THE PRINCESS BRIDE AT FIFTY - INCONCEIVABLE!

Note: This is a much longer version of an essay I wrote for Quillette last year to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.

Even by the eccentric standards of children’s fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd. The book purports to be an abridgement of a classic adventure novel written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. Goldman, in an extremely bizarre introduction (more about that in a moment), claims merely to have acted as editor of the book, having elided all but the good parts. In fact, unlike the famous film version of the story, the book’s actual title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Yes, all that actually appears on the cover of the book’s first hardbound edition (all but the first three words has been mercifully scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions).

In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Every few months someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of The Princess Bride. The first time this happened, I dutifully went to the store’s inventory computer to see if this was something we stocked. But my effort was abruptly cut short by a young co-worker who had been working there longer than I. He told my customer, “The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. It only purports to have been written by S. Morgenstern. But there is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t satisfied with this response. She insisted that, in the book’s introduction, Goldman acknowledged having merely edited the book. My co-worker, a recent college graduate and a bit of an intellectual snob, rolled his eyes and assured her that she was mistaken. “It’s called meta-fiction,” he told her. “It’s a novel that comments on its own status as a text.” The customer didn’t seem to believe this but she had the good sense not to argue with him. When she was gone, my co-worker told me that a lot of silly people believed that there was an original version of the novel available somewhere, a much longer version written by someone named S. Morgenstern. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film version, these people were now looking for the ur-text. I laughed with him about this and, a few months later, when another customer came looking for the unexpurgated version of The Princess Bride, I delivered somewhat the same response as my co-worker had, although I hope I did it with less condescension. At that point, despite being a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. My wife and I saw the 1987 film, directed by Rob Reiner, when it first came to American theaters. We have seen it several times since on VHS and DVD and, like millions of other people, we have been quoting from it for decades. But only about ten years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. And when I did, I found myself suddenly sympathizing with all those people who had naively believed that, somewhere in the world, there existed a much longer version, written by some old foreigner named S. Morgenstern.

If you think I am exaggerating this phenomenon, look up the book at Amazon.com and check out the reader comments (there are more than 11,000 of them). Even today, fifty years after the publication of the book and thirty-six years after the release of the film, plenty of people still believe that the book was written by S. Morgenstern and merely edited by William Goldman. The comments seem to be divided between those who genuinely believe in Morgenstern and those who, like my former Tower Books co-worker, enjoy sneering at such people. A few examples:

musiclover: So this is the abridged version by William Goldman, who consulted Stephen King on his abridged version. There's a lot of parts cut out (thus the 4 stars) , but honestly who wants to read 60 pages about trees, or 13 pages about a Countess packing and unpacking dresses? He's also made notations during parts of the books about why the parts were cut, which I found helpful, but he does have a tendency to ramble on a bit. The action scenes we loved in the movie are all there, and even some action scenes not included in the movie.

William Snyder: I haven't read it yet but it blows my mind how many reviews there are of people thinking S. Morgenstern is real. It's all William Goldman. Look it up.

Ravzender: William Goldman gives a lot of extra details about how this abridged version of S. Morgenstern's classic tale came about. S. went into a ton of detail at a time, like 60 pages worth, that William cut out. Actually, his father cut it out when he read him the story while he was a young boy recovering from an illness. Just like in the movie.

As You Wish: The author's introduction may confuse some readers, as it did with me when I first started reading it. I thought it was funny, but initially didn't realize that he was being satirical. William Goldman was actually pretending to write an "abridged" version of a book by a fictional author, when in fact he wrote the entire book himself. Perhaps knowing this might help some folks enjoy it more.

In Goldman’s introduction to the book, the only real tipoff that S. Morgenstern isn’t a real person is the fact that, according to Goldman, he was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the action of The Princess Bride is set. You can argue that an intelligent reader should know that Florin was never a real place, but I don’t think it’s fair to expect the typical twentieth-first-century American reader to know the names of every current and former European kingdom. Most contemporary Americans are probably not aware of the existence of The Most Serene Republic of San Marino, an actual European country, and if they saw it mentioned in a storybook would probably think it was fictional. European history is littered with microstates that rose up and then vanished again without leaving much of a trace. Nowadays, I suppose, anyone with an internet connection should be able to figure out fairly quickly if Florin and S. Morgenstern ever existed. But back in the 1990s, before internet access was commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European state would have been difficult to do.

