AFTER 54 YEARS, FANS STILL SCREAM FOR ACTRESS FAY WRAY

It is 54 years since the movie opened, but even today, if you mention “King Kong,” most people seem to know that Fay Wray was the star.

She was an important movie name when Brando and Newman were still practicing with their yo-yos, and today, six months away from her 80th birthday, she’s still as vivacious and alert as many half her age.

Clearly she must be doing something right?

“I can’t think what,” she said the other morning. “I never exercise--nothing.”

Sunday at USC Norris Theatre, Wray will make one of her rare public appearances at a retrospective honoring the late Robert Riskin, one of Hollywood’s top writing talents (“Lost Horizon,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”) to whom she was once married.

“It Happened One Night,” scripted by Riskin, will be screened during the evening, and the first Robert Riskin Screenwriting Award will be presented to a USC film student.

“It was my daughter Vicki Riskin who dreamed up the idea,” Wray said. “She’s a psychologist and went to USC. She was just 9 when her father died but she remembers him as a man who was always anxious to help young writers. So this award is an extension of that.”

Wray has already donated her memorabilia and some of Riskin’s scripts to USC--including some of the documentaries he made for the Office of War Information during World War II.

She starred--only once--in a Riskin movie: “Ann Carver’s Profession,” a story about a woman attorney who neglected her husband for her career.

“That was before I met him,” she said, “but of course I knew his terrific reputation. So when I learned they were going to make ‘Lost Horizon,’ I decided I just had to play the role of the girl who ages as she’s taken over the mountain pass (from Shangri-la).

“So one day when Robert Riskin was going to play tennis at Beverly Hills Tennis Club, I went there and stopped him at the gate. I’m not normally an aggressive person, but I felt I had to talk to him about the role. He was terribly charming--but I never did get the part (Margo played it). But it was a happy encounter.”

Writers have played an important part in Wray’s life. Before Riskin, she was married to John Monk Saunders, scenarist of “Wings,” the Paramount movie about pilots in World War I.

So it’s no surprise to find her busy doing some writing herself. Her first play, an autobiographical piece called “The Meadow Lark,” was put on two years ago in New Hampshire. Her other daughter, Susan Riskin, played the role of Wray’s mother.

Now she has almost completed her autobiography.

“I’ve always loved writing,” she said. “I once wrote an episode for Ronald Colman and his wife, Benita Hulme, for their radio series, ‘Halls of Ivy.’ They were so pleased (that) they sent me a cake all decorated with ivy.”

Married to Cedars-Sinai neurosurgeon Sanford Rothenberg, Wray said she has absolutely no desire to act again. The last thing she did was “Gideon’s Trumpet” for CBS-TV back in 1980. Her co-star was Henry Fonda; the writer/producer was David Rintels, who is married to her daughter Vicki.

“I enjoyed that,” she said, “but nothing interesting has come along since, so I haven’t bothered.”

It is a long time now since she struggled screaming in King Kong’s grasp (there was so many aaaaahhhhhs in that film that Filmgoer’s Companion describes her as “a great screamer”). She had made movies before it--her first leading role was in “The Wedding March” in 1928--and she made some 70 afterward.

But it’s “King Kong” that people want to talk about when they meet her for the first time.

“It’s a constant in my life,” she said. “I was sent the script for the De Laurentiis remake (which starred Jessica Lange) because they hoped to persuade me to play a small role in it. But I didn’t like it--I didn’t like it at all--so I said no. And I never saw it. The film I made was so extraordinary, so full of imagination and special effects, that it will never be equaled. They shouldn’t have tried.”