by Joe DeVito
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Also by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland
Copyright
This book is dedicated to the memory of Merian C. Cooper, the father of King Kong.
FOREWORD
“Have you ever heard of … Kong?” asked Carl Denham of Englehorn, captain of the ship taking the adventurer-moviemaker, and his cast and crew, nearer to Skull Island, in uncharted regions of the Indian Ocean. “Why, yes,” was Englehorn’s measured reply, as if rousing long-dormant memories of the native legends he had heard on his countless voyages in the area. Since the release of King Kong in March 1933, very few who have inhabited Planet Earth would need more than a second to respond in the affirmative. King Kong has become entrenched in movie lore and culture not only in America, but around the world as well.
The question that, in contrast, remains baffling to many people in the twenty-first century is: Have you ever heard of Merian C. Cooper? What may be surprising to a majority of those who are told about him is that Merian Coldwell Cooper, in addition to King Kong, is directly connected to the following: world exploration, many of the classic films directed by John Ford, Technicolor and the increased use of color in motion pictures, the birth of widescreen movies with Cinerama, the development of commercial aviation, and distinguished service in America’s air force in two world wars.
I vividly recall reading the newspaper obituaries, published side-by-side, of Merian Cooper and Robert Armstrong, the man Cooper had chosen, over forty years earlier, to play Carl Denham in King Kong. Cooper died on April 21, 1973, and Armstrong the day before. The death of one following so closely on the other reinforced even more to me the degree to which Cooper was the character of Denham. This mingling of Merian C. Cooper into his creations was a trademark of this passionate jack-of-all-trades. Readers of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong will discover that Cooper and Denham, in so many respects, are one and the same.
A life that, by ordinary expectations of achievement, would logically be credited to five or six individuals, is, in the case of Cooper, confined to one human being whom famed journalist and broadcaster Lowell Thomas described as “not just a remarkable man, he was incredible.” With all of his accomplishments, there is little doubt that it is for the creation of King Kong that Merian C. Cooper will be most fondly remembered. King Kong was also an outgrowth of the motto that Cooper and filmmaking partner Ernest B. Schoedsack adopted as a litmus test for their future film projects. It was that locations and story elements must incorporate aspects of the distant, difficult, and dangerous.
Cooper was a man with seven-league boots, imbued with the romanticism of exploration, discovery, adventure, and danger more typical of a bygone era. Yet his love of twentieth-century aviation, technology, high finance, and the motion picture industry would, on the surface, seem irreconcilable to his passion for the primitive. Perhaps the most enduring creation resulting from this unique amalgamation of disparate worlds was King Kong.
Cooper himself indicated that the elements that became the motion picture King Kong began to come together in his mind in 1929, when he was thirty-six years old. The seed was most likely planted, however, at the tender age of six, when an uncle gave him a copy of Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa by Pierre Du Chaillu. That, according to Cooper, was when he decided to become an explorer.
In his wanderings, Cooper was in search of adventure in cultures both primitive and modern, while all the time defining his own limits. The arc that brought Cooper to Kong, as chronicled by Mark Cotta Vaz in Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong, began with his birth in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1893. An appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy ended in Cooper’s embarrassing dismissal before graduation. In his early twenties, Cooper resolved to atone for his apparent casual view of life by losing himself in a cause and “living dangerously.” His life-long code of honor crystalized at this crucial time. Cooper became a crack pilot in the U.S. Aero Squadron in Europe during World War I, where he was shot down over Germany and declared dead in 1918, only to resurface in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Following the armistice, Cooper remained abroad, involving himself in humanitarian relief in Poland, then under siege by the Bolshevik Red Russians. There he helped found the Kosciuszko Squadron, a band of freedom-fighters composed mostly of American and English aviators who were brothers-in-arms during the Great War. Cooper became one of Poland’s heroes. He was shot down again, this time over Moscow, and escaped a Russian prisoner-of-war camp only to make a perilous trek on foot to freedom, all the way to the Latvian border.
Back in the United States, after stints as a reporter and feature writer on several newspapers, Cooper’s wanderlust took him on a round-the-world voyage with Captain Edward Salisbury on the yacht Wisdom II, a journey chronicled in The Sea Gypsy, coauthored by Salisbury and Cooper. During the voyage, he was reunited with cameraman Schoedsack, whom he had met briefly in Poland when Schoedsack was covering the Russo-Polish War. That adventure ended abruptly in Italy when the Wisdom II was consumed by fire. From the ashes of that fire, the partnership of Cooper-Schoedsack was formed and the pair made two landmark drama-documentaries: Grass (1925) followed the Bakhtiari tribe in its treacherous semiannual trek over the passes near Zardeh Kuh in the Zagros Mountains to their winter pasture in western Persia, now Iran; and Chang (1927), about a family in the jungle of Siam (Thailand) eking out an existence against the everpresent threat of predatory man-eating tigers. Both films were box office hits distributed by Paramount Pictures.
