Taming of the School : Ralph Helfer Brings His 40 Years of Exotic-Animal Training for Films and TV to the Classroom

The night’s special guest had finally arrived, covered in olive green fur and shuffling nervously through a side door. Pinocchio was obviously a baboon, the only baboon in a room crowded with smiling, staring humans. And if Ralph Helfer was suddenly upstaged, he didn’t seem at all surprised.

Helfer had just spent two hours lecturing his class about his 40 years as an exotic-animal trainer for films and television. Tonight’s focus at the Learning Tree University was on primates: gorillas, chimps, orangutans and baboons much like this visitor, now momentarily distracted by ripe chunks of banana. Minutes earlier, Helfer had shown some videotape of Bo Derek, topless and frolicking with a stoop-shouldered orangutan, in “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

But this green animal, this squatting baboon with these cooing students in Chatsworth, was real, and he was staring back with sharp, suspicious eyes. Helfer just smiled. At next week’s “Wild Animal Seminar,” he would bring some lizards and snakes. And after that, he planned to bring a cougar and a jaguar.

These Tuesday night seminars, and a scheduled field trip Dec. 8 to a local animal compound, offer a dramatic glimpse into the raising and training of wild animals. Helfer’s so-called “affection training” method, which seeks to establish a respectful bond between animal and trainer, is emphasized.

“There’s a tremendous thirst for knowledge in the public for getting back to nature,” Helfer said after class. “You find some people who would like to get in the business, who like the fantasy of being a trainer, some who want to get into research of animals in Africa. You have all these different hopes and dreams, and I shatter some of them. But I do it in a way that’s as gentle as possible, telling them the truth.”

In classes, Helfer is quick to mention the injuries and life-threatening situations he experienced in the early days of his Hollywood career as an animal handler. On one movie set, he was attacked and bitten by an outraged lion before being saved by a blast from a fire extinguisher. He has been chased and stomped by an ostrich in heat, and, in the back seat of a moving car, nearly crushed by a carsick bear.

Most of these events, he said, occurred in the days when the general attitude toward animal actors was “beat the hell out of them.”

Before affection training, “animals were brought in with steel-barred cages, with whip and chair, and it was terrifying,” said Helfer, 60, muscular in a Western shirt and boots. “And it was expensive. So when I brought a lion in the back of my station wagon and took it up the elevator at 20th-Century Fox and walked it in--with the secretary jumping on the desk--people couldn’t believe it.”

In fact, many believed that Helfer had drugged the lion. But he was quick to insist that a drugged animal would be less likely to understand or hear a trainer’s commands, and would consequently be more dangerous. “They couldn’t accept that maybe I really came up with a breakthrough.

“The communication between man and animal is reached through their emotions, rather than by any physical needs,” he explained. “It’s using part their world and part yours to find a meeting ground where you both feel relaxed and secure.”

Helfer said that by the 1960s he had assembled a collection of 1,800 animals, the largest and busiest collection working in film and television at that time. Africa U.S.A, his 385-acre compound in Soledad Canyon, provided animals for such shows as “Daktari” and “Gentle Ben.” The property--with its lakes, hills and forests--also served as an occasional location for “Star Trek” and other programs. Later, Helfer would supply Clint Eastwood’s orangutan sidekick for “Any Which Way You Can.”

The company “took animals to Europe and Israel and Sri Lanka and all around the world,” Helfer said. “I think the key is that they wanted safe animals. They wanted animals they could put with a Bob Hope or a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis Presley.”

In spite of this success, Helfer closed Africa U.S.A. about 10 years ago and moved to Kenya, where he now lives seven to eight months a year. Outside Nairobi, he is slowly building another animal collection, which he uses for productions as well as for his own enjoyment. Helfer spends much of his time writing and producing books and films. His first book, “The Beauty of the Beasts” (Tarcher, $10.95 paperback) in 1990, was largely a memoir of his days in Hollywood.

In recent years, he has lectured and taught exotic-animal courses during the few months he spends each year in the United States. The animals he brings to class come from local trainers. And among the students at the Learning Tree primate seminar were at least three women who had already taken a similar course with Helfer at Los Angeles City College.

“I love animals and plan on going to Africa,” said Donna Quinn, who owns Nature’s Window, a Beverly Hills store that sells animal-themed merchandise such as T-shirts and jewelry. “And the more you know about animals the more you can appreciate them. It’s just something that I enjoy.”

But neither Quinn nor Helene Oppenheimer of Hollywood were quite as eager to revisit Helfer’s reptile seminar. “We’re not doing the reptiles again,” said Oppenheimer, a self-described “elephant collector” who wore a necklace decorated with elephant shapes. “I touched a snake for the first and last time of my life. That was it.”

Women constitute about 70% of his classes, Helfer said. “Women seem to be more interested; they’re more of the earth, their roots seem to be different from men. In my lifetime with animals, I’ve found that the women are in many ways better with the animals than the men.”

The animal-training industry, he complained, breaks down in the opposite direction.

“A woman would raise a tiger, and would be the best with that tiger,” Helfer said. “And the men said they wouldn’t go on the job with her, because if anything happened they would end up saving her.” What they were really saying is that they didn’t want to share the credit with a woman, he said.

In his own work, Helfer said, his wife, Toni, has been a key partner. And Helfer’s experience with women relating to animals goes back to his years growing up in the same apartment building as actress Carol Burnett, teaming up with her to find snakes in their Hollywood neighborhood.

He discovered another comrade in Marilyn Monroe during the production of “The River of No Return.” While filming a scene, Helfer’s trained raccoon panicked and hid after a fake tree crashed to the ground. While most of the cast and crew took a break, Helfer was left to find his raccoon.

“Marilyn didn’t go to lunch,” Helfer remembered. “She went with me, and we went underneath the set, between all the pillars and dust. When we found the raccoon, we sat under there and talked about animals and horses. She had the raccoon in her lap and was petting him. She didn’t want to go back out to work.”

After this round of seminars at the Learning Tree end in December, Helfer will fly back to his ranch in Kenya. But he’ll return from Africa in the spring to teach a new course on elephants.

“We’re going to be able to have people on them, washing them, training them,” Helfer promised. “It’s going to be really spectacular.”

For information on Helfer’s “Wild Animal Seminars” at the Learning Tree University, 20920 Knapp St., Chatsworth, call (818) 882-5599.

for pix slugged ANIMAL VI