very sharp barbs for Chaplin, Rooney and Esther Williams. The most touching passages are when he talks about his work and life with Johnny. There is great love there, and the autobiography is as much about Weissmuller as it is about Cheeta.

The conceit of reading a book telling you what Hollywood was like as seen through the eyes of a chimp may be an odd one, but this was a treat from beginning to end. I'm so glad I had the chance to read it.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much a biography of the life of Johnny Weissmuller (and an insider's look into the escapades of several early film stars) this is a charming, romp in the Hollywood life of Cheeta, the chimpanzee in the Tarzan films of the 30s. This isn't a book for the kiddies, and even though there were times I thought I probably wouldn't give it 5-stars, it came together so nicely, so PERFECTLY in the end. A very good read, highly recommended.



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[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fun of the conceit wore off pretty quickly, the reveal at the end is moving, but getting there was a slog.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I knew Me Cheeta: The Autobiography was not written by a chimpanzee but it wasn’t until page six that suspected it was written by a Brit. There’s a joke about the British with “their total lack of humour and their godawful pedantic spelling” that could only have been written by a British person.

I loved the introduction. Cheeta is presented as the perennial luvvie, full of name-dropping anecdotes, pointed barbs at other actors, and self-preening, all thinly veiled under a sheen of magnanimous gratitude. This is a book where the ‘author’ claims to love all humans and is calling Rex Harrison a wife-murdering cunt by the ninth page. There’s a tension throughout the book, of Cheeta claiming to adore humans but having something nasty to say about most of them.

The fact is, there’s only one main joke in the book. Cheeta will talk about something innocuous but use something utterly shocking as a simile. The example I wrote down was, “I kept my head down behind a sagebrush no bigger, say, than the illegitimate daughter Loretta Young never acknowledged would have been at the time.” Other similes were about drugs, “gobbling down the male member”, gang-rape and suicide. To be honest, it’s something that really wore me down as a reader as it ceased to shock (because I was expecting it) and never much amused (because it was too blasé about some truly horrible things). It made sense thematically though, Cheeta as a chimpanzee came from a society with baby-eating and violent coups being normal and natural and so assumes such things are with us as well.

The running joke I did enjoy was Cheeta’s takes on the Tarzan films. He sees them as great works of art and his own contributions as the key to their success. He also sees them as a running drama where the soul of Tarzan is pulled between the good and proper, natural life as represented by Cheeta, and the evil domesticity represented by Jane. For Cheeta, she’s the real villain of the series and when she was no longer in them, they fall in quality due to the lack of a proper antagonist.

Another running joke is that Cheeta sees humanity’s capturing of wild animals, as well as its encroachment on the natural environment as a good thing. Humans rehabilitated him from his dangerous jungle life and while spending most of his time in a small cage surrounded by faeces and straw with nothing to do but masturbate might not be ideal, it’s better than the jungle. These are all delivered with obvious sarcasm by the author but it’s not until the end when the reader discovers that Cheeta himself was also being sarcastic.

However, Cheeta really does love humanity. In part, it’s because, as a chimpanzee, he sees what people call ‘inhumanity’ as a completely natural and human thing. For Cheeta, people aren’t no longer being people when they do terrible things but are being as human as when they do good. That’s another thematic reason for all the nasty Hollywood stories, the people are not monsters for all their horrid acts, they are just like a troop of chimpanzees, or a crocodile, or flea, or any other animal. The other reason Cheeta loves humans is because they created someone as wonderful as Johnny Weissmuller, ‘beautiful in his simplicity’ who wants to laugh, swim and play.

Ultimately, I found this book too mean and nasty to really love and I think it’s hard to write anything about humanity by focussing on the very odd community that peopled the Golden Age of Hollywood.

[Mel Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is absolutely a work of fiction, is more sophisticated than it seems, and should not be read at face value. Its basis is a real-life hoax in which a chimpanzee born around 1960 was claimed to be the same chimp who appeared in Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. (The role of 'Cheeta' was actually played by many individual animals over the years.) I've read that when this book first came out, it wasn't known that Lever was the author (or, perhaps, that the now old, retired 'Cheeta' was a hoax). The book was purported to be that one chimp's actual autobiography, and various famous authors were guessed to be the ghostwriter.

