> Several years ago, Herb Caen, the late, great San Francisco columnist,
> asked me, "Bellingham, what is your university experience?" I was
> eager to tell him the truth: I went to music school but that was
> hardly an ardent excursion into scholarship. Between classes, I had to
> go on my own to San Francisco's City College to get a decent encounter
> with the German language. I went to New York University's Film School
> -- for about ten minutes. Not even long enough to complete a short
> subject. I dropped out to work at a movie house, the Bleecker Street
> Cinema. At least I could watch movies that way.
> "Gee, Herb," I told Caen, "I guess you might say I'm an autodidact."
> "Oh, I know what that means, " Caen shot back instantly. "That's when
> you drive yourself crazy."
> Herb was always very quick. When I spent time with him, I often felt
> like George Fenneman trying to keep up with Groucho Marx. But I did
> all right.
> I always take an interest when I hear successful stories about people
> who are largely self-taught. But few are as vivid as the biography of
> Britain's Sir Godfrey Hounsfield who never went to university but was
> the preeminent leader in computer technology and later developed the
> CAT scan. He claimed a Nobel Prize for the latter. It goes to show:
> who needs to do homework? There is more than one way to scan a CAT.
Perhaps a formal education might have gotten in the way of his
genius. And just imagine the lives he saved along the way. He just had
an understand of mathematics and physiology that defies explanation. He
got most of his inspiration while taking long, country walks. This is
one part of the Hounsfield psyche that I can understand. If the world
took more long walks, we would have a much more serene planet.
> Like most great inventors, Hounsfield had unlimited courage. When it
> was time to put the kosher cow brains aside in the laboratory and turn
> to human trials, he placed his own head in the device that would later
> be known as the CAT scan. God knows he risked having his own brains
> reduced to the intellect of a kosher bovine. Mezuzah done told me.
> And he was modest. Hounsfield was uncomfortable with the awards and
> accolades that he received over the years. He was even invited to join
> the Royal Society. It was unheard for this long-entrenched scientific
> community to accept a chap who did not accrue a panoply of academic
> credentials. But his genius was undeniable. It's unfortunate to note,
> however, that from time to time his fellow Royal Society members would
> gleefully and cruelly lock him in the bathroom as a lark. (Yes, I made
> that up for the hell of it.)
> Further proof of his humanity was found in his piano playing. Yes, he
> taught himself that, too. It's stunning to note what a human being can
> accomplish with drive and celestially-endowed talent.
> One subject, though, seemed to have escaped him: marriage. Perhaps it
> was too complex for the fellow. It defies formulas, equations and
> exact dimensions. Not to worry, Sir Godfrey. No one seems to be able
> to figure that one out. All the same, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> apparently did not need a life partner in order to share a life
> well-lived with the world.
>
> Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
> bellsf@mac.com
>
>
>
> From the London Telegraph
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
> (Filed: 17/08/2004)
>
> Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, who died on August 12 aged 84, led the team
> which developed Britain's first big solid-state computer before
> inventing the computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanner for use in
> clinical diagnosis; in recognition of this latter achievement he was
> awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
>
> Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner in 1967 during a
> weekend ramble in the country. Initially it had nothing to do with
> medicine, but was simply "a realisation that you could determine what
> was in a box by taking readings at all angles through it".
>
> On his return to EMI's research laboratories at Hayes, in Middlesex,
> he began working on a device that could process hundreds of X-ray
> beams to obtain a three-dimensional display of the inside of a living
> organism.
>
> Combining computer and X-ray technology, and practising "on a brain of
> a cow my colleague got from a kosher house on the other side of
> London" (he submitted his own head for the first human trials), by
> 1972 Hounsfield had evolved a machine that could produce detailed
> images of cross-sections of the brain in four and a half minutes.
>
> Introduced in 1973, early CAT scanners were used to overcome obstacles
> in the diagnosis of diseases of the brain, and Hounsfield subsequently
> modified his machine to enable it to scan the whole body.
>
> Unknown to Hounsfield, a South African nuclear physicist, Allan
> Cormack, had worked on essentially the same problems of CAT, and in a
> paper published in 1957 had suggested a reconstruction technique
> called the Radon transform. Although Cormack's work was not widely
> circulated, and he and Hounsfield did not collaborate or even meet, in
> 1979 both men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the
> development of computerised tomography.
>
> The invention of the CAT scanner was a remarkable achievement, not
> least because of the complex algebraic calculations involved in the
> computer programming. Other research teams with larger resources than
> EMI had already dismissed such a device as impossible to develop, and
> one prominent British scientist remarked that Hounsfield's machine
> used "mathematics I wouldn't pretend to understand now or at any stage
> of my career".
>
> Yet Hounsfield had never been to university and was largely
> self-taught.
>
> Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, the youngest of five children of a farmer
> near Newark in Nottinghamshire, was born on August 28 1919. At an
> early age he became intrigued by the farm's mechanical and electrical
> machinery, and by the age of 11 he had begun to experiment,
> constructing electrical recording machines and launching himself off
> the top of haystacks with a home-made glider.
