The Loves of King Kong

In His 72 Years As A Screen Idol, Cinema's Best-Known Beast has Co-starred with A Mere Handful Of Leading Ladies. In her Last Interview, The Original Beauty, Fay Wray, and his Latest Obsession, Naomi Watts, Reveal What It's Like to be Counted Among

To speak of me is to think of him," says Fay Wray, sitting in an armchair that swallows her frail body. In a glass-walled den surrounded by a grove of tall trees, Wray is made up and dressed for the occasion, a trouper in a dark tweed jacket with a blanket across her lap. It is the summer of 2004, seven decades after her iconic turn as King Kong's sacrificial virgin, and she is here to talk about her most famous leading man.

At 96, Wray is feisty and still possessed of a star's presence. The enormous blue eyes that widened in terror at the sight of the beast have dimmed considerably, but they still sparkle when she discloses the appeal of what she considers the most successful movie ever made.

"It can be summed up in one word," she says, leaning in to spell out her secret. "M-E-N." It seems like a witticism, and I laugh. But when Wray passes away peacefully seven weeks later, I reconsider her words. King Kong did not become a cinematic legend, a cultural icon and the inspiration for two major remakes because of the work of a cinematographer, screen writer or director. King Kong was always about the girl and the visceral reaction men have at the sight of a screaming, kicking, helpless beauty. For Wray and her successors--the estimable actresses Jessica Lange and Naomi Watts--playing opposite the behemoth seems like a supporting part, but the role is deeply complex: The actress must play King Kong's lady, the object of his primal desire and the cause of his shocking death. In a movie full of fear, envy and evil, the women have to provide pleasure and sensuality, thereby humanizing the beast and turning the monster under the bed into a palpable reality. Not only did these actresses manage to do that, but each also created a character who reflected the preoccupations of her era--the Great Depression, the liberated 1970s, the anxious new millennium. Now, on the eve of Peter Jackson's much anticipated version, it seems appropriate to consider the loves of King Kong, the three actresses who starred opposite the big ape, the three beauties who killed the beast.

The Power of Innocence

Fay Wray worked in Hollywood during the Depression, when American capitalism was in profound crisis and Hitler was amassing power in Europe. "No one who made movies during that time considered it the golden age," she said.

Poverty and bad luck dogged Wray's childhood. Born in 1907, she was raised in hardscrabble towns from Alberta to Arizona, living a nomadic life that took her wherever her father sought work. Times grew desperate, and when she was 14, her mother entrusted her to a 20-year-old male family friend and sent her to find work in Hollywood. Imitating the sultry look of the silent-screen vamp Theda Bara, the nubile, curly-haired Wray began to find work as an extra in silent films. At a tender age, she already projected a smoldering sensuality and a pure, radiant presence. These qualities led legendary director Erich von Stro-heim to cast the 19-year-old virgin in his masterpiece, The Wedding March. "Fay has spirituality and that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men," he later explained. As she played the poor, beautiful girl who captures a Viennese prince's heart, Von Stroheim himself fell under Wray's spell and tried to seduce her. She demurred.

The Wedding March brought Wray fame and success, along with as many as a dozen movie roles a year. No labor laws or unions regulated movie sets, and Wray commonly put in 16 to 22 hours a day, six days a week, sleeping on sets and performing her own dangerous stunts. All that work seems not to have impinged on her social life. With her enormous kohl-lined eyes and lily-soft complexion, Wray had a raft of admirers. She flirted with Cary Grant, warded off Gary Cooper and eventually married the hard-drinking screenwriter John Monk Saunders, known for having once engaged F. Scott Fitzgerald in a peeing contest off a Hollywood Hills balcony. After she separated from Saunders, Clifford Odets carried her off to bed, Sinclair Lewis wrote her love poems, and Howard Hughes took her for spins in his seaplane. She eventually married Robert Riskin, the noted screenwriter who penned Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

Wray met a swashbuckling producer, Merian C. Cooper, along the way. "He was not a studio person," she said. Indeed not. Cooper was a jungle explorer, a pioneering documentary filmmaker and a World War I ace fighter pilot. Among his friends was W. Douglas Burden, a naturalist and explorer who had just returned from a steamer trip to a remote island where he had captured two Komodo dragons, the largest living lizards; he brought them back to New York. Cooper wanted to base his next project on that fantastic voyage.

