Appendix
Potpourri
The Myths
The following are excerpts from a book by David Fury titled Johnny Weissmuller: Twice the Hero:
• The whole situation [at the Motion Picture Home] was resolved when Johnny and María jointly [italics are mine] decided to move to Acapulco. . . .
• One publication wrote about Johnny in his forced retirement: “The once robust six-foot-three Olympic champion may be thin and weak, but his wife Maria is encouraged by his progress the past year. . . . It is evident that constant love and care have brought Weissmuller through another year.”
The article of course bespoke the love and care of Maria, who stuck with Johnny in these toughest of times. For better or worse, richer or poorer . . . they had all of these situations in the final years of their two decades as husband and wife.
• Despite his valiant battle that lasted more than six years to recover from the big stroke of 1977, the war was finally lost on Friday evening, January 20, 1984, when Johnny Weissmuller passed away at his home in Acapulco. A spokesperson from the Acapulco Sinai Hospital, where Johnny had been treated as an outpatient from time to time, listed the official cause of death as pulmonary edema, or a blockage of the lungs. Meanwhile, Dr. Eustasio Ordaz Parades, the Weissmuller family physician, offered the opinion that he died of cerebral thrombosis—blood clotting of vessels in the brain (Dr. Parades had also been the personal physician of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes). . . .
• Johnny’s last wishes were that he be buried in Acapulco. . . .
I know David Fury, and he is a good and decent man. It is not his fault that—as evidenced in the chapter titled “A Final Love: Johnny and Maria”—he became one of the many who were caught up in the mythical web that the Black Widow has spun so successfully for so many years. It is also not his fault that in the chapter titled “A Precious Gem Called Beryl,” he faithfully records every detail of a fairy-tale romance that has been “documented” in print for over fifty years. The man used what he had to work with. Unfortunately, he went to the wrong well to draw his water.
There was only one “gem” among the wives of Johnny Weissmuller, and her name is Allene Weissmuller McClelland née Gates. If only she could have endured the agonies that my father put her through and been there to support him during the declining years of his life. Had she been able to do so, this story would have had a different ending. The difference would have been somewhat akin to the difference between heaven and hell.
Longshoreman And Wife
Unlike my sister Wendy, my wife is not at all unhappy that I am a longshoreman. It pays well, and the benefits are substantial. Diane had to have a liver transplant in 1992 (the organ was donated by a seventeen-year-old Mexican boy), and she has just won a bout with cancer. California Pacific Medical Center, where her operation was performed, has the highest survival rate for organ-transplant patients, and her doctors say that the immune suppressants that they have given her have a three-percent incidence of cancer, which is very small indeed. Diane has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and she’s now a living testimony to the fact that there is life after a transplant. One can only imagine what all of this has cost, but the Longshoremen’s Union has paid at least ninety-nine percent of it. Thank God! Still and all, I just hit sixty, and I’m sure looking forward to retirement.
There Are Two Of Me
I am not the only Johnny Weissmuller Jr. around these days. There is another guy who goes by that name; his checks are imprinted “Johnny Weissmuller Jr.,” and he is apparently doing quite well for himself financially by using my name. He always pays by check; he drives a Ferrari, charters airplanes, and at last report was trying to purchase a hotel in Lake Tahoe, stating that he was the legitimate, one-and-only son of Johnny Weissmuller Sr. His credentials were impeccable. Luckily, the owner of the hotel knows me, and he kicked the bastard out. Then he phoned and told me to watch my back.
There was also an account in a Kansas City newspaper about an old prostitute and card dealer who had done some time in prison. She claimed that the biggest thrill of her life was when Johnny Weissmuller Jr. tipped her fifteen hundred dollars. It sure wasn’t me—I would have remembered.
In June of 2001, Entertainment Weekly published the “log” of Bonny Lee Bakley, which lists Johnny Weissmuller Jr. as one of her clients—or at least one of her targeted marks. She described Johnny Weissmuller Jr. as a rich playboy who had a home in an exclusive neighborhood, a swimming pool, and so forth.
