Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (73 page)

Thereupon Toumay and Lewis both came up with the obvious answer. What they needed was a story with a foreign angle that would be difficult to verify. Russia? No, none of them knew enough about Russia to make up an acceptable story. Germany was a possibility or perhaps, a bull-ring story from Madrid? Toumay didn’t think bull-fighting was of sufficient interest to Denverites. How about Holland, one of the reporters offered, something with dikes or windmills in it, maybe a romance of some sort.

THE PLOT THICKENS

By this time the reporters had had several beers. The romance angle seemed attractive. But one of the men thought Japan would be a more intriguing locale for it. Another preferred China; why the country was so antiquated and unprogressive, hiding behind its Great Wall, they’d be doing the Chinese a favor by bringing some news about their country to the outside world.

At this point, Lewis broke in excitedly. “That’s it,” he cried, “the Great Wall of China! Must be fifty years since that old pile’s been in the news. Let’s build our story around it. Let’s do the Chinese a real favor, let’s tear the old pile down!”

Tear down the Great Wall of China! The notion fascinated the four reporters. It would certainly make the front page. One of them objected that there might be repercussions, but the others voted him down. They did, however, decide to temper the story somewhat.

A group of American engineers had stopped over in Denver en route to China, where they were being sent at the request of the ruling powers of China, to make plans for demolishing the Great Wall at minimum cost. The Chinese had decided to raze the ancient boundary as a gesture of international good will. From now on China would welcome foreign trade.

By the time they had agreed on the details it was after eleven. They rushed over to the best hotel in town, and talked the night clerk into cooperating. Then they signed four fictitious names to the hotel register. The clerk agreed to tell anyone who checked that the hotel had played host to four New Yorkers, that they had been interviewed by the reporters, and then had left early the next morning for California. Before heading for their respective city desks, the four reporters had a last beer over which they all swore to stick to their story and not to reveal the true facts so long as any of the others were alive. (Only years later did the last survivor, Hal Wilshire, let out the secret.)

The reporters told their stories with straight faces to their various city editors. Next day all four Denver newspapers featured the story on the front page. Typical of the headlines is this one from the Times:

GREAT CHINESE WALL DOOMED!

PEKING SEEKS WORLD TRADE!

THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

Within a few days Denver had forgotten all about the Great Wall. So far, so good. But other places soon began to hear about it. Two weeks later Lewis was startled to find the coming destruction of the Great Wall spread across the Sunday supplement of a large Eastern newspaper, complete with illustrations, an analysis of the Chinese government’s historic decision—and quotes from a Chinese mandarin visiting in New York, who confirmed the report.

The story was carried by many other papers, both in America and in Europe. By the time it reached China it had gone through many transformations. The version published there—and the only one that probably made sense in view of the absence of any information on the subject from the Chinese government—was that the Americans were planning to send an expedition to tear down the Chinese national monument, the Great Wall.

Such a report would have infuriated any nation. It led to particularly violent repercussions in China at that time. The Chinese were already stirred up about the issue of foreign intervention—European powers were parceling out and occupying the whole country. Russia had recently gotten permission to run the Siberian railway through Manchuria, A year previously German marines had seized the port town of Kiachow, and set up a military and naval base there. France followed by taking Kwangchowan. England had sent a fleet to the Gulf of Chihli and bullied China into leasing Weihaiwei, midway between the recent acquisitions of Russia and Germany.

Faced with this danger of occidental exploitation, possibly even partition, the Chinese government under Emperor Kwang-Hsu began to institute radical reforms, to remodel the army along more modern lines, and to send students to foreign universities to obtain vital technical training.

An important segment of Chinese society bitterly resented not only foreign intervention, but all foreign cultural influences, as well as the new governmental reforms. In 1898 Empress Tsu Hsi made herself regent and officially encouraged all possible opposition to Western ideas. A secret society known as the Boxers, but whose full name was “The Order of Literary Patriotic Harmonious Fists,” took the lead in verbal attacks on missionaries and Western businessmen in China by openly displaying banners that read “Exterminate the foreigners and save the dynasty.”

THE SPARK THAT LIT THE FIRE

Into this charged atmosphere came the news of America’s plan to force the demolition of the Great Wall. It proved the spark that is credited with setting off the Boxer Rebellion. A missionary later reported: “The story was published with shouting headlines and violent editorial comment. Denials did no good. The Boxers, already incensed, believed the yarn and now there was no stopping them.”

By June 1900, the whole country was overrun with bands of Boxers. Christian villages were destroyed and hundreds of native converts massacred near Peking. The city itself was in turmoil, with murder and pillage daily occurrences and the foreign embassies under siege.

Finally, in August, an international army of 12,000 French, British, American, Russian, German, and Japanese troops invaded China and fought its way to Peking. There, the troops not only brought relief to their imperiled countrymen, but also looted the Emperor’s Palace and slaughtered innumerable Chinese without inquiring too closely whether they belonged to the “Harmonious Fists” or just happened to be passing by. The invading nations also forced China to pay an indemnity of $320 million and to grant further economic concessions. All this actually spurred the reform movement, which culminated with the Sun Yat-Sen revolution in 1911.

