Fay Wray

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Vanity Fair, August 1930

In 1930, things were looking up for this twenty-two-year-old. After three years of comedy shorts and "cow operas," she had starred in Erich von Stroheim's classic The Wedding March. And Fay Wray (her real name) found everlasting fame in 1933— when her beauty killed the beast in King Kong. (Promised the "tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood," she spent ten months sitting in an eight-foot hairy paw.) The Hays Office cut six minutes of monkey business with the big ape peeling off the heroine's clothes, hurling a fake Wray to the ground, and eating a hapless New Yorker, but missed Wray's uncovered breast bobbing above the waves off Skull Island. And even though she made nearly one hundred films, worked with Stiller, Capra, and von Sternberg, starred with Gable, Cooper, and Powell, co-wrote a play with Sinclair Lewis, and survived a stormy affair with Clifford Odets, Fay Wray remains the scream queen. She tells her story in On the Other Hand (St. Martin's).