ANYBODY HERE SEEN KONG?

IN SEARCH OF THE BEAST

I’ve been working on a book about my life as a book collector. It’s brought to mind some odd episodes. This one dates from 2003, and took place during a book-buying trip with a friend through the Pacific northwest. During such a tour, a visit to Peter B. Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley was obligatory. One might as well go to Paris and not pay one’s respects to the Crazy Horse. Such was the breadth of Howard’s knowledge and the richness of his stock that he was known in the trade as The Emperor. His welcome was the greatest compliment to which any bibliophile could aspire. For an hour, I roamed in awe through the vast shop, a former liquor warehouse, until….

Peter B. Howard in Serendipity Books.

“Something I’d like to show you,” said Howard at my elbow.

To my growing astonishment, he led me through a narrow door in the floor-to-ceiling shelves into a small office, most of it filled with a large safe, from which he removed a shallow quarto-sized box. Before the door swung shut again, I glimpsed books, individually wrapped; bulkier objects enclosed in bubble wrap: Aladdin’s Cave for a bibliophile.

“Do you happen to know the email address of Peter Jackson?” he asked.

“Peter Jackson, the director? Guy who made The Lord of the Rings? I suppose I could find one.” This wasn’t bragging. He was a New Zealander and as an Australian I had friends in the NZ industry.

“If you do, I’ll pay you $5000.”

I admired Jackson too, but not that much. “Why?”

“I hear he’s doing King Kong.”

“Apparently.”

“This would probably interest him then.”

He opened the box. The sheaf of paper it contained, held together along one edge with antique metal fasteners, was recognisably a film script – or rather, to judge from its thinness, an extended outline without dialogue known as a treatment. The yellowed paper and discoloured staples suggested age – but what age I didn’t realise until I read the few typed words on the cover sheet.

THE BEAST

Edgar Wallace.

When Edgar Wallace arrived in California on the Chief late in 1931, he wasn’t exposed to the indignity of alighting downtown at Union Station. Instead the train stopped at Pasadena, where a car waited to whisk him to the RKO studios.

Edgar Wallace.

With more than 170 novels to his name, twelve of them written in 1929 alone, as well as eighteen stage plays, almost a thousand short stories, plus journalism, film scripts and popular verse, Wallace was among the world’s most prolific writers. He was also close to broke, having spent a fortune on fruitless attempts to become a member of parliament and wasted the rest on gambling. To Merian C. Cooper, however, a producer of documentaries set in the furthest corners of the world, he was just what was needed to rescue his first fiction film, the story of a monster discovered in one such remote location and let loose in an American city, with disastrous results.

Not one to drag his feet, Wallace set to work in December and, early in the new year, despite some excursions to local racetracks, had completed the manuscript called provisionally The Beast. After some wrangling over titles, other candidates including Jungle Beast, The Jungle King and Kong, the Jungle Beast, it emerged as the classic King Kong.

“And this is really Wallace’s original manuscript?” I asked.

“I have no reason to think otherwise.”

“Cooper always claimed Wallace didn’t write a word. Spent all his time at the track.”

In one of those odd conjunctions that Jung called “synchronicities”, I had tentative confirmation of this claim. Among the exiles from Hollywood who drifted to Australia in the ‘sixties was editor Rex Lipton, whose father Lew had been a minor producer. Rex showed me a picture of Lew and Wallace at the races; prosperous men in ice-cream suits and those Panama hats so finely woven that one could scrunch one up and stuff it in your pocket.

“It’s his name on the script,” Howard said.

It went without saying that I couldn’t handle the manuscript. To even ask would have been a breach of decorum, like checking to see if anything was written on the back of the Mona Lisa.

“Is the story the same?” I asked.

“Well, there’s no Empire State Building. Kong’s cornered in a baseball stadium. And he’s killed by a bolt of lightning, not aircraft. But nobody knows how it would have developed.”

Wallace never finished The Beast. In January 1932, he started to suffer crippling headaches. A few weeks later, another British talent, the actor, songwriter and playwright Ivor Novello, took the train back to New York. He’d been imported to write dialogue for Tarzan, the Ape Man, during which he and Wallace met. A conductor on the train told Novello he couldn’t keep his dog in his stateroom but could visit him any time in the freight car. Novello did so, and found him tethered to the brass handle of a coffin. Inside was the body of Wallace. He’d died suddenly of undiagnosed diabetes and was being shipped back to England for burial

Ivor Novello in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger.

Other events intervened, and I never did track down Jackson’s email. Peter Howard became ill soon after our visit, and died in 2011. Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake was released in 2005, to modest acclaim. And Wallace’s treatment of The Beast? Perhaps it’s still in that safe. As is often the case in the never-ending search for literary rarities, research continued.