Lever deserves more credit. He's produced a sly and subtle parody of the self-aggrandising, overly confessional Hollywood memoir. Cheeta emerges as a veteran actor determined to defend his onscreen legacy, so there are a lot of funny jokes about Cheeta's brilliant method acting (which we read between the lines as basic chimpish clowning) and his consummate professionalism (he claims it's a mark of his acting genius that the director wanted to record take after take of his scenes). For me the most enjoyable aspect was Cheeta's gossipy war stories about his fellow Golden Age personalities, which comes across as both deeply seductive – he sketches a lost world of oddly childish debauchery under the noses of the studio chiefs, who are likened to alpha chimps leading their troops – and deliciously bitchy, especially in Cheeta's undisguised hatred of Charlie Chaplin and Weissmuller's wife Lupe Vélez.

I've read some reviews in which people were like "I don't understand why these actors and their families didn't sue!" But what part of 'this is a completely fictionalised account by a fictional protagonist' have they missed? Lever gives Cheeta a wonderfully knowing, salty voice and a turn of phrase that occasionally had me laughing out loud. You'll get a lot from this book if you already have some behind-the-scenes knowledge of studio-era Hollywood. But what makes it so accomplished is the way it balances knowingness with innocence, and the constructed with the genuinely heartfelt, in ways that echo intertextually with the story of Tarzan, the story of Hollywood and the story of our weird, destructive anthropomorphism.

Cheeta freely admits he's an unreliable narrator. Through most of the book he ingenuously insists that he loves humankind, is so happy about how much they love animals, is grateful for having been 'rehabilitated' from Africa by the studio system, and thinks of films as 'dreams' and the process of filmmaking as a kind of consensual 'dreaming' that endows the dreamers with souls. I actually really love that last bit, as a metaphor for what movies mean to both those who make them and those who watch them, and the way they reflect and refract our hopes and desires.

But towards the end, the jig is up (and the chimp who originally played Cheeta was called Jiggs) – "I was just kidding before … just being a cheeky monkey. Cheeta by name… I do know you're terrible killers. I do know what happened to Kong in the end."

The index in the back of the book shouldn't be skipped, as it's a fun metatextual riff on the way we read celebrity autobiographies. There are even additional jokes, such as "Cheeta; love for, 3–302" (that is, the entire span of the main text), the fact that both Barack Obama and John McCain (the US presidential candidates at the time the book was released) are alleged to have had sexual relationships with Lupe Vélez, and numerous bitchy references to Esther Williams. The joke is that Williams, like anyone who expects to be mentioned in a tell-all autobiography, might flip to the back to look herself up and would find various entries that suggest she defamed Cheeta's beloved Johnny Weissmuller in her own autobiography, and as revenge he has directed all references to Williams deliberately to a single page in which her fondness for sucking cock is mentioned in passing.

But despite all this tricky stuff, this is an affecting love story. Lever beautifully sketches cinema's best-known Tarzan as a manchild whose instinctive, animal joie de vivre made him attractive to everyone, but most of all to the chimp who adored him. Weissmuller's sad fall into alcoholism and poverty, and his unhappy series of marriages, aren't just a classic Hollywood tale of a burnt-out star; the destruction of all that's good and beautiful in Johnny also echoes mankind's destruction of chimpanzees' natural habitat, which Johnny and Cheeta then mimetically 'dream' on set in their Tarzan movies.

Lever shows Cheeta's perception of his different worlds – his wild infancy with its kill-or-be-killed hierarchy, the diegetic world of the Tarzan films, and the offscreen world of Hollywood – blurring and mingling. He describes real-life servants of colour as the native tribesmen whose onscreen village is always trampled by elephants; the franchise's sad decline when it moved from MGM to RKO, and became increasingly domesticated and focused on Tarzan's 'son', is likened to Weissmuller's unhappy offscreen family life.

The final meeting between the aged Cheeta and Weissmuller could have been mawkish, but somehow manages to be elegiac. The book is nostalgic in the word's oldest sense: it captures the ache for a lost home to which we can never return. It suggests everything and everyone we dream and love will inevitably be lost.