Metafiction was all the rage back in the 1960s and 1970s. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books such as The Sot-Weed Factor (like The Princess Bride, a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (whose text, Barth asserts in a forward, was given to him by someone who claimed it had been written by a computer). Most meta-fictions, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which was published in the same year as The Princess Bride, are comic concoctions and fairly easy to see through. In the beginning of The Princess Bride, Goldman appears to have tried something similar to what Vonnegut did: present the reader with a chatty, informal introduction to the work and to himself. We get much realistic detail about his boyhood, none of it difficult to believe. We are told that his father migrated to America at sixteen and that his English was always very “immigranty.” In 1941, when Goldman was ten, he fell ill with pneumonia. After a short hospital stay, he came home to recuperate for several weeks, spending most of that time in bed. He was bored. His only real pleasure was listening to sports on the radio. One evening his father sat down at the end of William’s bed and began reading to him from S. Morgenstern’s novel The Princess Bride. Prior to this, Goldman hadn’t been much of a reader. But after that night, everything changed:

For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next…Each night my father read to me, chapter by chapter, always fighting to sound the words properly, to nail down the sense. And I lay there, eyes kind of closed, my body slowly beginning the long flow back to strength. It took, as I said, probably a month, and in that time he read The Princess Bride twice to me…Even today, that’s how I summon back my father when the need arises. Slumped and squinting and halting over words, giving me Morgenstern’s masterpiece as best he could…My whole life with my father reading me the Morgenstern when I was ten…That book was the single best thing that happened to me.

Then we jump forward in time and William Goldman is now an adult, married to a psychiatrist named Helen. They have a son, Jason. The three of them live together in a nice New York City apartment. Goldman reminisces about the publication, in 1957, of his first novel, The Temple of Gold. Then he tells us, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, no question, the most popular thing I’ve ever been connected with. When I die, if the Times gives me an obit, it’s going to be because of Butch.” He informs us that, as Jason’s tenth birthday approached, the previous December, Goldman himself was out west, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking meetings with the producers of the film The Stepford Wives, whose script Goldman had been hired to adapt from Ira Levin’s novel. Remembering how his life was changed when his father read The Princess Bride to him at ten, Goldman telephones his wife back in New York and asks her to track down a copy of Morgenstern’s masterpiece and give it to Jason for his birthday, a present from his father.

This is marginally interesting, I suppose, if you are an adult and a fan of William Goldman’s previous work. But it’s hard to understand what this introduction is doing appended to a book for children. It’s true that The Princess Bride appears targeted at older children and their parents. It is a fairy tale that also acts as a spoof of fairy tales. Even so, it’s easy to see why so many readers of the novel were convinced that it was indeed an abridgement of an older book by another writer.