His cohort was cameraman Ernie Schoedsack, who had filmed many documentaries. During one expedition, Schoedsack fell in love with a fellow crewmate, the versatile and plucky Ruth Rose, who cooked, kept a log of events and shot crocodiles when necessary. Rose joined Cooper and Schoedsack in their travels and even collaborated with them on Kong's story. Indeed, after hiring and firing several screenwriters, Cooper turned to Rose, who improved the love story, wrote most of the dialogue and polished the final script. Rose became the model for the character Ann Darrow, and she drew heavily on Cooper and Schoedsack for the other key roles.

King Kong tells the story of an opportunistic showman, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), who hires a starving actress, Ann Darrow (Wray), to play in his jungle documentary. En route to Skull Island, where the natives worship a giant beast called Kong, Darrow falls in love with a crewman, Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). Once they land, Denham tries to use his leading lady to entice the gorilla, but the beast kidnaps the beauty and takes her to his jungle lair. She later escapes, but the smitten Kong chases her back to the ship, where Denham traps him. "We're millionaires, boys!" the showman exults. "Why, in a few months, it'll be up in lights on Broadway: kong, the eighth wonder of the world."

At first Cooper planned for his ape to escape and climb the Chrysler Building, but when the Empire State Building opened, he switched. He also aimed to cast sexy Jean Harlow as Darrow, but Wray entranced him. When he told her that he recognized something in her eyes, she asked him what it was. "Truth," he responded. "I've never seen that before in a woman's eyes." Cooper then promised her he would hire "the tallest, darkest leading man in town." Thrilled, Wray expected Cary Grant.

To create Kong, the inventive Cooper used many innovations, including rear projection, miniature projection and stop-motion photography. Willis "Obie" O'Brien, a pioneer in stop-motion cinematography, made six 18-inch-high metal Kongs. He padded them with cotton and foam rubber and covered them with rabbit skins to simulate gorilla fur. He then constructed intricate miniature sets for his animated apes. O'Brien would pose a creature, shoot its picture in a frame, raise its arm the slightest bit, shoot another frame and so on. With each second of film using 24 frames, O'Brien would spend 12 painstaking hours to get one minute of film, onto which previously shot footage of Wray would be inserted using rear projection. For such a crude technique, the results were spectacular, particularly the memorable scene in which Wray cowers in the crook of a barren tree while Kong battles a ferocious dinosaur. Wray kicks her bare legs to fend off the creatures and writhes in agony as her flimsy gown flutters in the dwindling light. "It took 22 hours to make that scene," Wray said. The next morning, Cooper bragged about how hard he had worked her. He also chortled over his not having to pay Wray when she wasn't on the set. As a result Wray worked on three other movies while shooting Kong.

Miniature projection allowed Wray to sometimes appear doll-like, particularly when Kong carries her to his vaporous cave, where (continued on page 72)King Kong (continued from page 62) she shrieks in terror, her tattered dress barely covering her thighs and bosom, her captor roaring in primal, prenuptial triumph. That was pretty racy stuff for the 1930s, but it's not the only suggestive moment; scenes of female vulnerability and sexual power define much of Darrow's character. We first meet her on the Bowery; she is destitute and walking the streets with prostitutes. When Denham offers her a job, she wonders if he's buying her. When he screen-tests her, he dresses her in a gauzy, off-the-shoulder gown with a belt encircling her waist and loins. She looks like a Lost Generation damsel in distress, complete with chastity belt. During the test Denham near sadistically badgers her to "scream for your life." Wray responds in her distinctive coloratura with an aria of anguish that trailed her for decades. "It was too much screaming," Wray tells me. But the studio men loved it.

King Kong was scheduled to open in New York on Thursday, March 2, 1933. On that day, banks across the country were running out of cash; on Friday many would close their doors. But by Sunday night the film had broken all attendance records for any indoor attraction--raking in $90,000 at a time when a movie ticket cost 15 cents.

Audiences lapped up the film's salacious scenes, especially the one in which a curious Kong gingerly strips Wray's skirt after she faints. He then smells his fingers and continues disrobing her, as though he's peeling a banana, until she is practically nude. The sexual tension is finally relieved when Kong tickles Wray. Audiences laughed, but Hollywood's censors, the Hays Commission, ordered that and 28 other scenes cut. Still, the film played well for decades in no small measure because of Wray's innocent allure. The idea of an enormous gorilla lusting after a diminutive blonde suggested notions that nice girls didn't discuss but boys could depict. And the last line--"Twas beauty killed the beast"--emphasizes the woman's centrality to this modern fable.

The Reluctant Siren

Forty years later King Kong's censored scenes had been restored, and the film found new life on college campuses. At the same time, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, the man who brought the world a sexy Jane Fonda in Barbarella, thought to do a remake. His idea was a breezy, funny, tongue-in-cheek riff on the original, and he hired Lorenzo Semple Jr., the writer who had provided the 1966 Batman TV series with its famously campy tone, to compose a comic-book romp with witty references to political corruption and corporate greed.

