The Leo Interview
From The North American Review
“Regrets are too easy. Remorse spun pure—that would be more like it.”
So says Leo, though in a tone that is anything but severe. In fact, his most striking feature, even more than a still imposing physical presence, is his chipper spirit. Like a breeze it wafts through the uptown sunbeams entering his apartment at the Althea where walls are studded with photographs of a career spanning generations. Above the exercise bike with four pedals, faces and accolades of those as iconic as himself, interspersed with publicity stills of the once famous, now forgotten, and the smiles of unknowns. All paying tribute.
“Remorse about what?”
“Oh, not remorse of the ordinary sort. You know.” He laughs. “That’s hardly me.”
Chipper, yes, but Leo has never been one for modesty. Informality makes no difference, and in fact allows him to press his advantage. He conducted this interview wearing only a lemon chiffon robe. The famous mane is thinner now, grayer, and a conspicuous paunch swells where the satin sash is loosely tied, an immodesty which only the force of his personality saves—just barely—from an appearance of being crude. His tail, which in conversation he will seize and shake at you to underline a point, is combed to a glossy tossle at the end. Finely powdered, too, with a scent of gardenia, if this interviewer’s nostrils may be trusted. Despite his years he remains undeniably handsome.
“In the beginning we were all just so busy, we didn’t have time, my friend, to think about remorse or anything along those lines. Wasn’t till later, maybe the first USO tour, that what I was doing began to be more than just work and assume a sort of weight.” (As he says this, one’s eyes inevitably stray to the framed photograph on the nearby grand piano, of a helmeted Leo in a jeep with Eisenhower.) “I was going through a bad marriage at the time. All the travel and the rest of it. Europe was a mess, you can’t imagine the conditions we had to put up with for the show! We had a bunch of skinny little guys, Alsatians I think, running in a circle around a big wheel under the stage just so we could get enough electricity for the lights. Where was I? Oh, yeah: telegrams about the divorce, and me doing the same song and dance every night. The roar, of course. I couldn’t wait to leave. Then I realized there was no home waiting for me to go back to.”
More than half a century ago—when Leo started making the entire world his home. In the process he made his share of enemies, too, participated in some colossal flops, even embarrassed himself. Yet all but the most sour of his critics acknowledge the extent to which he appealed to millions. And they all agree on the reason why: The Roar.
Audiences in theaters the world over thrilled to his signature cry. It was a call to dreams, a preamble to romance as couples clutched each other in the dark. Children tingled with awe and anticipation of adventure. Leo brought it all. The promise! Leo felt like everything America might hope it could be in a precious way, Leo was America. After such a performance, how could he ever top himself?
So much has been said, with hyperbole the common currency, that it is difficult to keep a sense of perspective. One must nonetheless ask: why this Leo? Many a show business lion, arguably as sleek, young, and charming, had preceded him. Why did not some other handsome cat break through the circus circuit before him? Clocking 5.87 seconds, how did his roar become The Roar?
Though many have pointed to its potent mix of power and desire, what is often overlooked is its spontaneity. If for just a moment one can ignore that astounding baritone, bared teeth: how disarmingly casual the young cat appears! Looks as if he’s hardly trying. In fact, for all the bravado, Leo’s is a performance of remarkable restraint. Behind the searing youthful magnetism, there is a preternatural maturity. The result: genius.
“It took us twenty-three takes,” he admits surprisingly. “Back then, to tell the truth, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just young and hungry, that’s all. They kept asking, so I kept trying. Back then, I had the chops. People don’t realize how hard we worked in those days.”
“Do you think it’s different now?”
“Of course it’s different now! You got talented performers but there’s nothing to let people dream. That was the flip side to the hard work. Mount Olympus. We had the glamor, kiddo.”
“Isn’t it possible that audiences have changed? And was it really as glamorous as you say?”
Leo yawns an impressive yawn, almost like a roar with the sound turned off, while reaching into the front of his robe and idly scratching his belly. Uninterested in such discussions. “Then why are you sitting here talking to me?” he asks.
“Is it true DiMaggio came after you with a baseball bat?”
He stops scratching, half a grin appearing on his lower lip.
