The American King of the Jungle.
Okay.
So, Johnny Weissmuller could never have played Hamlet.
But, for the role of a jungle superhero of exceptional masculine beauty and athleticism who said little, there was no better choice than the Olympic swimming champ.
Weissmuller:
“[Playing Tarzan] was right up my alley.
“It [was] like stealing.
“There was swimming in it, and I didn't have much to say.
“How can a guy climb trees, say 'Me Tarzan, you Jane,' and make a million?''
The arc of Weissmuller’s life tells a story about America we’d like to believe is still true: that someone with talent and drive who works hard can make it big, regardless of background or family connections.
He’d passed through Ellis Island with his Hungarian parents as a toddler in 1905.
Grew up in Chicago, learning to swim at a public beach on Lake Michigan.
Lied about his age to join the YMCA and compete in swim races, catching the eye of a swim coach at the Illinois Athletic Club.
Broke his first swimming world record at age seventeen and then won five gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics.
And set sixty-seven world swimming records in his early twenties, leaving competitive swimming having never lost a race.
Then came a modeling contract with BVD underwear and an uncredited, non-speaking role in the 1929 Ziegfeld Follies film, Glorifying the American Girl.
He wore a fig leaf and played Adonis who embraces a nearly nude young woman while surrounded by singers and dancers.
His beefcake performance got Weissmuller an MGM screen test for the role of Tarzan.
He beat seventy-five others to get the role.
Twelve Tarzan films followed.
For a time, Weissmuller lived the good life in a Bel Air mansion with a three-hundred-foot swimming pool and a series of beautiful, young wives.
But as he aged, the good times faded and so did the money.
By 1973, when he was sixty-nine years old, Weissmuller was working as a greeter at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas; but a broken hip and leg sidelined him the next year.
“Oh, I’ll be alright,” he assured actor George Hamilton in a 1974 television interview.
But he wasn’t.
Heart trouble followed.
And when the end came in 1979, Weissmuller and his fifth wife were living in a small, pink stucco cabana on the grounds of Acapulco’s Hotel Los Flamigos, an old favorite of movie stars, not far from the site of his last Tarzan film made thirty years before.
Few attended Weissmuller’s Acapulco funeral, but, in a sense, he got the last word.
As his coffin was lowered into the ground, somebody played a recording of his famous “Tarzan yell” three times.1
Forever, the King of the Jungle.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Banner image: Maureen O’Sullivan, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheetah in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).
Weissmuller did the yell himself. He said he’d modeled it after German neighbors who were yodelers and had won a yodeling competition as a child.
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