King Kong has thrilled movie audiences ever since its premiere in 1933, but few people know that the man behind the movie had a life as adventurous as anything he put on screen. Merian C. Cooper learned what it was like to fly military aircraft like the ones that shot Kong off the Empire State Building—and how it felt to be on the receiving end of their bullets. He had piloted bombers in World War I and fighters for the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War and was shot down in both conflicts. “Life has its high points,” Cooper once wrote. “You risk your skin, and in the moment when life balances with death, no matter how afraid you may be, you get a touch of the animal value of existence.” More than once he experienced that delicate balance.
Merian Coldwell Cooper was born on October 24, 1893, in Jacksonville, Florida. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy but got kicked out before he could graduate. “I was high-spirited, loved excitement, took chances and got caught too many times,” he told film historian Rudy Behlmer in 1965. “Besides, I had been interested in aviation even since the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk and I wanted to get into World War I and fly and realized I couldn’t get into flying in the Navy.” He joined the Georgia National Guard in 1916 so he could participate in the hunt for Francisco “Pancho” Villa in Mexico, and the Guard later sent him to aeronautics school in Georgia, where he learned to fly. Then Cooper headed off to France as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Service. Determined to enter combat as soon as possible, he trained to be a bomber pilot and received an assignment to the 20th Aero Squadron.
Cooper’s unit flew license-built British de Havilland DH-4 bombers powered by American Liberty engines. On September 26, 1918, Cooper was—was leading the flight when it was assailed by German Fokker D.VII fighters of 12, which shot down five of the American planes. One of them was Cooper’s. Living up to its pejorative nickname as the “flaming coffin,” the DH-4’s engine ignited and the flames spread into the cockpit. “As I fell straight down towards the earth in a spinning nosedive it looked to me as if the whole world was on fire,” Cooper wrote to his father. “The only thing in the world that I wanted to do was to get out of that pain.” Even though he didn’t have a parachute, Cooper readied himself to leap from the burning aircraft, but then he realized that gunner/bombardier, 1st Lt. Edmund C. Leonard was still alive. Cooper returned to his controls. Badly burned, barely able to use his hands, Cooper made a crash landing. The Germans captured both men and Cooper spent the rest of the war in a German hospital. He had been wearing a flying mask and goggles, so his lips were the only part of his face that suffered, but his hands were badly burned. “The Germans did a beautiful job on them, but I’ve had trouble with them ever since,” he told Behlmer.