“Yeah. He caught us in flagrante. But let’s get this straight: Marilyn would’ve never left him for me. There was nothing, like, serious. I almost got killed that night—no exit but through the window, and there wasn’t even time to open it!” A shudder ripples through the folds of skin around his chin. “I don’t blame him though. And Marilyn was a sweet kid, really sweet. It’s too bad what happened to her later,” he opines.
“You never lacked company, though. How do you account for the number of young women in your life? Is it just fame?”
“Oh, that’s a lot of it, surely. But these wonderful ladies also need something, and I like to think that I’ve been there for them.” He pauses, mouth pursed, eyes half-closed—somehow, for a reason Leo does not disclose but whose existence he nevertheless insinuates, his well-known predilection for starlets is necessary, even poignant. He leans closer, now nods. “Something else too. You might as well know. It’s the mane. I mean, don’t ask me why, but they just can’t keep their hands off it, baby!”
Then he tosses his head back and laughs, laughs, and suddenly black ties fall loose above dinner jackets, cars sprout fins, the pack is back, and one is in the presence of an unreconstructed swinger—it’s amazing, almost like meeting a Confederate general—a sensation that a moment later totally evaporates with a scuffling and tromp in the hallway. It’s the arrival of Max, a bubbling three-year-old, who scampers into the room.
“Come here, dude! Come right here!” he cries, scooping up the young one as he trots by, adding, “It’s all right, no problem,” to the pierced nanny hovering at the threshold. “How was the park?” Leo booms.
“We saw the baby goats.”
“You saw the baby goats!” Leo says to Max. “And how were the baby goats? How many did you see? What colors were they?”
Max looks around—a resemblance with his father is striking—but he doesn’t have the answers, yet. He basks in the attention.
“You know, there’s nothing like being a father again to get your feet back on the ground, to remind you of what really matters in life. What really matters to me is our trip to our place in the mountains this weekend. We’re going to the mountains, aren’t we, Maxie?”
Leo does appear calmer, even younger, with Max, and is avowedly grateful for what he describes as a second chance. (Vanessa, 44 years his junior, is for the record his fourth wife she declined to participate in this interview.) Leo’s earlier offspring grew up in the shadow of his career, and he speaks with open declarations of contrition about his failures as a father. Son Daryl died over 20 years ago, after a short stint fronting a rock band and series of small film roles daughter Julie (the only one whose picture appears among the crowd of faces in this room) now lives quietly on the West Coast (“She’s had her share of troubles, too. She opened a chain of health spas. We talk often on the phone”) the youngest, Geoffrey, remains estranged from his father, and in certain circles has acquired a notoriety of his own. Always the most political of Leo’s brood, he denounced his father in the harshest of terms for the way he’d constructed his public image, feeding the crudest stereotypes of the King of the Jungle. Geoffrey left the U.S. and for years lived on the savannah, far from the world of his upbringing, and nowadays works as a grassroots activist.
“Oh, he has his reasons, I guess,” Leo says now, though past retorts via the media were less conciliatory. “I just think he might see differently if we spent some time together, talked things out. That fuss about my spread in National Geographic—really I still don’t see what the big deal was.”
“Have you ever run down an oryx?”
“Brother, I don’t know an oryx from a penguin! So I posed for a few shots. I never pretended I wasn’t born in the Bronx. And let me add that being a zoo cub was no picnic—Geoff had it much, much softer, more than he’ll ever know or admit, no matter how much he preaches. I meant no disrespect to anybody in Africa or to cats back home. Or to oryxes everywhere, for God’s sake. It was just business. If you want to talk politics you’re only going to put everyone to sleep.”
“But there was a time when you did your share of talking politics.”
“Not really. Or just a little. Probably was drunk when I said it.”
“Was that the case for your remarks about Mao?”
“Huh? You got to be kidding. What was that?”
“This surfaced in a recent book by Frances Wilcox, professor of French and Film Studies at Duke University, a 1969 article on you in Cahiers du cinéma in which you said, according to her translation, ‘Mao not only makes sense of the past, he is the future, too. My life had no meaning till I discovered Mao and the people’s revolution.’ And a bit further on: ‘Purgative violence is necessary to construct the new revolutionary man.’”
