Chapter 3 - A royal presence

Summary

Brynner played King Mongkut on stage from 1951 to 1955 and, intermittently, from 1976 to 1985, onscreen in 1956, and on television in the 1972 thirteen-episode series, Anna and the King. The kingly trope continued in biographies; the 1987 Yul Brynner: The Inscrutable King and the 1989 Yul: The Man Who Would Be King; in the co-authored 1983 Yul Brynner Cookbook: Food Fit for the King and You; the 1995 made-for-television documentary, The Man Who Was King; and in a virtually endless array of newspaper and magazine articles addressing the actor and his legacy (see Chapter 9). Despite the spectrum of parts that Brynner played during his career, he remained tenaciously associated with his excessive and stylized interpretation of King Mongkut, the historical Siamese ruler made Broadway character. In journalistic mentions of Brynner spanning from the 1950s to the current day, only mentions of his bald head repeat with the same frequency as kingly allusions.

Examining Orientalism and masculinity in both the narrative of The King and I and in Brynner's screen presence, this chapter zooms in on the royal trope cutting through his star image. In doing so, it further examines the kingly reverberations in his roles as Pharaoh Rameses II, the ‘buccaneer king’ Jean Lafitte, and King Solomon in top-budget 1950s Hollywood studio spectacles that marked the early part of his career and fame.

An Oriental attraction

Steeped in myth, cosmopolitanism, and exoticism from the outset, Brynner's star image framed him as imported goods, a ‘product of the Mysterious East’ operating with a different kind of logic – and constraint – than that governing the lives of regular Americans. Within 1950s American culture, Brynner, in his son's words, ‘almost constituted a new species. Even his name was a mystery: one cannot confidently guess from which continent those three syllables emerged, for they are neither European nor Oriental.’ Brynner himself argued that the name was ‘common enough in Outer Mongolia.’ His was a project of self-exoticizing that made use of broad Orientalist tropes, often in highly playful, over-the-top manner.