Johnny Weissmuller
Almost a Fluke

In 1931 when Hollywood wanted to find a new star to play in the upcoming movie Tarzan the Ape Man, it seemed only natural to turn to Johnny Weissmuller who in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympic Games managed to collect a total of five gold medals. He was young, in excellent condition, and of course, a world class swimmer. So he was perfect for all the swimming scenes that would pepper the action.

But according to Johnny that's not the way it happened. He had decided to visit the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios to see if he could actually meet one of his favorite actors, Clark Gable. Not surprisingly the guard at the gate wouldn't let the unauthorized stranger in. Then a young kid came along and told Johnny that there was a group of about 75 guys on a back lot testing for Tarzan. If he signed up for the test then at least he would get through the studio gates.

So Johnny took the test and the casting director asked him if he could run. Johnny said sure. Then the director asked him if he could climb a tree. Johnny said sure, he could climb a tree. Well, then, could he swing on a vine? Of course. He was not only a swimmer but also a gymnast.

Anyway, since he was on the lot, Johnny got to meet not only Clark Gable but Greta Garbo as well. So it had been worth the effort.

Then a week later Johnny got a call. He got the job.

At first the studio balked at Johnny's long name. It was too long for the marquee. No soap, said Johnny. That was his name and he was keeping it. But the studio wanted to shorten it to Weiss.

Then one of the studio officials, who knew who Johnny was, pointed out that he was the young man who had broken all those swimming records. Well, then, that was fine. They'd cast him as Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic champion, and they'd add swimming scenes for the movies.

This, we must point out, is one telling. There are variants on the story - some minor, some considerable. One story is that the screenwriter, Cyril Hume was writing the Tarzan script and took a break at the Hollywood Athletic Club. There he saw Johnny working out. So Cyril arranged the screen test.

But whatever the modus that got Johnny into the movies, he was one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. He even achieved the épitomé of celebrity by being included in one of the Warner Brothers cartoons.

One of the biggest surprises came long after Johnny died. Then the world learned that Johnny was not a native born American. Instead he was born in 1904 in Austria - actually Austro-Hungary - either as Johann Weißmüller, Peter Johann Weißmüller, or - which one informational websites assures us is the original name - Jonas Weißmüller (the correct German pronunciation, of course, is VICE-mew-ler).

Young Johnny's (or Johann's or Peter's or Jonas's) parents immigrated to America where his dad first found work as a miner. Again the various biographies on the Fount of All Knowledge can't agree how old Johnny was at the time, whether a babe in arms or a toddler.

Surprisingly for someone who was one of the most famous screen actors of the twentieth century, there isn't an academic biography about Johnny. So documented information about him is rather sparse and variable. For instance, one account tells us that when he was young, Johnny's father died and another story is that he abandoned the family. So Johnny started working as a bellboy and elevator operator to help his mom make ends meet.

The family lived first in Pennsylvania and then moved to Chicago where Johnny learned to swim. Being on the shores of Lake Michigan, swimming was (and is) a popular pastime for the kids, and according to one source, Johnny learned real swimming at a local athletic club. The athletic clubs were a late 19th and early 20th century phenomenon, which although not dead, have been replaced by the now ubiquitous "health" clubs. Athletic clubs were also a neighborhood institution as traveling even short distances wasn't simple in a day when most families didn't own cars.

Early athletic clubs also placed more emphasis on competitive sports than the health spas of today and the clubs were used by serious amateur athletes who wanted to compete in national and international competitions. Of course, up-and-coming pros used them for their training as well. It was the swimming coach of the Illinois Athletic Club that saw Johnny swim and invited him to join that prestigious club.

Still in his late teens Johnny began winning national championships and breaking the records. Then at age 20 he competed in the 1924 Olympics in Paris. He won three gold medals and when the next Olympics rolled along in Amsterdam in 1928, he picked up two more golds. In his career Johnny ended up with 52 gold medals for various competitions.

We know that ultimately Johnny was married five times, sometimes briefly, and after his years as an amateur swimmer, he gave professional swimming exhibitions and modeled swimwear. All this pulled in a pretty good salary. Then from 1929 to 1931, he was featured in three films, one of which he appeared as himself. He also published a book on swimming.

But the world remembers Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, and of course for his famous "Tarzan yell". You will read that this now iconic soundbyte is the same forward and backwards. This information is indeed correct and the normal human ear can't tell if the yell is being played one way or another. Naturally people suspect the palindromic perfection was an artificial contrivance of the MGM sound department.

On the other hand, Maureen O'Sullivan - who played "Jane" in the first movies - always said it was Johnny doing the call. And indeed visual inspection of the sound spectrum waveform and frequencies show that the forward and backward spectra are not completely identical even if audibly they seem indistinguishable.

That said, further analysis of the calls show that at least in some of the movies the first "Ahhhhh" before switching to the falsetto triplets is the same length as the last "Ahhhhh" at the end after the second set of triplets, the duration of the "Ahhhhh's" being at least within 5/1000 of a second of each other. So while not denying the call was made by Johnny, it seems likely that the sound effects specialists fiddled a bit with the track.