“I said no such thing!”
“These statements are fabricated?”
“Sure they are! Come on, what do you think? Where have you been? And if they're not fabricated I was just fooling around, taking the air out. Those journalists print what they need you to say. Especially over there, nobody spoke enough of the same language that we even bothered to try. These serious little guys wrote their serious little articles, while Orson and I hung out at the rue de Buci. He was there at the same time, you know, sort of in exile, too, if you can call it that. He’d promised me the lead in Lear, he was going to play all three sisters, and we were waiting for the money so we could begin shooting, and in the meantime we went to our favorite rôtisserie where we had chicken-eating contests. We would say how much more subtle and sophisticated life was over there, how artists like us were better appreciated, and the journalists agreed, and quoted us on politics. One day, I swear, we ate 43 chickens. Yet the whole time we were plotting our return to the States. Orson wanted to drop the film and had it in his head that we should go back to America together, a triumphant return, I could be in his magic act. But I would have nothing of it.”
Leo breaks off here, perhaps preferring to pass over what actually happened, the less-than-inspiring homecoming for a short-lived and quickly forgotten TV sit-com (“Pa’s Paws”), several unfortunate record albums, guest cameos on reality shows and an act in Las Vegas (audiences of winter vacationers off charter planes really went to see The Sex Kittens, his high-stepping back-up chorus, who appeared in see-through shorts), till he infamously hit bottom one night on a talk show when he took a swipe at the host, griffes sorties, after a remark that he construed as insulting to his dignity. Tabloid photos of the time show a bloated, bedraggled Leo with a snarl on his lip as he ascends the courthouse steps.
Then the stay at the Betty Ford clinic. More than a few observers assumed that Leo was washed up. With intervening years, some even presumed him dead. In a bizarre footnote to his life story, a mentally ill airline pilot named Dexter Wills started claiming to be Leo, gave interviews and signed autographs and even managed to get hired as a PR spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security until, when doubts about his true identity surfaced, he called a press conference and tragically turned a gun on himself. That was more almost a decade ago but the story still fuels Internet conspiracies.
Yet since such low points, Leo’s rehabilitation has been astonishing. And he has accomplished it, one must conclude, not through new projects or career gambles—Leo is now notoriously chary of his time, selective of public appearances, and interviews such as this one virtually unheard of—but through stubborn survival. Indifferent to this year’s or next year’s fashion.
“Is it true you turned down Cats?”
Leo sighs, shrugs. “Well, I could never get on board. We were approached, yes, but negotiations went nowhere. The title was a sticking point. Why the plural?”
“What’s next?” Leo sniffs the air. “Who’s to know? Why know? Bye, dude!” he calls to Max as he runs from the room, disappearing into the sun’s glare from which a slim white hand emerges, and leads him away.
Since stage, screen and television are no longer Leo’s chosen venues, and websites the ephemeral creations of fans and enthusiasts over which he has no control, perhaps this interview offers the role he wants to play today. The best way to burnish his image and define his niche in American culture. He is frank about this.
“Even though I know what’s more important now, and my family comes first, I still like the fuss. I still hunger for something to show, sure.”
“What would you consider appropriate?”
“Several congressmen are proposing a postage stamp. That would be OK, I guess.”
“But you spoke of remorse. Let’s come back to that. What remorse?”
“Well”—he searches. “It’s like I haven’t found a role as great as my promise. Yeah, that’s it. So much has happened yet it doesn’t add up to what at one time seemed possible. It wasn’t just me who thought so, either. Everybody seemed to believe it. There was a time, a lost time—a beautiful time, truly—when I was part of something too big to fit on a postage stamp. Why should we settle for that?”
Leo gets up suddenly as if to put things right this instant. He advances to the window, looks back, beckons with a paw. Half a beat later his tail repeats the gesture with a lurid swish. (Was it on purpose, or some nervous shtick?) “Come here, kid, take a look.”
The view of Central Park, the leaves of treetops shimmering, the spiny backbone of the island protruding nakedly and beyond, the deep, deep swirling orange of Everything West.
“What are you going to do with it,” he asks, “after I’m gone and it’s yours?”
