THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260069
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 152 lines
They promised her ``the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.''
She expected Cary Grant.
She got King Kong.
In spite being undressed, tickled and sniffed by the 50-foot gorilla, Fay Wray has no complaints.
``To me, he was never the villain,'' said Wray, 88, as she prepared to travel to Charlottesville where she will host screenings of both 1933's ``King Kong'' and her 1928 breakthrough film ``The Wedding March'' tonight. She's the honored guest at the Virginia Festival of American Film, which runs through Sunday.
``He is very much a part of my public life. After all, I made 77 pictures, but he became quite immortal with just one.
``Kong is the symbol of the misunderstood outsider. I think that's why audiences throughout the world pulled for him. My heart aches for him every time I see the film. You see, I thought of him as a being, a character, never a thing. Actually, he was just this little 18-inch high doll, but not to me.''
Wray was speaking from her condominium on the ninth floor overlooking what was once the 20th Century-Fox back lot. From her window, she looks down on the very site where she filmed ``Shanghai Madness'' with Spencer Tracy, one of the 11 movies she made in 1933.
She was chosen by director Merian C. Cooper for ``Kong'' because she had worked with him in the adventure film ``Four Feathers.''
``He had a great sense of style, and a great deal of nerve,'' she said. ``Mr. Cooper, I think, felt closeted by having to work at the studios. He wanted to film in faraway, exotic places. If he'd had his way, `King Kong' would have been about lizards. That's the original idea that came to him. He was in New York and there was this story about these two exotic lizards who were given to the Bronx zoo. They perished. They couldn't survive in civilization. He got the idea to do a movie about prehistoric creatures who couldn't survive modern life.''
The studio, though, didn't go for lizards. Instead, Cooper concocted a giant, prehistoric gorilla.
Wray had no idea what she was getting into. ``I often had no idea what they were doing, and didn't ask. My purpose was just to believe in the story. I actually believed that Kong was there when I looked up and screamed, although nothing was there. He was just an 18-inch-high figure on a jungle set that was about 8 feet high. In the long shots, I was represented by a 2-inch-tall doll.
``I'd go in and scream. There was one day when I screamed all day long. There had to be a lot of screams to make it seem that the little doll was real - the little doll in his hand.''
Kong's hand was built to extra-big scale.
``If I looked in terror, it was more because I might slip through his fingers than that he might grip me too tightly,'' she remembered. ``The hand was lifted off the floor, and they tried to make one of his fingers fit around my waist. It was always loose and I was in danger of falling.''
She titled her best-selling autobiography ``On the Other Hand.''
At the world premiere at Grauman's (now Mann's) Chinese Theater in Hollywood, she was, as she puts it, ``on edge.''
``I didn't know what I was going to see, and I didn't particularly like the film I did see,'' she said. ``It was not until several years later that I realized the part that `Kong' came to play in many lives. The thing that worried me the most were all those screams. Too much. I kept thinking `I didn't scream that much.' I really thought I protested too much. To put it succinctly, it wasn't Shake-speare.''
The next morning, however, the critics proclaimed that her performance was ``brilliant.''
``I was quite amazed by the reviews, you know. I mean, to me, `brilliant' would involve something cerebral. `King Kong' was anything but cerebral.''
She doesn't care for the title Queen of Screams that she was subsequently given. ``I don't think labels should be put on people. That really isn't nice,'' she said.
Even so, she was the most traumatized woman in movies. She was pursued by a crazed surgeon in ``Doctor X,'' stalked by a doctor in search of new blood in ``The Vampire Bat,'' held prisoner in a diving bell in ``Below the Sea,'' encased in molten wax in ``The Mystery of the Wax Museum'' and horsewhipped in ``Viva Villa!''
Wray was born in Canada and her family lived in Arizona before moving to Hollywood. At 14, she got her first movie job, as an extra in a Western.
``Oh, I'm so sorry you missed that era in Hollywood,'' she said. ``It was quite lovely. There were more palm trees, and people had tea every afternoon when they weren't working - and there were lovely, elegant parties. I'm afraid they don't have much of that now.''
She thinks the town has been going downhill ever since sound came in. ``The silent film was a great art form,'' she said. ``It was a different form of story-telling. When sound came in, everything become commercial. It seems to me that the sound movies started the trend that everyone worried more about money. Of course, we all had to make sound tests. I got by.''
She more than got by. Her co-stars included Gary Cooper (``He slept a lot. He would simply fall asleep sitting up, but he had the most beautiful male face ever photographed'') and Cary Grant (``He had magic, a kind of stardust. You know, he didn't want to use the name Cary. I was told he was named after a little town in your Virginia - Caryswood, Va.'').
Her personal life was filled with tragedy. Her first husband was screenwriter John Monk Sanders who, at age 42 in 1940, walked into a closet in his cottage in Florida and hanged himself by the cord of his beach robe.
Her second husband was Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin, who wrote the classics ``It Happened One Night,'' ``Mr. Deeds Goes to Town'' and ``Lost Horizon.'' In 1950, at age 53, her husband suffered a debilitating stroke. He died five years later, leaving her with a son and a daughter to raise.
Her third husband was Dr. Sanford Rothenberg, a prominent brain surgeon who had treated her second husband. He died in 1991.
She continued making films into the late 1950s. She was Jane Powell's mother in ``Small Town Girl'' (1953). She was in ``Queen Bee'' with Joan Crawford and Betsy Palmer in 1955. She was the mother of the bachelor in ``Tammy and the Bachelor'' with Debbie Reynolds, and she went into the rock era, starring in ``Dragstrip Riot'' and ``Rock Pretty Baby.''
In hushed tones, she claims she never saw the latter two films and finds them ``mildly embarrassing.'' She adds, ``I remember, though, that the poet Rod McKuen was in one of them. He was quite charming.''
Writers have always fallen for her. Clifford Odets had an affair with her. Sinclair Lewis pursued her and even wrote a play for her.
``Lewis was not a very attractive man, and he insisted that he wanted to act,'' she remembered. ``He was a writer, not an actor. I didn't want to appear in the play with him, and that was the end of that.''
In the '70s, she became a cult figure for a new generation. ``Children seem, particularly, to identify with King Kong,'' she said. ``I think, maybe, it's the fact that he's an outsider who is the victim of authority figures.''
She turned down any participation in 1976's $40 million remake of ``King Kong,'' in which Jessica Lange had her role. ``I read the script and, to tell you the truth, it hurt my feelings,'' she said. ``They took away all the heart and the mythology of it.''
Her daughter and son-in-law will accompany her to Charlottesville. ``I'll probably sit through the film again, with them,'' she said. ``When I see myself up there, I don't think of it as me at all. I know, of course, what is in the film, but I'm always surprised by the next sequence. There is an aliveness about it that doesn't seem to go away.''
She laughs, a cheerful chirp of a laugh, when she's asked what she thinks Kong saw in her.
``Maybe he'd never seen a blonde,'' she said. ``I think he thought she was some kind of flower. But, you know, I was wearing a blond wig.''
After a moment's thought, she adds, ``you know, that girl is very pretty, isn't she?'' ILLUSTRATION: B\W photos
Wray in a 1980 photo
Wray with Robert Armstrong in a "Kong" publicity still.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Fay Wray meets Universal Studio's King Kong during a 1989 tour in
Los Angeles.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE INTERVIEW by CNB