Tribute to Fay Wray
Meeting Fay Wray today, it does not seem possible that this pretty, witty, chic and sharply observant lady first arrived in Hollywood in 1921, when there were geraniums in the streets and Rudolph Valentino had only just won stardom; or that hers was the Beauty that, much later, killed the Beast that was King Kong. Her hair is now white but stylish. What her first husband John Monk Saunders acutely styled her "Nefertiti eyes" are as startling as ever.
King Kong is the film which has brought her world-wide celebrity, but Erich Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March remains her finest and favourite role: "It means so much to me emotionally. It was the first big picture I was ever in, and now it’s come full circle. It’s a wonderful feeling."
She played her first bit parts in slapstick comedies while still at Junior High School. In 1926 she was nominated a WAMPAS Baby Star of the year, along with Joan Crawford, Dolores Del Rio, Mary Astor and Janet Gaynor. She went on to do a string of little westerns at Universal Studios, and was already 20 when a woman agent suggested her as a possible leading lady for Erich von Stroheim’s new picture.
"The very idea of meeting Von Stroheim, of being in a film with him - and this particular film! I got myself ready, with high-heeled shoes and my hair done up on my head. When I arrived at the office, the manager said, ‘Oh, no.You’re too tall and Mr Stroheim is short. And he wants a blonde - you’re brunette’ So I asked if I could come back next day, which I did, with low heels and my hair hanging down loose.
"Stroheim was not at all the whip-cracking teuton he was reputed. He was very genteel, immaculately dressed and considerate. He paced up and down, telling the story, apparently to the agent, but looking at me from time to time…
"When he finished he turned to me, ‘Do you think you could play the role of Mitzi?’ I said, ‘I know I could!’ And he offered his hand and said, ‘Well, goodbye, Mitzi.’ I couldn’t take his hand because I was crying so much I had to cover my face. And I heard him saying, ‘Yes, yes, I can work with her!’ They went out and I sat wiping my tears, knowing that from that moment my life was going to be immensely different, It was a beautiful feeling.
"I never did get another director as great as Von Stroheim. His genius was an infinite capacity for taking care of detail. Nothing was too small to be overlooked. Every inch of the film and of the frame was important. In the beer-garden scene, which was the first I shot with him, he had had thousands of blossoms made by hand, some in wax and some in paper so that they would flutter down on where we sat. And even though it was a silent film he insisted that the actors should speak precise lines.
"The sets were incredible. You felt you could live in that city — in fact I had a bedroom over the butcher’s shop. The great recreation of St Stephen’s cathedral for the scene of the Corpus Christi procession was not full size, of course, but the facade and much of the interior was complete. In fact the cameraman Hal Mohr was married in it.
"Stroheim was very considerate with actors. He could get angry, but usually it was justified. Working with him was not so much a question of acting as of living a feeling. It came from him. It was a beautiful feeling. It was unforgettable."
After The Wedding March, Fay’s career took off. Twenty more starring roles - with William Powell, Richard Arlen and the young Gary Cooper among her leading men - followed before King Kong. "I was not attracted to that film at first. In the end I was won over by the irresistible, boyish enthusiasm of the co-director Merian C. Cooper. He told me I was going to have "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood". For a moment she thought he meant Cary Grant, whom she had come to like a lot when they appeared together (he was still called Archibald Leach) in a Broadway musical.
A compulsive writer herself, she has always seemed a muse for writers. Central to her life was a ten-year marriage to the writer John Monk Saunders, an archetypal figure of the Scott Fitzgerald "Lost Generation". Fay herself, quite undeterred by the years, continues to write with ever-increasing energy and has just finished a new collection of essays which she calls "Scene By Scene as Seen by Fay Wray". Her play The Meadowlark was staged in New Hampshire last summer, and she is already at work on a new one.
A New Yorker now, she does not see many modern movies. "I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions. That doesn’t attract me - sensation for sensation’s sake. I fell madly in love with the movies at 8 or 9 when the family was living in Salt Lake City and I was taken to a show called The Kinema, and I’ve stayed in love with the movies ever since. I do not like the idea that sentiment is out of style. The kind of emotion you got in the silent movies is still valuable and meaningful. I don’t forget the things I saw and learnt in those pictures."
― |a|m|t|r|s|t| (amateurist), Monday, 9 August 2004 18:11 (twenty-one years ago)
Canadian-born actress Fay Wray of King Kong fame dies at 96 in New YorkBy Karen Matthews
NEW YORK (AP) — Fay Wray, who won everlasting fame as the damsel held atop the Empire State Building by the giant ape in the 1933 film classic King Kong, has died, a close friend said Monday. She was 96.