“Regrets are too easy. Remorse spun pure—that would be more like it.”
So says Leo, though in a tone that is anything but severe. In fact, his most striking feature, even more than a still imposing physical presence, is his chipper spirit. Like a breeze it wafts through the uptown sunbeams entering his apartment at the Althea where walls are studded with photographs of a career spanning generations. Above the exercise bike with four pedals, faces and accolades of those as iconic as himself, interspersed with publicity stills of the once famous, now forgotten, and the smiles of unknowns. All paying tribute.
“Remorse about what?”
“Oh, not remorse of the ordinary sort. You know.” He laughs. “That’s hardly me.”
Chipper, yes, but Leo has never been one for modesty. Informality makes no difference, and in fact allows him to press his advantage. He conducted this interview wearing only a lemon chiffon robe. The famous mane is thinner now, grayer, and a conspicuous paunch swells where the satin sash is loosely tied, an immodesty which only the force of his personality saves—just barely—from an appearance of being crude. His tail, which in conversation he will seize and shake at you to underline a point, is combed to a glossy tossle at the end. Finely powdered, too, with a scent of gardenia, if this interviewer’s nostrils may be trusted. Despite his years he remains undeniably handsome.
“In the beginning we were all just so busy, we didn’t have time, my friend, to think about remorse or anything along those lines. Wasn’t till later, maybe the first USO tour, that what I was doing began to be more than just work and assume a sort of weight.” (As he says this, one’s eyes inevitably stray to the framed photograph on the nearby grand piano, of a helmeted Leo in a jeep with Eisenhower.) “I was going through a bad marriage at the time. All the travel and the rest of it. Europe was a mess, you can’t imagine the conditions we had to put up with for the show! We had a bunch of skinny little guys, Alsatians I think, running in a circle around a big wheel under the stage just so we could get enough electricity for the lights. Where was I? Oh, yeah: telegrams about the divorce, and me doing the same song and dance every night. The roar, of course. I couldn’t wait to leave. Then I realized there was no home waiting for me to go back to.”
More than half a century ago—when Leo started making the entire world his home. In the process he made his share of enemies, too, participated in some colossal flops, even embarrassed himself. Yet all but the most sour of his critics acknowledge the extent to which he appealed to millions. And they all agree on the reason why: The Roar.
Audiences in theaters the world over thrilled to his signature cry. It was a call to dreams, a preamble to romance as couples clutched each other in the dark. Children tingled with awe and anticipation of adventure. Leo brought it all. The promise! Leo felt like everything America might hope it could be in a precious way, Leo was America. After such a performance, how could he ever top himself?
So much has been said, with hyperbole the common currency, that it is difficult to keep a sense of perspective. One must nonetheless ask: why this Leo? Many a show business lion, arguably as sleek, young, and charming, had preceded him. Why did not some other handsome cat break through the circus circuit before him? Clocking 5.87 seconds, how did his roar become The Roar?
Though many have pointed to its potent mix of power and desire, what is often overlooked is its spontaneity. If for just a moment one can ignore that astounding baritone, bared teeth: how disarmingly casual the young cat appears! Looks as if he’s hardly trying. In fact, for all the bravado, Leo’s is a performance of remarkable restraint. Behind the searing youthful magnetism, there is a preternatural maturity. The result: genius.
“It took us twenty-three takes,” he admits surprisingly. “Back then, to tell the truth, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just young and hungry, that’s all. They kept asking, so I kept trying. Back then, I had the chops. People don’t realize how hard we worked in those days.”
“Do you think it’s different now?”
“Of course it’s different now! You got talented performers but there’s nothing to let people dream. That was the flip side to the hard work. Mount Olympus. We had the glamor, kiddo.”
“Isn’t it possible that audiences have changed? And was it really as glamorous as you say?”
Leo yawns an impressive yawn, almost like a roar with the sound turned off, while reaching into the front of his robe and idly scratching his belly. Uninterested in such discussions. “Then why are you sitting here talking to me?” he asks.
“Is it true DiMaggio came after you with a baseball bat?”
He stops scratching, half a grin appearing on his lower lip.