But then the introduction gets even weirder. Goldman, who was forty and had been married for ten years when he took on the Stepford assignment, begins letting the reader see that there are cracks in his marriage. One sunny California day in December, Goldman is out by the hotel pool when “from somewhere, there actually appeared a living, sun-tanned, breathing-deeply, starlet. I’m lolling by the pool and she moves by in a bikini and she is gorgeous. I’m free for the afternoon, I don’t know a soul, so I start playing a game about how can I approach this girl so she won’t laugh out loud. I never do anything, but ogling is great exercise and I am a major-league girl watcher.” He begins flirting with the bikini-clad young woman and discovers that she is an aspiring actress named Sandy Sterling. He mentions that he is writing the script for The Stepford Wives, and she makes it known that she would be willing “to do anything for a shot at that.” Unfortunately, his name is paged and he has to go answer a telephone call. On the phone is his wife. He snaps at her, telling her that he is in a story conference and she shouldn’t be interrupting him. Helen informs him that she can’t find a copy of The Princess Bride anywhere. He tells her to call Argosy Books on Fifty-ninth Street. Then he hurries back to the pool. He thinks of telling Sandy that he doesn’t do the kind of thing she suggested (help starlets find film roles in exchange for sex). “But then I figured, Hey wait a minute, what law is there that says you have to be the token puritan of the movie business?” He begins to put the moves on Sandy but is once again interrupted by a phone call from his wife. She has phoned Argosy and they don’t have a copy of The Princess Bride. At this point, Goldman snaps at his wife so nastily that she begins to suspect that it isn’t a story conference she is interrupting. They bicker for a while and then Goldman hangs up and returns to Sandy. They are in the water together, touching hands, when Goldman decides he’ll try to track down the book himself. He explains this to Sandy. The phone is still at poolside, so Sandy waits while William starts calling New York City bookstores. Now the introduction goes from totally inappropriate for a children’s book to simply tedious, as Goldman makes call after call. Understandably, Sandy gets bored and departs. Goldman gives us the financial cost of his effort to make Jason happy, roughly 120 minutes of long-distance calls at a rate of $1.35 per minute. This is such tedious detail that it is easy to see why legions of readers have believed every word of it. Who would make up something so dull and inappropriate? The internet didn’t exist in 1973. Finding out personal information about Goldman would have been difficult. Today I can go to Wikipedia and discover that Goldman’s wife was named Ilene and that their two children were both girls. But a reader in 1972 couldn’t have accessed that information without spending hours at a library trying to track down a profile of Goldman in some periodical. At any rate, the introduction goes on and on as Goldman telephones his real-life attorney and then his real-life editor at Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich (Hiram Haydn, also a novelist) and tries to enlist their help in tracking down a copy of a book that, in real life, doesn’t exist yet. Eventually he learns that Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich published an English-language translation of The Princess Bride shortly after World War I, when the company was “Just plain old Harcourt, Brace period.” Weeks pass, and Goldman returns to his New York apartment where he and “Helen” engage in a tedious discussion of how difficult it is to find good domestic servants in New York. Helen seems to sack each new cook she hires after a week or two, all of them either “black or Spanish.” She hopes that won’t be the case with Angelica, the latest cook, whom Goldman hasn’t seen yet. When Goldman sits down to dinner, he finds that “Supper was on the table: creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, gravy and pot roast; terrific, except I don’t like pot roast, since I’m a rare meat man, but creamed spinach I have a lech for, so, all in all, a more than edible spread was set across the tablecloth. We sat. Helen served the meat…My pot-roast slice was not terribly moist but the gravy could compensate. Helen rang. Angelica appeared. Maybe twenty or eighteen, swarthy, slow-moving.” At this point Helen scolds the poor dark-skinned girl: “Now, Angelica, there is no problem and I should have told you more than once about Mr. Goldman’s preferences, but next time we have boned rib roast, let’s all do our best to make the middle is pink, shall we?” After which, Goldman tells us, “Angelica backed into the kitchen. Another ‘treasure’ down the tubes.”

Why in God’s name Goldman thought of including this scene in the introduction to a child’s fairy tale I have no idea. He merely manages to make himself and his wife look like privileged jerks. Even in 1973, most American pop-fiction readers would have been more likely to identify with the servant girl than with the wealthy people who employ her. But wait! It gets worse. After Angelica backs out of the room, Goldman begins fat-shaming his fictional son, Jason.

Jason was piling the mashed potatoes on his plate with a practiced and steady motion.

I smiled at my kid. “Hey,” I tried, “let’s go a little easy, huh, fella?”

He spattered another fat spoonful on his plate.

“Jason, they’re just loaded,” I said then.

“I’m really hungry, Dad,” he said, not looking at me.

“Fill up on the meat then, why don’t you?” I said. “Eat all the meat you want, I won’t say a word.”

“I’m not eating nothin’!” Jason said, and he shoved his plate away and folded his arms and stared off into space.

“If I were a furniture salesperson,” Helen said to me, “or perhaps a teller in a bank, I could understand; but how can you have spent all these years married to a psychiatrist and talk like that? You’re out of the Dark Ages, Willy.”

“Helen, the boy is overweight. All I suggested was he might leave a few potatoes for the rest of the world and stuff on this lovely prime pot roast your treasure has whipped up for my triumphant return.”

