The Sexism Behind King Kong Lies In The Grass

From my email to Love & Radio's Nick van der Kolk (I told you he'd appear here, so don't look so puzzled):

Speaking of Bedouin... Did you happen to see, on TCM's Sunday Silent, the (silent) documentary, Grass? The kicker was the bio on Merian C. Cooper afterwards, where he and the director mock the "lady author"... Huh. Now that I'm thinking about it, I should make a post about it.

And post about it I now will.

Last Sunday I watched Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life on TCM. It's a sweeping epic of a silent film. A naturally dramatic documentary, with the (apparently) famous scenes of 50,000 tribesman (and their vast herds -- 500,000 horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, bulls and cows) crossing a swift Karun River. I personally was more struck by other images. Men, many in little more than loin-cloth-esque garb, sitting in the snow to remove their cotton shoes (deemed, as the title card stated, about as practical as bedroom slippers), then proceeding, barefoot & carrying shovels, to create a zig-zag path for all to follow up the snow and ice covered 15,000-foot-high Zard Kuh (the highest peak in the Zagros Mountains). It's amazing.

But perhaps I should back-up a bit.

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is the 1925 film made by s Merian C. Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack, documenting the journey of The Forgotten People, a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe, from Angora (modern-day Ankara, Turkey) to the Bakhtiari lands of western Iran, in what is now the western part of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province and the eastern part of Khuzestan.

If the names Cooper & Schoedsack are at all familiar, it's because they made the original, definitive King Kong (1933).

However, as the biography I'm King Kong!: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (shown after Grass, but without record at TCM) informs us, the names Cooper & Schoedsack shouldn't be known -- in fact, couldn't be known, without Marguerite Harrison.

The three had met in Poland, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Cooper, a bomber pilot during World War I, had spent time in a POW camp, yet after that war he was instrumental in creating the Kosciuszko Squadron, a group of young American airmen who had volunteered to help Poland. When he was shot down over the Ukraine and captured by the Russians, Cooper was sent to the Gulag. There, he was saved from starvation through the intervention of Marguerite Harrison, a woman who became an American spy because women were not allowed to be war correspondents. (Ah, such delicate flowers should not use the pen, but slink around the swords.) He managed to escape, and poor Harrison would need to wait several years to be released.

So, when Harrison puts up half the money to make Grass and insists upon coming along, Cooper, naturally, feels indebted to do so.

The "hysterical" part is during The Exploits bio piece, when Schoedsack voices his opinions post return from filming Grass.

In a recorded interview, Schoedsack speaks freely, saying that women are pains in the ass; they can't help it.

He sympathizes with the Arab leaders in the migration, saying they were responsible for thousands of their tribe and the livestock, and here they were catering to a woman who required her own sleeping quarters etc. He says (and I'm paraphrasing) that Harrison "tried not to be a pain in the ass," but "she couldn't help it", she "was just a woman." Apparently Schoedsack was also greatly irritated by her continual application make-up before every filming -- even though of the three, Cooper, Schoedsack & herself, she was the only one in front of the camera.

The film script for King Kong was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth, who, according to in Mark Vaz in Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, based the it on conversations she remembered between Cooper and her husband about their travels and exploration. (Including Grass & Chang.) Hence, Marguerite Harrison, was the inspiration for the the "unwanted woman" Fay Wray played on the King Kong expedition.

The Cooper bio is apparently on this King KongDVD.