Film duplicates real events in Fay Wray's life.
["Shut up!" he explained.]
While the film was based on a British novel, the plot differs in severar respects. WARNING - SPOILERS
In the novel Johnny poisons his wife - no happy ending. In the movie, he apparently tries to force his wife to drive off a cliff. This actualy happened on at least one occasion to Wray when she was married to the award winning, dashing, and handsome - but wildly unbalanced John Monk Saunders.My source is the posthumously published 1940 diary of platwright Clifford Odets who was, at the time , having a torrid affair with Wray. Since the "car on the cliff" ending was not in the novel, perhaps the it was suggested by real events. (THE TIME IS RIPE - Clifford Odets Grove Press 1988)
Cary Grant, one of Fay Wray's closest friends and admirers, may well have known of the incident and passed it along when they decided to modify the ending.
In fact, Grant's movie character bears a remarkable resemblence to saunders, who he also knew very well. Saunders was a violent manipulative man who was abusive and self destructive. He once tried to inject Wray with a hypodermic needle while she slept, perhaps in what was meant to be a myrder-suicide. Odets believed that the cat on the cliff incident was also a murder-suicide attempt.
In addition, Saunsers stole all wray's money, leaving her, a few short years after King Kong. almost penniless. Twice he kidnapped their baby daughter and raised fears that he might take her life as well as his own.
In 1939, after 10+ hellish iears, Wray divorced Saunders. A few months later he was found , by a maid, hanging in his closet in his Fort Myers Florida home - a suicide.
Anyone have any opinions on this theory?