That Old Feeling: Anna May Win
Part II of Richard Corliss' tribute to the pioneer Chinese-American
star
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,1024222-
1,00.html


A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it
years later. "There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn in
front of his mouth, shouting, 'Anna May Wong, now you come
downstairs and look like the prince was already approaching — we do
a closeup of that!' ... and I have an overjoyed face because I feel
the great happiness — and the important man says, 'You did a great
job, Anna May Wong — You are a film star!'"

Born in Los Angeles in 1905, five years before the picture people
came west from New York and Chicago, Anna May grew up watching
movies made on the streets near her home. Her laundryman father
tried to beat (literally beat) a dutiful girl's sense into her, and
told her she was disgracing the family, as we learn from Graham
Russell Gao Hodges' thorough biography Anna May Wong: From
Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend. But Anna May couldn't get
the dream out of her head. Because she was tall and graceful, and
because her big eyes gave her a maturity beyond her years, she found
work as an extra by the time she was 14, and played important roles
opposite Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks while still in her teens,
and was a sensation in German and English films before she was 25.

Her resume would be impressive enough for a caucasian actress. It
happened that Anna May Wong was Chinese, at a time when East Asians
were no more likely to become Hollywood stars than someone from
India or Africa. She knew, from seeing The Perils of Pauline serials
with the villainous Wu Fang, or D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms,
about a sensitive, opium-sotted "Chink," that Chinese were portrayed
in films as notorious criminals or emotional cripples, and that,
anyway, they were almost always played by white actors. Hollywood
may as well have had a sign on the studio gate reading No Chinese
Need Apply. But Wong did; she was merely following her dream to be a
star. She was too young and ambitious to know it couldn't be done.
So she did it.

The magnitude of Wong's achievement is not that she was Hollywood's
first star actress of Chinese blood. It is that, for her entire, 40-
plus years in movies, and for decades after, she was the only one.
Lucy Liu, from Queens, has achieved a little fame on the small and
big screens; the Mainland's Zhang Ziyi, soon to star (as a
Japanese!) in Bob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha, may duplicate her
Asian luminosity. But Wong was the No. 1 Chinese lady, from the
teens to the 60s, and there was no No. 2. Against devastating odds,
she made her name in silent films in the U.S., with Douglas
Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad, and abroad, starring in the
amazing Anglo-German Piccadilly. Like Greta Garbo, Wong developed a
gestural language for silent film and attached it to her already
formidable screen presence. When sound came in, she wanted to stick
around.


WONG TALKS!

Dozens of silent stars failed in the talking pictures that went from
novelty in 1927 to the norm by 1930. Wong had garnered raves for
speaking German with a natural precision in her first talkie, Hai-
Tang. Her West End stage debut in The Circle of Chalk, though, was
calamitous. Critics derided her "Yankee squeak," and the show's
producer, Basil Dean, blamed her for its early close. Apparently,
she didn't always project for audiences to hear her, and when they
did they were appalled by her flat California diction. Well, she was
from California. Maybe she didn't look California? Here's what
Katherine De Mille said of her: "She has the world's most beautiful
figure and a face like a Ming princess, and when she opens her mouth
out comes Los Angeles Chinatown sing-sing girl and every syllable is
a fresh shock." Was Anna May the first Valley girl?

Prodded by the Circle of Chalk embarrassment, Wong paid #200 for a
speech teacher, who implanted a mid-Atlantic accent that the actress
would use from then on. What didn't change was the flatness. She had
a deep alto voice, with a cello's rich knowing, melancholy, but it
was a monotone; it didn't climb or fall with the musicality most
actors adopt. Her tonal range was one of the narrowest in talking
pictures, and that limited her emotional range. She rarely giggled
or shrieked; her voice suggested that she was either disdainful or
incapable of severe highs and lows. She wasn't one to spit out rapid-
fire dialogue, a vocal reticence that would have limited her roles
even in a color-blind Hollywood. Saucy comedy, of the sort Jean
Harlow personified, was out, as was the scalding, wiseacre
melodrama, Barbara Stanwyck-style. Wong could flash a regal hauteur
and, when called for, that sensuality. She could have played grand-
dame roles of the sort essayed by Garbo — she certainly could match
the Swede for fascination, and self-fascination — but not, say,
Marlene Dietrich, whose awareness of her power over men was always
comic and ironic.

