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 The nuances and style had been replaced by clumsy vulgarity.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.
No comments:
Post a Comment