Most famous Tarzan dies

Press, 23 January 1984, Page 8

Most famous Tarzan dies

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles Johnny Weissmuller, who died yesterday in Mexico aged 79, was a weak and sickly child who became a world swimming champion and the most famous of the film Tarzans. He made 19 Tarzan films, with Maureen O’Sullivan as his best-remembered mate, Jane, between 1932 and 1948, earning at least ?USIOO,OOO (now $NZ154,000) for each film.

But in later years he admitted that nothing remained of his film fortune. “I blew it on boats and good living,” he said.

Weissmuller married, six times. His last, in 1962, was to a German divorcee, Maria Brock.

His role as English society family’s lost son who grew up in the jungle came to haunt him. Everywhere he went people asked him to do his splitting Tarzan yell — 333336666600000.

Papers filed in court in Los Angeles in 1979, when Weissmuller was a sick

man, alleged that he had screamed and shouted like Tarzan, frightening hospital staff.

The son of an Austrian Army captain who had emigrated to the United States, Weissmuller was born in Chicago on June 2,1904, and was a sickly child. Doctors said that he should learn to swim to build his strength. Spending much of his youth in swimming-pools, he won five Olympic gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Games, and 50 United States national titles, becoming known as the “human fish.” In 1922 Weissmuller broke every world swimming record between 50 and 500 yards (45 and 450 metres). Standing 1.9 metres he was described as having the world’s most perfect physique. A Hollywood film executive offered him the role of Tarzan, the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

“I went to the back lot of M.G.M., they gave me a Gstring and said, ‘Can you climb a tree? Can you pick

up that girl?’ I could do all that, and I did all my own swinging because I had been a Y.M.C.A. champion on the rings,” he once said.

He was the fourth man to play the film role — the first was Elmo Lincoln, in 1918 — but became the most famous. His first film, with O’Sullivan, was “Tarzan the Ape Man.” That was followed by such films as “Tarzan and his Mate,” “Tarzan Escapes,” and “Tarzan’s New York Adventure.”

Weissmuller knew little about acting at first and his early roles were written to show off his physical prowess and play down his flat, mid-western accent.

According to Burroughs’ books Tarzan had a limited vocabulary as a man brought up by apes. That led to such lines as, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Publicity stunts, such as having Weissmuller swing from hotel chandeliers, were staged to show him as a man who belonged to the

jungle rather than in civilised society.

The Tarzan films were based on an adventure story by Burroughs about an English aristocratic couple shipwrecked on Africa’s coast whose son is raised by gorillas after his parents’ death. Asked after he had finished his career as Tarzan if he had any advice for successors, he said; “The main thing is, don’t let go of the vine when you’re swinging through the jungle.”

Weissmuller followed his Tarzan role with five years as a big-game hunter in a American television series, “Jungle Jim.” He later became an “official greeter,” welcoming gamblers to the Caesar’s Palace Casino in Las Vegas.

He and Maria lived comfortably off his casino earnings and his part ownership of a swimming-pool company. But in 1977 he had a stroke and went to Los Angeles hospital set up to care for people who had been in the film industry.

But the fund financing the hospital later asked that he be transferred to a mental hospital, saying that Weissmuller screamed and shouted like Tarzan and frightened the staff. A judge appointed Maria as guardian of Weissmuller and his estate — valued at SUS73B (now SUSII4O) a month.

The couple moved to Acapulco, Mexico, a few miles from the lake where he had made the film, “Tarzan and the Mermaids.”

In Acapulco he spent most of his time indoors, unable to talk or go in the water after a growth was removed by surgery to insert a tube in his throat for breathing.

His friends said that he suffered periodic depressions after the surgery, including a spell when he would pace the garden trying vainly to emit the famous Tarzan cry. His autobiography entitled “Water, World and Weissmuller” was published in 1967.