Under Michael's tan and athletic frame, his young and genuinely feminine heart would sit entranced by what his father thought were adventure movies.
'Mikey? We could go to the movies later if you wanna.' His father was big and athletic too, but his face was glum and disappointed. His son had been away all afternoon and they had only Saturdays and Sundays to do stuff together.
'Dad, I really want to watch this, OK?'
'OK, son. See ya later,' his Dad said. He left punching his baseball mitt. Michael felt bad. Michael had not meant to hurt his father's feelings. Michael's eyes were suspiciously heavy with deep feelings he had no name for. 'Dad. Why dontcha watch it with me? Dad?' He heard the back door slam.
His father had a rival.
Michael knew, even at twelve, what the MGM executives had known all along: they were selling a love story. A love story that promised, and delivered, a beautiful naked man. Michael's young heart would soar through the trees alongside Johnny Weissmuller. He dreamed of leaving the world behind, of living like a Boy Scout in a treehouse with a man as dumb and reliable and graceful as a horse. He dreamed of slipping the loincloth aside to see what lay underneath it. At twelve, that was as far as the dream went.
His father eventually nagged his son into joining a baseball team. It played on Sundays, which left Saturday for Tarzan and, in fact, gave Dad even less time with his son.
Summer wore on. Johnny got old. The series left MGM and went downmarket to RKO. It lost Jane and its love story. It gained Amazons in bikinis and cut-price Nazis. Johnny was no longer a sex symbol. He was a star of B- movies for kids. He got fat. A fat Tarzan is a great sadness. His last movie in the series,
Michael stayed in California long enough to see that sad ending and to experience something of a lover's sense of loss and longing as a partner ages.
Johnny Weissmuller died in Mexico in 1984, when Michael was 24 years old. Michael remembered reading about his death in the newspaper and thinking, Johnny Weissmuller? 1984? It was Michael's moment for realizing that we spend more of our lives being old than young.
In Michael's days of California sunlight, saltwater spray and young Americans in shorts, there had lived in that same state, an old bronzed man. He looked a little bit like a balloon from which the air had leaked. That man would have been able to tune in every Saturday at 5.30 as well, to see his sleek and catlike younger self pad lissomely through a studio jungle.
Maybe it was enough for him to remember the days when he had been a sex symbol, and it was possible that he could go on to be a real movie star. Maybe it was enough to have been the lover of Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, to have acted with Maureen O'Sullivan, to have people still call you Tarzan… once they recognized you. Maybe it was enough for him that he had won five Olympic gold medals and set 67 world records. In the encyclopaedias, it was those he was most remembered for, rather than a mere acting career. After all, sport is not fiction, is it? But Michael, even as an adult, would remember him for the heartbreaking climax of
Lust requires restitution. Even more frequently than love, lust goes unrequited.
•
The Chez Nous Hotel near Vauxhall Bridge Road is a French franchise operation. To an Englishman, it looks Scandinavian: clean, spacious, bland and smelling faintly of the mildest possible cheese. Being near Vauxhall Bridge and south of the River Thames, it is actually nowhere, and no one wants to stay there. Even at lunchtime, its brasserie is empty. Michael could eat there in perfect anonymity, and go upstairs alone without the slightest fear of being seen by anyone he knew. How, otherwise, would you explain booking a room 500 yards from where you worked? He could enter his room at 12.30 pm in complete assurance that it would be comfortable, clean and looking exactly as it would look in Luxembourg or Shepherds Bush.
Michael sat on a bed so perfect it looked as if no one had ever slept in it. As this was the Chez Nous Vauxhall, it was perfectly possible that no one ever had. He disliked crumpling the mottled blue duvet. His breath came fast and shallow. He asked for his boyhood love.
As naturally as a light breeze through eucalyptus trees, Johnny Weissmuller was sitting next to him. Unlike most movie stars, he was bigger than Michael expected – huge, broad and smooth, wearing only the loincloth. A flop of silky brown hair tumbled into his eyes. He stared intently at Michael, half in fear, one hand on his knife.
'Tarzan,' he said, jabbing at his breasts.
'I'm Michael.'
'Tarzan. Mikey,' Weissmuller said, prodding Michael so hard that for a moment Michael thought he would fall backwards out of a tree. 'Mikey. Tarzan.'
Tarzan looked baffled by desire. Desire was something new that he had never felt. He leaned closer to Michael and sniffed his face.
'Mikey smell like flower.'
Tarzan smelt of Max Factor.
Michael said, 'That's my aftershave.'
'What shave?'
Michael stroked his smooth cheek. 'You know, shave. Beard.'
Tarzan looked even more baffled. He rubbed Michael's face and looked puzzled.
'Bee-arr-ddd,' he said.
'Yeah beard, you know, shave. You don't shave?'
Tarzan scowled. He rubbed his own perfect chin. 'How Tarzan shave? No razors.'
'I don't know. I guess I never thought about that. Yeah. Howcum Tarzan doesn't have a beard?'
'Not monkey,' said Tarzan, and grinned.
They hovered about six inches apart. Michael wanted to kiss him, except that Tarzan was covered in tan body make-up, head to toe. It would leave marks on Michael's shirt.
'Uh. Johnny. Could you drop the Tarzan talk? It's a little bit creepy. I want you, not Tarzan.'
Tarzan got that look of idiot firmness he got when mistaking the motives of white hunters. 'No,' he said firmly. 'Mikey want Tarzan.'
Tarzan was shaved all over. Everywhere Michael touched him there were little pinpricks of body hair, like mustard on ham. Michael leaned forward and tried to kiss him and Tarzan ducked away.
'It goes like this,' said Michael and brought their lips together.
Tarzan tasted like one of your mother's friends. He had that perfumed, powdery, clotted smell of face paint. Tarzan smiled and pressed Michael to him, rather as if he were Cheetah at the end of the film. Michael had to coax him out of the loincloth. Tarzan had no conception that it could be removed. He looked as surprised as Michael when it slipped aside to reveal handsome, Catholically uncircumcised genitals from which every trace of pubic hair had also been shaved. MGM couldn't have pubic hair leaking out over the edge of the loincloth.
And, having stripped Johnny/Tarzan, Michael discovered that, like his twelve-year-old self, he wanted to do nothing else.
So he lay next to Tarzan and was cradled. Protected like Jane by the Hays Code, Michael wallowed in the bed as Tarzan prodded him, tickled him, and examined his feet. He sniffed his chin.
As Michael lay there in his arms he wondered. Is this all I wanted all along? With all those other men? Just to be held, stroked and cuddled? Perhaps it is simply that I never wanted real sex at all.
In which case it is possible that I never grew up.