I do not reside within that exclusive zip code; I do not own property; I do not own a swimming pool. What I am is a happily married man with children and grandchildren. I am hardly a Bonny Lee Bakley target.
Now, if the Old Man had been alive during Bonny Lee Bakley’s time, he may well have been on her list. He was not a hustler of women, but he could seldom say no to anything, let alone a proposition from a pretty woman. He was Tarzan. I’m a longshoreman. I invented the phrase “Joe Straight Arrow.” Bonny simply got the wrong guy. It had to have been the imposter, or at least an imposter.
Fortunately, in July of 2001, Entertainment Weekly printed a retraction. With Diane’s volunteer work helping transplant patients, it is imperative that both of us maintain a good public image. We cannot accept being associated with an immoral person such as Bonny Lee Bakley, or be even remotely associated with a high-profile Hollywood murder case. (Bonny was murdered, and her husband, Robert Blake, was eventually charged with the crime.) It’s unthinkable.
The most annoying thing that I encounter are guys who say to me, “You ain’t Johnny Weissmuller Jr. I met him. He’s about five-eight and 180 pounds. He sure as hell ain’t no six-six and 220 pounds!” What can I say?
Tarzoon
Although I am embarrassed to mention it, I suppose I should cover my experience with the production of Tarzoon. This took place just before I married Diane. Better you hear it from me than from my detractors.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated sued a film company in France for releasing a cartoon parody of Tarzan titled Shame of the Jungle. The French company won the lawsuit because parody, to almost any degree, is permissible under French law. One of the film’s producers, after visiting the United States during these legal proceedings, commented, “Once I talked to the persons in the United States, I came to realize that a parody of Tarzan by us was like a parody of Jeanne D’Arc by them. Tarzan was, apparently, a national treasure. We printed the film anyway, of course, although we did have to change the name of the film to Tarzoon.”
Unfortunately, in an unthinking moment, I became involved in that mess, along with John Belushi and Bill Murray of Saturday Night Live. They had asked Dad to do a voice-over for this spoof, and he didn’t want to do it because he was ashamed to. It certainly wouldn’t be a hit with his Tarzan fans. As usual, when he needed a way out of a difficult situation, he pulled me out of the wings on a tether. He told them that he couldn’t do it, but he had just the guy who could. Nobody’s old man is perfect, I’m sure, but that is one failing of Dad’s that I found hard to forgive. He had absolutely no compunction about using me as a patsy when he wanted to run away from something and still please everybody.
In a weak and foolish moment (I guess I was tempted by the chance to work with Belushi and Murray), I agreed. The gig paid only three thousand dollars, and to this day I regret having done the damned thing. The French producers said it would never be released in the United States, but they later sold it to some guy in New York, who publicized the hell out of it, with Johnny Weissmuller Jr. receiving top billing. They wanted to milk the Weissmuller name. Still later, they wanted me to reloop it, but I refused.
That’s when María and Lisa jumped on the bandwagon and sold a story to the National Enquirer that was printed under the headline “Father Too Ill to Be Told of Son’s Shameful Porno Flick!” Mother was furious with me, and with María and Lisa. Diane’s mother read that headline in the supermarket, and she called Diane to ask how she could explain to Diane’s father this thing about his son-in-law to be. I don’t think she ever told him. But it never really went away. To this day, every time I’m interviewed, Tarzoon is the first thing I’m asked about.
Howard Stern
In 1997, Diane and I flew to New York City to do some promotion work for American Movie Classics. AMC is a twenty-four-hour cable network devoted to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and it’s beamed into sixty-three million homes nationwide. All AMC films are presented as they were originally intended to be seen: uncut, uninterrupted, commercial-free, and without colorization. Diane and I love it; so does Howard Stern.
Stern is also a big Tarzan fan, so much so that when AMC launched a three-day marathon of Tarzan movies and documentaries, he stocked up on food and drink and spent an entire weekend holed up in his house, watching Tarzan swing from vine to vine. In his loud and clear voice, Stern informed anybody and everybody that there was only one real Tarzan, and that, in his humble estimation, was Johnny Weissmuller.
