by Andy Briggs
Robbie didn’t feel like filling him in on their adventure. That could wait. “We’ve been traveling. We’re about a week away. Tell Archie that Jane’s fine.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, some great news about the Greystokes—“
Robbie cut him off. “Whatever. It can wait until I’m back. I gotta go.” He disconnected as Clark started to protest. He was tired of Clark’s scheming and was in no mood to hear what he had to say. He turned the phone off for good measure.
The ferry journey across Lake Tanganyika was uneventful as they hitched aboard a cargo ship that didn’t ask any questions about the young ape with them. The crew kept away, wary of Karnath and frightened by Tarzan.
Robbie was keen to avoid any conflicts so they crossed into the Democratic Republic of Congo using narrow off-road trails that were beyond the reaches of frontier guards and drove almost continuously. He and Jane took turns at the wheel and when he wasn’t resting he played a little with Karnath and enjoyed talking to Tarzan.
The road soon petered out and they were forced to abandon the vehicle so they could continue on foot through the jungle. Entering the solitude of the rainforest seemed like a homecoming to them all. Jane was glad to leave the dry savannah behind and reveled in the heavy tropical rain as it washed the dirt away.
Tarzan made the trek easier by summoning Tantor and a pair of jungle elephants to carry them home. In the comfort of the jungle, Tarzan relayed Rokoff’s confession about D’Arnot. It was difficult as Tarzan still lacked the vocabulary to explain every detail, but they soon built a dark picture of the Greystokes as a family who would kill to preserve their wealth.
Karnath’s homecoming was greeted with grunts and hoots of delight from the gorillas, now back at the crashed aircraft. Even the normally aggressive Kerchak was pleased to see Tarzan’s return. Karnath’s adopted mother held the little ape tight, then began grooming his fur to remove the stench of his ordeal.
Jane was touched by the care and family spirit the gorillas showed Karnath. She glanced at Robbie and saw that he was affected by it too. She had been apprehensive about bringing him here, as she still hadn’t forgiven him for secretly videoing Tarzan. But without the camera he could do no harm. She was certain he wouldn’t be able to find his own way here from Karibu Mji.
Robbie kept a wary distance from the apes, but they appeared to welcome him—after all, they had met before when they had helped rescue him from Tafari’s clutches.
The aircraft fascinated Robbie, but he didn’t ask any questions or inflame Jane’s suspicions by taking anything away. He could hardly believe he was finally here. But instead of experiencing elation that he finally had the proof he and Clark needed, he felt unusually subdued. Circumstance had brought him and Tarzan together as friends who had risked their lives together and now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to do anything to betray him. However, that didn’t solve Robbie’s problems and he was painfully aware that he still had to fend for himself.
“Family need new home for a time,” said Tarzan watching as the apes lavished Karnath with attention.
“You’ll take them toward the volcano?” asked Jane.
Tarzan nodded. “First Tarzan take you home.”
Jane didn’t feel the need to ask if she would see Tarzan again. A bond had formed between the three of them during their adventure and, in a strange way, Tarzan had accepted her and Robbie into his family.
•••
Back at the camp, Archie welcomed Jane home with a huge hug. He shook Robbie’s shoulder, glad to see him.
“You smell terrible, mate,” he said laughing. “Where the heck have you been?”
“You really don’t want to know,” Jane replied. And she meant it. Her father worried enough and he didn’t need to know they’d traveled across half the continent over the last two weeks.
Clark slapped Robbie on the back and made sure Jane wasn’t within earshot.
“Good news. That private eye I mentioned was askin’ questions about ya. He turned up at Sango then suddenly got word you were in Uganda and left pronto.”
Robbie smiled to himself. He knew Milton’s report would raise a few alarms when his name was mentioned and had hoped that would draw attention away from the Congo.
“You get the footage?” whispered Clark.
“I lost the camera,” said Robbie.
Clark looked disappointed, but nodded. “Still, we got the GPS coordinates, ain’t we?” Robbie nodded. Clark’s eyes narrowed and he stared at him. “You’ve been there, haven’t you? You’ve seen the plane?”
Robbie nodded, but couldn’t meet Clark’s gaze. He was feeling guilty for betraying Tarzan. Clark smiled and squeezed his shoulder.
“So it’s all true. Perfect!” He shouted across at Archie. “Hey, Arch! Tell ’em the good news.”
Jane looked expectantly at her dad. “What good news?”
“That,” said Archie pointing over to the bar as Esmée came out with a tall dark-haired man who flashed a disarming smile.
Jane didn’t need to ask who it was. The family resemblance was clear. Her blood ran cold.
The man extended his hand. “Ah, you must be Jane. A delight to meet you, I’ve heard so much about your exploits. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is William Cecil Clayton. I believe you know my cousin?”
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF TARZAN
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND TARZAN
From the day he was born in Chicago, on September 1, 1875, until he submitted half of a novel to All-Story Magazine in 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs failed in nearly every enterprise he tried.
