Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  Third, as those who’ve seen all three films know, she could do more than just scream—even in Denham’s Kong she does a lot more than that—it’s just the screaming that most people remember.

  When Denham asked her “Did you ever do any acting?” she said “Extra work out on Long Island—the studio’s closed now.” Well, that was Paramount; at the time the movie was set, the Astoria studio had just suffered a disastrous fire and the decision had been made to move all production to the West Coast.

  That ended Paramount’s ability to do something the other studios couldn’t—to use Broadway talent without them having to take the five-day train trip west and live in California while making their films.

  The “extra work” Ann Darrow had done had been in several of those: the Four Marx Brothers had made both Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers at Paramount’s Astoria studio in the daytime while appearing in I’ll Say She Is! at night. (It ran on Broadway for two years.) If you look closely (as I did) you can see that Ann is one of the crowd of girls on the beach just before the Irving Berlin “Monkey-Doodle-Do” musical number in Cocoanuts, and is one of the guests at the unveiling of the painting in Animal Crackers. She was 19 and 20 when she did those. She’s only on for a few seconds in each, and don’t be looking for a blonde.

  Like all Hollywood stories, even her extra work has been glamorized and embellished—stories circulated that three of the four brothers were so smitten by her beauty, they tried various campaigns and stratagems to lure her into love affairs.[1] Most writers think this was a figment of some publicist’s imagination, retroactively fired by the thoughts of Ann’s beauty and the Marx’s notorious behavior.

  The Depression hit Ann as hard as it did anyone else; she’d had a few walk-on parts in a couple of revues written by writer friends of hers, but those jobs, like the extra-work, dried up. At the time Denham found her, she was living in a $6.00 a week rooming house at the edge of the Village, and, according to friends, having to borrow part of that most weeks.

  Then Denham offered her the “fame and adventure and the thrill of a lifetime, and the long sea voyage leaving at six o’clock in the morning” and the rest is just like Kong; little known is that all the scenes in Kong detailing Ann and Jack’s adventures from the time Driscoll left Denham on the other side of the ravine were recreations—about the last thing Denham still had money for after Kong fell off the building—he saw the movie as a way to recoup some of his losses from the disaster that was Kong as a Broadway attraction.

  What was recreated for the film were the early fight with the Tyrannosaurus, the scenes of Kong with Ann in his lair, the scenes of Jack and Ann’s escape from Kong, and a few of the scenes of Kong breaking the gate in the wall to get at the native village, in his search for Ann.[2]

  The rest was pieced together from scenes taken aboard ship and on Skull Island, and newsreels and Denham’s own films of Kong as a exhibition and of his New York rampage.

  In the studio, they got a well-known animator to recreate scenes; the effects were so wonderful and lifelike it was hard to tell where the real Kong left off and the 18” actor-model took his place. But the effects were hurried, which accounts for Kong’s variation in size. Assume when you see Kong, that everything when the camera in not near Denham is a recreation done in the few weeks between the death of the real Kong in March, and the release of the movie in June.

  What mattered to Ann was that she and Jack Driscoll, the man she loved, worked together in the studio a few weeks, filling in the gaps in the story.

  Kong as a living exhibit premiered two days before FDR took office as president, and it made an enormous amount of money that first night, even though FDR had already announced the four-day Bank Holiday in which all banks throughout the nation would be closed. People turned out to see Kong at top ticket prices, no matter what.

  The same thing happened when the film came out—it was an enormous hit. Denham had been right all along about “being a millionaire and sharing it with you, boys” and in this case, girl—or it would have been true had not Denham’s expenses and litigations not eaten up all the money from the exhibition and the movie.

  But by the time the movie premiered, Denham and Englehorn were on their way back to Skull Island, to find the treasure that would eventually save Denham, and with another leading lady.

  The people ask why didn’t he just take Ann back with him? At the time of his greatest financial troubles, the one valuable asset he did have was Ann Darrow’s personal contract. She was the most famous woman and actress in the world at the time. Denham had loaned her out to MGM for a huge sum of money for ther next super production.