>
> At Magnus Grammar School in Newark, he confessed to responding "only
> to physics and mathematics with any ease and moderate enthusiasm". But
> as with so many of Britain's great post-war scientists, his
> opportunity came with the outbreak of the Second World War.
>
> Hounsfield joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist, hoping to become
> involved in radio. Having perused some RAF books on radio mechanics,
> he sat a test and was amazed when he was then taken on as a
> radar-mechanic instructor and moved to the then RAF-occupied Royal
> College of Science in South Kensington, and later to Cranwell Radar
> School.
>
> There, in his spare time, he passed the City and Guilds examination in
> Radio Communications. In 1945 he was awarded the RAF's Certificate of
> Merit. His work impressed Air Vice-Marshal J R Cassidy, who was
> responsible for obtaining a grant for Hounsfield after the war which
> enabled him to attend Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in
> London, where he received a diploma.
>
> In 1951 Hounsfield joined the research staff of EMI at Hayes. For a
> while he worked on radar and guided weapons, then ran a small design
> laboratory, where he soon became fascinated by the emerging field of
> computers. Starting in about 1958, he led a design team which built
> the first all-transistor computer to be constructed in Britain, the
> EMIDEC 1100.
>
> In those days the transistor was a relatively slow device - much
> slower than valves, which were then used in most computers. However,
> Hounsfield was able to overcome this problem by driving the transistor
> with a magnetic core. This increased the speed of the machine so that
> it compared with that of valve computers and brought about the use of
> transistors in computing earlier than had been anticipated.
>
> When this work finished, Hounsfield transferred to EMI Central
> Research Laboratories, also at Hayes, where he began his work on CAT
> scanners. This work, and the development of progressively more
> sophisticated prototypes of brain and whole body scanners, kept him
> occupied until 1976.
>
> He remained responsible for long-term thinking about medical systems
> at EMI's research laboratories while others managed the Research and
> Development effort supporting his scanners. In his later years with
> EMI, he broadened his interests into related fields of diagnostic
> imaging, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.
>
> After his official retirement in 1986, Hounsfield continued to work as
> a consultant for EMI, and also to various hospitals, including the
> National Heart and Chest Hospitals, Chelsea, the National Heart
> Hospital and the Brompton Hospital.
>
> True to the archetype of the shy, retiring bachelor boffin, Hounsfield
> found the public interest in his invention "most embarrassing". He won
> numerous awards and honours (35 in the 1970s alone), among them
> election to the Royal Society, a rare accolade for someone who did not
> possess a university degree.
>
> A frugal man, Hounsfield spent very little on himself and always
> refused EMI's offer to let him take a sabbatical. When presented with
> the 1972 MacRobert award from the Council of Engineering Institutions,
> he said he would keep his £25,000 prize in reserve "in case some new
> research idea turns up, in which case I can plough it back". He did,
> however, spend a little of his Nobel prize money on fitting out the
> living-room of his small semi-detached house in Middlesex with
> scientific equipment.
>
> Apart from his work, Hounsfield's greatest pleasures were walking in
> the mountains and leading country rambles. He enjoyed music and played
> the piano "in a self-taught way". In company, he confessed to enjoying
> "lively, way-out discussions".
>
> On the day he won the Nobel prize in 1979, Hounsfield had some
> home-spun words of advice for all would-be Nobel prizewinners: "Don't
> worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have
> understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability
> to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the
> basics of what is happening."
>
> Godfrey Hounsfield was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1981. He
> was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1975.
>
> He was unmarried.
>
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Monday, August 16, 2004
Celebrity Boxing Comes of Age
In the "all-is-lost" department, the programmers at Fox Television
recently broadcast "Celebrity Boxing II" -- for the second time. It
was, once again, an unmitigated ratings failure and further evidence
that we are even closer to the end of civilization as we once knew it.
Into the ring gleefully bounced long lost luminaries who give obscurity
new meaning. They included the "Welcome Back, Kotter's" Ron Palillo --
cadaverous and pale -- who duked it out with "Saved by the Bell's
Dustin Diamond. The thrilla in vanilla.
Apparently no one has considered shooting the cretinous Joey Buttafuoco
with silver bulllets yet. There he was, ungallantly beating the hell
out of a young woman in the ring. I did not catch her name. I don't
think Joey did, either. Perhaps she decided not to reveal it. Did you
know that "Buttafuoco" comes from the Latin, meaning, "botched
lobotomy"? Joey is a real piece of work. He makes John Wayne Bobbitt
look like Charles Boyer.
The high point -- or low point -- was a match between former gold
medalist Olga Korbut and Darva Conger, who once married a millionaire
on TV who turned out not to be what he seemed. Imagine: a man lying
about his finances in order to snare a young woman. What will they
think of next? Ms. Conger later had the marriage annulled. Too bad. The
bride had already registered at the New York Stock Exchange. The Fox
announcer went out of his way to mention Olga Korbut had been arrested
in Atlanta for shoplifting. Now, that's class.