The poles of Wong's screen appeal were that she was nonchalantly
sexual (in many films the slim-chested actress wears no bra, thus
allowing viewers to ogle at what Sanney Leung on the invaluable Hong
Kong Entertainment News in Review website refers to as "two points")
and vaguely forbidding. Hollywood couldn't ignore her allure, and
had taken notice of her stardom in Europe. Finally, in 1931, at 26,
she got top billing in her first American talkie, director Lloyd
Corrigan's Daughter of the Dragon — which, in its unabashed
melodramatic excess, its rampaging ethnic stereotypes and the
opportunity it affords its star to be simultaneously sexy and grave,
sympathetic and villainous, qualifies the film as the definitive
Anna May Wong movie.


DRAGON LADY

Based on a Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer, the plot of Daughter of
the Dragon extended the curse sworn by Dr. Fu on the Petrie family
to the next generation. Fu Manchu (Warner Oland), long ago injured
and exiled in an attempt on Petrie Sr., returns to London and
confronts the father: "In the 20 years I have fought to live," he
says in his florid maleficence, "the thought of killing you and your
son has been my dearest nurse." He kills the father, is mortally
wounded himself and, on his deathbed, reveals his identity to his
daughter Ling Moy (Wong) and elicits her vow that she will "cancel
the debt" to the Fu family honor and murder the son, Ronald
(Bramwell Fletcher)... who, dash it all, is madly infatuated with
Ling Moy.

Ronald has seen "Princess Ling Moy — Celebrated Oriental Dancer"
perform, and the vision has made him woozy. "I wish I could find a
word to describe her," this calf-man effuses. "Exotic — that's the
word! And she's intriguing, if you know what I mean." In a near-
clinch, Ling Moy wonders if a Chinese woman can appeal to a British
toff. When he begs her to "chuck everything and stay," she asks
him, "If I stayed, would my hair ever become golden curls, and my
skin ivory, like Ronald's?" But the lure of the exotic is hard to
shake. "Strange," he says, "I prefer yours. I shall never forget
your hair and your eyes." They almost kiss ... when an off-camera
scream shakes him out of his dream. It is from his girlfriend Joan
(Frances Dade), and the societal message is as clear and shrill:
white woman alerting white man to treachery of yellow woman.

Ling Moy, a nice girl, previously unaware of her lineage, might be
expected to struggle, at least briefly, with the shock of her
identity and the dreadful deed her father obliges her to perform.
But Wong makes an instant transformation, hissing, "The blood is
mine. The hatred is mine. The vengeance shall be mine." Just before
his death, Fu mourns that he has no son to kill Ronald. But, in a
good full-throated reading, Wong vows: "Father, father, I will be
your son. I will be your son!" The audience then has the fun of
watching her stoke Ronald's ardor while plotting his death. When she
is with him, pleading and salesmanship radiate from her big eyes.
But when an ally asks her why she keeps encouraging the lad, she
sneers and says, "I am giving him a beautiful illusion. Which I
shall crush."

As a villainess, she is just getting started. Revealing her mission
to Ronald, she tells him she plans to kill Joan — "Because you must
have a thousand bitter tastes of death before you die." (The ripe
dialogue is by Hollywood neophyte Sidney Buchman, whose
distinguished list of credits would include Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Here Comes Mr Jordan and The Talk of the Town.) She soon
ascends on a geyser of madness as she decides on a new torture: "My
vengeance is inspired tonight. You will first have the torture of
seeing her beauty eaten slowly away by this hungry acid." An aide
holds a hose gadget over Joan's soon-to-be-corroded face, and Ronald
cries for Ling Moy to stop. Very well she says. "Ling Moy is
merciful." She barks at Ronald: "Kill her!" He must decide if his
favorite white girl is to be etched with acid or stabbed to death.
Great stuff! Melodrama is the art of knowing how precisely too far
to go

The film is a triangle: not so much of Ling Moy, Ronald and Joan as
of Ling Moy, Ronald and a Chinese detective, Ah Kee, played by
Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who in the teens was Hollywood's
first Asian male star. He's not plausibly Chinese here, and he is in
a constant, losing battle with spoken English. But he is a part of
movie history, in the only studio film of the Golden Age to star two
ethnically Asian actors. And he gives his emotive all to such lines
as "It is the triumph of irony that the only woman I have ever
deeply loved should be born of the blood that I loathe." And in the
inevitable double-death finale — neither the villainess nor the
noble detective can survive the machinations of Hollywood justice —
he gently caresses the long hair of the lady he would love to have
loved. "Flower Ling Moy," he says, a moment before expiring. "A
flower need not love, but only be loved. As Ah Kee loved you."