[Trepkos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a Voltairean take on Hollywood told from the perspective of Tarzan's rescuer, Cheeta. Hilarious, enraging, and woven through with the pathos of the life of an (animal) actor - Cheeta is never self-pitying, and until the end, seems blind to the faults of the humans who organise his world. He manages to skewer many of our screen idols, and the studio bosses and directors, but his love for Johnny Weissmuller shines throughout.

[Jonas Paro · Rating 4 out of 5]

En bitvis sanslöst rolig fejkad självbiografi ”skriven av” filmapan Cheeta. Avslöjande om livet i Hollywood. Skvaller och grova förtal i en härlig mix, men även väldigt kärleksfullt skriven. Härlig läsning!

[Ignacio Peña · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a lot easier to write about a book that never quite does it for me than one where "it's great, so great, run out and read this now!" So often I was really impressed with the wit and charm on display throughout Me Cheeta, the fictional autobiography of Tarzan's chimp during the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's a wonderful concept, and at times I found myself very engaged. But oftentimes I found myself having a hard time understanding what was happening, precisely, and at some point I realized what it was. There's a middle section in this book where a lot of it reads like On the Road or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which may be great for some, but I had similar problems getting myself fully engaged in those books as well. The writing becomes very frantic, and things happen in such a breakneck pace, that while I managed to get the overall picture, it was harder for me to enjoy a lot of the books more drug-addled and debauched scenes. Similarly, I wonder if my appreciation of this book would be greater if I were more intimately familiar with a lot of Old Hollywood references, of which there are many, and of which I had no context in terms of understanding just how biting some of Cheetahs comments on many events in that era may actually be.

But when the book stops being a book about a pseudo-fictionalized what-if surrounding Johnny's personal life and focuses on the immediate of Cheetah's desires, the book shines. Especially so when we come to understand the Jane-villain problem that plagues Cheetah's professional career. Indeed, Cheetah's relationship to his costar Johnny is portrayed wonderfully and is very touching.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was something really different and I was not sure what to expect. What I did get was a book that was very funny, and also crude, lewd and rude.

There are some descriptions of people that hit hard and hold nothing back which makes it entertaining and perhaps scandalous.

Who ever created the idea for this book really hit pay dirt and I hope we are not treated to the lost diaries of Rin Tin Tin or Trigger's life with Roy.

If you want something different to read then I highly recommend the book.

[Nickie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel terrible for binning this. It's well written, it's witty, it's a great idea. But there is no narrative progression. Maybe it's just me and biographies/autobiographies but there is absolutely no reason to pick this up and continue reading. I'm half way through and I do enjoy the wisecracking and the style and the made-up stories about david niven and all of the hollywood greats, but they're not real, and there's no reason to carry on. I probably shouldn't give it 3 stars, considering I'm not finishing it, but it feels bitchy and undeserved to give it 2 considering IT'S ALL MY FAULT

[Jenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A genuinely strange and uneven book that was half great and half terrible. Maybe because a chimp wrote it? ;)

[Fx Smeets · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven years after its original publication, the first French translation of Me, Cheeta has just been released by Le Nouvel Attila, whose founder has been exploring all kinds of genre literature for the past twenty years. I first heard about it on the French radio programme Mauvais Genres. Little is known about the author, said Francois Angelier, programme creator and presenter. James Lever doesn’t do interviews and his previous works went by rather unnoticed. Actually, Angelier added, rumour has it that James Lever might just be a pseudonym, that the actual author of Me, Cheeta might be Will Self.

This got my attention. Not that I particularly like Will Self, mind you. There is a difference between being witty and having a point and I sometimes find that Will Self doesn’t understand it. But I was intrigued: what do you get by applying his undeniable talent to a topic like Tarzan? So I bought the book.

