A cancerous camel strutted the perimeter, spitting tobacco juice. The leopards were using heroin and even the ostriches, traditionally abstemious, were drunk. She swung naked into a plaster tree and was gone before I could ask for an interview. The day I arrived, I glimpsed a fretful chimpanzee who’d played opposite both Tarzan and Jungle Jim and now spent all her time dressing up in old feathers. The place was a Sunset Boulevard of drunken rages, drownings in the pools, and a herd of gazelles who refused to change out of their pajamas. I’d thought I might coax it from someone, but the residents of Jungleland were not as voluble as I’d imagined they’d be. They were all called Leo in public, though MGM had been through five lions before this one: Slats, Jackie, Coffee, Tanner, and George. The lions of Jungleland had always been famous. Home in its heyday to two thousand animal actors and their human colleagues, the place had housed everyone from day players on Robin Hood to the rhesus monkeys who’d been sent off to cure polio. Jungleland was no longer what it had been. Lately, one of the panthers had escaped and prowled Thousand Oaks screaming for justice and trying to organize the housecats, but everyone had ignored him. The world had gone seriously downhill if it thought sending an actor known for his portrayal of King Lear to a rural grassland was a good deed, but things were bad here and no one wanted to say just how bad. The lion, in his trademark velvet jacket, wasn’t veldt material. An ecology group had threatened to buy Leo at auction, take him to Africa and release him into the veldt. The magazine was looking for an article one part cult massacre, one part Barnum, but above all, they were looking to profile the Forever Roar, who’d remained mum for the past twenty years. Species mixing, ligers and tigons, or maybe just a wading pool full of the sacrificial blood of giraffes. I typically covered hippies and communes in Northern California, but the magazine had sent me here to see if I could find ten thousand words of zoo scandal, crimes, or perversions, it didn’t matter to them. The owners of Jungleland padlocked the gates. The compound’s pachyderms-who’d once elegantly congaed in a small ring before retiring to practice their Martha Graham–choreographed scarf dances-stood by the side of the road, shamefacedly trumpeting for traffic, but the cars stopped coming. The animals went on strike, of course, but there was no union. It was the final humiliation, a generation of serious actors performing in a skin show, their dialogue spoken by human ventriloquists. Dolittle, cast with Jungleland’s residents, had been released the year before. Jungleland, by the time I drove through its rusting gates in ’68, was bankrupt and officially plotted to hit the block.ĭr. He’d come up in the glory days, the inheritor of the three–legged stool and the ring of fire, and now his paradise was tainted. I gathered he was miserable and disgusted. This didn’t mean he was planning to speak to me. He’d initially attempted to decline my interview altogether, but his contract required it. I’d been here six weeks and the Forever Roar refused to give me the time of day. A few of the pythons and boa constrictors drifted on their backs, their skins shedding into the chlorine. Leo, the star of the opening sequence of every Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer Film since the 1920s, and I, a 28–year–old journalist on assignment for a men’s magazine, looked out at the half–full pool. He was flanked by two aging blondes in tarnished spangles, their diamante balding, but still impressive, even in the unforgiving light of the California afternoon. He lapped at it unhappily, his eyes settling on nothing in particular. The lion sat in a lounge chair, his cocktail coupe full of something redder than bourbon and darker than blood.
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