Real star of the Tarzan movies

Hollywood is mourning the death of big-screen legend Cheetah There were the occasional tantrums, of course, but, old trouper that he was, he liked to put smiles on  people’s faces right up until the end.Cheetah was every inch the Hollywood star – though just how many inches depended on whether he was walking on two legs or four at the time.
Now, Cheetah, who played Tarzan’s chimp companion in the classic black and white Johnny Weissmuller films of the 1930s, has peeled his last banana. The  primate sanctuary in Florida where he lived has announced that he has died of kidney failure.
The sanctuary says he was aged ‘roughly 80’, which would make him the world’s oldest chimp by some margin as they don’t usually live beyond 60 in captivity. Animal  lovers and film buffs are united in mourning an icon that last year was hailed by Entertainment Weekly magazine as No 1 in its Top Ten Monkeys at the Movies.
‘It is with great sadness that the community has lost a dear friend and family member,’ the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbour announced on its website.
According to spokesman Debbie Cobb, Cheetah – aka Mike – had been there more than half a century and spent his twilight years indulging his passions for finger painting and football. He listened to ‘non-denominational’ Christian music and entertaining visitors.
Adorable when young, male chimps generally become very aggressive in adulthood. Not so the primate who, in the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, nursed his man-friend back to health after he was critically wounded; or who five years later, rescued a baby from a crashed plane in Tarzan Finds A Son.
Cheetah lived at the sanctuary since 1960.
He was never a chimp that ‘caused a lot of problems’, Miss Cobb said.
‘He was very compassionate, very in tune to human feelings. He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day,’ she said.
‘He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day.’
Ron Priest, a volunteer at the sanctuary, said Cheetah stood out from the sanctuary’s 14 other chimps because of his ability to stand up with his shoulders straight, and walk like a person. The chimp, who never fathered any offspring, had another unusual  habit, he added. ‘When he didn’t like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them,’ he said. ‘He could get you at 30ft with bars in between.’
Such technical precision will not surprise those who have watched Cheetah in action in what was the golden era of Tarzan films.
Hollywood has been churning out films about the jungle wild man since 1918 – the most recent, No 89, came out in 2008. But while  Weissmuller was not the first screen Tarzan, he was the longest lasting and is generally regarded as the definitive one.
The Austro-Hungarian born, five-times Olympic gold medallist swimmer played Tarzan in 12 films between 1932 and 1948. His distinctive yodel-like yell has become a Tarzan trademark that subsequent films ignored at their peril. It was even played from speakers as his coffin was lowered at his funeral in 1984.
Weissmuller’s acting skills were somewhat wooden, which hardly mattered given he had so little to say. But it did mean his co-stars – human or otherwise – had to pick up the dramatic slack.
This not only included Cheetah but Jane – played initially by Irish-born actress Maureen O’Sullivan, mother of Mia Farrow – and their adopted son, simply called ‘Boy’ and played by Johnny Sheffield.
With O’Sullivan dying in 1998 and Sheffield in 2010, their chimp co-star has outlived them all.
There was no major chimp character in the original Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Cheetah was introduced into the films principally for light relief.
The amount of screen time he got showed that Cheetah was considered one of the main attractions. He often appeared a more versatile actor than Weissmuller.
He rang a bell masterfully in Tarzan and the Amazons, got horrendously drunk on schnapps in Tarzan And The Leopard Man (‘Cheetah, what you drink?’ Tarzan demands, to which the chimp just burps), he trained a baby elephant in Tarzan’s New York Adventure and he blew on a snake charmer’s trumpet in Tarzan the Ape Man.
Perhaps his co-stars knew they were being upstaged – in a post on her Twitter account yesterday, Miss Farrow wrote: ‘Cheetah the chimp in Tarzan movies died this week at 80.
‘My mom, who played Jane, invariably referred to Cheetah as “that bastard”.’
In 1953, O’Sullivan said: ‘You have no idea what it is to be assigned to one picture after another with a certain monkey. Cheetah and I grew to loathe each other.’
But animal training for films was in its infancy back then. Some have wondered, how could one chimp be so versatile?
And this is where the mystery behind Cheetah gets as thick as a jungle creeper. For there was never just one Cheetah in each film but often several chimps, each playing on their strengths as the script demanded. Over the years, no fewer than 15 chimps have been linked with the coveted role and they haven’t even always been chimps.
CJ, a thespian orangutan best known as Clyde from Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way But Loose, played Cheetah in a 1981 remake.
Even more insultingly for chimps, it was a human – six-year-old David Holt – who played the chimp in 1933’s Tarzan the Fearless.
But this particular Cheetah’s claim to be the seminal Weissmuller chimp is strengthened by the fact that his only real rival for the crown – a primate with the subtly different name of Cheeta, who resides in a California primate home  –  has a CV which is a tissue of lies.
His first owner claimed he smuggled him out of Liberia to America as a baby, and that he escaped from under his coat during a Pan Am flight to the U.S. But when author Richard Rosen was asked to write this Cheeta’s biography, he discovered Pan Am didn’t run such flights until 1939, and the story started to fall apart.
Watching the old black and white Tarzan films, and comparing their ears in each, Rosen reached a startling conclusion. There was no one chimp sidekick in any particular film but several, the choice depending on what ‘talents’ the particular scene called for. Worse for the California Cheeta, Rosen was convinced he wasn’t in any of them.
Cheeta’s owners have since accepted that he may not have been in any of the Tarzan films.
With his grizzled white beard, the recently departed Cheetah of Florida looked considerably older than his upstart rival for the Tarzan crown. His credentials are further strengthened by the fact his owners have made relatively modest claims about his cinematic past.
The Florida sanctuary says it only knows for sure that he starred in Tarzan films between 1932 and 1934, a period that includes the first Weissmuller movie that shot him to fame.