Anna May Wong Did It Right

I’m Anna May Wong.
I come from old Hong Kong.
But now I’m a Hollywood star.
—from a song she performed in her cabaret act

This week, the Oscar nominations were announced, and five of the 20 slots in the acting categories went to Africans or African-Americans. That number, the most in the 77-year of the Academy Awards, heartens those who know how rare it was for any actor of color to be recognized as an accomplished artist in Hollywood. In 1940 Hattie McDaniel became the first non-white to win an Oscar, and that for a stereotype role, as Mammy in Gone With the Wind, a Civil War-era house slave who stayed loyal to the mistress of her plantation. The Oscar was for Best Supporting Actress. No black had been nominated for an Oscar in a leading role, for the simple reason that no black had played a leading role — not in a mixed-race film produced by a major Hollywood studio.

RICHEE / PARAMOUNT / MPTVAnna May Wong in 1933

In the quarter-century of Hollywood feature films before 1940, only two non-white actors had been regularly cast in starring roles. One, Sessue Hayakawa from Japan, was a stalwart heartthrob in the late teens. The other was all-American: born in California, a native English speaker, and with a sensual, intelligent allure that even the studio bosses could not ignore. She was Anna May Wong, whose centenary we celebrate this month.

Born Jan. 3, 1905, in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Wong played the lead role in the first Technicolor feature, The Toll of the Sea, in 1922, when she was just 17. By 19 she was intriguing against the movies’ top action star, Douglas Fairbanks, in his super-production The Thief of Bagdad. At 23 she went to Europe, where she starred in a half-dozen A pictures — including her best one, E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly — and, when sound films arrived, performing roles in three languages: English, German and French.

She returned to the U.S. to share top billing with Hayakawa in a Fu Manchu melodrama, Daughter of the Dragon, and, a year later, was Marlene Dietrich’s companion in Shanghai Express. After starring in three films in England, she anchored a series of B pictures at Paramount, a major studio, then starred in two more for a Poverty Row outfit.

Wong’s eclat spread beyond the big screen. In 1929 and 1930 she starred in plays in London (The Circle of Chalk, with the young Laurence Olivier), Vienna (the title role in Tschun Tschi) and New York (the Broadway melodrama On the Spot, which she would film at Paramount as Dangerous to Know). Her cabaret act, which included songs in Cantonese, French, English, German, Danish, Swedish and other languages, took her from the U.S. to Europe to Australia.

CHINESE CHIC

She was a figure of exotic fashion around the world, feted by high society in London, Berlin and elsewhere. (You can see her glamour and stature in a Jan. 1929 photo snapped by Alfred Eisenstadt: it shows Wong flanked by two almost-as-gorgeous German actresses: Marlene Dietrich, soon to decamp for Hollywood, and Leni Riefenstahl, soon to be the director of the Nazi-era documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia.) In 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her (to much uproar) the “world’s best dressed woman”; in 1938 Look magazine named her the “world’s most beautiful Chinese girl.” TIME magazine, run by beetle-browed, China-born Henry Luce, was a special champion, taking every opportunity to chronicle her social life. A few excerpts, from the must-search Time Archive:

Tall, pretty and sinuously graceful, Wong had a smoldering effect on people, especially men; they could be driven to a purple passion trying to describe her beauty. It’s said that her friend Eric Maschwitz wrote the dreamy lyrics to the pop standard These Foolish Things in Wong’s honor. She also had mesmerized set and costume designer Ali Hubert. Listen to his little Wong rhapsody:

Her career as a leading lady ended during World War II, during which she devoted most of her energy to China war relief. In the 50s she appeared on a few TV shows, and for 13 weeks hosted her own, The Gallery of Mme. Liu-Tsong (making her the first Chinese-American to host her own show). But she was not an important presence after the war. Indeed, Wong may be unknown to most readers of this column. Still, her achievement and legend cast a long, sultry shadow. Three recent books appraise Wong’s life and career with a sympathetic acuity: the biography Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges; the social and film critique Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905-1961 by Anthony B. Chan; and the very helpful catalogue Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work by Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane.

All this for an actress who by convention was not allowed to kiss her leading man. All this for a Hollywood star who, at the peak of her popularity, could not have bought a house in Beverly Hills. All this for a woman no white man could legally have married in her home state until 1947.

