/lit/ - Literature

"You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

The epigraph to Part Two is attributed to Merian C. Cooper, who produced King Kong in 1933. Cooper said this line to actress Fay Wray, who starred as Ann Darrow, when he was telling Wray his plans for her co-star. Wray thought "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood" was Clark Gable until Cooper showed her a picture of King Kong scaling the empire state building.

A couple times now, Jessica has been compared to Fay Wray:
"It's eminently fair," Roger now cynical, looking very young, she thinks. "Everyone's equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket." To which she gives him her Fay Wray look, eyes round as can be, red mouth about to open in a scream, till he has to laugh. "Oh, stop."(58)

"Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind of protective paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel jumps you from the ceiling." (279)

About 20 pages earlier, the first (?) mention of King Kong, during the scene at Raoul's party:
"Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and a face like Tenniel's Alice, same forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into the house and right between them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of the garden but––why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes of King Kong, treads spewing grass and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes to a halt." (250)