“Yeah. He caught us in flagrante. But let’s get this straight: Marilyn would’ve never left him for me. There was nothing, like, serious. I almost got killed that night—no exit but through the window, and there wasn’t even time to open it!” A shudder ripples through the folds of skin around his chin. “I don’t blame him though. And Marilyn was a sweet kid, really sweet. It’s too bad what happened to her later,” he opines.
“You never lacked company, though. How do you account for the number of young women in your life? Is it just fame?”
“Oh, that’s a lot of it, surely. But these wonderful ladies also need something, and I like to think that I’ve been there for them.” He pauses, mouth pursed, eyes half-closed—somehow, for a reason Leo does not disclose but whose existence he nevertheless insinuates, his well-known predilection for starlets is necessary, even poignant. He leans closer, now nods. “Something else too. You might as well know. It’s the mane. I mean, don’t ask me why, but they just can’t keep their hands off it, baby!”
Then he tosses his head back and laughs, laughs, and suddenly black ties fall loose above dinner jackets, cars sprout fins, the pack is back, and one is in the presence of an unreconstructed swinger—it’s amazing, almost like meeting a Confederate general—a sensation that a moment later totally evaporates with a scuffling and tromp in the hallway. It’s the arrival of Max, a bubbling three-year-old, who scampers into the room.
“Come here, dude! Come right here!” he cries, scooping up the young one as he trots by, adding, “It’s all right, no problem,” to the pierced nanny hovering at the threshold. “How was the park?” Leo booms.
“We saw the baby goats.”
“You saw the baby goats!” Leo says to Max. “And how were the baby goats? How many did you see? What colors were they?”
Max looks around—a resemblance with his father is striking—but he doesn’t have the answers, yet. He basks in the attention.
“You know, there’s nothing like being a father again to get your feet back on the ground, to remind you of what really matters in life. What really matters to me is our trip to our place in the mountains this weekend. We’re going to the mountains, aren’t we, Maxie?”
Leo does appear calmer, even younger, with Max, and is avowedly grateful for what he describes as a second chance. (Vanessa, 44 years his junior, is for the record his fourth wife she declined to participate in this interview.) Leo’s earlier offspring grew up in the shadow of his career, and he speaks with open declarations of contrition about his failures as a father. Son Daryl died over 20 years ago, after a short stint fronting a rock band and series of small film roles daughter Julie (the only one whose picture appears among the crowd of faces in this room) now lives quietly on the West Coast (“She’s had her share of troubles, too. She opened a chain of health spas. We talk often on the phone”) the youngest, Geoffrey, remains estranged from his father, and in certain circles has acquired a notoriety of his own. Always the most political of Leo’s brood, he denounced his father in the harshest of terms for the way he’d constructed his public image, feeding the crudest stereotypes of the King of the Jungle. Geoffrey left the U.S. and for years lived on the savannah, far from the world of his upbringing, and nowadays works as a grassroots activist.
“Oh, he has his reasons, I guess,” Leo says now, though past retorts via the media were less conciliatory. “I just think he might see differently if we spent some time together, talked things out. That fuss about my spread in National Geographic—really I still don’t see what the big deal was.”
“Have you ever run down an oryx?”
“Brother, I don’t know an oryx from a penguin! So I posed for a few shots. I never pretended I wasn’t born in the Bronx. And let me add that being a zoo cub was no picnic—Geoff had it much, much softer, more than he’ll ever know or admit, no matter how much he preaches. I meant no disrespect to anybody in Africa or to cats back home. Or to oryxes everywhere, for God’s sake. It was just business. If you want to talk politics you’re only going to put everyone to sleep.”
“But there was a time when you did your share of talking politics.”
“Not really. Or just a little. Probably was drunk when I said it.”
“Was that the case for your remarks about Mao?”
“Huh? You got to be kidding. What was that?”
“This surfaced in a recent book by Frances Wilcox, professor of French and Film Studies at Duke University, a 1969 article on you in Cahiers du cinéma in which you said, according to her translation, ‘Mao not only makes sense of the past, he is the future, too. My life had no meaning till I discovered Mao and the people’s revolution.’ And a bit further on: ‘Purgative violence is necessary to construct the new revolutionary man.’”