So the Broadway showman became a corporate conquistador, Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin). Looking for oil in the South Seas, Wilson is accompanied by a hippie paleontologist, Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), who believes a great beast lives near the oil deposit. And then there's Beauty, whom we meet in an extended erotic scene. Wilson and his crew come upon an unconscious woman floating in a rubber raft and looking like a sea nymph in a cocktail dress. (To get her to glisten, Lange was repeatedly drenched with buckets of cold water.) When Dwan, as she's called, regains consciousness, we learn that she is an aspiring movie star. She had been enjoying a day on the yacht of the producer who discovered her when the ship mysteriously exploded while everyone else was watching a pornographic film she had declined to see. "Did you ever meet anyone before whose life was saved by Deep Throat?" Dwan asks her rescuers in a little-girl voice. The camera lingers on her in an unbelievably long close-up.

Semple had written his script with Faye Dunaway in mind, and De Laurentiis had also considered Barbra Streisand, Cher and Bette Midler. But the part went to Jessica Lange, a waitress and occasional model who was auditioning for her first lead role. Standing five-foot-eight, Lange possessed a fresh, open face, a curvaceous body and a mischievousness that were all part of her allure. Co-star Bridges calls her "a free-spirited artiste," and in many ways her life experiences--her time as an art student and war protester, a romance with an avantgarde photographer--qualified her to represent hip, young 1970s American womanhood. De Laurentiis not only cast her as the lead, he signed her to an exclusive seven-year contract.

"Dino owned her," Semple says. He told her to gain 10 pounds, have her braces removed and dye her hair. He and director John Guillermin turned her into a contemporary version of Marilyn Monroe, with a breathy voice, giggly demeanor and kooky style associated with the free-love era. De Laurentiis took the then unusual step of holding a press conference before a frame had been shot. "Jessica is living proof that the great Hollywood dream can still come true, that a pretty girl can be magically discovered and made a star overnight," writes Bruce Bahrenburg, a Paramount publicist, in a book called The Creation of Dino De Laurentiis's "King Kong." "Her sweet sincerity--next to big breasts and firm buttocks--is what the press likes best in leading ladies."

"Jessica's physical beauty is the first thing that hits you square in the face," Bridges says. "She's just a gorgeous girl." Seldom does the film forget this. As the explorers hike into the mountains, Dwan scampers ahead, dressed in a cropped top and tight shorts, the camera zooming in on her derriere. Later the island's natives kidnap her and offer her as a sacrifice to Kong, dressing her in a skimpy strapless top and white beads. Oddly, though Dwan is supposed to be the one in a drugged stupor, it seems as if many of the scene's extras are high. About 300 people were hired off the street to play natives for $25 a day. According to one, fledgling actor Ross Johnson, alcohol and marijuana use were rampant among the extras. Halfnaked men jammed on drums while hula-skirted women danced with frenzied abandon. Some extras had sprinkled angel dust on their marijuana, prompting at least two overdoses. "It was one big party scene," Johnson says.

Dwan's Kong, unfortunately, was a disappointment. He was supposed to be a 40-foot-high, $2 million colossus made of horsetail hanks stuck on a three-ton frame, but De Laurentiis's Italian special-effects team couldn't communicate with the film's American engineers. "Our Kong looked hokey and corny," Bridges says.

During filming, a tired, bruised Lange frequently found herself working solo, playing love scenes opposite a six-foot mechanical hand whose clumsy operator often came close to crushing her. Even so, the young actress managed to convey some real emotion. After Kong takes Dwan to his grotto, he touches her gingerly, peeling off her gauzy blouse and ropes of necklaces. Lange regains her composure with a doe-eyed look that sparks a connection between her and the ape. Whereas Wray shrieks when Kong lifts her, Lange gazes into his eyes. She has quickly sized up her suitor, (continued on page 173)King Kong (continued from page 72) and what she sees is less a monster than just another lonely, misunderstood guy. Kong's inherent tenderness is evident in several scenes, notably one in which he washes Dwan under a waterfall, then blows her dry with his breath. It suggests Botticelli's Birth of Venus, in which Favonius, the god of the western wind, blows the goddess of beauty ashore. The wickedly droll touch would later come across as camp to another King Kong screenwriter. "The 1976 version was infused with this Italian male thing," says Fran Walsh, co-writer of the 2005 remake.