Conger, towering over the demure Korbut, pummeled the former Olympic
star mercilessly. Exceedingly aggressive, Conger must have had a
picture of that faux millionaire in her mind. I'm reminded of High Hat,
the heroic horse in the Marx Brother's "A Day At The Races," who goes
berserk when he hears the voice of the villain.
This "television event" was such a sad sight. "Television event": how's
that for a contradiction in terms?
On Monday morning, Fox executives met in New York for their regular
programming post-mortem. The question on the table: "Where do we go
from here?"
Here's the news. "Celebrity Boxing" will get a third chapter. But it
will take a new, imaginative direction -- into the world of politics.
There are plans to invite members of the House Armed Services Committee
to get into the ring with the Senate Committee on Intelligence. But
that's tentative. Besides, the term "intelligence" is repugnant to the
Fox marketing department. Meanwhile, some of the fallen stars on the
American political scene might soon through their protective headgear
into the ring. For example, Dick Morris might take on New Jersey
Governor Jim McGreevey. Fox management is particularly excited about
stationing a dominatrix in Morris' corner. Nice touch. McGreevey's
insisting on fresh cut flowers in his.
Another engaging match would be Al Gore versus Governor Howard Dean.
Gore could effectively use his turgid, stone face on his opponent while
Dean could employ that unnerving technique of shrieking like a peacock.
That rattles his challengers every time. In the event Dean backs out,
Michael Huffington is waiting in the wings. He might even wear them,
for all I know. Huffington all dolled up like an angel. I might even
pay money to see that.
Ralph Nader could use some publicity. He couldn't get on the California
ballot because he couldn't garner enough signatures. But if he went on
"Celebrity Boxing Three," it might be a different story. A matchup with
the CEO of General Motors might be fun. Or a bit of sparring with Ross
Perot, who intimidates adversaries with a terribly loud sucking sound.
A natural choice for the next round of "Celebrity Boxing" is Jesse
Ventura, who's been looking for a gig. It will be tough to find someone
who might go up against a pro. Schwarzenegger is too busy. Maybe the
Rev. Al Sharpton will go three rounds. They wouldn't have to fight. One
could try to force the other to submit through a steady stream of
invective and rhetoric. I know that sounds brutal but there are few
rules in the world of celebrity boxing.
Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." His e-mail
is bellsf@mac.com
recently broadcast "Celebrity Boxing II" -- for the second time. It
was, once again, an unmitigated ratings failure and further evidence
that we are even closer to the end of civilization as we once knew it.
Into the ring gleefully bounced long lost luminaries who give obscurity
new meaning. They included the "Welcome Back, Kotter's" Ron Palillo --
cadaverous and pale -- who duked it out with "Saved by the Bell's
Dustin Diamond. The thrilla in vanilla.
Apparently no one has considered shooting the cretinous Joey Buttafuoco
with silver bulllets yet. There he was, ungallantly beating the hell
out of a young woman in the ring. I did not catch her name. I don't
think Joey did, either. Perhaps she decided not to reveal it. Did you
know that "Buttafuoco" comes from the Latin, meaning, "botched
lobotomy"? Joey is a real piece of work. He makes John Wayne Bobbitt
look like Charles Boyer.
The high point -- or low point -- was a match between former gold
medalist Olga Korbut and Darva Conger, who once married a millionaire
on TV who turned out not to be what he seemed. Imagine: a man lying
about his finances in order to snare a young woman. What will they
think of next? Ms. Conger later had the marriage annulled. Too bad. The
bride had already registered at the New York Stock Exchange. The Fox
announcer went out of his way to mention Olga Korbut had been arrested
in Atlanta for shoplifting. Now, that's class.
Conger, towering over the demure Korbut, pummeled the former Olympic
star mercilessly. Exceedingly aggressive, Conger must have had a
picture of that faux millionaire in her mind. I'm reminded of High Hat,
the heroic horse in the Marx Brother's "A Day At The Races," who goes
berserk when he hears the voice of the villain.
This "television event" was such a sad sight. "Television event": how's
that for a contradiction in terms?
On Monday morning, Fox executives met in New York for their regular
programming post-mortem. The question on the table: "Where do we go
from here?"
Here's the news. "Celebrity Boxing" will get a third chapter. But it
will take a new, imaginative direction -- into the world of politics.
There are plans to invite members of the House Armed Services Committee
to get into the ring with the Senate Committee on Intelligence. But
that's tentative. Besides, the term "intelligence" is repugnant to the
Fox marketing department. Meanwhile, some of the fallen stars on the
American political scene might soon through their protective headgear
into the ring. For example, Dick Morris might take on New Jersey
Governor Jim McGreevey. Fox management is particularly excited about
stationing a dominatrix in Morris' corner. Nice touch. McGreevey's
insisting on fresh cut flowers in his.