This fight goes on and on, like some grim scene from a dysfunctional family film such as The Great Santini or Ordinary People (which was directed by the Sundance Kid himself). At one point Goldman says, “You’re making a poof out of that kid,” which actually sounds like something Robert Duvall might have said in Santini. He also manages to insult both fat people and the Japanese, when he says of his son, “paint him yellow, he’d mop up for the school sumo team. A blimp. All the time stuffing his face.” While Helen is defending poor Jason, Goldman writes, “Sandy Sterling in her bikini was dancing behind my eyes.” I can’t imagine why someone at HB&J didn’t tell Goldman that he comes across in this introduction as a sexist, a racist, a homophobe, a bad father, and a bad husband (as well as a sloppy writer). This has got to be one of the most misbegotten introductions ever written for a book, let alone a classic of children’s literature. It unintentionally paints a portrait of the author as a middle-aged crank.

When at last we come to the end of that wretched introduction, we arrive at the book’s first chapter, which is called The Bride. It introduces Buttercup (who is still just a lowly milkmaid) and the farm boy Westley in approximately the same way that they are introduced in the film. After Buttercup declares her love for him, Westley hastens away to America to make his fortune, knowing that this is the only way he can win the approval of Buttercup’s father. Alas, months later, Buttercup learns that the ship taking Westley to America was assailed by pirates who killed everyone on board. Although we have left the introduction behind, we have not left behind Goldman’s commentary on the narrative. These editorial interjections are always set in italic print to distinguish them from S. Morgenstern’s words (in the original hardbound edition, the editorial interjections are printed in red ink, but copies of that edition cannot now be purchased for less than several thousand dollars, so I have never seen one; the original Ballantine paperback edition also displayed the interjections in red ink, but that edition was pulled from circulation within weeks of its release because of objections over its racy cover illustration:

At times the The Princess Bride seems to exist primarily to promote Goldman’s other books. His first editorial interjection mentions Denise, an HB&J copy editor who has “done all my books since Boys and Girls Together” (which, by the way, was Sandy Sterling’s favorite of his novels). He appears to live in a world where everyone is familiar with his entire oeuvre.

The second chapter, The Groom, begins with another of Goldman’s intrusions. He informs us that, in the original Florinese, the chapter opens with a sixty-six page synopsis of Florin’s history. Mercifully, Goldman has elided this material, rendering the chapter only three pages long. Still, some might find it offensive. It introduces Prince Humperdinck, the heir to the throne of Florin. His sole joy in life is killing animals. Towards this end, he has built a five-level, underground Zoo of Death. Each level contains a different type of animal prey. One level is for speedy animals such as cheetahs. One is for strong animals such as anacondas and rhinoceroses. To this Zoo of Death he repairs each day to kill something. On this particular day he spends hours engaged in hand-to-hand combat with some sort of simian (referred to at times as an ape, at times as a monkey, and at times as an orangutan), squeezing its windpipe and trying to suffocate it (“…the ape was heaving at the chest now, desperate for air.”). Eventually, the Prince begins “applying pressure to the spine” of this animal and is finally able to break its neck, with a loud “crack,” thus killing it. Reminiscing about the film version of The Princess Bride in his 2000 memoir Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman laments that the Zoo of Death had to be replaced in the film by a far less graphic Pit of Despair. He says this was done for “budgetary reasons,” but to me it seems almost certain that director Rob Reiner had the good sense to know that a film hoping to attract large numbers of parents and their young children probably shouldn’t include a scene set in a zoo where large numbers of animals are brutally murdered for sport by a sadistic autocrat (who weighs 250 pounds and is shaped like a barrel in the book, but is played by the slender and handsome Chris Sarandon in the film).

Not until Chapter Five, The Announcement, does Goldman’s novel become truly engaging. Not coincidentally, this is the first chapter whose tone almost exactly matches the tone of the film. Early on, when it appears that Buttercup is about to be eaten by sharks, Goldman employs a different kind of intrusion into the story, one that is very similar to the framing device used in the film, where the story of The Princess Bride is being narrated by a grandfather (Peter Falk) to his grandson (Fred Savage), who is home from school, sick, and confined to his bed. Here’s Goldman’s intrusion (italics in the original):

“She does not get eaten by sharks at this time,” my father said.

I looked at him. “What?”

“You looked like you were getting too involved and bothered so I thought I would let you relax.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said, “you’d think I was a baby or something. What kind of stuff is that?” I really sounded put out, but I’ll tell you the truth: I was getting a little too involved, and I was glad he told me. I mean, when you’re a kid, you don’t think, Well, since the book’s called The Princess Bride and since we’re barely into it, obviously the author’s not about to make shark kibble out of his leading lady. You get hooked on things when you’re a youngster; so to any youngster’s reading, I’ll simply repeat my father’s words since they worked to soothe me: “She does not get eaten by the sharks at this time.”