A lot of the readers I know research a book and its author before reading it. I don’t. I am under the illusion that this provides me with a more unblemished reading experience. Plus, I cannot resist the challenge: how much can I figure out about a writer based on his or her prose? Here is my guess work about James Lever upon finishing his novel, minutes before googling his name:

“Finished Me, Cheeta. I doubt it is from Will Self. The writing sounds very American, especially the way the metaphors are developed (that passage p.271 where Cheeta refers to pain as “the blue button” (the blue button being Tarzan’s absence) which he carries on pressing: “I was like a chimp working in university failing the cognition test with the electric bolt over and over, just not getting it that the blue button meant pain” and, further down the page: “Because, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to move on. I liked the blue button. Even if I could, I’d never stop pressing it”) to the way the core ideas keep popping up at regular intervals, for a reassessment (Maureen / Jane saying “The hurt will die down eventually” and, towards the end, p.301, this conclusion from Cheeta: “Jane’s law? It doesn’t work. The hurt doesn’t die down. It doesn’t have to.” – this is particularly reminiscent of John Irving), the division in 3 parts: the beginning in the jungle, the glory days in Hollywood, then the end years, the ageing and death approaching, that perfectly drawn arc, the world changing, the remarkable balance between action and comments, all these structural elements point to an American school of writing. The tone is however quite personal, constantly funny – with this also very American way of slipping comedy crumbs in the most tragic scenes, keeping the deep sadness but cutting the bitterness – and satirical as only the best satirists like Voltaire can do. For this reason, if I had to guess an author’s name behind James Lever, I would go for James Morrow [...]. In particular, the consistency in which Lever has kept Cheeta’s voice – the voice of a chimp who can think but thinks like a chimp, misinterpreting whole slabs of human society – is a tour de force [...]”

How wrong was I? Let’s run a quick check on the web. Here you go. An interview from August 1st, 2009 for the Guardian by Zoe Williams reveals that not only does James Lever exist but also that she knows him from University, that he is British, lives in Kensal Rise, is – or was – broke and 37 at the time and had been unsuccessfully writing for the past 20 years. Me Cheeta was, however, a command from his publisher, who tied Lever to extremely strict deadlines. Most of his work effort was put in the research. The writing was done in one go and hardly corrected. This makes the result all the more impressive. It can also explain the school book quality of the structure(1).

Steward Homes’s The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones was my novel of the year 2014. So far, Me, Cheeta is my book of the year 2015. Both have this marvellous combination of a flawless style (precise, fast paced, fun, clever, well documented but never pedantic), a historical and cultural background to which I can relate. In both, the narrative point of view is, to say the least, unusual.

The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is an punk-anarchist, first-person account of the life of a thief who had his hours of fame in the late 20th century. Ray Jones, the narrator, is the opposite of a self-interested criminal. Stealing, he said, is completely acceptable provided that what is taken is taken from people who will not miss it. This, you might say, is nothing but the old Robin Hood tale all over again. However, the novel illustrates it from the insider point of view, giving it an angle that only stories can find.

Enabled with similar qualities, Me, Cheeta challenges what we usually see as an intellectual standpoint, more than a moral one: disbelief in humanity(2). The supposed simian author keeps hammering his love for the human race. “You want to make death disappear from the world!” Cheeta the chimp says to us. “You find shelter for us all, away from the risks and perils of the jungle”. This starts as a satiric joke. It ends up running throughout the whole novel. Always, new situations are interpreted with the same blissfully stupid adoring glance at human beings.

However, as the theme finds its pattern, it twists. At the start of the novel, in the capture scene, Cheeta is running away from a scene of carnage. His whole tribe has been decimated by what he calls “the hostiles” – bar this name, we will know nothing more of them. His mother and his favourite sister have just been killed. Cheeta drags in his wake his brother Cary and his other brother slash archenemy Stroheim. Stroheim catches up with him. Cheeta loses the ensuing fight. Just as he is about to die, the fight is interrupted by (this is Cheeta the chimp, writer of the autobiography, talking) “an ape, white-faced, complexly coated, smiling: […] Tony Gentry (3) [...]” . The same Gentry immediately turns to his assistant and shouts: “‘Got three! [...] Three of them playing together!’”. Sighing, Cheeta-the-author adds: “Thank God for humanity”.

Cheeta takes his raptor for an ape. Gentry takes a fight to death for a game. Two short and funny sentences is all it takes to Lever to tell us this: the misunderstanding between chimp and human is total and mutual. Humans love animals. Animals love humans. Neither of them has the smallest clue about what is going on in the other’s life. Me, Cheeta could have been called Love and Misreading. It could have been a Jane Austin novel or a Hernandez comic.