SHANGHAI GESTURES

Daughter of the Dragon was the first of two pictures Wong made at
Paramount in the early 30s. It happens that she bore similarities to
two other of the studio's cuties: she looked a bit like Claudette
Colbert, with the bangs and high cheekbones, and had some of Miriam
Hopkins' sexual musk (though, again, those actresses applied a real
or implicit smile to their roles). Of course, Paramount's big new
exotic flavor was Dietrich. To see the German import and the Chinese
girl from L.A. play off each other in Shanghai Express, as director
Josef von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes swathe them in a
kind of visual incense, is pleasure of a high order.

Lily (Dietrich), with her fancy frocks, and Hui Fei (Wong), in
scythe-shaped sideburns and a bob with the sides parted, are
prostitutes sharing a coach room on a train lumbering through China
during the Nationalist-Communist civil war. The two women fend off
the condemnation of the more proper passengers — "One of them is
white and one of them is yellow," says the Rev. Carmichael (Lawrence
Grant), "but both their souls are rotten" — with glances that may be
flirtatious or contemptuous. They toy with the huffy Mrs. Haggerty
(Louise Closser Hale), who runs a boarding house; Dietrich wants to
call it a bawdy house. When the matron declares that Lily and Hui
Fei might not be respectable enough to warrant her hospitality, Wong
looks up from her cards, takes the matron in her sights and
murmurs, "I confess I don't quite know the standard of
respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs.
Haggerty."

Wong imparts a ponderous, attention-grabbing delicacy to the speech,
possibly because it's the longest she has in the film. She has no
more than a score of lines, yet she is crucial to the film's plot.
The villain Chang (Oland again) is a Communist rebel who takes the
passengers hostage in order to secure the release of a comrade. As a
diversion — "It's a long journey, and a lonely one," he says to Hui
Fei — he rapes the Chinese girl. Later she fatally stabs him. "You'd
better get out of here," she whispers to Lily's captive beloved
(Clive Brook). "I just killed Chang." When Lily hears of this, she
says, "I don't know if I ought to be grateful to you or not." Hui
Fei replies, with quiet intensity, "It's of no consequence. I didn't
do it for you. Death canceled his debt to me." (Spoken like the
daughter of Fu Manchu.) Throughout, Wong exudes a star power that
complements Dietrich's but doesn't compete with it. She has a
stillness with a force field around it.


WONG RULES BRITANNIA

Paramount was Wong's home, or at least her hotel, throughout the
30s; she did three stretches there. But in 1933, going where the
work was, she returned to Britain for four films; I've seen three.
First was A Study In Scarlet, starring and written by Reginald Owen,
directed by Edward L. Marin, and based on the title but not the plot
of Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novelette. Wong plays
Mrs. Pyke, a suspect in the murders of several members of a secret
society, the Scarlet Ring. She has a generous spot on the cast list
(she's billed third), and a tiny role; she can't be on screen for
more than eight of the film's 73 mins. She gets a few closeups for
smirking privileges, and is enlisted into the climax, when she is
arrested and disappears without a word. Her exit is appropriate,
since Wong seems to be performing under silent protest.

In the 1934 musical fantasy Chu-Chin-Chow, Wong, though billed
second, is again a supporting player. Her role as Zahrat echoes the
one she had a decade earlier in The Thief of Bagdad: she's back in
that once-fabled city as a slave girl in the royal house, scheming
and spying for an invader villain with predatory aims. But this time
she gets to atone, by turning on her master Abu Hasan, played by
that thick slice of ham, Fritz Kortner. In one scene Wong displays
more leg than most stars would. (Then again, the long-limbed Wong
had more leg to show.) And when chained to a Wheel of Death, she
nicely flexes muscles in her sinewy arms. She strangles one of her
captors, escapes from the wheel (without bothering to free her
fellow prisoners) and silently vows (actually, smirks) revenge
against her master.

