I suppose that when my daughter is my age, the cinematic Tarzan she’ll most strongly remember is the Disney version, but for people in my generation and older, the only real movie Tarzan was Johnny Weissmuller. A discussion of Tarzan movies on the WELL recently got me thinking about Weissmuller’s contribution to the character.

WELL movie buffs point out that the earliest Weissmuller/Tarzan movies were produced before the Hays Office imposed its puritanical Production Code — which is why we got to see so much of Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane in the first two Weissmuller/Tarzan movies — “Tarzan the Ape Man” and “Tarzan and His Mate” — and why she was so demurely covered in later movies.

But Weismuller’s version of the character, despite the fact that he was nowhere near as articulate and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original, didn’t change much, in either costume or performance, from the period prior to strict imposition of the Production Code to the post-Code era. In fact, Weissmuller’s portrayal of the character, even with his limited lines, remains oddly compelling, as you can see in this collection of the first six Tarzan films Weissmuller did for MGM. (Later Tarzan films starring Weissmuller were produced by RKO.)

One of the reasons for Weissmuller’s effectiveness in his largely underwritten character has to be that the former Olympic champion was comfortable in his own body, even when wearing only a bathing suit or a loincloth. Another reason, I have learned from Johnny Weissmuller Jr.’s recent memoir, TARZAN, MY FATHER, was that Weissmuller got along well with animals, from dogs to chimpanzees to the Indian elephants that (through acting talent plus giant paste-on rubber ears) played African elephants in the films.

Weissmuller Jr.’s book is not a great book in any literary sense, but it underscores the extent to which the archetypal “search for the father,” as outlined by Joseph Campbell, can inspire a man to construct a story. Tarzan may have found a son in the movies, but in this book Weissmuller’s actual son returns the favor. To his credit, Weissmuller Jr. mostly avoids imposing any mythic view of his father upon the reader, but instead lets his father’s contradictions and ambiguities, as well as his undeniable strengths, speak for themselves.

Ironically enough, the last line of the novel TARZAN OF THE APES is Tarzan’s quiet (and false) declaration that “I never knew who my father was.”

—–