He attended half a dozen public and private schools before he finally graduated in 1895 from Michigan Military Academy, an institution he described as “a polite reform school.”
Having failed the entrance examination for the United States Military Academy at West Point, he enlisted as a private in the Seventh US Cavalry because he thought he might still obtain a commission as an officer if he distinguished himself in a different assignment. He asked to be sent to the worst post in America—a request the authorities speedily granted.
The post was Fort Grant in the Arizona desert, and his mission, as he put it, was to “chase outlaw Apaches.” “I chased a good many Apaches,” he said, “but fortunately for me, I never caught up with any of them.”
Private Burroughs soon had his fill of Fort Grant, and after one year he was discharged. In 1900, he married Emma Centennia Hulbert, who dutifully followed him back and forth across America during the next eleven years.
He became a cowboy in Idaho, then a shopkeeper, a railroad policeman, a gold miner, and even an “expert accountant,” although he knew nothing of the profession. Throughout this period he somehow raised money for a number of his own businesses, all of which sank without a trace.
Life was dismal for the newly married couple. Burroughs became depressed; his wife, discouraged. Perhaps to escape from the grim reality of their lives, or perhaps to amuse Emma, he would often sketch darkly humorous cartoons or write fantastic fairy tales.
By 1911, Burroughs’s position had become so desperate that not even his cartoons and stories could block out the frustrating fact of his successive failures. He even went so far as to apply for a commission in the Chinese army. (The application was summarily rejected.) He also applied for a post with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, but there were no vacancies.
Finally he reached rock bottom. He was thirty-five years old, without a job, without money. In addition to his wife and two children, a third child was expected soon. He could buy food and coal only by pawning his watch and Emma’s jewelry.
While working as a manager for pencil-sharpener salesmen, he used his leisure moments while “waiting for them to come back to tell me that they had not sold any,” to begin writing Under the Moons of Mars, his first story. He recalled:
I had no idea how to submit a story or what I could expect in payment. Had I known anything about it at all, I would never have thought of submitting half
a novel, but that is what I did. Thomas Newell Metcalf, then editor of All-Story Magazine . . . wrote me that he liked the first half of the story and if the second was as good he thought he might use it. Had he not given me this encouragement, I would never have finished the story and my writing career would have been at an end, since I was not writing because of any urge to write nor for any particular love of writing. I was writing because I had a wife and two babies, a combination which does not work well without money.
I finished the second half of the story and got $400 for first magazine serial rights. The check was the first big event in my life. No amount of money today could possibly give me the thrill that this first $400 check gave me.
Today, scholars consider that story to be the turning point of twentieth-century science fiction. New editions continue to be published annually throughout the world.
But Burroughs was still a long way from becoming an established writer. His next literary effort, a historical novel set in the England of the Plantagenet kings, was rejected. He nearly gave up but his publisher would not hear of it. “Try again,” the publisher urged. “Stick with the ‘damphool’ stuff.”
Burroughs did, and with his next novel, his future was decided. The novel was Tarzan of the Apes. An astonishing success on its appearance in All-Story Magazine in 1912, Tarzan of the Apes brought Edgar Rice Burroughs $700 and a surge of success. Burroughs sent the manuscript to book publishers but was rejected by practically every major company in the country. Finally, Tarzan was printed as a novel from A.C. McClurg and Co., and it became a bestseller in 1914.
Said Burroughs, “In all these years I have not learned one single rule for writing fiction. I still write as I did thirty years ago; stories which I feel would entertain me and give me mental relaxation, knowing that there are millions of people just like me who will like the same things I like. Anyway, I have great fun with my imaginings, and I can appreciate—in a small way—the swell time God had in creating the universe.”
A torrent of novels followed Tarzan: stories about Mars, Venus, Apaches; Westerns; social commentaries; detective stories; tales of the Moon and of a fictional Hollow Earth—and more and more Tarzan books. By the time his pen was stilled, nearly one hundred stories bore Edgar Rice Burroughs’s name.
In 1918, Tarzan debuted on screen in the silent film Tarzan of the Apes, starring Elmo Lincoln. It became one of the first films in history to earn one million dollars. Since then, fifty Tarzan live-action films, 115 one-hour television episodes, seventy-one half-hour animated television episodes, and three feature animation films have been produced, with more than twenty-seven actors playing the lead role.
Although he joked about the films, Burroughs was bitterly disappointed with the Tarzan motion pictures. Often he would not go to see them. His Tarzan was a supremely intelligent, sensitive man. His Tarzan sat in the House of Lords when not otherwise occupied in the upper terraces of the African jungle. His Tarzan was a truly civilized man—heroic, handsome, and above all, free.
In 1919, with financial security assured, Burroughs moved to California, where he purchased the 550-acre estate of General Harrison Gray Otis, renaming it “Tarzana Ranch.” By 1923, the city of Los Angeles had completely surrounded Tarzana Ranch, and Burroughs sold a large portion of it for home sites. In 1930, a post office was established, and the three hundred residents held a contest to find a name for the new community. The winning entry was “Tarzana.”