Another engaging match would be Al Gore versus Governor Howard Dean.
Gore could effectively use his turgid, stone face on his opponent while
Dean could employ that unnerving technique of shrieking like a peacock.
That rattles his challengers every time. In the event Dean backs out,
Michael Huffington is waiting in the wings. He might even wear them,
for all I know. Huffington all dolled up like an angel. I might even
pay money to see that.
Ralph Nader could use some publicity. He couldn't get on the California
ballot because he couldn't garner enough signatures. But if he went on
"Celebrity Boxing Three," it might be a different story. A matchup with
the CEO of General Motors might be fun. Or a bit of sparring with Ross
Perot, who intimidates adversaries with a terribly loud sucking sound.
A natural choice for the next round of "Celebrity Boxing" is Jesse
Ventura, who's been looking for a gig. It will be tough to find someone
who might go up against a pro. Schwarzenegger is too busy. Maybe the
Rev. Al Sharpton will go three rounds. They wouldn't have to fight. One
could try to force the other to submit through a steady stream of
invective and rhetoric. I know that sounds brutal but there are few
rules in the world of celebrity boxing.
Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." His e-mail
is bellsf@mac.com
Friday, August 13, 2004
The Little Terrors
I have often said that terror is the mother of invention.
I don't mean the sort of terror that saturates the news these days and penetrates the consciousness of the American people and countless others around the world.
I mean the little terrors; the deadlines, the bills that are due, maintaining the romance, the things that bring us to the threshold of humiliation. Most of us would do practically anything not to look foolish. This is a driving force, another aspect of the so-called work ethic. Shame is a terrific commodity.
The other day scientists announced they are having great success in getting monkeys -- like most humans, quite lazy by nature -- to stay busy and work hard without the inducement of a reward. The researchers employed gene therapy to block dopamine in the monkey's minds. Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that lures us into listening to reggae music and watching Dr. Phil on television instead of attending to our responsibilities. Dopamine is the daydreaming drug. The monkeys suddenly set about their activities with a non-stop fury.
It is sobering to think that corporate managers could get their hands on this genetic technology -- another blow to labor unions. But most of us don't need this sort of thing these days, with a deteriorating economy and shrinking paychecks. We are willing to accept all sorts of assignments. More terror.
Ah, but prosperity -- or recovery -- is just around the corner. Which corner, no one is saying. It is unsettling to hear George W. Bush use the same language as Herbert Hoover did.
But I digress.
Mankind's desire for stimulants is as old as mankind itself. The big theme at the Athens Olympics was "doping." That seems like an odd term for the use of illegal steroids and other body-bolstering substances that would enhance an athlete's performance for that extra edge. There were no dopes in the doping pas de deux between the cheating athletes and the ever-vigilant officials from the International Olympic Committee. The slick cheaters constantly found ways to outfox the officials with test-proof steroids and the officials kept coming up with more sophisticated testing methods. This drama should have been a separate competitive category at the games -- cops and robbers on a Olympian scale.
The manic drive to win produces a terror of it own. The fear of failure. The nightmare of humiliation. The agony of defeat.
I was amazed to learn a boxer from Kenya was kicked out of the competition after a test revealed that he had been using – get this - caffeine. Caffeine? Boy, are they serious. Athensis no place for Starbucks.
I am not going to knock Starbucks. I might have to go to work there.
Some of us are lucky enough not to be driven by terror but by the sheer pleasure of doing something we enjoy. Thirty years ago, while watching the Academy Awards of television, I saw the great actor Raymond Massey accept the Oscar for a colleague who was "away in Europe working." Massey paused for a moment -- a wonderful theatrical hesitation-- and said, "Work, isn't that a beautiful word?"
I'm not so sure the research monkeys would agree with him. After the gene therapy wore off -- that took about ten weeks -- the dopamine kicked back in and the monkeys resumed their lazy, layabout behavior. But one could get a lot done in ten weeks. I could write the Great American Resume. Monkeys seem impervious to the little terrors. We could learn from that.
Terror? What terror? What, me worry?
Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham By The Bay. His e-mail is bellsf@mac.com
Blogsite by kimberly kubalek, www.kubalek.com
I don't mean the sort of terror that saturates the news these days and penetrates the consciousness of the American people and countless others around the world.
I mean the little terrors; the deadlines, the bills that are due, maintaining the romance, the things that bring us to the threshold of humiliation. Most of us would do practically anything not to look foolish. This is a driving force, another aspect of the so-called work ethic. Shame is a terrific commodity.
The other day scientists announced they are having great success in getting monkeys -- like most humans, quite lazy by nature -- to stay busy and work hard without the inducement of a reward. The researchers employed gene therapy to block dopamine in the monkey's minds. Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that lures us into listening to reggae music and watching Dr. Phil on television instead of attending to our responsibilities. Dopamine is the daydreaming drug. The monkeys suddenly set about their activities with a non-stop fury.