  Of course she did it—she owed everything to Carl Denham—but little did she realize she would have to do it with a sorrowing and broken heart.

  She and Jack were married two weeks after the premier of Kong, the movie. It was a heady time in America, and everyone knew Prohibition was going to end. So one night while Ann was off making a personal appearance at a charity event, Jack ran into a bunch of sailors he’d shipped with before he became Captain Englehorn’s first mate, and they went off to some speakeasy and drank some poison liquor. Four of the sailors died, Jack among them.

  The newspapers that week said she was inconsolable—first Denham and the ship gone back to the Island; her on loan-out to MGM and now Jack dead. That was the state of things when she took the Zephyr out to California in the summer of 1933, to star in The Return of Tarzan, where she played Queen La of Opar, opposite Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan back in their roles from Tarzan, The Ape Man of 1932.

  Some of her heart is still up there on the screen—especially in the scenes of longing for Tarzan. “It was La and Tarzan before this woman came. We were happy. Let us be happy again. Rule with me, over my kingdom!” Cedric Gibbons’ set design for the collapsed Opar (the Ophir of the Bible)—the half-broken dome, remnants of former buildings, ruined gardens, crumbled and vine-covered statues—all got across a feeling of a vanished civilization, older and larger than the one on Skull Island. The inhabitants—La’s subjects—shambling half-ape men, beautiful women—chanted and danced at the thought their Queen was to marry the Lord of the Jungle.

  Ann threw herself into her work, all the while fending off Weissmuller’s “busy, busy hands” as she called them once in an interview (“he was like a six-foot upright octopus,” she said). Her screen time in the film is 30 of the 96 minutes, but they were memorable and intense ones. The famous still of her (not in the movie) half-crouched on her throne, backed by the two crossed 20-foot-long ivory tusks, still sells for high prices to collectors of movie memorabilia. More so even than the Elephant’s Graveyard sequence in the first movie, what most people remember is the scene with La and Tarzan standing on the broken balcony, looking over the vine-covered remnants of the former great city while the Moon rises behind the two bodiless legs (broken off just at hip level) of the statue of the Ape-god of the ruined city. (Cedric Gibbons again . . .)

  MGM rushed her into her next (and what proved to be last) film; it’s her most atypical, and the one she liked best. It was in the middle of filming Take My Heart—Please that the first news came out of the Indian Ocean that Denham was on his way back.

  Ann Darrow got the role of a lifetime (and the cast of a lifetime to act with) in Take My Heart—Please. During the filming of the offbeat movie, some publicist had put up a sign, supposedly from her, on her dressing-room door (please—no more gorillas)—it sounds like publicity, as Ann never denigrated Kong’s role in her life in any published interview.

  In the movie Ann is a low-tier stage actress who lives in a rooming-house much like the ones she’d lived in only eighteen months before—she and her best friend Zuxxy—(“the Xs are silent”), are hired by a producer to play (offstage) the parts of the producer’s and assistant producer’s wives. This is in order to counteract the suspicions of the society mother of a rising starlet about bachelor producers of Broadway shows. (They want the starlet in thei
r next play.)

  The usual complications ensue; one screwy complication leads to the lies that set up the next one; Anne’s character and Zuxxy end up with the (wrong) right people; there’s a tremendous chase with the hook-and-ladder fire truck and a trolley-car.

  For Zuxxy, Eve Arden was on loan-out from Paramount (in return, Loretta Young spent two weeks at Paramount in a South Sea movie no one ever saw). The producer was played by Leon Ames, the associate producer by Franchot Tone, who ends up with Ann’s character while Arden ends up with Ames; the society dame by Maragret Dumont—this time in a not-very-comic role, and she was very good in it. There are bits by Edgar Kennedy, Raymond Walburn, and Franklin Pangborn; Grady Sutton is the young starlet’s brother, sort of a thinking man’s suspicious weasel—the more he looks, the more he sees about the false situation.