From there onwards, the theme of the misinterpretation is recurrent: hundreds of animals are captured and shipped back to the US aboard the cargo named Forest Lawn? This is part of a herculean task to rescue the whole animal kingdom from mutual murder. Animals are kept in closed cages? This is part of a rehabilitation programme where, with food and shelter provided, animals are allowed to laze around as long as it takes to bring down their stress level (an awful lot of masturbation is involved at this stage). The seas are overfished? This is in order to make them safer. Through this distorted lens, the human world is reinvented as a Disney-esque theatre. At the centre of its stage, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta live the perfect love on a paradisiac set – which Cheeta calls The Dream and which we know as the setting of the early Tarzan movies.

Walking us through all the dirty stories of Hollywood Golden Age, James Lever uses and develops this angle. As he does so, the way Cheeta has to lie to himself to preserve his fiction of a perfect world gets more obvious and the satire more subtle. With Jane entering the scene, things start getting ugly. Soon, we come to realise that Cheeta is no fool. As the chimpanzee stops believing in his own lies, we stop believing in his naivety. What was satire becomes irony. This slow reversal takes us all the way to the final pages. When the extent of Cheeta’s credulity is finally revealed, it is with Lever’s characteristic sobriety, in one anecdotic piece of sentence, between brackets, like a rock dismissively flipped at our face. However, this falling of the mask does not alter Cheeta’s feelings towards humans. “[…] no other species would even have come close to what you’ve done! You’re amazing”. There might still be double meaning in these words. But there is no ambiguity in the declaration that follows: “I love humans […] I’m the one that’s on your side. I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had”.

Does this sound like American blind-bliss optimistic self-patting auto-satisfaction to you? This is one way of seeing it. Another way is to do what I did after reading about James Lever and recognise this as an expression of what British people quintessentially are: paradox lovers, contradiction seekers, and goddamn animal huggers (4).



(1)The interview also goes to show that I am not the only one not doing my homework. Francois Angelier, usually so well documented, should have known better.
(2)And is there anything more British than this form of self-deprecation?
(3)Tony Gentry was a once famous “animal trainer” (Wikipedia’s politically correct version of “animal hunter”) for Hollywood.
(4)I am by no way being dismissive to my dear wife’s fellow countrymen. I love you British people! I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had!

[Al Bità · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book as a potential source of some light relief reading, thinking it might amuse me. I was wrong, but initially I was not quite sure why. Eventually it became obvious: I had been expecting a tongue-in-cheek ‘exposé’ by the use of the literary conceit of the perspective of a non-human; instead we are presented with what appears to be a serious ‘memoir’ — Cheeta’s recollections of life in the jungle before capture and the promise of Hollywood; philosophical discussions on various concepts (living in cages in Hollywood is better than living in the forest, so long as you don’t mind the ‘training’ with electric prods and learn to appreciate what advantages humans can provide (!); how the best way for animals to be protected is to ensure that all of them are put in protective custody (!); complaints against using computer generated images instead of real animals in movies (political correctness gone mad?); etc. There are also sections written in a form of stream of consciousness; passages referring to incipient dementia in the older Cheeta, raising questions as to the accuracy of his so-called ‘recollections’; and so on. The image of Cheeta spending his remaining years planning CDs and perfecting his abstract paintings is slightly amusing.

Overall, Cheeta insists that humans are just wonderful human beings — and he says this so repeatedly that eventually one begins to suspect that there is more irony in his ‘approval’ than real appreciation. He loves exclamation marks. The titles of 14 out of 17 chapters (not including chapter 8 of Part 2 (page 218) which ‘…(had) been removed on legal advice’) all contain exclamation marks. Excessive enthusiasm? Yes. Childish? Yes. Funny? No. When one considers how he deals with humans, one is more inclined to think that there is a strong sense of misanthropy involved. Names, nicknames, place-names etc. are dropped right throughout the book usually with no other references as to who they might be. ‘Dan’ for example, is referred to throughout as his ‘carer’ but that’s it, while descriptions of Dan tend to be rather condescending, and ridicule him as a kind of nerdy momma’s boy… Only Johnny Weissmuller is ‘perfect’ — yet he is also depicted as being rather simple-minded as well. The men in Cheeta’s ‘life’ are basically OK only insofar as they act up in childishly foolish ways, more like immature schoolboys on a lark. Is this a criticism of the lifestyles of some Hollywood people at that time? Or even now? The women in Cheeta’s life fare much worse — in general he does not like them. The Index, on the other hand, verges on the misogynistic (but more on this later).

