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 apalling Rex Harrison, before his battles with substance abuse forced him into an early retirement. He now lives happily in Palm Springs where he has re-invented himself as a globally acclaimed abstract painter. Now, in his own words, Cheeta finally tells his extraordinary story.
Reviews
The Independent
Peter Carty
"Cheeta is the chimpanzee that starred with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, and this book is presented as his autobiography. Cheeta does concede, disarmingly, that he had some help. But what a memoir it is! He is the last surviving superstar from Hollywood's golden age, and has plenty of juice to spill. His delivery is exactly as you'd expect from a Hollywood veteran: wisecracking and worldly-wise and – of course – much too self-obsessed... Where the book performs best, however, isn't with the ironic anthropomorphism that Will Self explored in Great Apes, but as a bitter-sweet elegy to the Hollywood of yesteryear. A luvvie to the tips of his prehensile toes, Cheeta throws out encomiums like bananas."
15/10/2008
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Scotland on Sunday
Stuart Kelly
"So who is "Cheeta"? The inventive paradoxes, supple prose and brilliantly geeky trivia resemble authors such as Jonathan Lethem, John Colapinto and Percival Everett. Jerry Stahl's last novel was the wonderful ventriloquism I, Fatty, which purported to be Arbuckle's memoirs. Quite honestly, I don't know – but whoever you are, I salute you."
12/10/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Anne Billson
"Cheeta's last meeting with Weissmuller takes place with the actor confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak properly after a series of strokes. The encounter is so sad I burst into tears. I wept for the beautiful dead people whose ghosts we still see moving across our screens, for all the animals that were treated so cruelly and for Cheeta, who - unlike Lassie, Godzilla and Kermit the Frog - doesn't have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame even though he so richly deserves one. Who would have thought the autobiography of a chimpanzee could be so funny and affecting?"
05/10/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Roger Lewis
"Cheeta, whose career peaked with Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942) and dipped with Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), is now nearly 80, and his recollections of life in Hollywood form the most rollicking showbiz memoir since David Niven's Bring on the Empty Horses.... Me Cheeta is a satirical masterpiece, a spoof of genius."
15/04/2009
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The Sunday Telegraph
Richard Grant
"I finished the book a couple of hours later and I challenge anyone to find a more salacious, bitchy, foul-mouthed, unreliable and entertaining celebrity memoir. The ghostwriter has taken full advantage of the satirical possibilities and delivered a wicked skewering of the whole genre."
15/04/2009
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The Sunday Times
Lynne Truss
"Me Cheeta is a terrific book; the only thing one could possibly lament is the absence of a comma in the title. Vivid, funny and clever, it will subtly change for ever the way we think not only about Hollywood (and actors' memoirs) but also about our very species. I have no idea who really wrote it, by the way (the publishers are keeping that to themselves), but I'm fairly confident that an infinite number of untalented people could not have achieved it by accident - or not in less than a million years, anyway."
05/10/2008
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The Guardian
Veronica Horwell
"This book is great gossip - did Esther Williams feature in the section the lawyers pulled?; ace film criticism (yep, Robert De Niro sure does look like he's been on mouldy straw in the cage too long); and tremendous polemic - how well Cheets argues that an animated Pixar pixel hasn't suffered for its art, hasn't eluded death, there's no soul there even if every hair is exactly replicated. And it's the definitive buddy movie. These guys loved each other. As the trailer titles for Tarzan and His Mate say, "elemental passions ... never will it be surpassed"."
18/10/2008
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The London Review of Books
Michael Newton
"Me Cheeta is Hollywood Babylon with bananas. Is the misanthropy purely an impersonation, the kind of thing that an exploited and world-famous chimpanzee might feel, or evidence of the ghost-writer’s temperament? Either way, this is a puritanical book, dominated by righteous outrage. The quips work, but they leave a sour taste. There is a puzzling repugnance to sex, only one of the ways in which the book is reminiscent of Swift."
29/01/2009
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The Observer
Carole Cadwalladr
"Me Cheeta is a truly terrible idea for a book: the cover is lousy, the first chapter lame, the entire conceit of a memoir written by a chimpanzee - Cheeta from the Tarzan films and the oldest chimp alive - stomach-churningly cute. And, as it turns out, it's also the best celebrity memoir you'll read this year, and it's not even a memoir. Or only ostensibly: it's actually a rather joyous satire on Hollywood's Golden Age, with Cheeta its simian F Scott Fitzgerald. He's rude, funny, vindictive, revelatory, brutal. "
19/10/2008
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The Spectator
Philip Hensher
"Whoever has ghosted, or written, this book is evidently an acute reader of both Nabokov, who wrote unforgettably about a chimpanzee artist painting the bars of its cage, and of Martin Amis. He has constructed a highly convincing literary voice for the old monkey, and the memoir is something more than a very funny joke, although it is certainly that. It will make it very difficult to read other books in the same genre for some time."
24/09/2008
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The Times
Kate Saunders
"It is worth overcoming one's hostility to the basic idea of this novel, because it is a lot better than the fictional autobiography of a Hollywood chimpanzee ought to be. Cheeta is plucked from the African jungle and becomes the simian star of Tarzan, alongside Johnny Weismuller. He goes on to appear in Dr Dolittle with Rex Harrison and rubs shoulders with every legend of Hollywood's golden age - there are even photographs, just like a real memoir, and we're told that Cheeta now lives in happy retirement in Palm Springs. Amusing, if a bit overworked."
15/11/2008
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