Chu-Chin-Chow embraces — indeed, squeezes the life out of — all
manner of racial stereotypes, notably in the equal-opportunity
offender "Slave Song" and in a joke about a fat African woman.
Kortner, whose acting style manages the seemingly unimaginable
blending Al Jolson and Klaus Kinski, appears in black-face (as an
African), brown-face (an Arab) and yellow-face (a Mongol). The
picture, directed by Walter Forde, is an appalling but vagrantly
vigorous entertainment, especially at the end, when Wong leads a big
dance number (Lots of sinuous arm gestures) so she can find and stab
Abu Hasan, who dies as floridly as he lived. Here, as in Shanghai
Express, Wong gets to kill without being killed.


TRAGIC ALIEN

The higher-minded Java Head, directed by Hollywood's J. Walter Ruben
from a story by Joseph Hergesheimer, presents Wong as a tragic
heroine, driven to death by her own high ideals and the prejudices
of a 19th-century English village. Taou Yuen, the Manchurian
princess Taou Yuen, is brought to England as the bride of
businessman Gerrit Amiddon (John Loder). An epidemic of prejudice
immediately erupts, with everyone but Gerrit and his sister fuming
over Taou Yuen. The family cook calls her "a heathen, with
fingernails like that" and spreads her hand into a claw. The brother
of the pretty girl Gerrit left behind (Elizabeth Allen as Nettie)
spits out his verdict: "The great Gerrit Amiddon playing the fool
with a common little yellow girl from a teahouse." The great Gerrit
is, at first, in love with, in awe of, his precious acquisition: "I
feel like a clumsy fool who's stolen a priceless lacquered vase and
expected it to serve as a beer mug." Taou Yuen smiles and says: "As
long as you do not drop and break it." Guess what? He drops, he
breaks.

Learning that the family fortune has been stoked by trading in
opium, and feeling the fanning of an old flame with a white woman,
Gerrit chides Taou Yuen for her "barbaric" and "pagan ways." He
gives Taou Yuen the back of his hand, and Wong the chance to simmer
regally. She notices Gerrit's attraction for Nettie and asks if an
Englishman "can love two women equally" and opines that, in that
case, "One would die, and the other grow stronger." Any moviegoer
can recognize the Noble Renunciation theme that the young Wong had
embodied in The Toll of the Sea. The film's only suspense: How will
Taou Yuen be dispatched so Gerrit can marry Nettie? Answer: by
taking a gulp of poison meant for the white girl.

Java Head: has a passing resemblance to E.T. (48 years later), the
story of a strange and gifted creature who shocks on first glance,
wins over the kid sister, is rejected for looking different and
escapes to another land (a distant planet for E.T., death for Taou
Yuen). The movie also is mildly progressive and provocative in
positing a saintly Asian destroyed by ignorant Europeans. (Possible
caveat: the villain, Nellie's brother, is a white man tainted by the
Yellow Peril — opium.) But its most interesting subtext is the Code
of the Kiss. In movies of the day, the hero was destined to wind up
with the first woman he meaningfully kisses. Man and wife share
several intimate scenes in their bedroom, but they never kiss. Late
in he film, Gerrit surrenders to his old amour and plants a
passionate one on Nellie. It seals their fate — and, terminally,
Taou Yuen's.


YELLOW EARTH

Wong may have broken through the Hollywood race barrier, but her
success didn't help others; no studio boss told his casting
director, "Get me another Anna May Wong!" It didn't even help her.
When Hollywood made movies about Chinese people, it simply put white
actors in "yellowface." The term is a misnomer. Whereas a white
actor playing a black was obliged to dab cork to darken the visage,
a white playing an "Oriental" character didn't change face color but
applied spirit gum to give the eyes a higher slant.

Hollywood's rationale, put baldly, went like this: 1. East Asians
look just like "us," only their eyes go up funny, so they can be
played by European Americans with the help of spirit gum. And 2.
Asian-American actors don't have the training or star power to sell
a movie character or a movie ticket.

The theatrical tradition of white actors in "yellowface" precedes
movies, and the innate realism of films didn't discourage early
actors. In 1919, the year Richard Barthelmess played the
sensitive "chink" in Broken Blossoms, the Danish actor Warner Oland
played his first Chinese in The Lightning Raider. Oland looked no
more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast "yellow" dozens
of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16
Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney
Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films,
until his death in 1947. Wong had played Fu Manchu's daughter in
1931, but the following year, when MGM made The Mask of Fu Manchu,
that role went to caucasian Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Walter
Huston, Jerry Lewis, Alec Guinness, Shirley MacLaine all applied
Oriental makeup for mainstream movies. It wasn't until the late 60s,
when Americans were seeing East Asians on their TV screens every
night, that Hollywood finally renounced this sorry tendency,

Wong had played featured roles in A pictures, and leads in B's. But
could Wong win a major part in the biggest Chinese-set film yet to
be made? She yearned to play O-Lan, the heroine of Pearl Buck's The
Good Earth, a best-seller that won the American novelist the Nobel
Prize for Literature.

