Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,858

This is the grave of Margaret Landon.

Born in 1903 in Somers, Wisconsin, Margaret Mortenson grew up in Evanston, Illinois. She went to Wheaton College, graduating in 1925. While there, she met and married a man named Kenneth Landon. He wanted to be a missionary and she joined him. They lived in Thailand from 1927-37. He would later become a big time State Department expert on the country and then an academic teaching about southeast Asia. But Margaret would have the bigger career. They were located in Trang, down near the Malaysian border. She ran a mission school, raised their three children, and explored the history of the country, a place she found utterly fascinating.

In 1937, the Landons returned to the United States. Margaret began writing about her experience. In particular, she was interested in the story of Anna Leonowens, who was a 19th century British colonial who had taught the children of King Mongkut in Bangkok, bringing western education to the nation’s elite for the first time. She wrote a memoir about this in the 1870s. Now, at the same time, there was a lot of unprecedented interest in places like Thailand within the United States, based entirely World War II and where American soldiers were fighting. Kenneth Landon was pretty involved in promoting Free Siam materials in the United States, which started his work with State. So when Margaret published her lightly fictionalized account of Leonowens’ memoir in 1944 as Anna and the King of Siam, it became a best seller. The book was reviewed positively. The Times wrote of it as “an inviting escape into an unfamiliar, exotic past… calculated to transport us instantly.” So sure, plenty of orientalism.

But the book was almost immediately seen as great material for the movies. John Cromwell directed the first adaptation, in 1946, with the original title. This starred Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. No one much remembers it today because of course the second adaptation was the Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation for the stage as The King and I and then the movie which followed that with Yul Brynner, Deborah Kerr, and Rita Moreno that remains one of the classic musicals to the present. Of course, Landon made a lot of money on this. Later there was a 1972 TV series and a 1999 film with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat that I have no memory of, though it did get two Academy Award nominations, for Art Direction and Costume Design. Landon was so angry about the TV adaptation that she sued CBS over copyright infringement. It was settled out of court.

Landon didn’t write much more. There was one more book, a 1949 novel about a missionary in Bangkok titled Never Dies the Dream. It seems pretty repetitive from her previous book and was almost immediately forgotten. She spent her later years defending her book. She died in 1993, at the age of 90.

Margaret Landon is buried in Wheaton Cemetery, Wheaton, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other writers who wrote the source material for famous musicals, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Van Druten, who wrote the play that was the basis for Cabaret, is in Coachella, California. Fred Ebb, the lyricist for Chicago, is in Brooklyn. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.