  It had the only screenplay ever worked on at one time or another by the young John Huston, the not-so-young F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell.

  People who saw it at the time, or in re-release, think it’s a wonderful film, full of the kinds of things people used to go to the movies for. Ann was never better; she’s a terrific physical comedienne, and the playing between her and Eve Arden is just magic.

  It was one of only twelve films MGM released that year that only broke even at the box office. No one knows why—it’s a much better movie than 90% of the hits the studio had that year. In December, just after The Return of Tarzan was released, she got a telegram from Hawaii.

  GEE KID LOOKS LIKE YOURE A HIT. WILL CATCH THE FLICK IN HONOLULU TOMORROW. RETURNING TO THE STATES NEXT WEEK. DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME—THINGS ARE GREAT OUR MONEY WORRIES ARE OVER. STAY THE WAY YOU ARE AND BE SWELL.

  DENHAM

  It was with much surprise that Ann was given the 1934 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, in a strong field, for her role in The Return of Tarzan. (Gibbons won the first-ever-given one for his Art Direction) At the ceremony, Eve Arden had a telegram from her that said

  EVE IF I WIN JUST SAY THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND SIT DOWN.

  So Eve said, “Thank you very much and sit down.”

  That same month, Take My Heart—Please opened to some great reviews and disappointing box office.

  By then, Ann was 6000 miles away.

  From the only interview Paul Young[3] ever gave (in 1941), to an AP stringer who had walked the 50 miles from the nearest railroad station in the hopes of getting a story from him.

  PY: I fell in love with that girl the first time I laid eyes on her. Not the googly-eyed movie love, either. I said, “Paul, this is the one for you.” That was late in ’33, and I was leaving this rubber-and-peanut plantation for the States on business anyway, and I set about winning her heart, after all that Kong stuff, and the sad business about Driscoll, and Denham’s troubles and whatnot. (I once said: No One has to worry about Carl Denham . . .)

  Anyway, I knew people who knew people, and I found myself at a party somewhere up in the LA Hills and there she was, and brother, I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. I had shaved off my mustache for the trip: she was shorter than she looked onscreen, and she reached up and fingered the dip under my nose and asked, “How do you shave in there?” and I said something Hollywood, with embarrassment, like ‘For you, I’ll cover it back up’ or something.

  Three months later we were on our way back here, as happily married as two people have ever been in the history of the world.

  FROM: The Ninth Wonder of This World! My Life, by Carl Denham, 1946.

  She came into my office after she finished that last picture. She looked around eyeing all the sharp new stuff I had.

  “It’s true, then,” she said. “I don’t have to worry for you any more, do I, Mr. Denham?” (She never called me anything but Mr. Denham in all the time I knew her.)

  “Don’t worry about me ever again, Ann,” I said. “I’m rolling in it. Anything you need? Anything at all! You don’t know how much it meant to me, those first few destitute months on the way back to Skull Island, knowing you were here, giving it your all, becoming a star.”

  “Well, yes, there is one thing,” she said. “I’ve fallen in love with a wonderful man—he’s, he’s not like Jack at all—but there’s no fakery about him, either. He wants me to be his wife.”

  “That’s just great, Ann,” I said. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  “I’m as sure of it as I’ve ever been about anything.” And she reached across my desk and took my hand—the only time she ever did that, either. “It’s what I want. I want to ask you to release me from my contract. My future husband will pay whatever amount you think—”

  “Pay? Pay! There’s not enough money in the whole wide world to pay what your contract’s worth, kid.” I said.

  She looked crestfallen.

  I reached in my desk and took out her personal contract, signed like what seemed long ages ago on a rusty old ship. I tore it in half and handed her both pieces.

  “This isn’t something you buy and sell. This is something you give away for love.” Then I slapped myself in the face. “What am I saying? The price for this is you two owe me a dinner so I can meet this guy who’s taking you away from all this. I want to size him up.”