Buck's thoughts were similar to Wong's. As Anthony B. Chan relates
in his book Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905-
1961, Buck had lunch with an MGM executive, some time before The
Good Earth was to be cast. "I said I hoped they would use Chinese
actors in the leading parts," she recalled, "to which he replied
that this was impossible because of the American star system." Wong,
who had just turned 30, tested several times for O-lan, meeting with
skepticism and animosity. The skeptic was Albert Lewin, the MGM
producer in charge of casting the film. After a screen test, he
wrote an evaluation expressing "a little disappointed as to looks.
Does not seem beautiful enough to make Wang's infatuation
convincing; however, deserves consideration." She also tested for
the role of Wang's second, younger wife Lotus, but she was not
seriously considered. In the New York American, Regina Crewe
reported that "The producer said Anna May Wong 'wasn't the type'."

Lewin and MGM were unlikely to hire any Chinese-Americans for major
roles. "In his reports on ... other Chinese actors," Hodges
writes, "Lewin consistently argued that, despite their ethnicity,
they did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like."
What were they supposed to look like? Warner Oland? No, not a Dane
like Oland — Austrians! Paul Muni played Wang, Luise Rainer was O-
lan and Tilly Losch got the role of Lotus. Wong, Chan, speculates,
was "Too beautiful for one part and too old for the other." (Anna
May's younger sister Mary Liu Heung Wong did get the small role of
the Little Bride. She hanged herself in the family garage in 1940.)

Resistance to Wong came from outside the studio as well as inside.
The Chinese government's official advisor to MGM, who said that her
odor in China was "very bad ... whenever she appears in a movie, the
newspapers print her picture with the caption 'Anna May again loses
face for China.'" He wasn't exaggerating. When Shanghai Express
played in the city it supposedly was set in, a local newspaper
called Wong "the female traitor to China," and a journal in Tianjin
carried the headline: "Paramount Uses Anna May Wong to Embarrass
China Again." Apparently not realizing that the villain Chang was a
Communist, and Wong's Hui Fei, though a prostitute, was a brave
Nationalist who kills Chang to save China, Chiang Kai-shek's
Nationalist government banned the film. Said Wong: "It's a pretty
sad situation to be rejected by the Chinese because I am too
American."

A few years later, Wong did appear in the adaptation of a Pearl Buck
novel, The Patriot, on Orson Welles' Campbell Playhouse (successor
to his Mercury Theatre on the Air), supported by future Citizen Kane
co-stars Ray Collins and Everett Sloane (as Chiang Kai-shek!). Wong
played Peony, a servant in the house of the mandarin-turned-
revolutionary I-Wan (Welles). Again she gets star billing; again she
has a small role.

Listening to the show on the Mercury Theatre on the Air website, I
winced to hear Wong make three gaffes in less than a minute:
pronouncing the Welles character's name once as "Aye-Wan," a few
moments later as "Ee-Wan"; then blowing a simple line ("Oh I'm not
used — not used to — oh I'm used to serving, not sitting down with
the others"); and finally stammering out a scene-ending sentence
("Tell me more, En-lan — En-lan — tell me more about this
revolution") while the other actors try to cover and step on her
line. It was the Circle of Chalk debacle all over again.

At the end of this April 1939 radio play the author and the guest
star enjoyed a few moments of chat. "Delighted to meet you, Miss
Buck," Wong says. "As a Chinese I naturally have been intensely
interested in your books on China." Did Buck realize how probing and
poignant Wong's interest had been?


THE MOUNTAIN AND THE VALLEY

In 1937 she was back at Paramount, for three B pictures. But she was
the star! And now, no more dragon ladies. Also no more meaty roles.
Sinophiles may rue the villainy imputed to them in movies, but they
should realize that villains are often the best parts. The snake
gets all the lines.

