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Jane has done better on screen since Hollywood got liberated
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In the novels about Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs always treated Jane Porter, the ape-man's main squeeze, with considerable dignity. She was loyal, even-tempered and very understanding, even when Tarzan was off playing around with that sexy bitch La, the Queen of Opar, who always had the hots for Tarzan.
If you had to fault Burroughs for anything when it came to Jane, it probably was that he really wasn't all that interested in what she was doing. Let's face it, he was a century behind when it came to women. Though he seldom made her look really ridiculous, Burroughs apparently thought her job was to be rescued by Tarzan or, in those times when she wasn't in jungle jeopardy, to be a good homemaker.
To his credit, Burroughs didn't make her live in a treehouse. Lord and Lady Greystoke had a plantation and entertained people who wore clothes, most of the time. I don't remember if she ever let any of those dark-skinned Waziri warriors come into her parlor, but if she did, I'm pretty sure she made them wash their feet first.
But Jane became much more important when she joined Tarzan in the movies. And she was right there from the start, too--in 1918 when "Tarzan of the Apes" first came to the screen as a silent movie starring Elmo Lincoln as the first screen ape-man.
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The first movie Jane was Enid Markey, who seems a lot more charming when you actually look at the movie. In still photos, she looks like The Patchwork Girl of Oz. In 1918, she probably was considered quite a fox and, in fact, made a lot of movies opposite silent era macho men, like cowboy William S. Hart. Her Jane isn't far from the Burroughs Jane.
Markey made two movies as Jane--the other was "The Romance of Tarzan," also in 1918--then was replaced by Karla Schramm. (Rumor has it that the second Jane was supposed to be actress Evelyn Fariss, but she weasled out when she learned they were going to use real lions in her scenes.) Lincoln was replaced by a non-actor they named Gene Pollar, a real-life fireman. Schramm made two more pictures as Jane, but hardly anybody alive today has ever seen them.
Louise Lorraine and Dorothy Dunbar played Jane in silent pictures made in 1921 and 1927, but the next really classy mate for Tarzan was Natalie Kingston, who has the distinction of playing Tarzan's mate twice, but only once as Jane. (They called her Mary Trevor in her first picture, "Tarzan the Mighty.")
Kingston was a tall, lanky-looking Jane with a rather sophisticated air. You can see her readily these days in "Tarzan the Tiger," a 1928 serial from Universal pictures, which is mostly silent, but has a few sound sequences. As I recall, screaming was one of Kingston's major talents--and she did a good deal of it in that film because she was sold into slavery by some real rascals.
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Left: Glenn Morris with Eleanor Holm in "Tarzan's Revenge"; right, Natalie Kingston with Frank Merrill in "Tarzan the Tiger."
Her ape-man was Frank Merrill, a true physical specimen and one of the best of the silent era Tarzans. The bad news for Kingston, though, is that they cast Lillian Worth as Queen La of Opar--and she pretty much scorches the screen with her hot-to-trot antics, wearing precious little I might add. After watching a few sequences with Queen La, Kingston's Jane seems like a cold shower.
Then, in 1932, MGM produced the first all-talking Tarzan picture and hired an amazingly good actress named Maureen O'Sullivan to play Jane in "Tarzan the Ape-Man." O'Sullivan also happened to be an incredibly attractive and playful lady, so the films she made as Jane opposite Johnny Weissmuller today are considered the most entertaining of them all, even if they weren't very faithful to Burroughs.
To
this day, the swimming sequence between Weissmuller and O'Sullivan
in their second film together, "Tarzan and His Mate,"
can steam your windows, even on video. They both appear to be
nude and the erotic quality of those scenes holds up even in
this era of routine nudity in movies.
In 1994, I chatted with O'Sullivan, who still did small roles
in films and television, but was probably better known to 1990's
filmgoers as Mia Farrow's mother. I asked her about those scandalous
scenes.
"I've never seen them," she told me, claiming most of the underwater swimming was done by a double. "I have claustrophobia and couldn't even put my face under water. I didn't do any swimming except for close-ups above water. I'm not a swimmer, not an athlete at all. That was all doubles I hate to tell you, but it's true."
O'Sullivan felt the role of Jane had hurt her career, held her back from landing roles she might have been a contender for at MGM. She wound up making six films as Jane, then left her jungle hubby, Weissmuller, and her adopted "Boy," Johnny Sheffield, after "Tarzan's New York Adventure" in 1942.
One of her biggest complaints about playing Jane was having to work with the chimps. She liked them at first, but they soon drove her bananas, if you'll pardon the expression.
"They were all homosexual anyway," she told me. "They were crazy for Johnny and very jealous of me, so they always tried to bite me if I got near him."
Though the MGM series with Weissmuller, O'Sullivan and Sheffield was the real money-making series, there were other Tarzan films during the 1930s. Buster Crabbe, another Olympic swimming champ like Weissmuller, played the ape-man in the serial "Tarzan the Fearless," but went without any Jane. (Jacqueline Wells was his female co-star, but she played "Mary Roberts.") In 1935, Burroughs produced his own Tarzan serial, "New Adventures of Tarzan," starring Herman Brix as Tarzan. Again, there was no Jane, but Ula Holt played a similar character named Ula Vale. Then in 1938, "Tarzan's Revenge" showed up from rival studio 20th Century-Fox, starring swimming star Eleanor Holm as "Eleanor," a clone of Jane.