Despite the ‘seriousness’ of the matters referred to above, it is surprising just how shallow the main text is. It has a certain style, but lacks any substance. Contradictions abound. It is, in short, trashy. Worse, it is not even that funny… There is only one joke (attributed to Red Skelton) in the book that made me smile: “Why did the Mexican push his wife off the cliff?” This question is asked at p. 231. The answer is not immediately provided by Cheeta, who is more concerned to provide his comments on happy/unhappy marriages and the specific details of an ongoing argument between Weissmuller and his (fourth) wife Beryl Scott (who, incidentally does not even get a mention in the Index…) which goes on for about five and a half pages of ruminations including how to survive Beryl, when we are provided at the end of page 236 with a sentence, out of the blue, so to speak, and not related to what went immediately before or immediately after: “The reason the Mexican pushed his wife off the cliff was tequila.”

So what is this all about? After reading the book, I decided to see what if anything was on Wikipedia on the subject “cheeta”, and a great deal was revealed there. Apart from the 15 chimps that may have played the ‘actor’ over the years, it is revealed that sometime in the mid 1990s owner/trainer Tony Gentry perpetrated a hoax claiming that the original Cheeta was still alive; and he presented him at a reception. This was taken up by the media, and generally accepted by many as representing the truth. ‘Cheeta’ was even given an award for his film career by the International Film Festival of Pensacola Comedy! As part of the continuation of this hoax, James Lever was commissioned as ghost-writer for this book, and it even made it onto the long list for the Man Booker Prize in Literature in 2009! So all this is a hoax as well (not so surprising in itself — chimpanzees do not really speak, philosophise, paint, etc., nor do they usually live beyond 45-odd years) but as I have written above, it fails to be charming or insightful or even funny (qualities which might have ‘saved’ the book). Instead it ends up being merely too clever by half. The scene when ‘Cheeta’ is brought to visit the old, practically senile Johnny Weissmuller, is played out in full to elicit an emotional, sentimental response. Johnny (and the reader) is expected to accept that ‘Cheeta’ is one and the same as the original chimpanzee, and that they both recognise and greet each other as long-lost old friends finding one another again in old age — but it came across to me as painfully twee and embarrassing. The whole ‘memoir’ becomes some kind of homoerotic love affair between the two, or at least, from Cheeta’s point of view; and that makes the whole thing kind of weird as well…

When one comes to the Index, then all goes haywire. Under the heading ‘Cheeta’ in the Index there is a reference to “compared unreliability of”. The page reference is to pp 3—302 (in other words to the whole text of the book!) so the Index is telling us that the whole book is unreliable… But then, how reliable is the Index? The ‘Balboa Boy Club’ Index heading referring to p. 150 in the text is not some secret pedophile ring, but turns out to be a typo (deliberate?) for the Balboa Bay club… For Esther Williams, the Index has references to pp. xvi, 197, 210, 204 and 234 where her name appears in the text. The entry then goes on to list 8 sub-headings (egomania of; ingratitude towards Weissmuller, Johnny; invaluable swimming lessons given by Weissmuller, Johnny; malicious gossip about ex-husbands, lovers, colleagues, etc,; nauseatingly self-justifying autobiography of; unsubstantiated libel against Weissmuller, Johnny, in autobiography; vow of vengeance taken by Cheeta; and web reviews of autobiography). All these subheadings are referred at the end to “see page 234.” The only reference to Esther Williams at page 234 is in the startling statement: “…[Johnny Weissmuller and (fourth) wife Beryl Scott’s house] the Mansion of Misery gobbled down money as eagerly as Esther Williams did the male sex organ.” (!) OR: does the page 234 reference actually relate to the missing pages of chapter 8, ‘removed on legal advice’ referred to at p. 218?

