Image via University Press of Kentucky
Hollywood romances usually end in divorce. The marriage between actress Fay Wray and screenwriter Robert Riskin ended only in death. As their daughter Victoria Riskin recounts, dad came home one day, walking slowly, behaving oddly. He had suffered a stroke and lingered on for four years, partially paralyzed, mentally impaired.
Riskin’s Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir is a loving tribute to her parents and a temple of her own childhood memories. It was a happy life until her father’s stroke, and according to Riskin, her mother faced adversity with a clear head. She had retired from movies years earlier but with a husband to care for and bills to pay, she sought work and found it—mostly in television but also in several forgettable movies (Tammy and the Bachelor) and a few intriguing ones (The Cobweb).
Riskin depicts mom as a trouper, “a reliable professional, warmhearted with everyone, considering it her duty to help create an esprit de corps” on set and at home.
Most of us don’t remember Fay Wray from her guest appearance on “Perry Mason” in the’50s or her dozens of movies in the ‘30s but as the original scream queen—the woman in the palm of King Kong’s hand as he scampered up the side of the Empire State Building in the 1933 classic. By then, she had already amassed a long resume. Wray arrived in Hollywood in 1920, age 14, accompanied by a photographer who promised to get her into movies. As Wray told her daughter, this odd arrangement involved no exploitation. By 1923 she landed star roles for Century Pictures and moved on to Universal where she rose from B westerns to starring in Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March. Meanwhile, the author’s father, a New York playwright, moved to Hollywood and began penning screenplays for Frank Capra (It Happened One Night earned him an Oscar). Wray even starred in one by Riskin, but they were on parallel tracks until their marriage in 1940.
But back to the big ape: the years leading to King Kong were busy for Wray. She transitioned easily from silent to talking pictures. Between 1928 and 1934 she appeared in 46 films in a variety of roles opposite Ronald Coleman, George Raft, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracey and other leading men of Hollywood. But King Kong became the classic, a spectacle of special effects elevated—one suspects from reading Riskin’s account—by the life experiences of director Merian Cooper. The adventurer-explorer brought a sense of reality to the fantasy. He had been to places that resembled Skull Island even if they lacked prehistoric monsters.
Although Wray wanted to be remembered for things other than King Kong, the movie became one of the world’s most familiar and widely circulated films. Riskin recounts traveling to China in 1978—barely open to the outside world after Mao’s death—with a Hollywood delegation. That nation’s leading cultural official stared blankly at Norman Lear and Carl Reiner. Mary Tyler Moore meant nothing to him. But when she was introduced as Fay Wray’s daughter, “the aged minister of culture struggled to his feet and, smiling broadly, pounded his chest with his fists and roared like Kong.”
Originally published in 2019, Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir is out in a paperback edition by University Press of Kentucky.