It is sobering to think that corporate managers could get their hands on this genetic technology -- another blow to labor unions. But most of us don't need this sort of thing these days, with a deteriorating economy and shrinking paychecks. We are willing to accept all sorts of assignments. More terror.
Ah, but prosperity -- or recovery -- is just around the corner. Which corner, no one is saying. It is unsettling to hear George W. Bush use the same language as Herbert Hoover did.
But I digress.
Mankind's desire for stimulants is as old as mankind itself. The big theme at the Athens Olympics was "doping." That seems like an odd term for the use of illegal steroids and other body-bolstering substances that would enhance an athlete's performance for that extra edge. There were no dopes in the doping pas de deux between the cheating athletes and the ever-vigilant officials from the International Olympic Committee. The slick cheaters constantly found ways to outfox the officials with test-proof steroids and the officials kept coming up with more sophisticated testing methods. This drama should have been a separate competitive category at the games -- cops and robbers on a Olympian scale.
The manic drive to win produces a terror of it own. The fear of failure. The nightmare of humiliation. The agony of defeat.
I was amazed to learn a boxer from Kenya was kicked out of the competition after a test revealed that he had been using – get this - caffeine. Caffeine? Boy, are they serious. Athensis no place for Starbucks.
I am not going to knock Starbucks. I might have to go to work there.
Some of us are lucky enough not to be driven by terror but by the sheer pleasure of doing something we enjoy. Thirty years ago, while watching the Academy Awards of television, I saw the great actor Raymond Massey accept the Oscar for a colleague who was "away in Europe working." Massey paused for a moment -- a wonderful theatrical hesitation-- and said, "Work, isn't that a beautiful word?"
I'm not so sure the research monkeys would agree with him. After the gene therapy wore off -- that took about ten weeks -- the dopamine kicked back in and the monkeys resumed their lazy, layabout behavior. But one could get a lot done in ten weeks. I could write the Great American Resume. Monkeys seem impervious to the little terrors. We could learn from that.
Terror? What terror? What, me worry?
Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham By The Bay. His e-mail is bellsf@mac.com
Blogsite by kimberly kubalek, www.kubalek.com
Monday, August 09, 2004
Fay Wray, Beautiful Screamer
When I read about the splashy characters of a not-so-far bygone age -- such as Fay Wray, who died this week -- she and her contemporaries seem to have lived their lives in a much larger way than most of us do. They had color and panache. They seemed to have had unreluctantly attached their tongues to the marrow of life. And sometimes just as unreluctantly to each other.
Ms. Wray, her pals and her paramours appear fearless to face things, much like the character she portrayed in the immortal "King Kong," an off-beat romance with primal overtones. In the film she is introduced as "Ann Darrow, the bravest girl I have ever known." By comparison, all seems so mundane today; derivative as it is deliriously dull.
In the following piece from the London Telegraph, we learn that Ms. Wray was saddened by what she described the death of romance in the movies. The nuances and style had been replaced by clumsy vulgarity. She was wryly (or is that wrayly?) funny on the topic of on-screen kissing: "You would never see Ronald Coleman take a bite out of someone."
In "King Kong," Fay Wray set the standard for on-screen screaming -- loud enough to set off the car alarms, if they had been around then.
The girl with the "Nefertiti eyes" took several famous actors for lovers but she also attracted the literati, such as Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets. They must have adored her wit, as well as her pulchritude. (Speaking of wit, do you recall that George S. Kaufman line, "Odets, where is thy sting?") But for all the films she made, she is inextricably linked to "King Kong." Who does not have affection for the movie and for the dangerous, giant primate who becomes a little boy lost in the big city looking for love? As a kid, I would watch the film on TV out of New York dozens of times. When the big ape faces the fusillades from the planes atop the Empire State Building, I, like everyone else was pulling for him -- even though he had destroyed the Third Avenue El. I think WOR-TV got a kick out of broadcasting it because the transmitter was atop the Empire State.
This week Fay Wray received a grand accolade. The lights on the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in honor of the actress. New York has class. So did Fay Wray. Hers was a life well-lived. And remember: "It was beauty who killed the beast."
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Fay Wray
(Filed: 11/08/2004)
Fay Wray, who died on Sunday aged 96, made more than 70 films throughout Hollywood's best period, but was irrevocably identified with her most famous role - the screaming girl in King Kong's enormous paw.
Very pretty and sweet-natured, she played opposite such major stars as Gary Cooper, Fredric March and William Powell, and was not only loved by Cary Grant and made love to by Howard Hughes, but won the hearts of the playwright Clifford Odets and the novelist Sinclair Lewis.
She survived more than one tragedy in her private life, emerging with her optimism and charm untarnished, to write in old age a singularly graceful autobiography. With wry humour, she acknowledged her debt to "the tallest, darkest leading man", who bestowed on her a place among the Hollywood immortals. Whenever she saw the Empire State Building, the scene of King Kong's pitiful death for Beauty's sake, she felt a kind of proprietorial affection.
Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born at a ranch-house in Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on September 15 1907. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married when very young a man who proved impotent, and fled north across the border with Joseph Herber Wray, an ingenious, feckless rolling stone who had been born in Hull.
Wray established a saw-mill, which failed, and they moved back to America, first to Arizona, where a small farm was equally unsuccessful, then to Salt Lake City. He invented a can-opener for condensed milk, but the factory making it went out of business. Meanwhile, Fay made her first theatrical appearance as Mrs Santa Claus in the school play.
Following another move, to the small Mormon town of Lark, Joseph Wary drifted off, looking for work elsewhere. Nobody seems to have minded much, and the Mormon community was supportive. Fay's mother, having already introduced her daughter to the enchantment of silent films, entered Fay for a newspaper competition, in which she won a screen test.
Fay's eldest sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918; and, because Fay's own health was considered frail, she was somewhat recklessly sent, at the age of 14, to live in Los Angeles with a young photographer named William Mortensen, who was a friend of her second sister, Willow.
At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she did well academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. Her mother, hearing that Mortensen had taken photographs of Fay, drew the wrong conclusion, stormed to Los Angeles, broke his glass negatives and whisked her daughter off to a boarding house. "My mother was ridiculously oppressive without meaning to be," Fay recalled. "She wanted me to have a career, but she wanted me to be untouched by it in any way."
One of the film people to whom Mortensen had introduced her gave Fay the leading role in a small film. This was followed by a series of bit parts in which she appeared simply as a pretty girl.
When she left school, she applied to the Hal Roach studio, and was given a six-month contract. She appeared in two-reel Western’s, sharing a dressing-room with Janet Gaynor; she played opposite Stan Laurel, who was not yet teamed with Oliver Hardy.
In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim's hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March. She resisted the director's sexual advances without too much difficulty or subsequent ill-will, and she learned a great deal from him.
In the same year she made Legion of the Condemned, starring Gary Cooper, whom she liked but remembered as "very stiff, rather like part of the furniture". The script of the film had been written by John Monk
Saunders, a handsome, charming, former Rhodes Scholar who had been a flying instructor during the war and had wept when he heard of the armistice, because he would never now see action. Captivated by Fay Wray's "Nefertiti eyes", he had a failed marriage behind him and was a much more disturbed person than Fay realized when she embarked on a relationship with him.
While she was on location in Maryland, filming The First Kiss with Gary Cooper, Fay Wray heard that her brother Vivien had died, ostensibly by accident, probably by suicide. Saunders arrived to comfort her, and, with Cooper as witness, they were married. For the first time she felt independent of her mother.
Saunders himself won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol (1930). Fay Wray went to New York to star in his musical play Nikki, which flopped but which introduced her to Cary Grant, who was still called Archie Leach ("Cary" was the name of his character in the play). She had already discovered that Saunders was a compulsive womanizer and a periodic drunk.
In 1929 Fay Wray made The Four Feathers; in 1930 The Texan; in 1931 Dirigible. Although late in life she was to refer to the coming of talkies as "a kind of rudeness" which led to her being "tossed on to the commercial heap", she appeared to take the development in her stride. She made 10 films in Hollywood, one of which was King Kong, which had a 10-week shooting schedule spread over most of the year. It saved RKO from bankruptcy, although nobody then, including Fay Wray, had any idea of its potential impact.
For the rest of her life, she was asked about the special effects. King Kong himself was just 18 inches high, but the arm which lifted her was six feet long and, when she felt that she was slipping from his paw, it was genuinely frightening. It is said that Fay Wray had been one of a dozen actresses auditioned for the part of Ann Darrow, and that she had been selected because she produced the loudest scream.
Throughout 1933 and 1934 she started a new film every fourth Friday, which was how Hollywood worked in those days. Among the best was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.
Reflecting on her career in 1996, Fay Wray lamented what she saw as the death of romance in cinema. Of screen-kissing, she remarked: "These days, they just chew each other. Today there is no such thing as a really wonderful embrace . . . You never saw Ronald Coleman taking a great big bite out of someone." She herself, when kissing on screen, always kept her mouth closed.
Of silent movies, she said: "Every little movement by Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford was compelling and wonderful. They held us close to their hearts. Every time we saw a silent film, we were drawn by the fact that the caring was inherent."
As for modern pictures, Fay Wray seldom watched them: "I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions."
Life with the vulnerable, volatile, Saunders became desperately erratic: sometimes sweet, sometimes tormenting. In 1935 they traveled to England ("I really came to get away from horror films," Fay Wray said), and she appeared with Jack Hulbert and Ralph Richardson in Bulldog Jack and with Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant. Saunders showed her Oxford and took her to the Boat Race.
She returned to Hollywood for the birth of her daughter, Susan; but in 1938 she and Saunders separated.
Fay Wray busied herself with films and also with summer stock theatrical productions in New England. On one occasion while she was away, Saunders took Susan away with him. Fay traced and recovered her daughter with the powerful assistance of Colonel William Donovan, who was soon to create the Office of Strategic Services, which begat the CIA.