Kong II's denouement again comes in New York, where the captured beast is displayed. Alarmed by the horde of paparazzi photographing Dwan, who is wearing a dazzling backless silver lamé dress, Kong busts out and grabs her; she looks as regal as Grace Kelly, talks as fast as Carole Lombard and proposes marriage like a true feminist. The end comes atop the World Trade Center, as new in 1976 as the Empire State Building had been in 1933. Helicopters replace biplanes in attacking the ape. "Hold on to me or they'll kill you," Dwan screams, but the wounded beast can only give her a final glance before plunging to his death. Audiences reacted as De Laurentiis had predicted: "Monkey die, everybody cry."

The initial reviews were lavish--the Los Angeles Times called it as good as the original. And though it would rank among the five highest-grossing films of the year, King Kong: The Legend Reborn did not become a blockbuster, earning only $52 million, about twice its exorbitant cost. When the picture didn't live up to its hype, the critics turned nasty. "I've written a lot of trash in my time," Semple says, "but this was the only film I thought was unfairly panned."

Reviewers were especially hard on Lange, "that notoriously inept model." The attacks hurt, Bridges recalls. "She did such a great job that people thought she really was this ditzy blonde." Lange managed to extricate herself from her contract with De Laurentiis and temporarily left Hollywood. "She hated the movie," Semple says. She doesn't even list it among her credits.

A Desperate Woman Redeemed by Love

Today, nearly 30 years after the remake and seven decades after Wray's hit, Kong is back. The World Trade Center has been destroyed, oil prices are at historic highs, and America has sent troops half-way around the world to fight an intangible enemy, terror.

But love, not fear, is what brought Peter Jackson to the movie. If it hadn't been for his crush on Wray, the visionary director behind the epic Lord of the Rings movies might not be making films at all. But when he saw the original movie on TV more than 30 years ago, young Jackson was, in his own estimation, "gobsmacked." He was so enthralled that he cut up his mother's fur to make his own miniature ape, built an Empire State Building out of cardboard and used his parents' Super 8 camera to film Kong against the Manhattan skyline.

He also wrote a fan letter to Wary, to which she responded. Jackson kept her letter, bringing it out when, just days before The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 Oscars, he went to visit her. "Imagine that," Naomi Watts says. "He's getting to meet the woman he fell in love with at the age of nine." Wray knew he wanted to remake her famous film. Initially she was anxious, but he won her over. "I liked his spirit," Wray tells me. She gave her blessing to both Jackson and her new on-screen successor, Watts.

Jackson had long wanted to remake Kong. In 1996 he and his wife and collaborator, Fran Walsh, had written a humorous screenplay, envisioning Carl Denham as a man in love with his legend--part Orson Welles, part John Huston. In it Denham talks about his latest film documentary, Indonesia: Hell Hole of the World, and boasts that "Ernie Hemingway's agreed to write the narration." He asks a Sumatran if native women still appear in traditional dress, but the official looks at him blankly. Denham finally blurts out, "Hooters, Mr. Ginting! There's nothing the public likes to see more than native hooters."

When Universal canceled the project, Jackson was devastated. But after his coup with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the studio offered him an unprecedented deal to film his dream come true. He, Walsh and their screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens started from scratch, reviewing the original movie, with its undeveloped characters, as well as the 1976 version. "We loved the silver lamé dress from that film," Boyens says, "but that's probably about it."

In late 2003 the three began outlining the new version. Mindful of the critical scorn heaped on the previous remake, the New Zealanders were determined to deliver something worthy. Rewriting the classic was "a bit scary," Walsh says. But the key was to develop strong characters, including a complicated, vulnerable beast. They decided that their Kong would be an old gorilla who never felt an ounce of empathy for another creature. Their story would tell what happens when he meets a young woman. At first the ape believes she's going to kill him. Then he realizes she won't. Their relationship deepens to explore that murky psychological realm that can doom even the most highly evolved romances.

Having established those cornerstones, Walsh and Boyens went off to write the script. "Peter provides the action, Fran provides the heart, and Philippa acts as the bridge between the two," says Paul Voight, head of New Zealand's film fund, which helped launch Jackson's career. This writing team evokes memories of the trio that wrote the original King Kong in 1933.

The 21st century version returns to the Depression. Ann Darrow is now a vaudeville actress who finds herself out of a job. Her luck changes when she meets Carl Denham (Jack Black). He's a raconteur, adventurer and filmmaker who will do anything to make it big in show business. Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is a cerebral New York playwright assigned to write the jungle adventure that Denham is filming. Neither is a likely action hero.

Kong IIl's beauty is Watts. At 37 the actress is a bit of a late bloomer, having spent two decades honing her craft before winning acclaim for performances in Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. Watts's characters are often eccentric but not weird, lonely but not alienated. They frequently wind up in a claustrophobic bad dream--as Watts has herself.

