The Fruits of Aping Fiction : ‘Tarzan’ Literary Group to Honor Gorilla Who Saved Boy

For Bob Cook, it was life imitating art. The Florida real estate broker kept seeing TV newscasts featuring the videotape of Binti, the female gorilla who last week rescued a human toddler who had fallen into the ape pit at a Chicago area zoo.

“The story touched me very much,” said Cook, 68, of the seemingly tender way the lowland gorilla, bearing her own baby on her back, had gathered the unconscious 3-year-old human boy into her arms, shielded him from other gorillas and carried him to where rescue workers could reach him.

As a member of the Burroughs Bibliophiles Literary Society, Cook instantly saw the parallels between Binti’s behavior and that of Kala, the female ape who saves the life of an orphaned English infant in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 novel “Tarzan of the Apes”--the deed that begins the entire deathless Tarzan saga when the infant grows up to become the jungle king.

“Kala did almost the same thing,” Cook said. “She saw Tarzan lying there, and she picked him up and nurtured him.”

As a result, Binti will be honored tonight with the first Kala Award at the society’s convention, being held this weekend at the Warner Center Marriot in Woodland Hills.

Binti, who has already been feted with hundreds of pounds of bananas, will be honored with a plaque honoring her “for her rescue, protection and return of a male human child . . . and for displaying extraordinary alertness, compassion and bravery in the face of her nervous and agitated fellow gorillas.”

Cook admits he thought the award might catch the eye of the press and thus raise the profile of the 750-member group, whose purpose is to celebrate Burroughs the author and his approximately 70 books.

But, according to Cook, his main impulse was to honor a creature who is a credit to her species. “I wanted to acknowledge that great act,” he said.

Binti herself will not attend [maternal obligations will keep her in Chicago]. Instead, the plaque will be presented to Jerry Spannraft, a Burroughs Bibliophile from Illinois, who will present it, in turn, to the Brookfield Zoo.

First published in 1912 in the magazine “All-Story,” “Tarzan of the Apes” was the third novel written by Burroughs, who was born in Chicago in 1875. One of the first writers to protect his characters with trademarks as well as copyrights, Burroughs long lived the lifestyle of a gentleman rancher in the San Fernando Valley on the river of profits from books, films and other adaptations starring his ever-popular ape-man character.

After he died in 1950, his ashes were buried under a tree in front of the headquarters of the Burroughs family corporation on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana, the Valley community Burroughs loved and named after the character who made him rich enough to live there.

Actually, members of the society don’t call their convention a convention. They call it a “Dum Dum,” the term Burroughs coined for the simian convocations in the Tarzan novels. (“Tarzan” means “white skin.”)

This year’s meeting is the 35th, featuring everything from the sale of Burroughs first editions to screenings of his home movies.

Roy and Dela White of Denver were among about 100 conventioneers circling the sales tables Friday. They have a collection of 10,000 Burroughs books, comics, toys and other materials that has attracted national attention.

“Our children grew up and got married and that gave us a basement room, a large basement room,” Dela White said. Because they have two sons, both of whom want to inherit the collection, the Whites have found two copies of every Burroughs’ first edition, most of them complete with the dust jackets that make their value soar.

Laurence Dunn, 41, had come to the convention from London, where he supports his Tarzan habit as a structural engineer. Dunn spends $15,000 a year on material related to the ape-man and his creator. That figure includes travel, such a recent weekend journey to Manhattan to snap up a new line of Tarzan toys unavailable in England.

Dunn said he fell under Burroughs’ spell when he was 16, drawn to the half-naked woman on the cover of a British edition of Burroughs’ “Lost on Venus.” Dunn loved the story under the lurid book jacket and an expensive obsession was born.

Fans lined up to exchange a few words with Vanessa Brown and get autographed copies of publicity stills from her 1950 film, “Tarzan and the Slave Girl.” Brown, who lives in North Hollywood, was 22 when she played Jane to Lex Barker’s chest-pounder.

Brown finds it ironic that fans are willing to pay $5 per signature because of her association with a forgettable jungle romance. In her view, the high point of her career was the female lead in “The Seven-Year Itch” on Broadway, the part that boosted Marilyn Monroe’s career in the movie version.

Brown, who was once poet Carl Sandburg’s landlady, said she loved swinging on vines and riding an elephant during the making of the movie. The only problem, she said, was the flak she had to take from her fellow students at UCLA: “I was on the paper, the Bruin, and they ribbed me about the film. It was lowbrow.”

Nearby sat Gordon Scott, who donned the loincloth in films after Barker, filling requests for autographs at $10 for a black-and-white, $15 for a color photo.

Tarzan was the first movie role for Scott, now 70 and living in Sherman Oaks. An agent spotted the 6-foot-3 swimmer and hammer thrower when he was a lifeguard at the Sahara in Las Vegas. He played Tarzan seven times between 1954 and 1961, doing all his own stunts, he said.

Once, he recalled, he was walking hand-in-hand with a 50-pound chimp when the animal became startled, “and he literally yanked me off my feet.”

The society this week is also honoring famed writer Harlan Ellison for his work in preserving an Edenic tract of canyon in Sherman Oaks where Burroughs liked to ride and picnic, and where Ellison wants to erect statues of Burroughs and Tarzan.

Burroughs’ work is underrated, Ellison said, blaming literary snobbery.

“There are only five literary creations that are known by everybody in the world,” Ellison said--”Superman, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and Mickey Mouse . . . I quite admire what he did. There’s a vigor there, there’s a passion there that’s very hard to deny.”

Men outnumbered women 10 to one at the Dum Dum. Why does a gentleman in a loincloth continue to speak to the imaginations of generations of men, or at least the little boys inside them? (Dum Dum organizer Scott Tracy Griffin, a writer from Santa Monica, has read “Tarzan of the Apes” 14 times.)

Bob Hyde, the 71-year-old president of the Bibliophiles, hazarded a guess.

“He’s the perfect man,” Hyde said. “Men would like to be like him.”