In 1929, following his and Schoedsack’s making of The Four Feathers at Paramount under the supervision of producer David O. Selznick, Cooper became a New York City businessman and a central figure in the formation of Pan American Airways. Cooper assisted the talented Selznick in becoming head of production at RKO Radio Pictures, and, in the fall of 1931, Selznick brought Cooper into the organization as his assistant. Two years later, Cooper became production head at RKO when Selznick left for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. During his tenure at RKO, Cooper paired up Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, brought Katharine Hepburn to Hollywood, and began his long association with director John Ford, whom he brought to RKO to make The Lost Patrol and The Informer. Cooper’s stint at RKO also brought him in contact with technical wizard Willis O’Brien, then working on a secret, and ultimately unproduced, project called Creation, involving the stop-motion animation of models of prehistoric beasts. O’Brien would prove invaluable in bringing Kong to the screen.
The final link in what would become King Kong came out of discussions Cooper had with explorer W. Douglas Burden. Inspired by Chang, Bur
den led a filmmaking expedition to the island of Komodo and brought back two of its indigenous giant lizards for exhibition at the Bronx Zoo. That they eventually became ill and died was an element that found its way into Cooper’s beauty-and-the-beast story of a giant gorilla. The final story was classic Cooper, combining elements both primitive and contemporary, and whose premise involved difficulty, distance, and, most certainly, danger.
Popular British novelist Edgar Wallace was brought into the project in December 1932, but died suddenly of pneumonia just over two months later, after turning out a draft script of Cooper’s story. The script was more fully developed, under Cooper’s supervision, into its final form by James Creelman and Ruth Rose. Cooper, nevertheless, kept Wallace’s name on the film and in publicity connected to King Kong, both because of his promise to Wallace and for its publicity value.
At nearly fifty, Cooper, with a wife and three children to care for, could easily have remained safely at home during World War II. However, his innate patriotism compelled him to sign up, as he had done nearly three decades earlier, to serve his country. In China, Cooper was chief of staff to General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers, and flew numerous bombing missions with his younger subordinates. Later, in the South Pacific, he was chief of staff to General Edward Kenney, masterminding air operations. At war’s end, he was among those on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay at the ceremony formalizing Japan’s surrender.
Following the war, Cooper and John Ford formed Argosy Pictures Corporation, and together were responsible for some of that era’s best films, including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Quiet Man, as well as revisiting the giant gorilla theme with Mighty Joe Young. Ever on the cutting edge, Cooper was a major force in the development, along with Lowell Thomas, of Cinerama, the first commercially successful widescreen movie process, which revolutionized the motion picture industry.
I never met Merian C. Cooper. Photographs of him often show a broad smile of Cinerama proportions. Surviving audio recordings revealed his expansive Southern drawl, and a passion for what he was doing at the moment. My early interest in movies was bolstered by frequent viewings of King Kong on Los Angeles television during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its effect was singularly impressive: the human qualities of Kong; Max Steiner’s powerful score, laced with themes for each character; and the derring-do, man-on-the-make Depression-era elan of Carl Denham. At the time, the only accessible publication on Cooper was an excellent article by movie historian Rudy Behlmer in the January 1966 issue of Films in Review.
It was in meeting members of his family that I discovered firsthand the Cooper quality of relentless decency and warmth. My association began in 1976, with Cooper’s widow, the gracious Dorothy Jordan, at her home on Coronado Island near San Diego, where the couple had retired. I was early in my career as a manuscript curator at the Special Collections department at Brigham Young University. In the ensuing decade, during which Cooper’s papers were donated to BYU in 1986, I also enjoyed getting to know their son, U.S. Air Force Colonel Richard M. Cooper. He patiently entertained the countless questions thrown at him as I wound my way through over fifty cartons of correspondence, passports, scrapbooks, photographs, and memorabilia accumulated by Richard’s father and seen by no one else.
I must admit to being more than guarded when I heard of a modern adaptation of the original King Kong story. My immediate reaction was to conjure up horrific images of the makeover of the Kong story by movie producer Dino De Laurentiis in the mid 1970s. Leave well enough alone was my unspoken plea. What made me even consider reading this new version was that the request came from Colonel Cooper himself. A subsequent weekend immersed in the typescript erased any concerns I had about heresy, blasphemy, or crassly commercial exploitation of Merian C. Cooper’s original story by Mr. DeVito and Mr. Strickland. After years of being immersed in Cooper’s own papers, I emerged from reading the manuscript feeling at home.
The authors’ single-minded determination to remain faithful to Cooper’s original story has resulted in what is, to me, a seamless tale that authentically derives from the spirit of Cooper’s fertile imagination. What they have done is to flesh out the story that Kong devotees so protectively revere, and yet allow the reader to create an authentic theater-of-the-mind experience, not unlike that of old time radio. DeVito and Strickland convincingly invoke the senses into the voyage of The Wanderer to Skull Island and back: the pelting rain, the pungent smell of the jungle, the strained muscles, sweat, and sinews of Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll on the chase for Ann Darrow in peril, the heat and dampness of the tropical isle, and even the acrid aroma of Kong crashing through groves of jungle flora. Of particular interest are their credible embellishments on Cooper’s original story, covering the time between the capture of Kong on Skull Island and his exhibition on Broadway, as well as what transpires from Kong’s escape and the havoc wreaked in midtown Manhattan until his ascent of the Empire State Building, Ann Darrow in hand.