THE PERIL OF BEING YELLOW

Anna May Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American — her grandparents had been in California at least since 1855, long before many of the state’s natives — had plenty of hurdles to jump. She was a minority (a woman) within a minority (Chinese) within the larger, fractious congestion of minorities, in an America where white was all-right, the brown could stick around, the black had to get back, and the yellow… they’d better not bellow.

The Chinese, who in the mid-19th century had come to America by the tens of thousands and helped build the transcontinental railway, were on the receiving end of much prejudicial legislation. Various federal acts and Supreme Court rulings forbade the Chinese to own real estate, to become naturalized citizens, even to emigrate to the U.S. (if they were laborers). In California, an 1879 law banned Chinese laborers from working on public projects. Miscegenation laws enacted in 13 states, including California, criminalized marriages between whites and Chinese. In the slang wisdom of the day, sojourners from the Middle Kingdom “didn’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.”

Discrimination was not uniquely American to the Chinese. They suffered it back home: Shanghai in the early 20th century was divided into three concessions — French, International and Chinese — and the locals were banned from many parts of the other three. (No Dogs or Chinese read a sign in an International-concession park.) So after coming to the Golden Mountain, as they called the U.S., they herded into another concession: the enforced isolation of Chinatowns in a dozen big cities. The residents there were mostly hard-working, productive, resourceful — and quiet. So it took a lurid ingenuity (and just a few headlines) to plant in the popular mind the twin, and contradictory, notions of the Chinese: as both passive opium addicts and meta-violent Tong gangsters.

Yet there was an awestruck aspect to Americans’ view of the Chinese, a grudging admiration for the traditions they brought from their home country: the reverence for learning, the family loyalty. The familiar epithet for the Chinese was inscrutable, a word that certifies Otherness but not in a contemptuous way. It meant they were unknowable, with a complicated system of manners and values beyond our understanding — unlike Americans, who had no secrets, no depths to plumb; we thought we were totally scrutable. Inscrutable elevated the Chinese above other non-white groups; they were a foreign language, ethos, species that we couldn’t understand.

So we called them yellow. The vileness of the word, apart from its derogatory taint (yellow means cowardly), was in the word that went with it: peril. The Yellow Peril was the plague of cunning amorality that spread from China (and Japan) to America, as embodied in malefic fictional characters like Fu Manchu. There was no complementary phrase to oppose it. Anna May Wong could have been, but never was, called the Yellow Pearl.

HALF-CASTE WOMAN

Drink a bit, laugh a bit, love a little more,
I can supply your need,
Think a bit, chaff a bit, what’s it all for?
That’s my Eurasian creed.

Half-caste woman, living a life apart,
Where did your story begin?
Half-caste woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?

Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes
Waiting and hoping to see,
Scanning the far horizon,
Wondering what the end will be?

—by Noel Coward, 1931

Wong, who used Coward’s ballad as a signature song in her cabaret act, wasn’t half anything, ethnically; she was all Chinese. But culturally, this Chinese-American tried to keep her balance with a foot in two worlds, East and West. She was where the twain met.

Or where it got derailed, by any number of mistaken presumptions. She was not just Chinese; she was a Chinese woman. Among the Chinese in the U.S. at the time of her birth, there were seven men for every woman. Her parents might have wanted her to marry a nice educated fellow from the Mainland, but Mandarin Chinese students in the U.S. tended to disdain the Cantonese who had settled here. Two attributes that made Wong attractive to Euro-Americans — her 5ft.7in. stature and her large eyes — were off-putting to many Chinese men. They also rejected the tinge in her of modern American womanhood: she did the Charleston and was quoted in one profile as saying, “My, that’s a nifty car. It’s like the kitty’s eyebrows, what?”

The kitty she often played in movies was a sex kitten, a role shocking to Chinese conservatives in the U.S. and around the world. “Her role as a sexually available Chinese woman,” writes Hodges, “would eventually earn her resentful criticism in China.” Wong was stung by the attacks. “It’s a pretty sad situation,” she said, “to be rejected by the Chinese because I am too American.”

She might have added: “…since I’ve already been rejected, pigeon-holed and fetishized because I am Chinese.” As Chan writes in Perpetually Cool: “She was always a ‘Chinese’ because she looked Chinese even when she sought to be and act American, with her flapper slang and costume during the early 1920s. She was, in fact, truly American in being and action. She even walked and stood like a European American. But she was neither European American nor ‘white’.”

