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JOHNNY SHEFFIELD 1931-2010
 Johnny Sheffield in his seventies, working online after he wrote his memoirs for TheColumnists.com |
The Hollywood jungle icon
who wrote for this website
of TheColumnists.com
There was a time--long, long ago--when I thought it would be the most wonderful thing in the world to be a Hollywood kid named Johnny Sheffield. In his real life, he got to do all the things I most wanted to do as a kid--swing on jungle vines with Tarzan, ride on the back of an elephant and pal around with that fun-loving character, Cheetah the Chimp.
Well, when I got to know Johnny Sheffield a great many years later, he punctured a good many of my fantasies about his childhood in "the jungle." For one thing, those jungle vines were really ropes and they weren't very high up when he was doing the swinging on them. For another, driving your own car with a starlet cuddled up next to you impressed him a lot more than riding elephant backs. As for Cheetah, he was all right as far as chimps go, but you didn't want to exactly hang out with him.
And yet Johnny didn't pop all my balloons. The truth is he really loved those years he spent in the make believe jungles of Hollywood as Tarzan's adopted son called "Boy" and really felt he had it made when he got his own jungle series playing "Bomba," the jungle boy.
Johnny Sheffield died earlier this month at age 79. He had been up a ladder, trimming a palm tree at his home in Southern California, when he slipped and fell. He suffered a heart attack after the fall and they couldn't get his heart beating again. It was a shock to all his friends and to his family, who expected him to go on for quite a few more years.
Johnny was an incredibly colorful character and I miss him already. We met in the 1990s when the American Movie Classics (AMC) cable network staged a "Tarzan" event and showed all the films made by Johnny Weissmuller at MGM and RKO from 1932 to 1948. Sheffield joined Weissmuller in that series in 1939 as "Boy" in "Tarzan Finds A Son!" and stayed with it for seven more films, leaving in 1947 after "Tarzan and the Huntress."
He then went to Monogram Pictures where he starred as "Bomba" in 11 films, ending with "Lord of the Jungle" in 1955. Based on a series of novels for kids by Roy Rockwell, the "Bomba" films were about a Tarzan-like character who was in his late teens. (Sheffield had grown into a strapping young college boy, a natural athlete who excelled in water polo.) After "Bomba", Johnny tried a TV series pilot made by his father, actor-producer Reginald Sheffield. It was called "Bantu" and Johnny rode a zebra in that one. It didn't catch on. Johnny realized he'd probably taken the "jungle boy" thing as far as he could go with it and retired from screen acting.
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"Bantu," the unsold TV series pilot that turned out to be his last appearance on screen in a jungle role. |
My first chat with Johnny was a telephone interview for that AMC special event. We really hit it off that day and began an email relationship that lasted for the better part of 15 years. I persuaded Johnny to tell his own story in his own words and he wrote "Memoirs of A Jungle Boy" for this website, a two-part column that has been one of our most-read features of the past decade. Later, he wrote a column about his latest golf hero, Tiger Woods.
Our friendship deepened to the point that Johnny and his lovely wife, Patti, came to stay with my wife and I in our home in Blaine, Washington, and he co-hosted a program on his career and the Tarzan/Bomba films with me at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA. The crowd loved it. We had a great time together and he extended an open invitation to us to visit him and Patti at their home in Chula Vista, CA. Sadly, that visit, postponed quite a few times for one reason or another, is never going to happen.
Johnny didn't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for himself that he never had an adult movie career after "Bomba." His film career as a boy earned him a college education and launched him on a new career in home construction. He fessed up to having raised a good deal of hell in his youth and had battled alcohol addiction for years. What he didn't need to tell me is that it isn't easy for child stars to carve out adult careers, especially if they were type-cast as such an iconic screen character as "Boy," the son of the movies' all-time most popular Tarzan. This is the problem that many other popular young Hollywood players had to deal with, such as Jerry Mathers, who has never been able to shake his childhood image as TV's Beaver Cleaver from "Leave It To Beaver."
Mathers has gone with the flow and let people love him as The Beaver forever. Johnny Sheffield did that to a certain extent, although he generally avoided taking part in any events that weren't respectful of the Tarzan/Boy canon.
Since Johnny has told his own story for us in "Memoirs of A Jungle Boy," which we're repeating this week in his memory, I won't spend any time in this column repeating any of the quotes he gave me over the years because he uses most of the better ones in his own memoirs. Let me just say that he genuinely loved Johnny Weissmuller, the great Olympic swimming star, who taught him to swim and always treated him like a friend and not some kid he had to put up with on the movie set.
Instead, I'd like to mention just a few things about Johnny Sheffield that really endeared him to me in the times we spent together. For example, he could give out a tremendous "Tarzan yell" even when he was in his 70s. I know this because he did it one morning when we met for breakfast in our kitchen. My wife and I live on a golf course at the Washington resort known as Semiahmoo (named for the Indian tribe that used to dwell here) and there are, I'm sure, still some golfers who are recovering from the earth-shaking Tarzan yell Johnny summoned up that morning.
Johnny was a very funny guy, but he also was a smart one. He knew computers inside and out, for instance, and spent one whole evening re-programming mine and adding several programs he downloaded from the internet. He was a cutting edge dude on computers and I always took his advice.
Johnny had lots and lots of friends all over the world and he kept in touch with most of them through his computers. I have saved a great many of his emails to me and they're incredibly rich in the sort of "jungle telegraph" jokes we used to lay on one another. For example, when he heard I was trying to block some housing development up here that I thought was bad for our natural environment, he offered to send a herd of elephants up to stomp the structures into the ground as soon as the developer put them up. I mean, that's what Tarzan and Bomba used to do, right?
Johnny and I also used to banter over the meaning of the word "umgawa," which is uttered so frequently in his Tarzan movies. Though I'm sure he didn't get this from any linguistic expert, Johnny said "umgawa" was a positive word. If you look at a shapely woman, wiggle your eyebrow and say "Umgawa!," he assured me she will know you're paying her a compliment. Johnny and I used "umgawa" for our formal greetings to each other and our farewells.
And so I'm going to use it right now as
my final message to my "jungle boy" pal,
a bright and energetic child actor whose youthful performances
are still as good as they were 60 years ago.
"Umgawa! Johnny. I know you and Big Johnny are looking down at us from way up on the escarpment where only the bravest dare to go. Enjoy the view, my friend, and watch out for that damned chimpanzee who somehow found his way up there, too!"
©2010 by Ron Miller. The photos were from the collection of Johnny Sheffield and were provided to this website by him in 2000 and 2001. This column first posted on Oct. 25, 2010.
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