Venerated stories that have become cultural legends are both formidable in their longevity and, at the same time, highly vulnerable and fragile. Their strength comes from endurance in the culture; their fragility becomes exposed by attempts to alter them. DeVito and Strickland have taken a story—for generations familiar and for decades beloved—and have given it a fresh retelling. They have done their job so convincingly that they reinforce King Kong as myth without disturbing its core time-honored elements. As with Cooper himself, the authors have deftly blended the old with the new in a story that is well within the confines of the term “Faithful.” “It’s alive!” cried Dr. Henry Frankenstein in the movie about his creation that has also become a cultural legend. In the case of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong, Cooper’s creation is, indeed not only alive … but alive and well.
—James V. D’Arc
Curator, Merian C. Cooper Papers
Brigham Young University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Joe and Brad would like to thank the family of Merian C. Cooper, Randy Merritt, Barbara Strickland, Danny Baror, and our editor, Keith Kahla.
1
HOBOKEN WATERFRONT
DECEMBER 3, 1932
John Weston peered anxiously ahead from the backseat of the creeping taxi. Even in the obscuring twilight, and behind the lightly floating veil of snow, the Wanderer was clearly no more than a humble tramp freighter. Weston shook his head. He had imagined a ship of lean grace, all sharply curving contours, straining to embark on a great adventure.
“Sure we’re in the right place?” Weston asked the cabdriver.
“Where you told me, pal. Pier four.”
The cabbie found a place to park in the shadowed lee of a warehouse. Weston sat for a moment looking through the side window, still not sure. The down-at-heels support of the Hoboken pier certainly matched the rusty tub moored to it. With others of her kind, the Wanderer blended into the nondescript background of the unpretentious old town, camouflaged into anonymity. Beyond her, visible in the far distance, twinkled the bright Saturday-evening lights on the Manhattan side of the river. “Lord, I’d never have called that a seagoing craft,” Weston muttered. “Don’t knock the flag down yet. I want to make sure this is the right place.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Weston opened the door and lumbered out of the taxi with the short-winded dignity of a fat fifty-year-old man. He saw movement in the shadows next to the warehouse, and then an old watchman stepped out into the light, his head tilted quizzically, his red nose nearly glowing. “Help you?”
Weston pointed. “Yes, Cap. That the moving-picture ship?”
The red nose bobbed up and down in a nod. Weston ducked back into the taxi, read the meter, and handed over the fare from Forty-second Street and Broadway. “Wait here. I won’t be long.”
“Suit yourself. I ain’t gonna pick up nobody in this neighborhood.”
Weston shut the cab door and huddled deeper into his topcoat. The watchman switched on a flashlight as Westo
n scuffed through the light fall of snow. “You another one goin’ on this crazy voyage?” the old man asked as Weston neared the foot of the gangway.
Weston stopped in his tracks and gave the watchman a sharp, suspicious look. “Crazy? What’s crazy about it?”
The old man shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
“Is it the ship?” Weston demanded. “I expected something a little more modern than this.”
“This is it, all right,” the watchman said, rubbing his nose. “And the Wanderer’s better than she looks. Engines are sound. They’ll push her along at a steady fourteen knots, come hell or high water. Hull’s in stronger shape than it seems from here. ’Course they say she’s had a lot of work done belowdecks, bulkheads ripped out, some kind of steel tank or something put in—I dunno. She’ll do, though. Naw, the crazy part is—well, to start with, it’s the fellow that’s hired her.”
The cold was making Weston’s ears tingle, but he hunched his head down and said, “You mean Denham?”
“That’s him. Fellow that if he wants a picture of a lion, he walks right up to the critter and tells it to look pleasant! If that ain’t crazy, what is?”
Weston chuckled. “Yeah, he’s a tough egg, all right. But why are you saying the voyage is crazy?”
The watchman took a step closer, and Weston caught the scent of bourbon on his breath. “Just is, that’s why. You ask anybody on the docks. Let me tell you, there’s some mighty smart fellows around here, even if they ain’t got such high-and-mighty jobs, and everybody around the docks says it’s crazy. They got stuff stowed aboard that vessel I don’t believe yet, even if I did see it go aboard with my own two eyes. And take the crew! Old Englehorn’s hired on extra hands, three times as many as he needs to sail the ship. Take shoehorns to squeeze ’em all aboard!”
He shook his head, his aromatic breath pluming out on the snowy air. Before he could start again, a man’s voice called down from the deck of the Wanderer: “Hey, on the gangway there! What do you want?”