  “You name it,” she said. “We’d love to.”

  “Tonight. The Coconut Grove. 8 sharp.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  And then she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

  “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said, and tousled my thinning locks. “That, too.”

  “Banana oil!” I said. “Get outta here before I change my mind!”

  She left.

  That night as I said good-bye to them outside the club, I thought sure she would be okay for the rest of her life (well, she was, but you know what I mean.) I shook hands with Paul—working hands, not the ones of a sissy—“Take care of my little girl. I mean it.”

  “I surely will,” he said. “I love her more than anything. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

  “If I had a heart,” I said, “I would probably love her, too.”

  They got in the cab and waved. They looked so happy.

  It was the last time I saw her alive.

  Poor kid.

  From the 1941 interview with Paul Young:

  PY: I asked her when we first got back here if she didn’t miss all that.

  “Not really,” she said. “Though sometimes I think what a wonderful thing it would have been to make more movies with Eve. She’s just so great.

  “But look around, Paul. It’s just like you said—it’s cool at night, and not as hot and muggy as somebody would think. The world can go by out there somewhere, and you’d never even know it was there.”

  She loved this place. It was like my whole life led me to buy this plantation, just so it would be there for her when she needed it. It made me proud to have done that. That had been the major accomplishment of my life.

  FROM: The Ninth Wonder of This World! My Life, by Carl Denham, 1946.

  I wrote her a letter about a year later. I put it in here to show that I was still thinking at the time . . .

  April 20, 1935

  Dear Ann (and Paul),

  I can’t believe it’s been a year—I’ve been so busy I just looked up and a whole year was gone. I got to see your last picture a few months ago—you and it were swell; so was everybody else in it, and you’re right—that Eve Arden is a pistol! Sorry the picture tanked. But it’s still there for everybody to see, from now ’til the end of time. They can’t take that away from you.

  What with the two pictures I made this year, and what’s left of the Skull Island treasure, I look to be sitting pretty for a long long time—but I’ve got to admit, I’m getting a little too stiff to be running around jungles and throwing gas bombs and such.

  People keep bringing me plays and movie scripts they say you’d be great in, and trying to get me to get you back over here, but I tell them, “Don’t
get your boxers in a twist—I know she’s happy AND she knows the door’s always open if she ever changes her mind. Meanwhile, write your stuff for Carole Lombard and Jean Arthur—though neither has Ann’s range.”

  I just want to say again how much knowing you has meant to me—we gave ’em some socko stuff, didn’t we, kid? I hope you’re tremendously happy, and my best to Paul.

  Your Pal,

  Carl Denham

  From the Paul Young interview:

  PY: She woke me up the night of the day we’d gotten back from Madoni, where she’d seen the doctor and knew she was going to have a baby. She was upset.

  “For the first time in a year,” she said. “I dreamed about Kong, and it wasn’t a nightmare, like all the other times in the past. We were on top of Skull Mountain, outside the cave where the pterodactyl picked me up. But the only ones in the sky were far, far away. Kong was sitting, leaning forward, his hands out in front of him, his legs dangling over the abyss. We were just sitting. I didn’t say anything. It was like he knew what was going to happen. Like Denham said—was a tough egg, but he’d already cracked up and gone sappy. Like he’d already accepted anything and everything that was going to happen. Because of me.

  “Paul, no matter what the future holds, I want you to know it’s—well, it’s not necessarily for the best, always, but it will be what’s supposed to happen. I’ll be okay if I know you’re going to do one of two things for me. If I have a boy, I want you to name him—don’t be upset, please—Jack Denham Young and give him this”—she’d been shopping in Madoni, where there’s not very much shopping to be had, but they’d just got in stuff from Nairobi—where it came from in British-controlled Africa I don’t know—she handed me a baseball glove—“I know there aren’t any teams out here, but teach him how to play like he was a boy in America.”