Theatrical work improved her skill and introduced her to intelligent new people. Sinclair Lewis fell for her heavily, and pursued her relentlessly; Howard Hughes courted her briefly. She had a protracted affair with Clifford Odets, which ended for reasons she never quite understood. In 1939 she heard that John Monk Saunders had hanged himself.
Her second, and much happier, marriage was to the distinguished screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose credits included It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You. "Be good to her," she overheard Cary Grant say to Riskin. "I was so in love with her." She and Riskin had a son, Bobby, and a daughter, Vicki.
During the Second World War, while Fay found new openings in radio drama, Riskin was in Europe working for the Office of War Information. The tranquil post-war years ended when Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951. Fay Wray tended him devotedly until his death five years later.
In 1971 she married Dr Sanford Rothenburg, whom she had met in the hospital where Riskin was being treated. Her last film was Summer Love in 1958, but in the mid-1980s she wrote a play about her parents, which was produced in New Hampshire with her daughter Susan playing the role of Fay's mother.
Her autobiography, On The Other Hand, was published in 1989. Combining candor with discretion, it showed a woman serenely and compassionately meditating on all that had happened to her.
Ms. Wray, her pals and her paramours appear fearless to face things, much like the character she portrayed in the immortal "King Kong," an off-beat romance with primal overtones. In the film she is introduced as "Ann Darrow, the bravest girl I have ever known." By comparison, all seems so mundane today; derivative as it is deliriously dull.
In the following piece from the London Telegraph, we learn that Ms. Wray was saddened by what she described the death of romance in the movies. The nuances and style had been replaced by clumsy vulgarity. She was wryly (or is that wrayly?) funny on the topic of on-screen kissing: "You would never see Ronald Coleman take a bite out of someone."
In "King Kong," Fay Wray set the standard for on-screen screaming -- loud enough to set off the car alarms, if they had been around then.
The girl with the "Nefertiti eyes" took several famous actors for lovers but she also attracted the literati, such as Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets. They must have adored her wit, as well as her pulchritude. (Speaking of wit, do you recall that George S. Kaufman line, "Odets, where is thy sting?") But for all the films she made, she is inextricably linked to "King Kong." Who does not have affection for the movie and for the dangerous, giant primate who becomes a little boy lost in the big city looking for love? As a kid, I would watch the film on TV out of New York dozens of times. When the big ape faces the fusillades from the planes atop the Empire State Building, I, like everyone else was pulling for him -- even though he had destroyed the Third Avenue El. I think WOR-TV got a kick out of broadcasting it because the transmitter was atop the Empire State.
This week Fay Wray received a grand accolade. The lights on the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in honor of the actress. New York has class. So did Fay Wray. Hers was a life well-lived. And remember: "It was beauty who killed the beast."
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Fay Wray
(Filed: 11/08/2004)
Fay Wray, who died on Sunday aged 96, made more than 70 films throughout Hollywood's best period, but was irrevocably identified with her most famous role - the screaming girl in King Kong's enormous paw.
Very pretty and sweet-natured, she played opposite such major stars as Gary Cooper, Fredric March and William Powell, and was not only loved by Cary Grant and made love to by Howard Hughes, but won the hearts of the playwright Clifford Odets and the novelist Sinclair Lewis.
She survived more than one tragedy in her private life, emerging with her optimism and charm untarnished, to write in old age a singularly graceful autobiography. With wry humour, she acknowledged her debt to "the tallest, darkest leading man", who bestowed on her a place among the Hollywood immortals. Whenever she saw the Empire State Building, the scene of King Kong's pitiful death for Beauty's sake, she felt a kind of proprietorial affection.
Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born at a ranch-house in Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on September 15 1907. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married when very young a man who proved impotent, and fled north across the border with Joseph Herber Wray, an ingenious, feckless rolling stone who had been born in Hull.
Wray established a saw-mill, which failed, and they moved back to America, first to Arizona, where a small farm was equally unsuccessful, then to Salt Lake City. He invented a can-opener for condensed milk, but the factory making it went out of business. Meanwhile, Fay made her first theatrical appearance as Mrs Santa Claus in the school play.
Following another move, to the small Mormon town of Lark, Joseph Wary drifted off, looking for work elsewhere. Nobody seems to have minded much, and the Mormon community was supportive. Fay's mother, having already introduced her daughter to the enchantment of silent films, entered Fay for a newspaper competition, in which she won a screen test.
Fay's eldest sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918; and, because Fay's own health was considered frail, she was somewhat recklessly sent, at the age of 14, to live in Los Angeles with a young photographer named William Mortensen, who was a friend of her second sister, Willow.
At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she did well academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. Her mother, hearing that Mortensen had taken photographs of Fay, drew the wrong conclusion, stormed to Los Angeles, broke his glass negatives and whisked her daughter off to a boarding house. "My mother was ridiculously oppressive without meaning to be," Fay recalled. "She wanted me to have a career, but she wanted me to be untouched by it in any way."
