Not far from my Santa Monica
home is the legendary McCabe’s, where serious folk musicians gather to jam as
well as to stock up on guitar picks and such. The upstairs walls are lined with
candid photos of the likes of Joni Mitchell and Arlo Guthrie. These luminaries
and many others have performed on McCabe’s tiny stage, to the delight of
rapturous crowds. But why, in this downhome music mecca, is there a prominent
poster of Fay Wray, trembling in the
arms of King Kong?
This mystery was finally
solved when I met Victoria Riskin, psychotherapist, screenwriter, producer, and
now the author of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir. Victoria
is the youngest of three children of an unlikely Tinseltown couple whose
thirteen-year marriage was going strong until Riskin’s untimely death, at age
58, on September 20, 1955. Victoria’s brother Bob, two years her senior, is the
longtime owner of McCabe’s. So it makes sense that one wall of the funky guitar
shop pays tribute to a vibrant woman who treated life as a great adventure. I
had always mentally lumped Fay Wray with the scream queens of Hollywood, those
damsels in distress—the mainstays of B-movies—who were forever needing to be
rescued. But Wray at the time she shot King Kong was a major Hollywood
star who shared the screen with some of the industry’s most talented actors,
including Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, and Spencer Tracy. When a new project
arose in 1933, she was told by director Merian C. Cooper she’d be playing
opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. She immediately thought
of Cary Grant, or perhaps Clark Gable. But ultimately she found Kong a very
agreeable substitute for a Hollywood hunk. Years later, she confessed to a
friend, “Every time I’m in New York, I say a little prayer when passing
the Empire State Building. A good friend
of mine died up there.”
Fay Wray came from pioneer
stock. Hailing from an impoverished Mormon family, the plucky teenager boarded
a train in Salt Lake City to try her luck in the movie biz. By contrast, Robert
Riskin was the child of Jewish immigrants, raised on the mean streets of New
York. He arrived in Hollywood by way of his skills as a playwright, soon
connecting with director Frank Capra. Together they turned out some of the
wittiest films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. On 1931’s Platinum Blonde, Riskin
was credited solely as a dialogue writer, but his sparkling script for It
Happened One Night (1934) won him a screenwriting Oscar. He also
contributed the Riskin touch to such other Capra triumphs as Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, and Meet John Doe. Sad
but true that in later years Frank Capra became enamored of the auteur theory,
and resisted attempts to credit his favorite screenwriter (and longtime close
friend) of playing any part in his own success.
Victoria remembers long after her father’s death, when the great
director spoke before an appreciative crowd at the American Film Institute.
During the question-and-answer period, he artfully dodged questions about
working with screenwriters. Victoria was left to remember something her father
had said twenty years earlier: “So little is known of the contribution that the
screenwriter makes to the original story. He puts so much into it, blows up a
slim idea into a finished product, and then is dismissed with the ignominious
credit line—‘dialogue writer.’”
Wray and Riskin had different
skills and very different backgrounds, but their marriage was rock-solid. In
Hollywood (and elsewhere), that’s saying a lot.
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