A similar misogynistic slur against Lupe Vélez (Weissmuller’s third wife) is scattered throughout the Index. On pp 150–151 Cheeta tells the reader that Johnny is having an argument with Lupe about some possible affair she might or might not have been having, and Cheeta goes on to list all the possible names he could think of as to whom the argument was about: he can’t remember, exactly, but mentions a total of 24 men, most of whom he appears to be dismissive of. In the Index, however, we find a strange occurrence: apart from Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, and Bert Lahr (all of whom have Index entries) and Warwick Laverne (who has no Index entry), all remaining twenty names have the subheading ‘sexual relationship with Lupe Vélez’ followed by the appropriate page reference (150 or 151). Even more intriguingly, however, three other names (Charles Laughton, John McCain (!), and Barak Obama (!), all of whom are not in the listing on pp 150–151, are listed in the Index with references for their subheading ‘sexual relations with Lupe Vélez’ being page 151! We are, of course, in lala land…

So the book is a hoax; the Index tells us it is a hoax; and the Index itself is a hoax, ridiculing both the text and itself, and incidentally the reader who takes any of the book seriously. For me, this is precisely that kind of ‘bad’ postmodern conceit that at heart is nihilistic and self-defeating. The really annoying part is that, in order to criticise its position, one needs to go into some detail and point out the inherent stupidities (and the above comments are only some of the many others that could be made) when everything within me is telling me not to waste my time on this trash! I apologise to my readers for having put you through this long ‘review’. I can only hope that my time has not been wasted, and that it will help others to see through the dangerous, poisonous nihilism books such as this exhibit.

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This initially anonymous jeu d'esprit was first notable for its skewering of celebrity autobiography--the mendacity, the luvviedom, the omissions; and it's presumably a treat for any devotee of tittle-tattle from the age of the Silver Screen--John Barrymore, the suave David Niven, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich (apparently poisonously subhuman), Esther Williams (apparently cock-fixated). All the stars' high jinks are brittle and nasty. Cheeta, the narrator, is brought out of lock-up to lend a note of decadence to orgies. Harold Lloyd has an algae-green pond disguised as a ninth green on a golf course out the back of his house; he laughs mirthlessly as, one by one, his playing partners' perfect irons mysteriously disappear. Cheeta gets a laugh at Chaplin's--Charles Chaplin's, as he desires to be called--expense when he takes the crashingly unfunny comedian's hat into the star's bonobo cage, from which two engorged females have signalled at him and where he proceeds to lose his ape virginity.

Beyond this, Lever taps into a vein of sub-Swiftian satire in belaying humans' grossly exploitative conduct towards the natural world. The conceit here is that Cheeta believes the cramped cages of the cargo ship he's being transported to New York in are a form of rehab; that big-game hunters are trying to make the world safe for animals, etc. His tone in retailing celebrity gossip is silkily camp; but the deeper worldview is scouring and indignant. A satirist and smartass, the chimp himself entertains a Nabokovian ambivalence about the magic of the movies. Filming on the 'escarpment' with his beloved Weissmuller and his 'Jane', a rival he drives out, is 'dreaming'. He loves Johnny, who can only say in his senility facing death that Cheeta is the 'best goddamn friend I ever had'.

[David Ward · Rating 1 out of 5]

Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood as told to James Lever (Ecco 2009) (791.8) (3739).

This is one of the worst excuses for a book that I’ve ever seen. I only picked this up because I grew up on the film Tarzan the Ape-Man (1932) and the Tarzan movie series of the 1930’s and 1940’s starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan with their simian sidekick Cheeta. Cheeta was a wild-caught chimpanzee who had been kidnapped from Liberia as a baby to provide comic relief in the Tarzan films.

There is no book here. The author’s conceit herein is that the entire volume purports to have been written in the first person from Cheeta’s perspective. The entire book consists of what the author apparently believes to be cute dialogue from Cheeta’s point of view.

Cheeta lived to be almost 80 years old. I suspect that he might have found out that this piece of limp drivel had been attributed to him. If so, I’m pretty sure that he died of embarrassment.

I’m chagrined to say this, but I purchased a used PB copy of this in good condition for $0.75 from McKay’s Books on 9/1/22. For once I did not get my money’s worth.

My rating: 1/10, finished 3/19/23 (3739).

