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To the 60 or so people who gathered on Saturday in front of the chimpanzee’s cage here at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary to memorialize him, Cheetah was a friend and a symbol that the power of love can do miraculous things.
For example, it kept him alive, his caregivers claim, for nearly 80 years — a feat primate experts say is improbable at best.
“You don’t worry about what people say,” said Debbie Cobb, who runs the sanctuary and whose late grandmother claimed that relatives of the Weissmuller estate gave her the chimp they called Little Mike in 1960.
“You just walk your walk,” she said. “I had 51 years with him. I know who he was.”
Cheetah died from kidney failure just before 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Ms. Cobb was with him. She loaded his 140-lb. body on a cart and took him around to the other primates at the sanctuary so they could say goodbye. Then he was cremated.
News of his death captured the fancy of a nation during the slow news cycle of the holidays. Tarzan fans grieved. So did primate fans.
His death also gained the attention of people who think they know an old carnival ruse when they see it.
Certainly, the odds that this was the real Cheetah — or at least one of the dozen or more chimps that appeared in the movies — weren’t good.
The claim was immediately debunked by the writer R. D. Rosen, who in a 2008 article in The Washington Post dashed similar assertions by a California man who also said he owned Cheeta (one spelling variation on the name).
“I’m afraid any chimp who actually shared a sound stage with Weissmuller and O’Sullivan is long gone,” Mr. Rosen said in an e-mail to The Associated Press, referring to Weissmuller’s co-star Maureen O’Sullivan.
The history of Ms. Cobb’s family, who had possession of the Florida Cheetah since the 1960s, might make a thoughtful student of primate lineage a bit suspicious, as well.
Bob and Mae Noell , her grandparents, had come from a family that was in the traveling medicine show business. They had their own show once, too; a highlight was the chance to climb in the ring with a boxing chimpanzee.
In 1954, they opened the 14-acre sanctuary just south of Tarpon Springs as a winter refuge for their own performing animals and as a roadside attraction called Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm. It became a retirement home of sorts for aging animal performers and other creatures no one else seemed to want.
In the 1990s, the chimp farm fell into disarray. Cages were rusty and cramped. It attracted the attention of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The U.S.D.A. took its license in 1999.
But then, driven by a belief in God and a love of animals, the granddaughter who grew up thinking Cheetah was the real Cheetah pulled it back into shape. Proper licenses were restored, and renovations were made. A dedicated cadre of volunteers, and donations that now total about $100,000 a year, keep it a tidy refuge for animals and their devotees.
A fire in 1995 destroyed records that might have shown that Cheetah was indeed famous, Ms. Cobb said. A hand-lettered pamphlet from the 1960s making the claim is all that remains.
Diane Weissmuller, a representative of the Weissmuller estate, said that her father-in-law would not have had a chimp to give away. He did not own one as a pet and did not much like working with them anyway.
So how could this be the real Cheetah?
“It stretches one’s credulity beyond the snap-back point,” said the writer Susan Orlean. She is now one of the nation’s experts on celebrity animals, having just published “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” a book that examines the multianimal legacy of the canine star of movies, radio and television.
Tracing the lineage of animal actors is tricky business, she said.
“Animal stars have the unique ability that human stars don’t have of a certain fungibility,” she said. “You could swap out a chimp and create a kind of continuity that would be impossible with humans.”
Anyone who remembers the shock when the actor who played Darrin Stephens changed abruptly on the television show “Bewitched” in 1969 can relate.
Still, Ms. Orlean has sympathy for those who want to believe the chimp that died in Florida was the real deal.
“Animal stars have a kind of purity,” she said. “People have a fondness for them that’s not complicated by human frailty.”
Since all of the human stars of that era are dead, the sentimental attachment to Cheetah is that much stronger.
“We’d like to believe it’s the same Cheetah because it’s a connection to a period that has since passed,” she said.
That was certainly true for Theresa Toth, 65, who splits her time between Florida and New Jersey.
She and her sister-in-law came Saturday to pay their respects to a chimp that loved to paint and dance to Chuck Berry songs and that was so tidy he folded his own lavender-scented blanket.
“He’s a part of our youth, of our generation, and we all loved him,” she said. “To us, he’s Cheetah and always will be. Let somebody prove he’s not.”
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