In any case, Goldman found his groove in Chapter Five. Reading it now, you would swear that he was inspired by the engagement of Britain’s Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. But Diana was twelve when the book was published, and blessedly unengaged to anyone. Humperdinck is the largely useless son of a long-serving monarch, King Lotharon. Buttercup is much younger, lovely to look at (unlike her betrothed), beloved by the people (ditto), and more comfortable with commoners than royals. Humperdinck, like Prince (now King) Charles, doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with anyone. The engagement was more or less forced on Humperdinck (as Charles’s may have been forced upon him). Diana first met Prince Charles when she was sixteen, and married him when she was twenty. Buttercup first meets Humperdinck when she is eighteen and marries him at twenty-one.

Chapter Five also introduces us to the three most memorable characters in the story. At first they are described merely as the Sicilian, the Spaniard, and the Turk. Eventually we will discover their names. The Sicilian is a self-proclaimed intellectual giant named Vizzini (played by Wallace Shawn in the film). The Spaniard, Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), is a brilliant swordsman on a years-long quest to find the six-fingered man who murdered his father. And the Turk is Fezzik (André the Giant), a massive but kindly and slow-witted professional wrestler. Almost all of the most memorable lines in movie come from Chapter Five, and most of them were taken verbatim from the novel. Chapter Five, by itself, is probably the best piece of prose fiction Goldman ever wrote. It’s a long chapter and could practically stand alone as a classic fairy tale in and of itself.

In the final decades of his life, Goldman told just about anyone who would listen that he wrote only two things in his long career “not that I’m proud of, but that I can look at without humiliation.” These were the original screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the novel The Princess Bride. Goldman sells himself short here. At least three of his other screenplays (All the President’s Men, Misery, and The Princess Bride) are near masterpieces. And his 1974 novel, The Marathon Man, was one of the best thrillers of the 1970s. But if Butch and Bride were, in fact, his two best works, Chapter Five brings the two of them together in many ways. Butch is essentially one long chase, wherein a posse led by a lawman named Joe Lefors, and aided by an uncannily gifted Indian tracker named Lord Baltimore, doggedly pursues the title characters, both of them outlaws, across hundreds of miles of Western terrain. Again and again Butch and Sundance look back at the men pursuing them and wonder, “Who are those guys?” In Chapter Five of Bride, Vizzini, Montoya, and Fezzik, all of them kidnappers, are being pursued by a man in black who seems to be constantly gaining on them. Over and over again they wonder, who is he? In Butch, it is Lord Baltimore who possesses unnatural tracking powers. In Bride, it is Humperdinck. In the book there is a long scene in which Humperdinck is able to recreate, in astounding detail, an entire sword fight simply by looking at the footprints on the ground. A shortened version of the scene appears in the movie. But Humperdinck displays his uncanny tracking skills several more times in the book. In Butch, the two outlaws find themselves stymied, briefly, near the top of a sheer cliff. In Bride, the three kidnappers find themselves stymied, briefly, at the base of a sheer cliff, part of the dreaded Cliffs of Insanity. When they finally make it to the top of the cliff, they look down and see the man in black climbing towards them. Vizzini feels certain the man will fall, and tells the others, “[H]e will be dead long before he hits the water. The fall will do it, not the crash.” In his introduction to Bride, Goldman tells us that the most famous scene in Butch is “the jump off the cliff.” Just before they jump into the river below, Sundance tries to back out by telling Butch, “I can’t swim.” Butch finds this hilarious. “Are you crazy?” he says, incredulous. “The fall will probably kill you!” The line is so iconic that it has been copied in other pop cultural products.

In his introduction, Goldman claims it was the Cliffs of Insanity in Morgenstern’s book that inspired the scene in Butch. But, clearly, it was the other way around. Parallels between Butch and Bride abound. Both contain a giant who is defeated by the hero in a fistfight. Both contain a main character who dresses in black and possesses an uncanny amount of skill with his preferred weapon. Both stories are sausage-fests in which the main female character is seriously underdeveloped (psychologically, that is, not physiologically). And both Butch and Bride (I’m speaking here of the novel) end with the protagonists facing almost certain destruction by their enemies. At times, the two stories seem to be funhouse-mirror images of each other.