Thus did a journalistic hoax make history. Of course, the Boxers might have been sparked into violence in some other fashion, or built up to it of their own accord. But can we be sure? The fake story may well have been the final necessary ingredient. A case could even be made that the subsequent history of China, right up to the present, might have been entirely different if those four reporters had been less inventive that Saturday night in the Hotel Oxford bar.

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And Now It’s Time For A Little…WEIRD MUSIC

Here are some real (no kidding) albums you can get:

• “Music to Make Automobiles By”

Volkswagen made this recording “to inspire their workers.” It features the sounds of an auto assembly line backed with an orchestra.

Not to be confused with:

     
• “Music to Light Your Pilot By,” from the Heil-Quaker Corporation (a heater and air-conditioner manufacturer),

     
• “Music to Relax By in Your Barcalounger”

     
• “Music to Be Murdered By” (from Alfred Hitchcock)

• “The American Gun: A Celebration In Song”

A late-night TV special, not available in stores. Rage International offered this country music classic with a
free
oiled plastic rifle case. Songs include: “Thank You, Smith & Wesson,” “America Was Born with a Gun in Her Hand,” “Never Mind the Dog, Beware the Owner,” and the ever-popular “Gun Totin’ Woman.”

King Kong was one of the most influential movies of all time. As both entertainment and a vehicle for special effects, it ivas unsurpassed. Even its promotion foreshadowed modern advertising techniques. We all know the character, but few of us know anything about how the film was made.

P
ART I: ADVENTURE FILMS

The early 1900s were years of discovery in which transcontinental railroads, steamships, and airplanes were opening up the last unexplored corners of the world.

• In 1909 U.S. explorer Robert Peary became the first person to reach the North Pole.

• In 1911 Roald Amundsen was the first to step foot on the South Pole.

• In 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris.

Thanks to the new medium of motion-picture film, it was now possible for explorers to take cameras with them and bring back footage of an exotic world that audiences at home would otherwise never see.

The Partners

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were part of the new breed of filmmaker/explorer. Cooper, a former fighter pilot, and Schoedsack, a combat photographer, had met during World War I. In 1925 they reunited and traveled to Persia (now Iran) to film a feature-length documentary about the migration of 50,000 Bhaktiari tribesmen over a 12,000-foot mountain range and across the Karun river in search of grazing land for their herds.

Even today, the film—called
Grass
—is considered a classic. “The crossing of the torrential Karun river,” Eric Barnow writes in
Documentary
, “with loss of life among men, women, children, goats, sheep, donkeys, and horses, provided one of the most spectacular sequences ever put on film.”

Cooper and Schoedsack followed up with
Chang,
a film about tribal life in the remote jungles of Siam (now Thailand). Like
Grass
, it was a critical success that also made money at the box office. One critic called it “the most remarkable film of wild beast life that has reached the screen….Man-eating tigers, furious elephants in thundering stampedes, leopards, bears, monkeys, snakes, and other animals are shown in…one tense thrill after another.”

Chang
was popular with theater
audiences,
but theater
owners
complained that the movie would have played to larger audiences if it had contained a love story. Cooper took their message to heart.

PART II: GORILLA MY DREAMS

In 1929 Cooper and Schoedsack split up: Cooper stayed in New York to tend to his investments in the fledgling aviation industry; Schoedsack and his wife shot another film in the Dutch East Indies.

While he was stuck behind his desk in New York, Cooper began reading up on the newly discovered Komodo dragons. The world’s largest species of lizards, they are found in only one place on earth: the island of Komodo in the South Pacific.

The Island That Time Forgot

The dragons gave Cooper the idea for another film, set on an imaginary island “way west of Sumatra.” It would be about modern man’s discovery of the island, and an encounter with huge “prehistoric” animals there. As the plot developed in Cooper’s imagination, he explained,

      
I got to thinking about the possibility of there having been one beast, more powerful than all the others and more intelligent. Then the thought struck me—what would happen to this highest representative of prehistoric animal life in our materialistic, mechanistic civilization? Why not place him at the pinnacle of the tallest building, symbol in steel, stone and glass of modern man’s achievement and aspiration, and pit him against modern man?

Evolutionary Thinking

That central character, Cooper decided, should be a gigantic ape. An ape would be better at approximating human emotions than an elephant or dinosaur.

He wrote up a proposal for the film in 1931 and pitched it to Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He suggested filming the jungle scenes on location in Africa and on Komodo Island, and casting a real ape in the lead—a character he named “Kong.” The studios liked the concept, but the Great Depression was underway, and they refused to risk so much money on a film that relied on animal actors and expensive on-location filming. Cooper put the idea aside.

PART III: THE SPECIAL EFFECTS MAN

In 1932 David Selznick, head of production at RKO studios, hired Cooper as his executive assistant. Like many Hollywood studios in the 1930s, RKO was on the verge of bankruptcy. Cooper’s job was to help Selznick review studio projects to see which ones were likely to make money, and which ones should be scrapped.

One project that Cooper looked over was test footage from
Creation
, a movie about shipwrecked sailors who land on an island of prehistoric animals. The dinosaur footage was created by Willis O’Brien, a former cowboy, prize-fighter, and newspaper cartoonist who was now a pioneer in trick photography,