As a longtime animal lover, I have what I consider to be the best beat at The New York Times: covering animal health and science as a reporter for the Science desk. I’m also a sucker for a messy docuseries, so I was intrigued to learn about “Chimp Crazy,” an HBO docuseries released this fall.
The series, which focuses on people who keep chimpanzees as pets, follows the story of a chimp named Tonka, who had once been a bona fide star, performing in major Hollywood movies.
Tonka was part of the entertainment industry’s long history of using trained chimpanzees as performers. In the 1930s, for instance, a chimp named Jiggs rocketed to stardom after appearing in early Tarzan movies, ultimately commanding a salary of $350 a week; more than $8,000 in today’s terms. The use of these great ape actors ended less than a decade ago, with growing pressure from animal activists and the advent of CGI.
But many former performers are still alive, living in zoos and sanctuaries across the country.
This fall, I found myself wondering what had happened to these trained entertainment chimpanzees after the curtain came down. So I traveled to Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, to meet Eli and Susie, a bonded pair of former performers.
Susie was a petite 18-year-old, fiercely protective of 15-year-old Eli, among the last chimpanzees known to work in Hollywood. I felt drawn to Eli and Susie, and it was easy for me to understand why someone might want to forge a closer connection with a chimpanzee. It was thrilling when they walked up to the wall of their enclosure and tried to engage with me; disappointing when they retreated.
But what the zoo wanted was for Susie and Eli to ignore me. Since the chimps arrived, in 2020, zoo employees have been trying to help the animals distance themselves from humans. It was a fascinating, impossible-seeming task: How could people possibly teach Eli and Susie how to be chimps?
The zoo connected me with a pair of filmmakers who were making a docuseries about Eli. According to their research, Eli and Susie had an impressive list of credits, including appearances in episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “How I Met Your Mother” and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”; music videos for One Direction and the Offspring; and ads for Geico, Chevrolet and McDonald’s.
In 2018, the filmmakers had tagged along as Eli completed his final job: a role in a Bollywood movie filmed in Alabama. By then, Eli was big, strong and dangerously unpredictable. Actors were not allowed to have any direct contact with him. Earlier in his life, however, Eli had essentially been treated as a human, even sharing a hotel room with his trainer, who had raised Eli and Susie in his home, alongside his own children.
For many animal welfare advocates and primatologists, that’s one of the fundamental problems with keeping chimps as pets or performers. The chimps are not allowed to be, well, chimps — to live in the large social groups that are typical in the wild, or to express natural chimpanzee behaviors.
In fact, they’re often trained to behave in patently unnatural ways. In clips from their own work, Eli and Susie can be seen doing yoga, drinking from wine glasses, vacuuming and even carrying guns.
To help Eli and Susie tap into their inner apes, the zoo had integrated them into a larger group of chimps and was trying to give them time and space away from humans. To that end, their troop lived behind the scenes, out of public view.
That put me in a bit of a bind. In order to tell their stories, I would need to go see Eli and Susie, and presumably let them see me. The zoo assured me that I was welcome to visit, and that their goal was not to shield the chimps from humans altogether. But I was asked not to actively engage with the chimps or to encourage them when they tried to charm me with human gestures, which they’d been taught in their prior lives.
It turned out to be a tall order. At times, the animals seemed like big, hairy humans; a male named Patrick spent a lot of time sitting with his face pressed up against a window, staring out at me as he slowly ate an apple.
I had to remind myself that the apes were not there to entertain me. As I wrote my article, I realized that the best thing that I — and other members of the public — could do for chimps was to recognize that they were wild animals, with innate behaviors, expressions and needs that did not always resemble our own. What they needed, in other words, was not to be watched but to be seen.
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