Diane heard this, told producer Sal Cataldi about it, and soon an interview with “the son of Tarzan” was arranged on Stern’s radio show. I was nervous about that, and I fully expected to come out tattered and torn, as did almost all of Stern’s guests. Not so. We talked about the Mia Farrow–Woody Allen scandal (which was causing a world tempest, but scarcely a Hollywood ripple), and Howard lacerated a few other people before proceeding to a discussion of my father and me. Apparently, Howard Stern really loved my father as Tarzan, and he was the most cordial and respectful host that I have ever worked with. Cataldi called me and said that he could not believe how well the show went. It was the first time he had heard Howard be that nice to anyone.
Black Tarzan
Many blacks, to this day, resent the fact that Tarzan was not represented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hollywood as a black person. Or that his Jane was not a black Jane. In the film Investigating Tarzan, a black girl says, “Tarzan should have been a black man, not that Johnny . . . that swimmer guy . . . whatever his name is . . . sort of a fantasy of white people, I guess.” A black man says, “A white guy in the jungles of Africa, killing animals and black men with abandon? Conquers all that he sees, destroys what he likes. . . . We are to believe this crap? I am . . . well . . . I guess you might say . . . insulted.”
In the same documentary, France Zobada, a black actress who later worked on the Sheena, Queen of the Jungle films, was pro and con. She liked the Tarzan series because “they were the first films in which we saw, as children, a man who could speak with animals.” But she did not like the elements of racism inherent in the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. France Zobada went on to say,
When they called me to play in the Sheena film, I was very excited. I thought that I would be a she-Tarzan. Not so. I discovered that the mind-set of the day prohibited a black she-Tarzan. I was, instead, cast as a black villainess . . . well, it was good money, and I accepted the role anyway. . . . But what confuses me to this day is the fact that Tarzan waited most of his adult life, without sex, for a white princess to drop from the sky. . . . Are we to believe that he did not take a black woman from the jungle in all that time? . . . The new Tarzan image must be one of brotherhood rather than paternalism.
My own feelings on this subject are best expressed by Professor E.B. Holtsmark, Department of Classics, University of Iowa:
What Burroughs did is really fascinating. Tarzan embodies the mythical imagination, really, of Western civilization. He is clearly based on characters from ancient mythology. Search for a woman, quest for knowledge, search for treasure . . . these are all things that you find in the Odyssey. . . . There is this element of racism in the novels, [but] you cannot judge the past by present standards, whether in literature or anything else. I do not approve of sexism in the Bible. I think that there are sequences of intolerable, unspeakable violence in Homer’s poetry, but I don’t see that as a reason to reject Homer—or Burroughs’s novels . . . the Tarzan stories, I think, have the ability to speak to all ages and—really—all time.
There is a magic in the Tarzan films—something that transcends race, color, bias. Peter Elliott is an actor who worked on Greystoke, the 1984 Tarzan film; he also studied the species of primates who, in the first Burroughs Tarzan novel, raised a human baby as one of their own. Elliott comes close to describing that magic: “Tarzan represents the famous ‘missing link’ between primate animals and human animals. I sometimes wonder if the universal appeal of Tarzan is that he somehow articulates this notion of bridging these two different worlds. . . . I think we all crave contact, somehow, with our real animal selves.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I do know that Tarzan is Tarzan. Try to change his color at this late date, have him mutter political slogans or other such nonsense, and you might wind up inciting a revolution. And I firmly believe that for an earlier generation of young people, watching Tarzan movies was a far less hazardous activity than hanging around on street corners, looking for a mark to hit or a customer to buy your drugs or guns—a lifestyle to which some of today’s young are susceptible.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs Clubs
ERB clubs span the globe. The guiding force behind them is Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I doubt that anyone can calculate how many hundreds of thousands of admirers of Edgar Rice Burroughs there are, people who assiduously collect every bit of trivia concerning the author’s life. It is almost a cult. One Burroughs admirer, George McWhorter, even goes so far as to say, “I think that Edgar Rice Burroughs is probably the greatest undiscovered national treasure of the United States of America. . . . There have been a total of 164 different fan magazines devoted to Edgar Rice Burroughs. I don’t think that [even] Sherlock Holmes can claim that.”
