Ranch House Of The Apes

Several years ago, in anticipation of a family we did not yet have but were planning on brewing up, my wife and I went looking for a house. Not that our old house wasn’t big enough. It was. We lived in a swanky Spanish hacienda just above Los Angeles’ World Famous Sunset Strip. The house was built directly into the hillside, to which it clung desperately. In fact, all the homes in our neighborhood looked as if they’d been tossed against the Hollywood Hills as part of a large-scale carnival centerfuge ride.

As a result, all the rooms in our house were stacked upon one another, and our then-penciled-in baby’s room would have been two flights down, and she (it turned out) would have had to wail into an intercom at feeding time, and then, I assumed, we would yank her up to us via an elaborate system of pulleys.

Also, more importantly, the World Famous Sunset Strip is a billboard-walled sluice-gate of cultural diarrhea, and no child should have to grow up in its shadow.

To the Valley (!), where we found ourselves clomping through what the pamphlet described as, “a roomy two-story ranch house in a quiet woodsy setting”. To our astonishment, it turned out to be a roomy two-story ranch house in a quiet, woodsy setting. It was perfect. It was also at the upper ceiling of our price range. In fact, it climbed up to the rafters, burst through the ceiling, and was up on the roof scaling the chimney of our price range. We were about to excuse ourselves, fake smiles affixed, when the realtor tossed ten seemingly-innocent words our way. “The house used to belong to that actor, Roddy McDowall.”

Our heads swiveled around like two barn owls gliding past a field mouse get-to-know-you grooming party.

“You know him,” the realtor continued, “he was a child actor in the forties and then went on to be in those ape movies.”

“Yes. Those ape movies,” I huffed. “Those silly, little inconsequential apes movies! Excuse me.”

My wife followed me outside.

“It’s a good thing it’s perfect, ‘cause I guess we’re buying it,” she said.

“We can’t. No one will believe this was a coincidence! People will think I’m really nuts.” An arched eyebrow from my beloved assured me I had cashed the “not-a-nut” chit a long time ago. You see, my friends do think I’m a bit of a nut. A Planet Of The Apes nut, specifically.

The original Planet Of The Apes premiered on network television in the fall of 1973, when I was nine-years-old. I saw a commercial for it one night, and immediately became unhinged. I recall it vividly. We were watching television when suddenly The Bob Newhart Show was gone and across the screen galloped a gorilla. A horseback-ridin’, rifle-totin’, leather jerkin-wearin’ gorilla was chasing Charlton Heston, loincloth a-flappin’, across a cornfield.

“I’m watching it!” I bellowed. I was the fifth boy in a family of six, and if you wanted to watch a TV show, in those pre-Tivo times, you had to “call it”. As the runt of the litter, my demands were frequently over-ruled, but since I had made this proclamation with un-runt-like intensity, standing atop the coffee table with tiny fists clenched, no one challenged me.

That movie rang me like a bell. My room became a shrine. I subscribed to Marvel Comics’ Planet Of The Apes magazine. Those films were as important to me as baseball and blowing stuff up with M-80’s were to my brothers.

Years later, a psychiatrist explained to me that my position in our family was probably what prompted my preternatural affection for the Apes saga. “Growing up small, surrounded by large, intimidating siblings, you related to Charlton Heston’s rage at being powerless.”

That could be. Which is not to say there isn’t something undeniably appealing about watching gorillas dressed like Fonzie aiming shotguns at Moses dressed like Tarzan.

Over the years, my obsession with these movies became something of a running joke amongst with my friends, an inextricable aspect of my personality, a surefire deal-closer when trying to score with the ladies (one of these statements is false, can you find it?), but who would believe that I bought Roddy McDowall’s house by chance? To the casual observer, it would look like a grotesque attempt by an overzealous fan to obtain the ultimate collectible, a veritable orgasm of fiscal recklessness.

That said, I don’t feel as if I’ve come into ownership of the place as much become its steward. Roddy was a famous and frequent party-thrower, and anyone who was ever anyone has at one time gnawed Fiddle-Faddle on his pool deck. Our downstairs bathroom, once a comfort station for Hollywood’s A list, has been removed en toto from the house and reconstructed on the floor of the Hollywood History Museum, its walls, full of photos of the famous and very famous mucking casually about, a testament to this modest home’s glitzy guest list. Note the picture Betty Davis and Harrison Ford sitting on the window bench my daughter now sprawls across to watch Wonder Pets.

It’s rare day indeed when I bump into a show biz fancy-pants who hasn’t been to my house. Once at a party, I had the good fortune to meet one of the key make-up artist’s from the Apes film. “You live in Roddy’s place?” he marveled “I have something for you.”

Two days later a box arrived containing one of the chimpanzee extra’s masks from the movie. The background apes (you read that right) didn’t endure the grueling six-hour make-up process the principals did, and wore specially designed over-the-head rubber masks, one of which I know held in my trembling fanboy grip. With no one home, unable to restrain myself, I yanked it firmly down over my head.

Here’s a funny fact about polyurethane rubber. Over time, its chemical compound starts to decay, and it undergoes a process called “off-gassing”, where the toxic exhaust of its deterioration is released. In the case of, let’s say, a chimpanzee mask, this gas settles in the muzzle of its mouth. One could say that an over-the-head chimpanzee mask is, in fact, the perfect vessel for capturing these fumes. And when said fumes have brewing for two or three decades, they are exquisitely ripe.

I found this out when I tried to breath. “Ungoo!” I grunted, as thirty-odd years of monkey mustard gas knuckle-punched my nostrils. Stunned, I staggered back and tried to clear my head. Then I coughed, sending what poisonous vapors were not in my nose up into the safety of my eyeballs. Blind and hacking, my head encased in a simian gas chamber, I zig-zagged about the room. “I can’t die like this,” I thought, “it’s too hilarious.”

Finally, I got down on my knees wrenched the mask from my head. A chimpanzee face stared back at me from the floor, impassive, but mocking.

As well I deserved. I look my collection of Apes memorabilia, and wonder what it is I’m really trying to obtain. Don’t I just want to relive that original thrill? The past is a conundrum, yours eternally, gone forever. No reclaimed baseball card, vintage tea set or model train is going to transmute into a time machine and zoom you back there. Then again, these are big words from a Planet Of the Apes fan who lives in Roddy McDowall’s house, with a now-ventilated chimp mask on the mantle, swaddled in the cool leather embrace of Charlton Heston’s original loincloth.

Or hadn’t I mentioned that?