Holm was known as something of a wild character in those days--she'd been booted off the 1936 Olympic team for "drinking champagne"--and was in demand for lots of quasi-show business jobs when she was signed for the Tarzan picture. Her "Jane" character was pretty saucy and independent, like Holm herself, and she did all the really ambitious swimming in the picture opposite one-shot ape-man Glenn Morris, the 1936 Olympic decathlon champ. Many have wondered how she might have showed up Weissmuller or Crabbe if they ever jumped into a jungle river together.
Holm definitely got along better with the chimps thatn Maureen O'Sullivan. In fact, in a 1997 interview, she told me: "Cheetah had quite a crush on me. It held up shooting sometimes because certain parts of his anatomy would start to show. It was very funny."
However, Holm didn't get along with all the animals, especially a certain crocodile. She was shocked that they were going to use live crocodiles for the seen where she has to turn on Olympic-record speed to escape being a meal for one.
"They had wired the jaws shut, so I wasn't bitten by it," she told me, "but it could swipe you with that big tail. I was scared to death!"
Which may explain why the look of relief on her face when she finally scrambled on shore was so convincing for a woman with no previous acting experience.
She also liked Glenn Morris, even though the critics often cite him as the all-time worst of the Tarzans. In one scene, he has to pick her up and run with her to save her life. She was bowled over to find out he was so strong that it was virtually effortless for him.
"He was a strong guy," she said. "I had to admire him. He took it all quite seriously."
Weissmuller and Sheffield made a couple of Jane-free movies, then the part was recast for the 1945 "Tarzan and the Amazons" with lovely Brenda Joyce taking over the role. Joyce stayed with the part for five films and wound up as the mate of a new Tarzan, Lex Barker, in "Tarzan's Magic Fountain," after Weissmuller retired from the role.
Barker set a certain kind of record in the "Jane" department: He never had the same one twice, which may or may not reflect anything about his overall charm. His Janes: Brenda Joyce, Vanessa Brown, Virginia Houston, Dorothy Hart and Joyce Mackenzie.
The next Tarzan, Gordon Scott, made five films, but his female co-star was "Jane" in only one of them: "Tarzan's Fight for Life" in 1958. That was Eve Brent.
In 1959, MGM remade "Tarzan the Ape Man" with Denny Miller as Tarzan and Joanne Barnes as Jane "Parker" instead of "Porter."
By the 1960s, when the feminist revolution was under way in America, Tarzan went on his longest Jane-less stretch. Perhaps the traditional Jane seemed out of step with the feminist movement. Whatever the reason, the screen Tarzans generally had their adventures with fiercely independent young women who had their own careers. None of them seemed the least bit interested in treehouse living.
In 1981, the weirdest of all Tarzan movies finally brought Jane back to the screen with a vengeance in "Tarzan the Ape Man," a bizarre remake of the original Weissmuller/O'Sullivan film, only this time the woman was on top. Playing Jane was screen bombshell Bo Derek and her manager-husband, talent-free John Derek, was directing, so the movie was much more about Jane than it was about Tarzan (Miles O'Keeffe). It eclipsed "Tarzan's Revenge" as the all-time worst.
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Left: Glamorous Andie MacDowell in "Greystoke"; Nasty Bo Derek as a pulchritudinous Jane in "Tarzan the Ape-Man."
Three years later, the most spectacular of all Tarzan films arrived: "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes." Shot on authentic jungle locations with a massive budget, it attempted to be the first Tarzan movie that was faithful to the Burroughs original. Actually, it wasn't all that faithful, but it was big and beautiful and frequently exciting.
However, the film's ape-man was terribly miscast in the person of slim, runty Christopher Lambert, a French actor whose only asset was the fact that he looked like he'd been raised by apes. Much, much better was their Jane, the most photogenic of them all--Andie MacDowell, a real-life model. MacDowell's performance was reasonably good and she has gone on to have a long and interesting film career.
Among the post-MacDowell "Janes," the weirdest certainly was played by Kim Crosby in the 1989 TV movie "Tarzan in Manhattan." In that ridiculous film, Tarzan (Joe Lara) comes to New York and ends up in the company of a Brooklynese "Jane," who drives a taxi cab! She was definitely a modern girl, like it or not.
A much better spin on the modern "Jane" came with the new "Tarzan" television series in 1991, starring Wolf Larson and filmed on location in Guatemala's jungles. She was a French model-turned-actress named Lydia Denier, whose "Jane" was a scientific researcher, working in Tarzan's neck of the woods.
"Tarzan isn't married to Jane," Denier told me over lunch one day, "except under the law of the jungle. I'm not sure what that is, but I'm going to find out!"
Come to think of it, I don't think we ever saw Jane wearing a wedding ring in the movies. Which is probably just as well. Tarzan probably would have made her wear it in her nose.
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
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