Perhaps this is a little strong. There are still plenty of people whose idea of Tarzan and his origins is pretty vague. One lady, a native of Tarzana, California, where Burroughs once lived, and which was named after his Tarzan, replied when asked if she knew why her town was so named, “Oh, sure! Tarzan, who was named after Edgar Allen . . . ?”
Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, when asked how he came to write Tarzan of the Apes, replied, “I had the story from one who had no business telling it to me—or to any other. I do not say that the story is true, but the fact that in telling it to you, I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.”
There is no doubt that readers all over the world wanted the tale to be true. Few stories have ever captured the public imagination so thoroughly. And few have been so lucrative. Edgar Rice Burroughs was tired of being poor, and he took steps to ensure that he would never be poor again. In the words of his biographer, John Taliaferro, “[Burroughs] was ahead of his time in the area of intellectual property, in negotiating First Rights, Secondary Rights, merchandising . . . there were costumes . . . dolls . . . comic strips. . . . He took a resource, Tarzan, and squeezed every drop out of it possible.”
The 1930s were good years for Edgar Rice Burroughs. He’d come a long way since 1912, when the first installment of Tarzan of the Apes came out in the October issue of All-Story magazine, which sold for fifteen cents. But in the 1940s, the Tarzan novels “lost ground,” writes Marianna Torgovnick, in an article titled “Taking Tarzan Seriously.” She quotes Life magazine’s Paul Mandel as saying that this occurred “because substantial clans of American boys had started living their own real-life jungle dramas” in the Pacific arena during World War II. Torgovnick continues:
By 1960, only nine of the twenty-three novels remained in print. . . . Biographies of Burroughs and the essays by Mandel and Vidal [Gore Vidal, writing for Esquire] state clearly—too clearly—the reason for Tarzan’s return. Burroughs’s fans, the explanations go, always wanted Tarzan in paperback, Burroughs’s heirs, unlike Burroughs himself, became complacent in the decade after his death with regard to sales and profit.
When the fans discovered that Burroughs’s heirs had sloppily allowed copyrights to lapse, they urged publishers to reprint, and the publishers did. The rest is publishing history, and history of an unusual kind in that the audience created the demand and the occasion for the reprints, not the publishing houses. . . .
Some of Burroughs’s heirs may have dropped the ball in the past, but Danton Burroughs is apparently a chip off the old block. He holds regular meetings in his grandfather’s house in Tarzana, hosting ERB club members from all over the world. Celebrities such as Maureen O’Sullivan (who died at the age of eighty-seven in 1998), former Tarzan Denny Miller, and former Sheena Tanya Roberts often attend, as do Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs aficionados and merchandisers. Artifacts and memorabilia of every description are sold, bartered, or exchanged at these gatherings.
And, in Danton’s words, “We are very protective of the Burroughs copyrights. Unauthorized Tarzan films are regularly produced in such places as Singapore, Czechoslovakia, India; and we sue whenever and wherever possible.” Witness the aforementioned lawsuit over Tarzoon.
As I mentioned earlier in this book, Edgar Rice Burroughs was disturbed about the Hollywood treatment of Tarzan. He became so upset that he started his own film company and chose his own Tarzan—named Herman Brix, who was slim like an Olympic runner and very elegant. Dressed in a dinner jacket, Brix truly looked like an English lord. Although he played the role from 1935 to 1938, Brix never really caught on. Still, others tried to emulate his approach.
