Cheaters make us Cheetah chumps

CARRIE ROSEMA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Enlarge Image

Dan Westfall with adopted chimp Cheetah. Is this the same Cheetah from the Tarzan movies who recently died at 80? Tough to say.

When he died recently at age 80, Cheetah the chimp received respectful obituaries across the globe. This seemed only fitting for a star in the 1930s Tarzan films with Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. Cheetah was the world's most famous non-human primate. (His only serious rival, King Kong, was a fictional character.) No less an authority than Turner Classic Movies host and prominent film historian Robert Osborne weighed in on Cheetah's cinema legacy: "He was a major star. He was one of the things people loved about the Tarzan movies because he made people laugh. He was always a regular fun part of the movies."

Ah, but was this really the famous Cheetah? The animal's caretakers insisted it was. But reporters questioned the story and animal experts doubted it could be the 1930s movie star. "To live into your 70s is really pushing the limits of chimp biology," Lincoln Park Zoo primatologist Steve Ross told The New York Times. "Eighty is tough to swallow."

Writer R.D. Rosen had debunked the death of another imposter in a 2008 Washington Post story. He raised doubts about the story of how the chimp had been brought to Hollywood on a trans-Atlantic passenger flight from Liberia in 1932 and created havoc in the aisles, forcing stewardesses to pacify him with warm bottles of milk. Problem here: There was no trans-Atlantic passenger service between Africa and America in 1932. "Any chimp who actually shared a soundstage with Weissmuller and O'Sullivan is long gone," Rosen wrote.

So it is highly unlikely the recently departed Cheetah was Tarzan's ungawa companion in the early (and best) movies of the franchise.

A lot of people, though, probably believe it was, based on the initial announcement of Cheetah's death on the website of the Florida animal sanctuary where he lived, and the quick spread of that news online. (On Dec. 29 the Chicago Tribune ran a Reuters story that reported the death, but noted there was skepticism that this Cheetah actually appeared in the films.)

So do people put too much trust in what they find online? They do.

Consider Wikipedia, which in a short time has become a ubiquitous source for information. The online encyclopedia collating global knowledge is truly an extraordinary undertaking. Unfortunately, inaccurate information entered on Wikipedia, deliberately or accidentally, can be repeated all over the digital universe before it is corrected.

Shane Fitzgerald, a sociology student in Dublin, demonstrated this with an experiment three years ago when Maurice Jarre died. Jarre was a well-known composer who wrote the Academy Award-winning score for Lawrence of Arabia and music for other movies including Dr. Zhivago, Passage to India, Ghost and Dead Poets Society. In several obituaries a quote was attributed to him: "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear."

Nice quote, except Maurice Jarre never said it. Fitzgerald made up the quote, attributed it to Jarre and placed it on Wikipedia. Many newspapers published it in their Jarre obituaries and had to issue retractions once the truth came out.

Fitzgerald's experiment demonstrated that Wikipedia is not always the final word and that modern technology affords dangerous shortcuts.

The potential for error, of course, didn't start with the Internet. Steve Miller of The Wall Street Journal noted, "(This) is not to say that our analog predecessors never made a mistake. Many of them would have cribbed from Wikipedia too, given the chance. How do we know? Because in clips we can watch them crib from each other and standard reference sources."

The story of Cheetah demonstrates the value of healthy skepticism and good reporting in a world where fiction becomes accepted fact in a keystroke.

In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen bragged to Alice that she sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And she never even met Cheetah.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 21, 2012 J6