The Alberta-born actress died Sunday at her Manhattan apartment, said Rick McKay, a friend and director of the last film she appeared in. There was no official cause of death.
“She just kind of drifted off quietly as if she was going to sleep,” said McKay, director of the documentary Broadway: The Golden Age.
“She just kind of gave out.”
During a career that started in 1923, Wray appeared with such stars as Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy, but she was destined to be linked with the rampaging Kong in movie fans’ minds.
“I used to resent King Kong,” she remarked in a 1963 interview. “But now I don’t fight it anymore. I realize that it is a classic, and I am pleased to be associated with it. Why, only recently an entire issue of a French magazine was devoted to discussing the picture from its artistic, moral and even religious aspects.”
She wrote in her 1988 autobiography, On the Other Hand: “Each time I arrive in New York and see the skyline and the exquisite beauty of the Empire State Building, my heart beats a little faster. I like that feeling. I really like it!”
King Kong obscured the other notable films Wray made during the ’30s. They included adventures The Four Feathers (with Richard Arlen and William Powell) and Viva Villa (Wallace Beery), Westerns The Texan (Cooper) and The Conquering Horde (Arlen), romances One Sunday Afternoon (Cooper) and The Unholy Garden (Colman) as well as horror films Dr. X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum.
After appearing in Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 silent The Wedding March, playing a poor Viennese girl abandoned by her lover, a playboy prince, Wray became a much-employed leading lady. In 1933, the year of King Kong, she appeared in 11 films, co-starring with Beery, George Raft, Cooper, Jack Holt and others.
In 1980, she told of her dissatisfaction with roles of that period: “In those days, the female characters never knew who their parents were. Leading ladies were not supposed to be funny but were supposed to stand there and look beautiful. That was frustrating as an actress.”
In her autobiography, the actress recalled that she had been paid $10,000 for King Kong (budget: $680,000), but her 10 weeks’ work was stretched over a 10-month period. “Residuals were not even considered, because there were no established unions to protect us,” she added.
In King Kong, she plays an unemployed actress who agrees to take a job with a movie company that is going on location to a mysterious island. Kong is the huge ape that inhabits a part of the island.
When the film company discovers him, Kong is attracted to Wray and abducts her. But he is eventually captured and brought to New York and put on display. Kong escapes and finds Wray, with terrifying results, but eventually meets his death on the Empire State Building.
She was proud that King Kong had saved RKO studio from bankruptcy. Of Kong she wrote: “He is a very real and individual entity. He has a personality, a character that has been compelling to many different people for many different reasons and viewpoints.”
She was the guest of honour in 1991 at a ceremony marking the 60th birthday of the Empire State Building, saying that if she were mayor of New York, “I would want to run the city from this building ... and get up every morning to see the sun rise.”
Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was really only half a metre tall. Miss Wray knew him by the arm, which was more than two metres long.
“I would stand on the floor,” she recalled, “and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.”
By the late ’30s, the actress was appearing in low-budget films, and she quit working in 1942 to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was John Monk Saunders, who wrote such air films as Wings and The Dawn Patrol. She was 19 and he was 30 when they married. She discovered he was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and the marriage became a nightmare.
After a divorce, she married Robert Riskin, the brilliant writer of It Happened One Night, Lost Horizon and other Frank Capra films. In 1950, he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. He died five years later.
Returning to work in 1953, Wray appeared mostly in motherly roles in youth-oriented films like Small Town Girl, Tammy and the Bachelor and Summer Love. In 1979 she played opposite Henry Fonda in a TV drama, Gideon’s Trumpet.
She was born Vina Fay Wray on Sept. 15, 1907, near Cardston in rural Alberta. Her parents moved to the United States when she was three, first trying farming in Arizona, and eventually returning to Salt Lake City, where Wray’s mother was from. Later, they settled in Los Angeles.
As a teenager she haunted studio casting offices and won an occasional bit role. Despite her mother’s fears that the movie crowd was sinful, Wray was allowed to accept a six-month contract with Hal Roach at $60 a week.
Wray had a daughter, Susan, from her first marriage and a daughter and son, Victoria and Robert Jr., by the second. Sixteen years after Riskin’s death, she married his physician, Dr. Sandford Rothenberg.
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Associated Press writer Bob Thomas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
― Huck, Monday, 9 August 2004 18:25 (twenty-one years ago)