Throughout my life, I would hear two famous Hollywood names but knew little about them — Robert Riskin and Fay Wray.
Riskin, a great screenwriter and Academy Award winner, worked alongside director Frank Capra during Hollywood’s early days making moves such as It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Wray starred in a most iconic movie, King Kong (1933), as a glamorous woman held in a 60-ton gorilla’s gigantic hand on the Empire State Building. During her long life, she acted in more than 120 movies.
Vicki Riskin’s latest book, Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir (Pantheon Books, 2019), brought the two alive by showing who they were, what they were like and their importance as celebrities and her passionate parents.
When Riskin and playwright husband, David Rintels, moved to Santa Barbara, she soon joined a local memoir-writing group led by Maureen Murdock. The personal anecdotes she wrote repeatedly emphasized her parents’ public lives and importance in her life. It became clear what her next book should be.
Riskin’s parents created a close, strong family household, ideal until Robert Riskin sadly died in 1955, only 13 years into their marriage. The loss of his work, income and family magnitude changed their lives, including 9-year-old Vicki. Still, her mother remained a compelling woman and fervent mother raising three children. Life was not easy but full and loving.
Count Riskin herself as a celebrity with careers in psychology, screenwriting/producing (My Antonia, The Last Best Year) and community activism. Some examples were serving as president of the Writers Guild of America West, director of Human Rights Watch helping create Southern California and Santa Barbara chapters, and president of the local Antioch University board. Her efforts brought communities together and made positive changes.
How do you write about famous yet close parents? We talked about such a dilemma.
“I piled up pages and found the memoir not just about me but a ‘dual bio,’ Riskin said. “My parents became more interesting with remarkable lives. I became insatiable as I moved into finding out about them.”
The introduction to Wray and Robert Riskin gives an overview about her parents’ early lives. It concludes with their romance.
“When they connected, my parents both knew they had found the intimacy they had longed for,” she said. “A few close friends attended their small wedding, including Irving Berlin, David O. Selznick and William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.”
The introduction “creates excitement as they get together throughout the story.” Riskin is right. Each page pulled me forward.
A tough part of writing a biography or memoir is finding and sorting research information. Riskin had an overflow with major resources of papers, letters between Robert Riskin and Wray, clippings, photos and more. The largest was her mother’s gift to the USC Cinematic Arts Library. Her father’s notes for Columbia Pictures and to CEO Harry Cohn, the famous Hollywood movie mogul, showed how writing conveyed his thoughts easier than verbally expressing himself. Many newspaper and magazine interviews are available online today.
Going through everything, Riskin found something she never knew — where her father’s family lived in Russia. One box contained an old Western Union telegram sent in 1943 by Jacob Riskin, Robert’s father, with information for his security clearance during World War II. The translated telegram testified that both grandparents came from Vitebsk’s region in today’s Belarus.
For safety, Riskin stored boxes containing personal family material in their upstairs bedroom in Montecito. On Jan. 9, 2018, rain storms sent mudslide debris down San Ysidro Creek. Those boxes disappeared.
“The debris wiped out the house and sent that bedroom onto our next door neighbor’s house,” she said. “Somehow, the boxes caught in debris were not destroyed.”
Riskin’s writing procedure could be categorized as traumatized yet a miracle.
Another difficult writing aspect is choosing from hundreds of photos. After she finished, 30 of them had to be eliminated.
When we talked, she looked back at the unexpected.
“The biggest surprise for me is that the book is done, all pulled together, and I managed to get a good publishing company,” she said. “Telling my father’s story gave me many surprises as well as what I learned about my mother and how resilient she was with all she went through. Could I have handled all that while going through fame, a difficult first marriage, early loss of a great love and caring for three children? She didn’t let us know about resentment but kept our lives going.
“I found writing this book a pleasure for the most part. When my father died, comedian George Jessel said, ‘The story of Robert Riskin is in three acts. You can write the first two on a joyous note; you will have to write the last with a tear.’”
As we parted, she said, “I’ve learned much and was tenacious setting down this road similar to the tortoise and hare situation. I was the tortoise so learned the value of my parents’ world view and the way they cared about the world. Their duties were strong, something that means much to me.”
— Noozhawk columnist Susan Miles Gulbransen — a Santa Barbara native, writer and book reviewer — teaches writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and through the Santa Barbara City College Continuing Education Division. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.