In Daughter of Shanghai she again stars with an Asian, the Korean
actor Philip Ahn (though he was billed 10th). She's the daughter of
an antique dealer who is threatened, and killed, by a smuggling ring
he is trying to expose. In an early scene, smugglers are shown
flying aliens into the country; when the Feds close in on them, they
jettison their human payload. (An identical scene appears two years
later in Secret Service of the Air, the first in Ronald Reagan's
Brass Bancroft series.) Wong turns globe-trotting sleuth to learn
the identity of the smugglers' Mr. Big (who turns out to be a Mrs.)
and is nearly gang-raped on slave ship of illegal immigrants. When
four guys fight in a dispute over her honor, she stands by,
paralyzed. Scriptwriters, who didn't have trouble dreaming up cool
things for her to do when she was a baddie, usually made her passive
as a goodie.

The 1938 Dangerous to Know was a film version of Edgar Wallace's On
the Spot, which Wong had played on Broadway. She's the "hostess,"
i.e. mistress, of a gangster (Akim Tamiroff) with potent political
connections. While he does all the heavy acting, she stands by,
stoic and steaming, as, essentially, a housekeeper in her own house.
She hasn't much more to do in the 1939 Island of Lost Men, where the
strong man is J. Carrol Naish as the Oriental plantation boss
Gregory Prin. She's a nightclub singer ("China Lily — Songstress of
the Orient") and, again, a top-billed irrelevance. She is sent off
the island, and doesn't appear in the climactic seven mins. of a 63
min film.

Her career was winding down. Her last contract was with the Poverty
Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) for top-billed
roles in two 1942 propaganda films set in the Asian war. In Joseph
H. Lewis' Bombs Over Burma she's a schoolteacher joining forces with
American GIs to defeat the Japs. "I can stand up and take it now," a
soldier brags. "And what's more I can give it back." Wong smiles and
replies, "Like China." This is one of the few exchanges in a strange
movie, whose dialogue is so sotto voce, it's almost not-o voce. Long
sequences are without dialogue, others are only in Cantonese. The
actors play like non-actors. In its rigorous artlessness, Bombs Over
Burma is almost a preview of Italian neo-realism.

The PRC Lady from Chungking reunited Wong with William Nigh, who had
directed her in two silent films. She plays Kwan Mei, a rebel leader
who is organizing guerrillas in the hills while wheedling strategic
information from Kaimura, the Japanese officer in town. "There is a
fragile but durable beauty in you, Madame," purrs the smitten swine,
to which Kwan Mei says, "Perhaps I'm as aged-looking as the Great
Wall." No, she is fetching in her improbable gear. Anthony Chan
observes: "Even as the rebel leader in the rice fields, Kwan Mei
wears a silk suit with handwoven buttons..."

While paying a dozing attention to the plot, a viewer wonders
whether, for once, Wong will get an on-screen kiss. She does, from
Kaimura — a rebel leader will do anything for the Cause — and, when
he discovers her true mission, she pays with her life. Standing
before the firing squad, she declares: "You cannot kill me. You
cannot kill China. Not even a million deaths would crush the soul of
China. For the soul of China is eternal. ... We shall live on until
the enemy is driven back over scorched land and hurled into the
sea. ... Out of the ashes of ruin ... until the world is again sane
and beautiful." The firing squad's fatal work doesn't interrupt Kwan
Mei's oration; her ghost finishes the speech. It would be Wong's
last grand gesture in films.


THREE RULES FOR ANNA MAY WONG

A few rules that guided and restricted Wong's career:

1. She couldn't kiss. A Wong character might lure men to delight or
destruction, but she was forbidden the main movie signifier of
romantic fulfillment: the kiss. In Piccadilly with Jameson Thomas
and in The Road to Dishonor (the English-language remake of Hai-
Tang) with John Longden, their kiss was cut by British censors "on
moral grounds." Wong, quoted in TIME, proclaimed the furor much ado
about bussing, "I see no reason why Chinese and English people
should not kiss on the screen, even though I prefer not to." Both co-
stars agreed. Thomas: "In England, we have less prejudice against
scenes of interracial romance than in America. In France, there is
still less, and in Germany, there is none at all. But we are careful
to handles such scenes tactfully." Longden: the ban on kissing
was "a ridiculous anomaly," "stupid and inconsistent."

There were occasions when Wong could be kissed: tenderly, sexlessly,
by a child (in her first starring role, The Toll of the Sea) or,
greedily, by a rapacious, besotted Japanese general (in her last
starring role, Lady from Chungking). But, so often, directors sidled
up to the big smooch, then found an excuse to abort it, as with the
white Fletcher and the Asian Hayakawa in Daughter of the Dragon and
with Loder in Java Head. Decades after her death, the poet John Lau
wrote a verse titled "No One Ever Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong."
That's not quite true; the poem's title should be "Everyone Tried to
Kiss Anna May Wong But Hardly Anyone Got to Do It."

