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Whale Talk. Eventually, the most promising trainees graduate to the "Beverly Hills" suite of cages, home of such four-legged thespians as Judy the chimp, who can understand 76 verbal commands; Clarence the cross-eyed lion; Bruce the ocelot, who was a regular on TV's Honey West; Zamba II the lion, who appears on the Dreyfus Fund commercials; and Modac the elephant, a 53-year-old veteran of the Ringling Bros. Circus. Tors's Method menagerie accounts for 90% of all the animal scenes filmed in Hollywood; the going rate for a jungle headliner, who travels with two handlers and a standin: $1,000 per day.
Tors, whose grey spade beard gives him the look of a dietetic Burl Ives, is known as the "witch doctor" among his friends and as a photographic innovator throughout the movie industry. His stunning underwater camera work for Thunderball won an Oscar last year. And in the past four years he has built his own company's gross from $750,000 to $12 million. About the only mishap Tors has suffered occurred after he had filmed Namu, the Killer Whale. He had made friends with the five-ton mammal by spending all-night vigils floating on a log in Namu's pen while squeaking to him in "whale talk" and scratching his back. Shortly after the film was completed, Namu became entangled in a fouling net, and, unable to surface and breath through his spout, he drowned. Tors mournfully postponed release of the film, called Namu "the most intelligent creature I ever met."
The more Tors sees of animals, the less he thinks of man. "There are no natural enemies," he likes to say, "except man and woman." To prove that a peaceable kingdom is a possibility—at least on his 260-acre preserve near Los Angeles—he has combined such unlikely pen-mates as a python and a chimpanzee, a lion and an elephant and, most unlikely combination of all, a tiger and a fawn. "We humans live a phony existence," he insists. "We have fallen out of rhythm with nature."