Johnny's Tarzan, we must admit, is a far cry from the literary creation by the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs who from 1912 to 1947 penned 22 books with another three being published posthumously. The literary Tarzan spoke excellent English and French. His parents had been marooned in Africa after a mutiny and had built a house near the coast. But his mother and father died and Tarzan was adopted by a tribe of Great Apes. Then on finding elementary reading books in the house, he figured out how to read and write. Finally he learned spoken French from the written English. Tarzan later wryly commented that his instructor - who was in fact French - complicated things by this unorthodox approach to teaching foreign languages.

But the Tarzan of Johnny's movies was referred to somewhat discourteously in a recent article as a "simpleton". And we admit that although Johnny's Tarzan certainly seems smart enough in the jungle environment, but when he shows up in an urban setting he can't quite figure things out. Tarzan's New York Adventure is a classic "fish-out-of-water" movie showing Tarzan encountering the bewildering facets of civilization. But for Tarzan fans, it's a nice change of pace.

The best movie - as almost everyone agrees - is the second one, Tarzan and His Mate. The manner of the couple's relationship is skirted since their son "Boy" - who appears in Tarzan Finds a Son - is adopted, having been found as the survivor of a plane crash. However, the subject of Tarzan and Jane's lack of formal nuptials remained a bit touchy, and there were some surprisingly sophisticated localities that banned the books.

The movie plots were somewhat formulaic. You'd have the exploitive white hunters wanting to cause trouble, often pilfering the natural resources of Africa. They would run afoul of Tarzan who wanted to keep the jungle in its natural state. Then paradoxically you'd have the "savages" - members of some more or less generic native African tribes - that wanted to rid Africa of the influx of colonial powers. And yet the - again we must use quotes - "savages" were almost always cast as bad guys as well.

These rather inconsistent plot lines were a reflection of both the times and the plots of the Tarzan novels. In the novels the black Africans - the gomangani - were almost always seen negatively. The natives' dealings with Tarzan are almost always hostile, and they did not accept the white colonial rule. Nor were they true children of nature like Tarzan, Jane, and later, Boy.

On the other hand, one of the books Jungle Tales of Tarzan deals with the subject of prejudice that an outsider encounters even if he has been adopted into the society. In one of the stories Tarzan realizes that actually becoming the head of a household in the ape tribe is impossible although he does his best to try. We'll leave it to the reader to read the book and fill in the details.

The tribe of apes that adopted Tarzan - the Mangani - are described as "Great Apes". They were not gorillas, and indeed gorillas were the Mangani's traditional enemies. The Mangani walked upright and spoke an intelligible language which expressed concepts as complex as any human language.

So those who want to enjoy the books must do so with a most forgiving attitude. The prospective reader will understand that by today's standards the depiction of the native Africans is condescending at best and is usually insulting.

But then we must remember that Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in 1875 and almost coincident with the collapse of Reconstruction in the American South. The first novel, Tarzan of the Apes appeared in 1912. At that time the vast majority of those of European descent took their superiority over other races as a given and in the United States separation of races in education, leisure, and even in marriage was the law of the land. A lot of states had laws that prohibited black citizens from voting and any who attempted even to register literally put their lives in peril.

That said, the books were not written to preach any moral tale. They were adventure tales and escapism, nothing more. So just as people still read and enjoy James Bond novels, even Live and Let Die, you can still enjoy the Tarzan books.

And indeed Edgar still retains quite a following, not just for his Tarzan books but for his other adventure novels. Particularly popular are the stories of John Carter and his exploits on the planet Mars. John, we have to point out, was, yes, a Confederate veteran, who heads west after the war to prospect for gold. To avoid having to explain how John got to Mars without a spaceship, Edgar had John enter a cave in Arizona and then have his existential self separate from his earthly body - no one knows exactly how. Then hey, presto!, he's off to Mars.

Johnny was never really able to shake free of the jungle-movies genre. After the Tarzan movies, he played in sixteen movies as Jungle Jim, a white explorer, guide, and troubleshooter who led people into the depths of the African jungle for various reasons.

There was one welcome and modern feature in these movies. Often one of the characters would often be a highly intelligent professional woman whom seeks out Jungle Jim's expertise for a scientific safari into the jungle. Of course, at some point she gets into a jam which brings Jim to the rescue.

Every now and then the movies are both accurate about Africa regarding facts that are not that well known. In Jungle Jim in the Forbidden Land one of the early scenes has Dr. Linda Roberts (Angela Greene) wanting to lead a safari into the jungle. But to her chagrin, Dr. Roberts is denied permission by the commissioner.

Yes, the commissioner. These movies, we must remember, were all founded on the nostalgia for colonial rule. And in fact, in the 1950's much of Africa was still under foreign control, and the English had a big chunk of it. We do wonder, though, why the English high commissioners sometimes spoke with American accents.

But as Dr. Roberts was being rowed across a river, a hippopotamus comes up. He knocks over the boat but fortunately Jungle Jim happens to be there and he jumps into the water and rescues Dr. Roberts. Unfortunately, before Jim comes to the rescue, the hippopotamus grabs one of the oarsmen who screams horribly as he's dragged under.