Part of Anna May was the dutiful Chinese daughter, who lived at home and kept the books for her father’s business even after she was working full-time in movies. The other part was of a strong-willed pioneer who ignored formal and informal laws of discrimination to forge the most successful movie career of any non-white performer of the first half of the 20th century.

YELLOW FROSTED WILLOW

The birth name of the first prominent Chinese-American star is poetically, or pathetically, appropriate. Wong (Huang in Mandarin) means yellow; her Chinese name, Wong Liu Tsong, means Yellow Frosted Willow. The second of six children, she attended a mostly-white school until the racial taunts got to her, and she transferred to a Chinese school. But she had the itch to get out of Chinatown and into the big world. Her ticket was the movies.

“We were always thrilled when a motion picture company came down into Chinatown to film scenes for a picture,” she recalled in 1926. “I would worm my way through the crowd and get as close to the cameras as I dared. I’d stare and stare at these glamorous individuals, directors, cameramen, assistants, and actors in greasepaint…” Continuing her flashback in another magazine, she said: “And then I would rush home and do the scenes I had witnessed before a mirror. I would register contempt, shame, reproach, joy, and anger. I would be the pure girl repulsing the evil suitor, the young mother pleading for her baby, the vamp luring her victim.” She also received advice from James Wang, one of the few Chinese actors in early pictures. He told her: “Your eyes are large and your features stand out clearly. There is no reason you should not make good if you are willing to work hard. You will do.”

She did well, and quickly. While still at school Anna May got extra work, making her screen debut in Metro’s The Red Lantern when she was 14. She appeared in two films by Marshall Neilan, who had directed seven prime Mary Pickford films. In one, Bits of Life, she was the wife of Lon Chaney, playing a Chinaman. In 1922 she got the lead, Lotus Flower, in The Toll of the Sea, directed by Chester M. Franklin and written, after Madame Butterfly, by Hollywood’s most famous scenarist, Frances Marion (another important member of the Pickford team). Produced by the Technicolor Company, the film was clearly a test of the new process, and a triumphant one: it revels in botanical beauty, contrasting a riot of floral colors with the smooth ivory shading of Wong’s face.

The sea throws a white man, Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlan), onto the rocks near a Chinese village. He is rescued by young Lotus Flower. Elders warn the girl — “His coming bodes no good” — but she falls for him, and he, seemingly, for her. Plot and convention require him to leave the island, and to leave her with child, whom she raises with fantasies that his father will return. He does, four years later, with a Caucasian wife. Lotus Flower sees her duty and hands the child over to his new family, after which she throws herself into the sea that had brought a her double-edged gift. The climax is the standard act of noble renunciation — which bows to convention while showing how it destroys decent people — and not specifically racial. In movies it was frequently imposed on heroic outsiders: not just to mixed-race couples, but to stalwart single moms (Back Street) and heroines of lower station (Stella Dallas).

“She’s sweet and charming — different,” Carver says of the girl. Wong is: pretty and frittery, quick to blush, an excellent counterfeiter of all the emotions Lotus Flower must endure. When she is heartbroken, fat tears fall from the actress’ eyes; it’s the money shot in any antique romance, and Wong delivers. She gets little help from Harlan, who is a plank, but the wonderfully poised child actor Baby Moran, as Lotus Flower’s son, has a terrific moment with her. Taken from his mother and held by Carver’s wife, the boy touches Wong’s face, leans in and, with great tenderness, kisses her twice. It would prove to be the most plangent screen kiss in Wong’s career.

SMALL PARTS, BIG RUMORS AND A LONG TRIP

As satisfying as it may have been to star in a small production, Wong got much more exposure, in several ways, as the Mongol Slave in The Thief of Bagdad. It’s not a large part, but next to Fairbanks’ it’s the most eye-catching — partly because she and he are the only actors showing lots of skin. He’s shirtless through most of the movie, she’s outfitted in essentially two sashes, one across her chest, the other around her hips. She plays a handmaid to the Caliph’s daughter, and becomes a spy for the Mongol Prince. That makes her a villain, unless you root for Mongol solidarity. Whatever, Wong is a luminous presence, fanning her arms in right-angle gestures that seem both Oriental and flapperish. Her best scenes are with Fairbanks, as they connive against each other and radiate contrasting and combined sexiness — a vibrant, erotic star quality. And she’s the taller of the two. (In many films, Wong is literally head and shoulders above her fellow actors.)