One of the film people to whom Mortensen had introduced her gave Fay the leading role in a small film. This was followed by a series of bit parts in which she appeared simply as a pretty girl.
When she left school, she applied to the Hal Roach studio, and was given a six-month contract. She appeared in two-reel Western’s, sharing a dressing-room with Janet Gaynor; she played opposite Stan Laurel, who was not yet teamed with Oliver Hardy.
In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim's hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March. She resisted the director's sexual advances without too much difficulty or subsequent ill-will, and she learned a great deal from him.
In the same year she made Legion of the Condemned, starring Gary Cooper, whom she liked but remembered as "very stiff, rather like part of the furniture". The script of the film had been written by John Monk
Saunders, a handsome, charming, former Rhodes Scholar who had been a flying instructor during the war and had wept when he heard of the armistice, because he would never now see action. Captivated by Fay Wray's "Nefertiti eyes", he had a failed marriage behind him and was a much more disturbed person than Fay realized when she embarked on a relationship with him.
While she was on location in Maryland, filming The First Kiss with Gary Cooper, Fay Wray heard that her brother Vivien had died, ostensibly by accident, probably by suicide. Saunders arrived to comfort her, and, with Cooper as witness, they were married. For the first time she felt independent of her mother.
Saunders himself won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol (1930). Fay Wray went to New York to star in his musical play Nikki, which flopped but which introduced her to Cary Grant, who was still called Archie Leach ("Cary" was the name of his character in the play). She had already discovered that Saunders was a compulsive womanizer and a periodic drunk.
In 1929 Fay Wray made The Four Feathers; in 1930 The Texan; in 1931 Dirigible. Although late in life she was to refer to the coming of talkies as "a kind of rudeness" which led to her being "tossed on to the commercial heap", she appeared to take the development in her stride. She made 10 films in Hollywood, one of which was King Kong, which had a 10-week shooting schedule spread over most of the year. It saved RKO from bankruptcy, although nobody then, including Fay Wray, had any idea of its potential impact.
For the rest of her life, she was asked about the special effects. King Kong himself was just 18 inches high, but the arm which lifted her was six feet long and, when she felt that she was slipping from his paw, it was genuinely frightening. It is said that Fay Wray had been one of a dozen actresses auditioned for the part of Ann Darrow, and that she had been selected because she produced the loudest scream.
Throughout 1933 and 1934 she started a new film every fourth Friday, which was how Hollywood worked in those days. Among the best was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.
Reflecting on her career in 1996, Fay Wray lamented what she saw as the death of romance in cinema. Of screen-kissing, she remarked: "These days, they just chew each other. Today there is no such thing as a really wonderful embrace . . . You never saw Ronald Coleman taking a great big bite out of someone." She herself, when kissing on screen, always kept her mouth closed.
Of silent movies, she said: "Every little movement by Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford was compelling and wonderful. They held us close to their hearts. Every time we saw a silent film, we were drawn by the fact that the caring was inherent."
As for modern pictures, Fay Wray seldom watched them: "I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions."
Life with the vulnerable, volatile, Saunders became desperately erratic: sometimes sweet, sometimes tormenting. In 1935 they traveled to England ("I really came to get away from horror films," Fay Wray said), and she appeared with Jack Hulbert and Ralph Richardson in Bulldog Jack and with Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant. Saunders showed her Oxford and took her to the Boat Race.
She returned to Hollywood for the birth of her daughter, Susan; but in 1938 she and Saunders separated.
Fay Wray busied herself with films and also with summer stock theatrical productions in New England. On one occasion while she was away, Saunders took Susan away with him. Fay traced and recovered her daughter with the powerful assistance of Colonel William Donovan, who was soon to create the Office of Strategic Services, which begat the CIA.
Theatrical work improved her skill and introduced her to intelligent new people. Sinclair Lewis fell for her heavily, and pursued her relentlessly; Howard Hughes courted her briefly. She had a protracted affair with Clifford Odets, which ended for reasons she never quite understood. In 1939 she heard that John Monk Saunders had hanged himself.
Her second, and much happier, marriage was to the distinguished screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose credits included It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You. "Be good to her," she overheard Cary Grant say to Riskin. "I was so in love with her." She and Riskin had a son, Bobby, and a daughter, Vicki.
During the Second World War, while Fay found new openings in radio drama, Riskin was in Europe working for the Office of War Information. The tranquil post-war years ended when Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951. Fay Wray tended him devotedly until his death five years later.
In 1971 she married Dr Sanford Rothenburg, whom she had met in the hospital where Riskin was being treated. Her last film was Summer Love in 1958, but in the mid-1980s she wrote a play about her parents, which was produced in New Hampshire with her daughter Susan playing the role of Fay's mother.
Her autobiography, On The Other Hand, was published in 1989. Combining candor with discretion, it showed a woman serenely and compassionately meditating on all that had happened to her.
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