Gradually, the image evolved. Gordon Scott, who played Tarzan from 1955 to 1960, commented, “There was an effort [in my era] to restore the Tarzan image to something more akin to the manner in which Edgar Rice Burroughs had portrayed [Tarzan] in the original Ape Man—a multilingual, more sophisticated Tarzan.” Director Hugh Hudson, with Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan (1984), starring Christopher Lambert, probably came closest to pulling off this new Tarzan image, but that image just didn’t catch on with the public.
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A Johnny Weissmuller Filmography
(Courtesy of Geoff St. Andrews)
Films featuring a cameo appearance by Johnny Weissmuller have been omitted from this filmography. They are documented in countless other publications.
Crystal Champions (1929, Paramount) This Grantland Rice short featured Weissmuller and other Olympic water champions at the famous Silver Springs in Florida, which would serve as a location for underwater scenes in Tarzan Finds a Son!
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932, MGM) Johnny Weissmuller in his first appearance as Tarzan.
Tarzan and His Mate (1934, MGM)
Tarzan Escapes (1936, MGM)
Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939, MGM) Johnny Sheffield makes his initial appearance as Tarzan’s adopted son.
Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941, MGM)
Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942, MGM)
Tarzan Triumphs (1943, RKO)
Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943, RKO)
Tarzan and the Amazons (1945, RKO)
Swamp Fire (1946, Paramount)
Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946, RKO)
Tarzan and the Huntress (1947, RKO)
Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948, RKO)
Jungle Jim (1948, Columbia)
The Lost Tribe (1949, Columbia)
Mark of the Gorilla (1950, Columbia)
Captive Girl (1950, Columbia) Four swimmers in this one: Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Anita Lhoest, and Rusty Wescoatt.
Pygmy Island (1950, Columbia)
Fury of the Congo (1951, Columbia)
Jungle Manhunt (1951, Columbia)
Jungle Jim in the Forbidden Land (1952, Columbia)
Voodoo Tiger (1952, Columbia)
Savage Mutiny (1953, Columbia)
Valley of Head Hunters (1953, Columbia)
Killer Ape (1953, Columbia)
Jungle Man-Eaters (1954, Columbia)
Cannibal Attack (1954, Columbia) For the final three films on this list, Johnny played himself, since Screen Gems now owned the rights to the Jungle Jim character.
Jungle Moon Men (1955, Columbia)
Devil Goddess (1955, Columbia)
Devil Goddess was Johnny Weissmuller’s last Katzman film for Columbia. Then followed a twenty-six-episode Jungle Jim TV series for Screen Gems. It’s a pity that it couldn’t go on forever. After that, out of work, with no more jungles to conquer, it was only a downhill swing for Johnny Weissmuller.
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The Jungle Jim TV Series
In 1954, the screen rights to the Jungle Jim character were turned over to Columbia’s subsidiary, Screen Gems. At Screen Gems, producer Harold Greene was given the opportunity to do for television what Sam Katzman had done for the movies. By further lowering the budgets and by using as much stock footage as possible, Greene made a success of the project.
When Johnny Weissmuller completed his final film for Columbia, he did the TV series for Screen Gems. The series costarred Martin Huston as Weissmuller’s son and Norman Fredric as his friend Kaseem. It says something about Weissmuller’s enduring appeal that the series lasted as long as it did. It was never designed for prime time, and it went almost immediately into syndication, but it kept the Jungle King clothed and fed for several more years.
Here is a list of Jungle Jim episode titles:
Man Killer
Land of Terror
Treasure of the Amazon
Lagoon of Death
A Fortune in Ivory
Jungle Justice
The Eyes of Manobo
The King’s Ghost
White Magic
The Deadly Idol
The Leopard’s Paw
The Man from Zanzibar
Precious Cargo
The Golden Parasol
Code of the Jungle
Wild Man of the Jungle
Safari into Danger
Blood Money
Striped Fury
The Sacred Scarab
Voodoo Drums
The Avenger
Return of the Tauregs
The Silver Locket
Gift of Evil (a.k.a. Jungle Fever)
Power of Darkness
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Johnny Weissmuller Swimming Records
Weissmuller participated in fifty-two national championships (thirty-six individual and sixteen relay team) and sixty-seven world championships. He set fifty-one individual world records, achieved ninety-four individual American records, and was a member of thirteen American record-setting relay teams (between 1921 and 1928). He was also a member of national championship water polo teams in 1924 and 1927.