And indeed more people are killed by hippopotamus in Africa than by any other animal. That is, if you don't count mosquitoes and poisonous snakes. Estimates are that snakes cause 30,000 deaths per year in Africa alone and even more in India. But in Africa about 400,000 people die a year from mosquito borne diseases with most being from malaria.

Tarzan the Ape Man starring Johnny was not the first Tarzan movie. That credit goes to Tarzan of the Apes released in 1918 with Elmo Lincoln playing Tarzan in this silent film. The first Tarzan in the talkies was Frank Merrill in the 1920's.

Of course, we can't forget Cheetah. That was Tarzan's chimpanzee companion. Cheetah's one great virtue is that he evidently understood what "Ungawah!" meant. But in the books there was no Cheetah and news stories that Cheetah - or rather the chimpanzee billed as Cheetah - lived to be 80 years old are, sadly, not true.

The first six of Johnny's Tarzan movies were produced by MGM and then RKO took over for the next half dozen. The running times were quite varied. The shortest was just 70 minutes and even Tarzan and His Mate ran only 104 minutes. So neither the Tarzan nor Jungle Jim movies needed much editorial paring to fit the Saturday morning television time slots.

After the last Jungle Jim movie, Johnny pretty much retired from the film industry to focus on various business ventures. He suffered from a number of health problems in the late 1970's and died in 1984 at age 79.

Johnny, though, was not without competition. In the 1930's and 40's, Buster Crabbe - who like John was an Olympic swimming champion - also played the heroic jungle dweller. But Buster is better known for playing Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. He also had a guest appearance in the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which aired from 1979 to 1981. In one episode he played a veteran space fighter pilot. He kept making various side remarks to the series star, Gil Gerard, that the knowledgeable understood.

Gil:	Gordon [Buster's character], where did you learn to shoot like that?
Buster:	I've been doing this since long before you were born, Captain.

But even though Johnny had retired as Tarzan after 1948, Lex Barker filled the loincloth for five pictures. But the Baby Boomers best remember Gordon Scott who played Tarzan in six films from 1955 to 1960. Gordon's Tarzan was a bit more sophisticated than Johnny's and spoke English with greater fluency albeit still in a bit stilted manner.

But the Tarzan movies kept a-coming, and if you count animated and foreign versions there's well over fifty. Not all Tarzans are created equal. Some have been disparaged by Tarzan fans and others praised.

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan was released in 1984 and is notable that it featured the distinguished Shakespearean actor Sir Ralph Richardson in his last acting role. The movie starred the French actor Christopher Lambert as Tarzan and Tarzan's tutor in French, Phillippe D'Arnot, was played by Ian Holm. At that time Ian had appeared in many (and successful) movies and on television and was a top stage performer. But it wasn't until 2001 with his role as Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring that he really sank into the American consciousness.

Tarzan hit the small screen with Ron Ely playing the Ape Man from 1966 to 1968. Perhaps because Ron had extensive acting experience, the writers let him play Tarzan close to the literary figure, articulate and savvy with civilization. Ron's Tarzan did, though, speak with an American accent. And yes, his "Tarzan yell" was the famous Johnny Weissmuller call.

Three years was not a bad duration for a TV series of the time. The hit shows Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, and Batman only lasted that long. The popular Wild Wild West only four.

The last Tarzan movie at this writing was released in 2016. It was not considered a major success.

References

"Interview: Johnny Weissmuller", George Hamilton (Host), Alana Stewart (Host), That's Entertainment: 50 Years of MGM, 1974.

"Johnny Weissmuller", Internet Movie Data Base.

Hollywood Steps Out, Dave Barry (Voice Actor), Sara Berner (Voice Actor), Mel Blanc (Voice Actor), Kent Rogers (Voice Actor), Tex Avery (Director), Leon Schlesinger (Producer), Warner Brothers, 1941, Internet Movie Data Base.

"Johnny Weissmuller - American Athlete and Actor", Encyclopedia Britannica.

Johnny Weissmuller (USA), 1965 Honor Swimmer", International Swimming Hall of Fame.

"Johnny Weissmuller, 1904-1984, Notable Sports Figures, Gale, 2004, Encyclopedia.com.

"Banned Books Awareness: 'Tarzan'":, R. Wolf Baldassarro, Banned Books Awareness, April 6, 2004.

"Gordon Scott", Internet Movie Data Base.

"Lex Barker", Internet Movie Data Base.

"Ron Ely", Internet Movie Data Base.

"15 Hunky Actors Who've Played Tarzan Throughout the Years", Lydia Price, People Magazine, June 30, 2016.

"Tarzan Movies Through the Years", Internet Movie Data Base, 2014.

"Planet of the Slave Girls", Gil Gerard (Actor), Erin Gray (Actor), Buster Crabbe (Guest Actor), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, September 27, 1979, Internet Movie Data Base.

"Antivenoms for Snakebite Envenoming: What Is in the Research Pipeline?", Snakebite Envenoming, World Health Organization.

"Number of Malaria Deaths, Global Health Observatory (GHO) Data, World Health Organization.

 

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