Overall, the film of The Princess Bride is better than the book. But chapter five of the book is better than the corresponding scenes of the film. This is because back-story is much easier to establish in a novel than in a film. Chapter five brings Inigo Montoya’s father, Domingo, alive for us in a way that the film never even attempts. Chapter Five also gives us Fezzik’s back-story: his birth, his childhood, his kindly parents, his long career as a globetrotting professional wrestler hated by audiences because of his invincibility in the ring. And it tells us much more about the relationship between Westley and the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Alas, after Chapter Five, the novel takes some extremely dark turns. This isn’t necessarily bad. Traditional children’s literature is full of horrors. What’s problematic about the latter half of The Princess Bride, however, is how much torture it presents as entertainment for the reader. Some of the book’s torture scenes occur in Buttercup’s nightmares, where she frequently imagines giving birth to Humperdinck’s child only to have it die in some hideous fashion right before her eyes. As in the film (where he is played memorably by Christopher Guest, who is pictured above), Count Rugen, Humperdinck’s six-fingered right-hand man, is an authority on torture. In the book he is writing a treatise on pain, and he researches it by torturing both animal and human subjects. The scenes of Rugen torturing Westley are numerous. Rugen sets Westley’s hands on fire in one scene. In another he unleashes upon Westley the dreaded Spinning Ticks, insects which screw themselves painfully into Westley’s flesh and later have to be burned out. As in the film, Rugen invents a machine for inflicting incredible pain on living creatures. One of the most disturbing scenes in the book occurs when Rugen straps an animal into the machine, a trial run for the torture he will later inflict on Westley. Goldman writes, “Yellin [Florin’s chief law-enforcement officer] had heard many things in his life but nothing quite so eerie as this: he was a brave man, but this sound frightened him. It was not human, but he could not guess the throat of the beast it came from. (It was actually a wild dog, on the first level of the Zoo, but no wild dog had ever shrieked like that before. But then, no wild dog had ever been put in the Machine.) The sound grew in anguish…It would not stop. It simply hung now below the sky, an audible reminder of the existence of agony. In the Great Square, half a dozen children screamed back at the night, trying to blot out the sound. Some wept, some only ran for home.”

Torture is a major element in many of Goldman’s works. The novel Marathon Man contains extended scenes of its Jewish protagonist, Thomas “Babe” Levy, being tortured by Nazi Christian Szell who, in an effort to extract information, first uses a dental pick to poke at a cavity in Levy’s mouth and, later, uses a dental drill to bore into one of Levy’s healthy teeth. Naturally he does all this without anesthesia. When this scene was recreated in John Schlesinger’s 1976 film version (with a script by Goldman, although Robert Towne made uncredited contributions to it), it became probably the most graphic example of torture porn in a mainstream American film up to that time. Because preview audiences were horrified by the torture scenes, Schlesinger and his editor, Jim Clark, made drastic cuts to them. Goldman wasn’t happy when he saw how much torture had been cut from the film. But despite those cuts, the scene ranks sixty-sixth on Bravo’s list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Number twelve on that same list is the scene in Misery (1990, and adapted by Goldman from a novel by Stephen King, another specialist in torture literature) where villain Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) uses a sledgehammer to break the ankles of a novelist (James Caan) she has kidnapped. Among his many other writerly gifts, Goldman is an expert at dreaming up exquisite tortures. It’s curious, though, that he gave this gift its fullest expression in a fairy tale written for children – a fairy tale that is perennially popular and still sells thousands of copies every year in a variety of different editions.

Stranger still is the fact that the book contains plenty of other content that a contemporary reader of the woke variety would surely fine objectionable, including racist terms such as “spick” (in reference to Inigo Montoya) and “Pollack.” None of this – Goldman’s inappropriate references to Sandy Sterling, his sexist attitude towards his wife, the fat-shaming of his son, the homophobia, his reference to Asians as “yellow,” his dismissive treatment of his “swarthy” young servant girl, Buttercup’s contemplation of suicide, the use of the word “shit,” and so forth – seems to have brought the book even close to cancellation in these overly sensitive times. Making the situation even more ironic is the fact that, in 1974, one year after the publication of The Princess Bride, HB&J released another Goldman book for children, this one called Wigger.

