A Hollywood love tale, a Hollywood memoir, a dual biography of two of Hollywood’s most famous figures, whose golden lives were lived at the center of Hollywood’s golden age, written by their girl, an acclaimed writer and producer.

Fay Wray was most famous as the female—the blonde inside a diaphanous dress—who captured the heart of the mighty Ruler Kong, the twenty-five-foot, sixty-ton gorilla, as he placed her, nestled in his eight-foot hand, around the ledge from the 102-story Empire Condition Building, about Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir setting Wray in the elevation of New York’s skyline and cinematic immortality.

Wray starred in more than 120 photos reverse Hollywood’s biggest celebrities—Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper (The Legion from the Condemned, The Initial Kiss, The Texan, 1 Sunday Evening), Clark Gable, William Powell, and Charles Boyer; from cowboy stars Hoot Gibson and Art Accord to Ronald Colman (The Unholy Garden), Claude Rains, Ralph Richardson, and Melvyn Douglas. She was directed from the masters of the age, from Fred Niblo, Erich von Stroheim (THE MARRIAGE March), and Mauritz Stiller (The Street of Sin) to Leo McCarey, William Wyler, Gregory La Cava, “Crazy Costs” William Wellman, Merian C. Cooper (The Four Feathers, King Kong), Josef von Sternberg (Thunderbolt), Dorothy Arzner (Behind the Make-Up), Frank Capra (Dirigible), Michael Curtiz (Doctor X), Raoul Walsh (The Bowery), and Vincente Minnelli.

The book’s—and Wray’s—counterpart: Robert Riskin, considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy Honor–winning article writer (nominated for five), maker, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on such images as American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to City, Lost Horizon, and Meet up with SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR, hailed by many, included in this F. Scott Fitzgerald, as “among the best screenwriters available.” Riskin wrote females characters who have been sensible, ornery, sexy, often resilient, as he perfected what took complete shape in It Happened One Night time, the Riskin character, male or feminine—breezy, self-made, streetwise, positive, with a feeling of humor that is delicate and sure.

Fay Wray and Robert Riskin lived huge lives, finding one another after establishing their artistic selves and after each had had many romantic accessories—Wray, an eleven-year-long hard marriage and a fraught affair with Clifford Odets, and Riskin, some romances with, among others, Carole Lombard, Glenda Farrell, and Loretta Small.

Listed below are Wray’s and Riskin’s lives, their function, their fairy-tale marriage that ended therefore tragically. Listed below are their dual, quintessential American lives, eventually and blissfully intertwined.