MORE MONKEY MADNESS

 Oh, this has to stop happening. Like when I took an evening off from praying for someone who seems never to get enough Aves and entrusted her to Saint Therese and watched The Chase which to my amazement has one key scene of a washer-woman who has an altar to the Little Flower.

This weekend, I watched Sunset Boulevard, a movie I’ve avoided for some time because no word of a lie, I’ve known a few people in my life who are uncannily similar to the characters.

It concerns Joe, a struggling screenwriter (who reminded me of my younger self) and a jaded movie star who had been one of the greatest silent movie actresses of her day. I wasn't going to think of the rights and wrongs of a pet monkey for a long time...

Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, the faded, aging and drunk-on-delusion movie queen. Her eyelashes are edged in black mascara triangles that make her eyes look like a shark’s gaping maw. Norma welcomes the lost writer, Joe Gillis into her home, thinking he is the undertaker who will provide a red satin-lined coffin for her pet who has just passed. 

Then she pulls back a silk sheet to reveal the head of a dead chimp. Joe is glib in the face of her agonizing grief and off-handily tells her he is not from a funeral home. Little does he fathom he is her new caprice, her chimp replacement.

In a scene of exquisite foreshadowing, Joe spies Norma in a black veil burying her chimp, she is like a mafia widow laying to rest a small child. 

Yesterday, a friend informed me that Michael Jackson (who was put on a pedestal as being saintly and sane long before my time when he was a beloved singer) had a pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. 

There was an intimacy surrounding Jackson’s relationship with the chimp, like father and child, and it is often referenced as a sign of Jackson’s private and later public decompensation. The chimp outlived, his master or servant, and is 42, the same age as me. 

In this era having a monkey as a pet is a coda for madness, but in Saint Thomas More’s era, the 1500s, it was considered a status symbol and a sign of having a daring, courageous side to your personality. Catherine of Aragon, who is considered an uncanonized Saint by many, had one of her most noted portraits executed with a chimp resting on her wrist. The primate looks like the baby boy she never bore. It’s like she got bitten good with monkey love.

 I'm with Jerry Seinfeld who joked that if you are at the monkey level of pet ownership it’s time to have children. 

But I'm also with Saint Thomas More - he had 5 daughters and 1 son - so his monkey was also their pet. It might be best to have both a large brood of children before thinking of getting a monkey.  Had Thomas Moore and Catherine of Aragon known that they would one day have something in common with the deranged Norma Desmond and Michael Jackson, they may have made a different choice of pet, irrespective of owning a monkey being a sign of prestige and bravery.

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All pictures used are in the public domain. The painting of Catherine of Aragon was executed by Lucas Horenbout.