Wong figured this was the start of something big. The same month The Thief of Bagdad opened, March 1924 (remember, she’s just turned 19), she signed a deal creating Anna May Wong Productions, hoping to raise financing for films about Chinese legends. But, as Chan notes, she ran afoul of her new partner, a character named Forrest B. Creighton, and after a law suit or two the company was dissolved. A pity, because no one else in Hollywood was giving Wong meaty roles. She can be spotted in Peter Pan (as a Tiger Lily who shares a long kiss with Betty Bronson as Peter) and, in a larger but subservient part as companion to Renee Adoree, in yellow face, who played the daughter of Lon Chaney in Mr. Wu. In Old San Francisco she was the aide-de-camp to the half-caste villain, played by Warner Oland.

She received publicity writeups in the movie magazines. She was the rumored mistress, over the years, of several prominent film men: Neilan (14 years older, supposedly Wong’s lover when she was 15), director Tod Browning (23 years older, when she was 16) and Charles Rosher (Pickford’s favorite cinematographer, who was nearly 20 years older, when Wong was 20). A young woman of Wong’s sexual appeal was likely to be a gossip magnet — at least here, she was equal to white actresses — but no biographer can say for sure that any of the affairs occurred. Or any others in her globe-trotting life. In meetings with the press, Wong would deflect personal questions, even before they were asked, with a preemptive, smiling comment: It’s not true.

Frustrated by small or demeaning parts, Wong sailed for Europe. That would become a familiar itinerary for performers too hot, one way or another, for America. Two of them were black: dancer Josephine Baker, who went to Paris and became a shimmying sensation on night-club stages and movie screens; and Paul Robeson, too huge a figure, talent and threat to be shoehorned into Hollywood dramas, who found his smartest, most congenial roles in four English films of the 30s. Louise Brooks, a Caucasian, had Hollywood supporting roles that didn’t please her. It was as Wedekind’s vampish Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box that secured her screen immortality.

Wong was a member of this elite ex-pat fraternity of performers who went East when they realized that Hollywood wouldn’t have them like anything on their own terms. What’s amazing is that the laundryman’s daughter, having dared to incorporate at 19, now saw the chance for maturity as an actress, and a movie star, in Europe. Guess what? She found it.

ANNA MAY CONQUERS EUROPE

Five of her films — three of them versions of the same script in German, French and English — she made for the German Richard Eichberg. I haven’t seen Song (Wong as a woman in a knife-throwing act who pines for her partner’s love),Big City Butterfly (A circus artist on the run from a murder charge) or the three version of Hai-Tang (a dancer in pre-Revolutionary Russia). But the plot synopses and reviews suggest these were adult melodramas with juicy parts for Wong, and for which she received wide praise. But I have seen another film she made for a German director in 1929: Dupont’s Piccadilly, her finest movie, her most liberated performance and one of the last gasps of silent-film greatness.

Like her other European films, this is a showbiz tale. Mabel (Gilda Gray) and her partner (Cyril Ritchard) are the star act at the Piccadilly Club, run by Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas). A complaint about a dirty dish sends the boss to the club’s scullery, where he finds Sho-Sho (Wong) dancing on a countertop. That night, Sho-Sho insinuates herself into Valentine’s chambers, tells him she wants to dance in his club and, somehow (off-camera), persuades him. With her first performance she’s a star of such heat that her dancing incites a knife fight. Mabel is furious too, with the righteous rage of the jilted. In Sho-Sho’s lair, Mabel flashes a gun, Sho-Sho pulls a knife from her brocaded sleeve. And the more interesting woman dies.

Gray was top-billed, and she’s pretty, with sharp-featured photogenicity, though a hippo on the dance floor. It’s Wong’s movie. A kewpie doll with Louise Brooks bangs (although Wong wore them first), she carries herself with an insolent poise; she knows what she’s got, and how to use it. As so often, she’s a dancer, though not one of finesse; in her big number, which seems more Balinese than Chinese; she displays a little skill and a lot of skin. But even when in relative repose, she exudes a musk, a star-is-born radiance, that absorbs her and exhausts the men in love with her (whose mute devotion she hardly notices). And with a female rival, she has an unfair advantage. This exchange, written by novelist Arnold Bennett, shows who’s boss. Sho-Sho: “You want me to give back what you couldn’t keep.” Mabel “He’s too old for me.” Sho-sho: “He isn’t too old for you — but you’re too old for him.” And Sho-Sho, in Wong’s incandescent incarnation, is too hot to live.

NEXT: Part II: Anna May Talks!