The story is about a poor orphan girl named Susanna and the ratty pink security blanket called Wigger that serves as her only companion and confidante. It contains almost nothing that even the most woke individual could complain about. The Child Study Association of America voted it one of the best children’s books of 1974. Alas, according to Wikipedia, “Wigger has since fallen out of print and is considered rare to book collectors; this was in part due to the book’s title (in American slang, a ‘wigger’ is a white person who appropriates and emulates African-American behavior; the word, which came from the term ‘white nigger,’ is considered extremely offensive).”

I doubt that one American in a hundred can tell you what the term “wigger” means. But such is the topsy-turvy world we live in that The Princess Bride, which is filled with material that even I find somewhat questionable, remains a perennial favorite among parents and children, while Wigger, a much better children’s story, has been out of print for decades simply because its title inadvertently employs an extremely obscure racial slur (and one that is only used to disparage white people!). In Goldman’s book, no explanation is given as to why Susanna calls her blanket Wigger. Thus, there is no reason why the book (and the blanket) couldn’t simply be renamed and a new edition published for contemporary readers who lack the $120 necessary to purchase what is currently the cheapest used copy of Wigger available online.

Throughout the 1970s, various directors – Robert Redford, Francois Truffaut, Richard Lester, Norman Jewison, etc. – showed an interest in filming The Princess Bride but couldn’t find studio backing for the project. No official source has ever confirmed this but I suspect that the enormous interest in the 1981 royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di probably helped convince Twentieth Century Fox to greenlight the film. The main stars of the film, Cary Elwes (born 1962) and Robin Wright (1966), were, like Lady Di (1961), part of the late-Boomer early-Gen X birth cohort. The film was shot in England and its look tends to mimic British fantasy tales rather than Germanic ones. Fox seems to have wanted to ride the train of Lady Di’s wedding dress to box office gold. They were disappointed. During its initial theatrical run, Bride earned $31 million on a production budget of $16 million. Once you account for its advertising budget (which isn’t public information), the film probably wasn’t all that profitable. In his forward to Cary Elwes’s 2014 memoir As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, Rob Reiner writes, “We opened to some critical success but only moderate business. Luckily through VHS, DVD, and TV it managed to take hold, and over the past twenty-five years its popularity has grown.”

Like Groundhog Day, the film’s modest box office earnings are incongruous with its massive cultural influence. The fact that tens of millions of Boomers and Gen Xers can recite numerous lines from the film suggests that most of them absorbed its dialog via multiple VHS viewings rather than a single theater experience. Elwes notes that for a year or so after the film’s original release, he rarely heard anyone mention it. It seemed to be mostly dead. “And then – I can’t pinpoint the time when it actually occurred – a strange thing began to happen: The Princess Bride came back to life. Much of this can be attributed to timing – in particular to the newly developing video market. The Princess Bride came to be enormously popular in VHS format. And it was via this relatively new medium that the film began to gain traction, and not simply as a rental. After careful scrutiny by those who do these things, it became clear that fans were not only recommending it to friends and family members, they also began purchasing a copy for their own home libraries. Copies of it were being passed down from generation to generation in much the same manner that children were introduced to the magic of The Wizard of Oz by nostalgic parents who wanted to share one of their favorite movies.”

In the late 1990s, for a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Princess Bride, Goldman added two things to the end of novel that made it even weirder, and not in a good way. One of these additions is the first chapter of a sequel that Morgenstern supposedly wrote titled Buttercup’s Baby: S. Morgenstern’s Glorious Examination of Courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart. But before that, we get another long (25-page) authorial intrusion in which, among a lot of other nonsense, Goldman explains that the trustees of the estate of S. Morgenstern have decided to hire Stephen King to write the abridgement of Buttercup’s Baby. After that Goldman flies to Bangor, Maine, for a meeting with King and the whole thing just becomes way too meta for its own good. The joke about Goldman not having been the real author of The Princess Bride was never terribly funny to begin with. And by 1998, he had beaten it thoroughly to death.

The Princess Bride is now fifty years old and time has not diminished its weirdness. If you know the story only through Rob Reiner’s film version, you might want to get hold of the source material and give it a read. Just make sure there are no children around.