In 1968, when she was born, her father, Peter Watts, was Pink Floyd's soundman. His talent at building stereophonic equipment helped lift the group from cult status to stadium fame. His lunatic laughter is a signature on the Dark Side of the Moon track "Brain Damage."

But Peter lived the rock-and-roll life to the hilt, and when Naomi was four, her parents divorced. They were considering reconciliation when Peter died of a heroin overdose. Naomi, her mother and brother wandered for a time before settling in Australia, where she took acting lessons and began appearing on TV.

She met Nicole Kidman, now her best friend; they appeared together in a film called Flirting (1991). She then came to Hollywood. While Kidman attained stardom, Watts begged for parts she could barely tolerate. She hoped her role in the cult hit Tank Girl would further her career, but it didn't; at the age of 32 she despaired of ever attaining success. But then came David Lynch and Mulholland Drive, then the hit remake of the creepy Japanese film The Ring, and then 21 Grams, which led The New York Times to proclaim her "one of the most critically acclaimed actresses of her generation." It may seem like a happy ending, but don't expect any happy endings for her King Kong.

Ann Darrow's prospects are bleak indeed as the new Kong begins. "She reaches an all-time low once the theaters close down," Watts says. Wandering through Times Square as it was 75 years ago in scenes that were digitally reproduced using original blueprints and historical records, Darrow even wears a replica of the flapper hat Wray wore in the same scene. "I love this," Jackson says. "This is a little tribute to Fay."

After Denham finds Darrow stealing food, he offers her a mysterious job. The position takes her to "the jungle from hell," a Stygian underworld that hisses and roars with skin-crawling dread. When the fragile blonde runs through the jungle, barefoot and screaming in her ripped, diaphanous gown, she could frighten the ghost of Fay Wray.

Like his predecessors, Kong picks up Darrow, and like her predecessors, she's frightened at first. But when Kong saves her from a ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, Darrow begins to soften. "How can you not fall in love with Kong when he's physically protecting you time and again?" Watts says. "To watch a man who is that full of rage turn into such a beautiful, gentle soul because he's moved by his emotions is transcendent."

To film those scenes, the actress spent days in Kong's six-foot-high motorized hand, sometimes sleeping in it. She was strapped into a rubber ring at the top of an apparatus that had a huge rocking base. For violent action scenes, she was jerked into painful contortions. "There were times I'd dread getting into that thing," she says. But at other times Kong's hand became a nest, a chair, an embrace. When Kong rocks her gently, Darrow's sweet face lights up like a child's, her eyes closed ecstatically above a beatific smile. When she does open her eyes, it's to stare into the bones of the primate's scarred, loving face. In those moments, this odd human-simian couple seems like the most natural thing in God's kingdom. As Watts says, "Kong is the ultimate man. He lives and breathes strength-- not just in the physical sense but emotionally as well."

No wonder that when Darrow leaves Kong, his fury knows no bounds. He tracks her down, then tries to escape atop the Empire State Building, where he encounters the old biplane problem. Watts was nervous about playing the finale because the ending is so charged. "The other actresses, Fay and Jessica, had done it so well that you get scared," she says. But she used the pressure to deliver the right amount of emotion and empathy. Her saving grace turned out to be Kong's burning, questioning eyes. Without giving away the ending, Watts says her character is absolutely changed in a way similar to her predecessors. "It's not black-and-white, but she's made a choice she can live with."

Is there a jinx on the actresses who play opposite the ape? After Kong, Wray worked in 41 films and a dozen TV projects, but nothing ever matched the primordial heat of Kong. She felt stymied and frustrated until the 1950s, when TV began airing her most famous film. After that she devoted much of her life to promoting the movie, appearing at festivals, responding to fan mail and giving interviews. The studios pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars exploiting her as the Queen of Scream; her take was $3,000, but she was never bitter. "I was just looking to do some valuable work as a woman," she tells me.

Lange fared better. Her much maligned debut forced her to retreat from the screen, but she later roared back to produce a body of work that includes The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frances and Tootsie, which won her the first of two Oscars. After Kong, though, she never again lived in Hollywood.

Of course it's too soon to tell how Watts will fare. When asked if she's afraid the new Kong will be the thing she'll be remembered for most, she cringes. Who knows what price will be exacted for capturing the fancy of the Big Guy? "I try not to thing about any of that," she says.

The idea of a gorilla lusting after a dimunitive blonde suggested notions that nice girls did not discuss

As a boy, Jackson was so enthralled by Kong that he cut up his mother's fur to make a miniature ape to film.