It's 1935, and Johnny Weissmuller and David Niven are plotting an intricate practical joke, but it lacks an essential element: the perfect car. Weissmuller, the Olympic swimming star of the 1920s, is well established on-screen as the definitive Tarzan, but Niven hasn't gotten his big break yet. His charming company, though, has already cemented his position in Hollywood social circles.
The plan: Send a car down Hollywood Blvd. with Cheeta, Tarzan's chimpanzee sidekick, at the wheel and honking the horn while Jackie, the lion that roars to open MGM's movies, rides shotgun. Two dwarfs hidden under the dashboard will operate the brakes and steering wheel (with the aid of an improvised periscope) while Niven and Weissmuller sit regally in the backseat. They persuade Douglas Fairbanks to loan them his beloved open-top Rolls-Royce without telling him what they want it for. All goes well until Niven lights up one of Fairbanks's cigars and decides that it would look good as a prop for Cheeta while he's driving. The cigar explodes in the chimp's face -- Fairbanks, what a joker! -- and the panicked ape wrecks the Rolls.
How do we know all this? Cheeta tells us so. When the chimp realized that everyone emerged from the wreck relatively unscathed, "I gave them a backflip of joy and, what the hell?, stood on my hands," he writes in "Me Cheeta," his memoir of the glamour, debauchery and jollity of Hollywood's golden age.
Apparently the book ends with a scene where Weismuller and Cheeta ". . . are finally reunited not long before Weissmuller's death in 1984, the wheelchair-bound former King of the Jungle and the elderly chimp who had been his most faithful friend. The scene is a marvel: completely idiotic and wholly, throat-catchingly convincing."
Hilarity and heartbreak. What else could you ask for in a work of fiction?
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