For World Gorilla Day: A Tribute to Gargantua

It’s World Gorilla Day, and while we have certainly dealt with gorilla depictions here, in this post about ape horror movies, this one about King Kong, and this one just a couple of days ago on Planet of the Apes, this post on on Gargantua the Great (1929-49) marks our first biographical post on an actual member of that species. And it’s of course because he was in show business.

I’ve known about Gargantua since I was a kid from books about the circus, and many years ago acquired this fine 1972 biography:

This gorilla was found as a baby by missionaries in the Belgian Congo, and given as a gift to the Captain of a seagoing freighter who kept him onboard as a kind of pet. This was precisely the kind of vessel you see depicted in horror movies of that era (the early ’30s) in movies like King Kong, Island of Lost Souls, and The Most Dangerous Game, and also in O’Neill’s sea plays. The Captain, a man named Arthur Philips, regularly trafficked in exotic creatures. The crew was fond of the ape and made him their mascot, naming him “Buddy”. But nonetheless such an environment was not the safest. One day a drunken sailor threw acid in the gorilla’s face in revenge against his employer over some slight. The animal wasn’t killed as intended, but his face was badly disfigured, the mouth badly contorted into a permanent snarl that made him terrifying to look at.

The Captain sold him to a woman named Gertrude Lintz, the eccentric wife of a wealthy doctor whose hobby was caring for exotic animals. The Lintzes lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in one of those urban mansions that once characterized the borough, like the one in Arsenic and Old Lace (or in The Addams Family). Mrs. Lintz helped nurse the creature back to health, but received a literal wake-up call when Buddy, terrified by a thunder storm one night, broke out of his cage and climbed into bed with her. Only then did she realize there was a certain danger in having a 500 lb gorilla in the house.

So she sold Buddy to Ringling, Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. It was the circus folks who renamed him “Gargantua” after Rabelais’s anti-hero, and puffed him up to be the biggest and most savage gorilla ever exhibited. Their marketing department worked overtime to present him as a frightening specimen, but that alone wouldn’t necessarily have made Gargantua as successful an attraction as he was. Gargantua was indeed large, and his disfigured face made him truly scary to look at. So word of mouth was strong. For once, audiences weren’t disappointed by the ballyhoo. Gargantua was the circus’s biggest attraction since Jumbo, and is credited with actually saving the circus at a time (the Great Depression) when it was very much at risk in going under, as many other circuses had. The circus also paired him with a female gorilla, billed as Mrs. Gargantua, although the two never actually mated.

Rather than an ordinary cage, Gargantua was kept in a special climate-controlled tank, to protect him from disease, for he was prone to illness due to the open nature of his face. This isolation actually made him seem even scarier to audiences, as though the structures he was kept in were for their own protection. As it was, he died of pneumonia at age 20, about half the natural life span of a gorilla. (In captivity they can live even longer, about 50 years)

There were some posthumous legacies, though.

For example there was a 1976 episode of Wonder Woman entitled “Wonder Woman vs Gargantua”, in which the Nazis brainwash Gargantua to hate and attack Wonder Woman. As in the very similar “Six Million Dollar Man vs. Bigfoot” episode from around the same time, the two eventually become friends, but not until they have engaged in fierce battle.

And there was a fictionalized 1997 bio-pic called Buddy, with Rene Russo as Gertrude Lintz, with Robbie Coltrane, Alan Cumming, and Paul Reubens. It was written and directed by frequent Tim Burton collaborator Caroline Thompson, produced by Jim Henson Productions and Coppola’s American Zoetrope. Unlike the real Gargantua, it did not sell many tickets.

For more on show business history, please consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.