His real name was Jànos, like the Roman god of beginnings and endings. A god with two faces that look in opposite directions. That’s just how it was Johnny Weissmuller. In his biography, the perfect athlete coexists with the fragile child, sentenced to a short life in bed; the movie star with a helpless and lonely old man forgotten by his friends. And, above all these silhouettes, a man swinging on a vine.
Johnny Weissmüller was born on this day 120 years ago. His nationality has also disappeared over time: Weissmuller It was, like Berlanga’s cinema, Austro-Hungarian. Nor does the city in which he spent his first months exist anymore: it now belongs to Romania, under the name of Freidorf. The world Johnny Weissmüller lived in left with him. As the only trace of his presence, the most famous scream of all time.
Tarzan in New York
What would be the embodiment of the American dream made its entry into the United States through Ellis Island. “Bring me those who are exhausted, your poor, the huddled masses that long to be free, the unhappy waste of your crowded coast,” reads the poem on the Statue of Liberty, the inaugural profile of the newcomers to New York. If they had known English, Johnny Weissmuller and their parents would have thought they were waiting for them.
The Weissmüller family moved to Chicago, where Johnny’s maternal grandparents resided. Months later, his brother Peter was born, the first all-American member of the tribe. And the life of the Weissmüllers passed peacefully for years. One more family, illuminated by the radiance of the American way of life and living in the suburb of a new city. A city built on the jungle.
Tarzan learns to swim
At nine years old, Johnny Weissmüller contracts polio. For Salk to discover the vaccine, there was almost half a century left. In those years, the most serious stages of this disease developed at Weissmüller’s age. Of every three patients like him, one suffered from total paralysis. The others could lose, forever, the mobility of their limbs. The games in the garden stopped, and Johnny Weissmüller secluded himself in his bedroom thinking that, perhaps, he would never run next to his brother again. And always beat him.
The doctor who treated the boy recommended, as a preventive treatment, swimming, so Johnny Weissmüller and his father began visiting Lake Michigan. The boy enjoyed a second life in the water and his unhappy days on land were strokes away. Johnny Weissmüller was a born swimmer that he defeated anyone who wanted to compete with him. Polio was one of his victims.
At age 11, he enrolled in the YMCA. To do this, she had to falsify his age and add 365 more days, the stipulated minimum. It wasn’t the last time Johnny Weissmüller took a shortcut in the pool. When the Olympic trials began, Weissmüller, who still lacked American nationality, feared she would miss them.
His mother devised an ingenious plan: since John’s middle name was Peter, like his brother (born in Chicago), she showed up with the Weissmüller youngest’s documentation under her arm. No one objected and Johnny, incognito and terrified, jumped into the water. The Olympic Games were waiting for him.
Tarzan wins five gold medals
Johnny Weissmüller became the first man to swim 100 meters in less than a minute. Between 1924 and 1928, won five gold medals: The Olympic Games in Paris and Amsterdam saw him excel, time after time, in each competition. He broke the world record every time, so that, after the first race, Weissmüller began to compete only with himself. In fact, he made time to join the Olympic water polo team, and won another medal, this time a bronze.
By the time he retired, he had gone two years without losing a race. Perhaps the most important of all occurred in 1927: while competing in the Chicago Marathon, a boat sank not far from where Weissmüller was, who ignored the competition and rushed towards the shipwreck.
He managed to save the lives of 11 people. Months later, now as a coast guard, collaborated in the rescue of more than 60 people (many of them children) after the sinking of a cruise ship. His next goal was of a different nature: Johnny Weissmüller wanted to meet Clark Gable. Because of him, he entered the film industry and, almost by accident, became Tarzan.
I, Tarzan, I, Johnny Weissmüller
Following his idol’s lead, Johnny Weissmüller appeared at MGM. The elusive swimmer managed to go as far as humanly possible until the doors of Hollywood closed. Weissmüller would be a few meters away from being in front of Clark Gable. Taking pity on the tender devotion of that six-foot-two young man, an assistant proposed a solution: if he said he was going to a movie casting, they would let him pass. “What movie?” asked Weissmüller. “Tarzan”the assistant responded.
Clark Gable and Johnny Weissmüller would only meet in a documentary, Hollywood, Hollywood, by Gene Kelly. In fact, Gable himself was up for the role of Tarzan, but an unknown athlete snatched it away from him. “They asked me if I could climb a rope, swim, things like that,” Weissmüller said in a television program. The five-time gold medalist shrugged humbly. Of course he could do it. And there was nothing more to talk about.
Between Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan and the mermaids, his last film as the king of the jungle, Johnny Weissmüller spent 16 years on top of the world. Total, Johnny was Tarzan in twelve feature films, directed by filmmakers such as Richard Thorpe. He also worked for Frank Borzage on one of his lesser known titles, Three days of love and faithplaying himself.
Weismüller became the center of attention. Until Cheetah, who was actually a male, fell in love with him. AND Maureen O’Sullivan, her Jane in seven films, had to suffer like the chimpanzee’s anger when she kissed Weissmüller. The earnings of the athlete Johnny became those of Johnny, the movie star: thanks to Tarzan, the Hungarian bought a house in Acapulco, where he filmed his last film as the king of the monkeys, and He was able to get divorced four times.
His wedding with the actress Lupe Velez It was a six-year cataclysm, punctuated by disputes, infidelities and fights (Weissmüller’s makeup artist on Tarzan had to work hard to camouflage the scratches and bruises that Vélez left on the king of the jungle’s body). One morning, Weissmüller arrived at his house and his dog, a German shepherd mix, did not come to meet him. Stranged, the actor looked for his pet throughout the house and found it curled up in a corner. She was dead.
Lupe Vélez made no effort to hide: she had killed him herself. She was fed up with Johnny Weissmüller, but her husband was away too much to take direct revenge. Weissmüller counterattacked by throwing the cage containing Lupe Vélez’s parrot out of the window. There were differences between Weissmüller and that animal: the actor suspected that his wife was cheating on him with Gary Cooperand the parrot ended up confirming it by shouting Gary’s name every time he saw Weissmüller.
Tarzan dies in Mexico
Johnny Weissmüller’s film career depended on his physical stamina, and it ended up failing him. Despite having played sports for years, his heart did not seem to notice. Johnny Weissmüller retired from cinema in 1957 and disappeared from public life.
It was learned, over time, that the Cuban Revolution found him playing golf in Havana, and that, cornered by Fidel’s troops, it only occurred to him to scream at the top of his lungs like Tarzan. The revolutionaries recognized him instantly and kindly accompanied him to the airport so that he could leave the island safely. In the seventies, Weissmüller suffered several heart attacks and was admitted to a hospital specializing in actors and film personalities. His head also gave out: in the eighties, his wife declared that she no longer recognized her.
From here come the never confirmed rumors that Johnny Weissmüller died believing he was Tarzan. According to these testimonies, Johnny Weissmüller’s last words were not even words, but the simian scream that made him so popular in the 1930s. No co-stars (except the latest Chita monkey, Samanta) or family attended his funeral, except for his wife.
More than a thousand Mexicans accompanied Weissmüller’s coffin through the streets of Acapulco. Upon reaching the cemetery, those carrying the coffin carefully placed it in the ditch in which Weissmüller’s body still rests, and a howl broke the stillness of the ceremony. It was a recording of Tarzan’s scream, which Weissmüller had requested to be played at that moment. The scream of a young, athletic man running through a jungle in black and white.
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