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. Cheeta is as foul-mouthed as Rex Harrison, and quite as judgmental about his rivals while trying to say something nice:

Chaplin is an extraordinarily special human being, a person in whom a whole multitude of talents and virtues is united but, as the saying goes, to be human is to be fallible … and not even Charlie’s stoutest defenders would claim that he was perfect or even likeable or indeed defensible on any level at all.

One chapter, winningly titled ‘F***ing Bitch!’ has, when we get to it, been ‘removed on legal advice’. Readers will want to know that Esther Williams, the subject of the chapter, is summarily dealt with in the unaltered index, and in Cheeta’s description of her elsewhere as a ‘two-bit dugong’. Cheeta is a terrible old lush — his sacking from Tarzan and the Mermaids came about as a result of his bawling for yet more tequila before the shoot, he tells us — and the ungenerous bar-room confidences are fantastical, but oddly believable.

It is, in its own sweet and ingenuous way, a love story, and the love is of Cheeta for Johnny Weissmuller, about whom nothing bad could ever be said. The women who compete with Cheeta, on the other hand, are torn to shreds in the most score-settling way, disconcertingly like Roger Moore’s views on, say, David Niven’s second wife Hjordis. Cheeta lives on calmly in his simian refuge, visiting human children who, he sourly admits, are about as likely to have heard of him as they are of Rin Tin Tin, watching his old movies one after the other, and painting one saleable abstract after another. The latest one we hear of is entitled Johnny #12,562. It doesn’t sound so very bad a way to end up, after all.

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