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[Siobhan Markwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very clever, biting satire. Told from the point of view of Tarzan's chimp companion as he negotiates capture in Africa, training in New York and transport as to a life as an animal actor for one of the big nine Hollywood studios in the 1930s. It's a thoughtful book and looks at the dawn of celebrity culture and its corrosive effects, the loss of innocence both personal and social and the battle of the sexes. Cheeta adores his co-star but has less amenable relationships with Jane and other Hollywood stars. Johnny Weissmuller's portrayed as the ultimate good-guy who's never happier than when swimming around or hanging out in the wild while his wives represent the acquisitive side of modern American culture. If you're a fan of pre-war Hollywood movies and star, you'll get a lot more out of the book than I did. It might have influenced Karen Joy's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Both made an amazing job of chimp protagonists but in a very different style.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very funny, although those who will enjoy it most will have a deeper knowledge of 20th century Hollywood than I do. It is more than just good satire, though, it has something more, something quite poignant at its heart: fundamentally it is a love letter to Johnny Weissmuller. He was surrounded by crooks and villains who exploited his naivete but he never lost his essential goodness. It is an intended irony that Cheeta is more worldly wise and cynical than Tarzan. Amongst many pleasures is the enjoyable skewering of the awful Lupe Velez, Weissmuller’s first wife. The index made me laugh too: almost all the men mentioned in it have the same wildly improbable entry, e.g.

Mc Cain, John
Sexual relations with Lupe Velez, 154

[Margo Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A spoof autobiography by the chimp in the 1930s Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. It mocks the vanities, anecdotes, artistic efforts and occasional bitchiness of autobiographies by old Hollywood stars with aplomb. But like a doorstop tome on the life of Hedda Hopper or Andre de Toth, it's maybe more fun dipped into at random, enjoying some bizarre anecdote, rather than read end-to-end. I liked the attention to detail, such as the chimp's hatred of Esther Williams, who in her own (real-life) autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid, complained that Johnny Weissmuller was a creep - the chimp is bitterly defensive of his co-star.

[James Peak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely the best book ever narrated by a chimpanzee, and probably one of the top fifty ever by a primate. This book is incredibly witty and suave, but also surprisingly thought-provoking and even, in parts, existential. I thought I was going to love it just from its central conceit (the chimp-sidekick of the star 1940s >Tarzan films unleashes a thousand golden era Hollywood anecdotes) but I was taken by surprise by how brilliantly this worked. James Lever is one hell of a writer, and I really want to know more. Does anyone know what he is up to?

[Russio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often funny but overlong faux (obviously) autobiography of the ape that worked with Tarzan. Scurrilous but occasionally shot through with a nastiness that I found a little unpalatable. A gag about a gang-rape, for example, might be a brave revelation of truth or a vicious creation but to trivialise it is not something I find funny. It is this fast and loose play with taste that I think the writer misjudges.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book after listening to the BBC radio 4 adaptation which I thought was great (turns out wrong sex though as it was voiced by John Malcovich). I gave up half way in as it is just so dull. The beginning is interesting but once in Hollywood it is just the same old name dropping. The sentences are over long spiralling into non sense at times and the jokes just do not deliver. I would recommend the 45 minute radio play over the book.

[Dr R · Rating 5 out of 5]

For most readers this a fun and amusing fantasy novel with insights into 1940s Hollywood. For men of a certain age, late 50s and 60s, who grew up watching the black and white tarzan movies in the holidays and on children's tv; who saw Johnny Weismuller as a substitute father/big brother/hero,; this book will make you laugh hysterically in the first half and leave you broken in the second half. Quite literally the only book that has made me cry.

[Calvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts out brilliantly. Is very very funny. Then it can’t decide whether it wants to continue being scathing about Hollywood or be a plea for the end of animal cruelty. And so it unsuccessfully tries to do both and ends up failing at both. It becomes clunky and boring, long out staying it’s welcome.

[Heather H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this via a podcast and like the idea, with distant childhood memories of watching black and white Tarzan movies. It’s a clever device that highlights the exploitation of animals in Hollywood and gives a lot of historical info about movie stars younger generations will most likely be unaware of. Funny in places, sad too with the love of cheeta for Johnny, but the gag wears thin after a while so perhaps the book could have been quite a bit shorter with less repetition.