Olympic Gold Medals
1924 (Paris, France)
100-meters freestyle
400-meters freestyle
800-meters United States relay team
1928 (Amsterdam, Holland)
100-meters freestyle
800-meters United States relay team
National Championships
(Outdoor)
| (Event) | (Year) | (Time) |
|---|---|---|
| 50 yards | 1921 | 23.2 |
| 50 yards | 1922 | 23.0 |
| 100 yards | 1922 | 52.8 |
| 100 yards | 1923 | 54.6 |
| 100 yards | 1925 | 52.0 |
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Johnny Weissmuller Jr. Stage, Film, and Television Credits
STAGE
We’re No Angels; Yellow Jackets; Bus Stop; Hairy Ape; Under the Yum Yum Tree; Mr. Roberts; The Cain Mutiny Court Martial; Harvey; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; That Splendid Little War; What the Devil.
MOTION PICTURES
Andy Hardy Comes Home (MGM); THX 1138 (American Zoetrope); American Graffiti (Zoetrope); Magnum Force (Warner Malpaiso); Blackbird (Columbia); Massive Retaliation (Massive Prod./Indep.); Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (Kerner Prod.); Wildfire (Indep.).
FILMS FOR TELEVISION
Kansas City Massacre (ABC); Return to Manzanar; Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story (Burbank); The Johnnie Mae Gibson Story (CBS); Six against the Rock (ABC).
TELEVISION SERIES
Sugarfoot; Lawman; Outlaw; Death Valley Days; Wagon Train; Gunsmoke; Streets of San Francisco; Bert D’Angelo: Superstar; Alison Sydney Harrison (pilot); Tales of the Unexpected; Partners in Crime.
COMMERCIALS
Ford Motor Company; American Motors; National Biscuit Company; Busch Beer.
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Sources
Azcárraga, Gabriel. Tape recording, 2000.
Baxter, John. Stunt: The Story of the Great Movie Stuntmen. London: Macdonald, 1973.
Bogle, Donald. Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies. New York: Cadillac, 1968.
Fury, David. Johnny Weissmuller: Twice the Hero. Minneapolis: Artist’s Press, 2000.
—–. Kings of the Jungle: An Illustrated Reference to Tarzan on Screen and Television. Jefferson: McFarland, 1994.
Gallery, Don. Interview, 2002.
Huston, John. Tape recording, 1978.
Jewell, Richard B. The RKO Story. London: Octopus Books, 1982.
Libby, Bill. “Tarzan Today: The Messed-Up Life of Johnny Weissmuller.” Saga Jan. 1965.
McClelland, Allene Gates Weissmuller. Tape recordings, 1999.
Mueller, Arlene. “Hot Stove.” Sports Illustrated 6 Aug. 1984.
Oliver, Mike. Tape recordings, 2000.
Olsen, Carolyn Roos. Tape recording, 2002.
Onyx, Narda. Water, World, and Weissmuller. Los Angeles: Vion, 1964.
Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. New York: Ballantine, 1975.
Silva, Maru Eugenia. Tape recording, 2000.
Weissmuller, Diane. Tape recordings, 1999–2002.
Weissmuller, Johnny, and Clarence A. Bush. Swimming the American Crawl. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin; Riverside, 1930.
Actor and longshoreman Johnny Weismuller Jr. lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife. Weissmuller served on the Executive Council of the Screen Actor’s Guild’s Minorities Committee for fourteen years.
William Reed makes his home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He is the author of the award-winning biogra- phy Olaf Wieghorst and collaborated with film director John Huston on Huston’s memoir An Open Book.
W. Craig Reed lives in San Hose, California, and is a former nuclear submariner. He co-authored Crazy Ivan: Based on a True Story of Submarine Espionage with his father, William Reed.