By the mid-1930s, daily and special Sunday Tarzan comic strips appeared in more than 250 newspapers all over the world. Tarzan radio serials thrilled millions of listeners across the country, with Burroughs’s daughter, Joan, in the role of Jane, and her husband, James H. Pierce—who had played the lead in the silent movie Tarzan and the Lion Men—as Tarzan.
Today, Tarzan television programs and films are shown on an array of different networks all over the world. A Tarzan movie plays somewhere in the world every day. And with the contemporary emphasis on outer space, Burroughs’s science fiction writings are still treasured.
In 1942, Burroughs became America’s oldest war correspondent, covering stories with the Pacific Fleet for United Press. He returned home from the South Pacific only after suffering a series of heart attacks. Ironically, he was unable to find a suitable home in Tarzana, and he spent his remaining years in a modest house in nearby Encino. It was there, on March 19, 1950, that he set down his pen for the final time.
The last line he ever wrote:
“Thank God for everything.”
Burroughs around age ten.
Edgar Rice Burroughs at age sixteen in Idaho.
Burroughs’s friends and fellow soldiers, known as “the May-have-seen-better-days Club,” at Fort Grant, Arizona, in 1896.
Tarzan of the Apes (1918), a silent film, was the first Tarzan movie ever made and one of the first movies to ever earn one million dollars. The success of the film allowed Burroughs to buy the ranch he named Tarzana.
In 1919, Burroughs purchased a ranch near Los Angeles with the money he earned from the first Tarzan movie, calling the property “Tarzana.” As the city spread around the ranch, Burroughs sold part of it for development, and in 1930, his neighbors voted to name their new town Tarzana.
In 1922, Burroughs’s old friend, Robert D. Lay from the Michigan Military Academy, visited Burroughs’s California ranch. Lay had become president of a large life insurance company.
Buster Crabbe, an Olympic swimmer, stepped into the title role for 1933’s Tarzan the Fearless, opposite Jacqueline Wells.
Burroughs reviewing Tarzan and the Lion Man, the seventeenth book in the series, in 1934. Lion Man is the closest thing to a comic novel in the Tarzan series, with Burroughs satirizing Hollywood’s treatment of the Tarzan character and even spoofing his own work
Burroughs dictating into an Ediphone in March 1937.
Burroughs, right, and Cyril Ralph Rothmund, his secretary and manager for many years, in 1937.
Burroughs working on a story at his Honolulu office on November 21, 1941. He wrote many stories in this office, and sent them to his secretary-manager, Rothmund, in Tarzana. Rothmund then arranged for retyping and submission to magazine editors.
Burroughs with his grandchildren, John Ralston Burroughs, James Michael Pierce, and Danton Burroughs, in 1945.
Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan costarred in many of the Tarzan films.
Burroughs with Lex Barker, the tenth movie Tarzan.
Since 1912, the Tarzan character has been brought to life in television, movies, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and art. Illustrator Frank Frazetta began creating cover art for Burroughs’s Tarzan paperbacks in the 1960s, a period when Frazetta’s work was redefining fantasy art.
TARZAN: A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LEGEND
The year 2012 sees the centenary of an iconic figure. One hundred years ago Tarzan first swung from the jungle and into the pages of All-Story Magazine. Through books, comics, films, radio shows, and countless television shows, Tarzan left an indelible mark on the public’s imagination. Generations still know who he is even if they’ve never read one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s twenty-six original Tarzan novels. There is no better time than the one-hundred-year anniversary to give new life to the world’s first eco-warrior.
To author Andy Briggs, it was clear that if somebody didn’t inject new life into Tarzan, the character was in danger of eventually becoming extinct, consigned to pop-culture memory. But when he approached the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate to suggest Tarzan be reinvented for a whole new generation of readers, he was astonished by the estate’s overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. They agreed it was time for a contemporary Tarzan.
With the estate’s blessing, Briggs was given rein to bring Tarzan into the twenty-first century. Everything we know and love about the character has been maintained: He’s still an English lord raised in the wild by apes, and he’s often a wild untamable savage. But gone are the clichéd native tribes, replaced by warring rebel
guerrillas. Jane is no longer an inactive damsel in distress; she’s now a modern teenager who proves herself more than a match for the Lord of the Jungle. And Tarzan himself is not only Lord of the Jungle, but also a symbol for all that is good and noble, and for the preservation of the wild, untamable regions of our natural world.
Andy Briggs, author of the latest Tarzan books.
ANDY BRIGGS is a screenwriter, graphic novelist, and author. He has written for movie projects such as Judge Dredd, Freddy vs. Jason, and Aquaman. He also collaborated with Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and legendary producer Robert Evans on the screenplay for Foreverman. Briggs struck an eight-book deal with Oxford University Press for two series: Hero.com and Villain.net. His graphic novels include Kong: King of Skull Island, Ritual, and Dinocorps. He has recently rebooted the classic character Tarzan with his novels Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy and Tarzan: The Jungle Warrior.
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