“I said no such thing!”
“These statements are fabricated?”
“Sure they are! Come on, what do you think? Where have you been? And if they're not fabricated I was just fooling around, taking the air out. Those journalists print what they need you to say. Especially over there, nobody spoke enough of the same language that we even bothered to try. These serious little guys wrote their serious little articles, while Orson and I hung out at the rue de Buci. He was there at the same time, you know, sort of in exile, too, if you can call it that. He’d promised me the lead in Lear, he was going to play all three sisters, and we were waiting for the money so we could begin shooting, and in the meantime we went to our favorite rôtisserie where we had chicken-eating contests. We would say how much more subtle and sophisticated life was over there, how artists like us were better appreciated, and the journalists agreed, and quoted us on politics. One day, I swear, we ate 43 chickens. Yet the whole time we were plotting our return to the States. Orson wanted to drop the film and had it in his head that we should go back to America together, a triumphant return, I could be in his magic act. But I would have nothing of it.”
Leo breaks off here, perhaps preferring to pass over what actually happened, the less-than-inspiring homecoming for a short-lived and quickly forgotten TV sit-com (“Pa’s Paws”), several unfortunate record albums, guest cameos on reality shows and an act in Las Vegas (audiences of winter vacationers off charter planes really went to see The Sex Kittens, his high-stepping back-up chorus, who appeared in see-through shorts), till he infamously hit bottom one night on a talk show when he took a swipe at the host, griffes sorties, after a remark that he construed as insulting to his dignity. Tabloid photos of the time show a bloated, bedraggled Leo with a snarl on his lip as he ascends the courthouse steps.
Then the stay at the Betty Ford clinic. More than a few observers assumed that Leo was washed up. With intervening years, some even presumed him dead. In a bizarre footnote to his life story, a mentally ill airline pilot named Dexter Wills started claiming to be Leo, gave interviews and signed autographs and even managed to get hired as a PR spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security until, when doubts about his true identity surfaced, he called a press conference and tragically turned a gun on himself. That was more almost a decade ago but the story still fuels Internet conspiracies.
Yet since such low points, Leo’s rehabilitation has been astonishing. And he has accomplished it, one must conclude, not through new projects or career gambles—Leo is now notoriously chary of his time, selective of public appearances, and interviews such as this one virtually unheard of—but through stubborn survival. Indifferent to this year’s or next year’s fashion.
“Is it true you turned down Cats?”
Leo sighs, shrugs. “Well, I could never get on board. We were approached, yes, but negotiations went nowhere. The title was a sticking point. Why the plural?”
“What’s next?” Leo sniffs the air. “Who’s to know? Why know? Bye, dude!” he calls to Max as he runs from the room, disappearing into the sun’s glare from which a slim white hand emerges, and leads him away.
Since stage, screen and television are no longer Leo’s chosen venues, and websites the ephemeral creations of fans and enthusiasts over which he has no control, perhaps this interview offers the role he wants to play today. The best way to burnish his image and define his niche in American culture. He is frank about this.
“Even though I know what’s more important now, and my family comes first, I still like the fuss. I still hunger for something to show, sure.”
“What would you consider appropriate?”
“Several congressmen are proposing a postage stamp. That would be OK, I guess.”
“But you spoke of remorse. Let’s come back to that. What remorse?”
“Well”—he searches. “It’s like I haven’t found a role as great as my promise. Yeah, that’s it. So much has happened yet it doesn’t add up to what at one time seemed possible. It wasn’t just me who thought so, either. Everybody seemed to believe it. There was a time, a lost time—a beautiful time, truly—when I was part of something too big to fit on a postage stamp. Why should we settle for that?”
Leo gets up suddenly as if to put things right this instant. He advances to the window, looks back, beckons with a paw. Half a beat later his tail repeats the gesture with a lurid swish. (Was it on purpose, or some nervous shtick?) “Come here, kid, take a look.”
The view of Central Park, the leaves of treetops shimmering, the spiny backbone of the island protruding nakedly and beyond, the deep, deep swirling orange of Everything West.
“What are you going to do with it,” he asks, “after I’m gone and it’s yours?”