2. She had to die. Not always, but frequently. You may know that
Chaney, because of his gift (and fondness) for distorting his
features to play a wide range of characters, was known as the Man of
a Thousand Faces. Well, Wong was the Woman of a Thousand Deaths. A
saunter through the film synopses in Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide
to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work, by Philip Leibfried
and Chei Mi Lane, reveals some of the mischief done to Wong
characters: she was buried alive in The Devil Dancer, fatally
impaled on knives in Song, shot dead in Piccadilly, Daughter of the
Dragon and Lady from Chungking. She committed suicide in Shame and
Drifting, Hai-Tang, Tiger Bay and Java Head (poison) and Limehouse
Blues and Dangerous to Know (dagger).

You may think that her regular demise was the last vengeance of
racist screenwriters. Think again. Garbo, the most exalted Hollywood
star of the period, died in most of her movies too.

3. She would be given star treatment in the credits but not in her
pay packet. On the business side of Wong's career, two anomalies
stand out. She was often billed higher than warranted by the
importance of her character or the size of her role. (The names of
black actors, no matter how substantial their roles, were typically
placed below the least significant white actors.) Yet, even when she
was the star, she often was paid less than her supporting actors. In
Daughter of the Dragon, where she was top-billed, she earned $6,000
to Hayakawa's $10,000 and Oland's $12,000 (though he's out of the
picture by the 23rd min.). Her Shanghai Express gig, where she is
billed third, again above Oland, Wong earned another $6,000;
Dietrich got $78,166. A decade later, in her two-film deal with PRC,
she was paid a pretty paltry $4,500. She donated it all to China War
Relief.


ANNA MIGHT...

She spent much of the war beating the drum for the Chinese who had
not made it to the Golden Mountain: America. At war's end she was
40 — not as old as the Great Wall, but getting on. Age had thickened
her features, and years of playing either stern villains or stalwart
heroines had stripped animation from her face. Now it was an
impassive mask, as if she were preparing for a Peking Opera version
of a Samuel Beckett play.

She didn't return to films until 1949, and then in a small role in a
B picture called Impact. As the hero's housekeeper she is mostly
mute and still, a piece of antique statuary, hoarding secrets in
deference to her good master. When she speaks, it's in tortuous
translations from the pseudo-Cantonese ("It is the hope that Su Lin
was of small help to Mr. Williams"), Eleven years later she was
another housekeeper in the Ross Hunter production Portrait in Black,
this time supporting Anthony Quinn, who had done small roles in her
late-30s Paramount films. Now he was the famous name and she the
filler. (Also in 1960, Quinn starred as an Inuit in Nicholas Ray's
The Savage Innocents — opposite another actress, Marie Yang, who in
this film was billed as Anna May Wong! It may be the only instance
of an actor appearing with two actresses of the same name in the
same year.)

Like a lot of veteran performers in the 50s, Wong found more work on
the small screen than the large. She hosted a 13-week series, The
Gallery of Madame Liu Tsong (her Chinese name), for the Dumont
network in 1951, and in 1957 hosted an ABC evening of film clips
from the 30s trip to China, called Bold Journey. She did guest spots
on The Barbara Stanwyck Show and Adventures in Paradise. In 1956 she
got a long-deferred chance to play a role she lost out on in
Hollywood: as the Asian blackmailer in Somerset Maugham's The
Letter. The director of the TV show was William Wyler, the man who
had said no when he made the film version in 1940. She was set to
return to Hollywood, with the large role of Auntie Liang in Hunter's
production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, when, on
Feb. 3, 1961 — 44 years ago today — she died of a heart attack
following liver disease. She was 56.

The woman who had died a thousand deaths on screen now died for
real. And the story of her life traced the arc of triumph and
tragedy that marked so many of her films. Wong's youthful ambition
and screen appeal got her farther than anyone else of her race. But
her race, or rather Hollywood's and America's fear of giving Chinese
and other non-whites the same chance as European Americans, kept her
from reaching the Golden Mountaintop. We can be startled and
impressed by the success she, alone, attained. And still we ask: Who
knows what Anna May Wong could have been allowed to achieve if she
had been Anna May White?