Cinema and the City: New York, New York

I’m newly back from New York City, a place where you’d think the locals would look down on Hollywood. New Yorkers, after all, have Broadway, as well as some of the world’s best museums and attractions. Yet Hollywood loves making movies about New York City, even giving them evocative titles like Manhattan and New York, New York. In films, New York City seems made for romance—see everything from Splash (where a mermaid comes ashore in front of the Statue of Liberty) to Moonstruck to You’ve Got Mail. And of course there are celebrated TV series like Sex and  the City, in which every central character is hot, funny, and out looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Right. 

What I learned on my most recent trip to the Big Apple is that New Yorkers too are secretly infatuated by the lure of Hollywood. They support funky little neighborhood cinemas, and gather in local eateries for Oscar watch parties. They’re proud of landmark locations like the exterior of Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City apartment on Perry Street in the West Village. If you visit the museum near the top of the Empire State Building, you’ll find yourself surrounded by reminders of how many films include the famous skyscraper in pivotal moments. There are tearjerkers like An Affair to Remember, in which an attempted meeting at the top of the building leads to near tragedy. (The famous Cary Grant/ Deborah Kerr scene was to be mirrored, decades later, by the romantic climax of Sleepless in Seattle.) There’s also a joyous dance number in the World War II classic, On the Town, that takes place on a soundstage re-creation of the building’s observation deck.

But of course the most famous use of the Empire State Building (or a Hollywood facsimile thereof) occurred back in 1933 when a giant ape climbed the skyscraper with Fay Wray in its arms, only to be shot down by a passel of buzzing biplanes. Today the building’s museum can’t get enough of King Kong: there are posters and models, and you can pose looking horrified while in the grip of the ape’s enormous fist. (I admit that I couldn’t resist trying it out.)  

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where generations of immigrants have crowded into tenements while trying to pursue their own American dreams, also has movie and showbiz connections that go back generations. This slightly squalid but picturesque area is home to a cramped little shop called Orchard Corset. It’s been around since 1949, and in the same family since 1968, but these days it doesn’t cater solely to buxom mamas from the neighborhood. This is the place from which none other than Madonna orders her sexy custom bustiers. And Orchard Corset is also beloved by theatrical costume designers, who count on the shop to supply period-appropriate undergarments. Remember the 1950s-era torpedo bosoms featured in the TV series, Mad Men? Where do you think those imposing bras were found? (Improbably, Orchard Corset also does a lively mail-order business from a site in Wenatchee, Washington.)   

Visitors to the Lower East Side would be well advised to check out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where you can book tours of what once were the cramped little quarters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. What’s special is that these tiny apartments reflect the actual daily lives of specific well-researched families. In one flat, circa 1935, the children’s bedroom reflects a fascination with Hollywood glamour. On the wall over a young girl’s bed you can see vintage images of her movieland favorites: a very young Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.  

                                                                                    

Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: Odd Couple? or Marriage Made in Movie Heaven?

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.