Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (15 page)

The Coburn/Lee/Silliphant script is written to be read as well as shot. “And so it is with martial arts,” it begins with an introduced by Lee that tells a story of three swordsmen who try to provoke a fight with a master at an inn. They flee when the master catches four flies with his chopsticks. “The story illustrates a great difference between Oriental and western thinking… To the westerner the finger jabs, the side kicks, the back fist, etc. are tools of destruction and violence, which is, indeed, one of their functions. But the Oriental believes that the primary function of such tools is revealed when they are self-directed and destroy greed, fear, anger and folly.” The bottom line, Lee teaches, is that “true mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself — the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.”
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It became the challenge of the script to portray, in the objective medium of film, these subjective and highly ephemeral elements. Watching it now, it becomes painfully obvious why it failed. From a purely cinematic point of view there are simply not enough set-ups (angles) to tell the story. Restricted by budget and time, director Moore couldn’t shoot the footage that editor Ernest Walter
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needed to construct into sequences that could work on a cinematic and emotional level beyond merely telling the story. The martial arts sequences, in particular, are photographed in a disappointingly meat-and-potatoes manner rather than with angles designed to show them off. Fortunately, they are performed without added screams, smacks, and grunts.

The dialogue, which in Silliphant’s draft was meant to be spoken in Thai, is translated into English in the Mann script and loses its poetry, sounding like fortune cookies. Subtitles would have been more forgiving. But the death blow is struck by Carradine’s expressionless monotone. Where James Coburn could hold the screen with his presence alone (someone noted he has only eleven lines in
The Magnificent Seven
, yet dominates the picture), Carradine exudes an arrogance that undercuts Cord’s character.

Circle of Iron
fulfilled no one’s dream, and, for years, fans yearned for a remake that would do justice to Lee’s vision. In 2010, producer Paul Maslansky, who served as one of Howard’s producers on
Circle of Iron
, announced that he would bring
The Silent Flute
to the screen as Lee had intended. He acquired the rights from the estate of Sandy Howard, who had died in 2008, and began work. His son, Sasha, who was also his producing partner, would write the new screenplay from Lee’s original eighteen-page treatment using neither Silliphant’s nor Mann’s earlier work.
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“It’s been an interesting road thus far,” he said in 2013, while he was still trying. “I’ve had so many people that came forward and said they had the financing for it, and then, as so many things are in Hollywood, they turned out to be more illusory than real.” Instead of the Spartan fittings given
Circle of Iron
, in 1976, Maslansky planned to mount
The Silent Flute
as a major production. “The ambition we have is a little more expansive,” he said, “using state-of-the-art special effects. I’m trying to collaborate with people from the Lee estate so we do it properly to make a large-sized film.”
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By the time
Circle of Iron
hit theatres in 1978, Silliphant had moved on to other adventures, most significantly one he had begun on July 4, 1974. That was when he married one of Bruce Lee’s students — not an established movie star, but one whose career he would encourage while both of their lives were changing. Her name was Du Thi Thanh Nga, but their friends would come to know her by what it sounded like to American ears: Tiana.

Her name — De Thi Thanh Nga — means “transparent moon” in South Vietnam and “blue swan” in the North. Her father was Phouc Long Du (“auspicious dragon”) and, when he became director of press for the Embassy of the Republic of South Vietnam during the American occupation of his country, he called himself “P. Dulong,” then “Patrick Dulong” when he learned that “Phouc” sounded profane in English. Her mother, Hoang Thi Van Anh, was a homemaker and master cook who taught famed restaurateur Joyce Steins about Vietnamese cuisine. “Dad told me about the day he first saw mom,” she said in her 1992 autobiographical documentary,
From Hollywood to Hanoi.
“They met on a traditional bamboo swing. Of course, their marriage was arranged, but dad said it was love at first sight.” Like her countrymen and women, Tiana grew up knowing only war, and the urge to seek peace and unity would inform the rest of her life and art. “In school we sang songs about a time when our country would be at peace,” she said. “I was a kid when the ‘saviors’ landed. They were huge, they were handsome, they were American boys. They were there to protect us. I was in love.”

Tiana has two brothers, Michael and Daniel, who are in law enforcement in Northern California. She also has a younger sister, Marian, and had an older sister, born in 1951, who did not survive. Other details of her life history change with the occasion. “I have two birth certificates,” she once explained. “I have a birth certificate from 1951 and a birth certificate from 1961, and I was born somewhere in between. The ‘51 belonged to my sister, the birth certificate that I came over with, which is on my passport, is my dead sister’s birth certificate, which was used to get me over here because I had to be older to join my father, who was getting a scholarship at Georgetown University. My parents say that they got the wrong baby out of the hospital, so there’s always been a thing about my age and, also, I always lied about my age to be older so I could work. When I was thirteen, I said I was sixteen so I could work at the May Company department store.”
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Bright and fiery, with huge dark eyes and a ready, brittle wit, Tiana realized somewhere between Vietnam and America that she wanted to be a performer. Coming from a war-torn country, and living in a family where stability was the byword, however, she knew that she couldn’t count on her family for emotional support.

The Dulongs came to America permanently at the end of 1966. “I was four or seven,” she said, “depending on the different birth certificates. Now that I’m an actress I’d rather be four; when I was little, I wanted to be older.”

Because her father was liaison between press and politicians, Tiana got to accompany him to embassy events. President Kennedy sent her a Chatty Cathy® doll, inspiring her father to call her Catherine, which she didn’t like, and which began her habit of changing names several times over the years.
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Given the highly charged relationship between the governments of the United States and Vietnam, however, stability was not part of Patrick’s job description. “Dad had many jobs,” Tiana recalled, “and moved us to the U.S.A. via Bangkok, Hawaii and San Francisco. The sounds of the cable car bell and ‘Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat’ ditty still swarms in my head. When I was three, he worked in the U.S. Embassy in Washington, DC. Later he was upset that Madame Nhu made him her personal press secretary, which he hated, as his loyalties were to President Ngo Dinh Diem, so he quit.”
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Deprived of an income and diplomatic immunity, and struggling to survive, the Dulongs settled in Virginia. There her father went to work for the Voice of America and became a night security guard to try to make what he hoped would be a “typical American home.” Raised on American movies in Vietnam, Tiana decided in junior high school — where she appeared in a production of
Rebel Without a Cause
 — that she wanted to be an actress. At the same time, reality intruded on her childhood, as it did for countless American-born teenagers, who watched the increasingly brutal news reports from Southeast Asia.

“Along with the rest of the nation,” she recalled, “we were glued to the six o’clock news. I was scared of the Northerners (NVA); in school, where kids said they hated the gooks, I did too. They were killing our boys. I was ashamed to be Vietnamese.”
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Her teenage years were stolen from her when her father forced her to take housekeeping work, including a cleaning job at twenty-five cents an hour for an elderly couple, the husband of which would attempt to molest her whenever his wife was out of the room. Attending Thomas Jefferson high school during America’s Civil Rights struggle was difficult for an Asian.

“In public schools during desegregation, black kids were really nasty to me because I was more accepted than they were,” she said. “I could go to the prom, they couldn’t — with a white boy, that is. They’d pull me in the bathroom and threaten to cut me up or to beat me up. That’s why I got so tough.” Eager to break away as well as to learn how to defend herself, she sought out Washington, DC martial arts master Jhoon Rhee when she was 11, after seeing coverage of his school on local television. “I was the karate princess,” she reported, “and I was the demonstrator. I was the girl who showed the guys how high they should kick. I was Jhoon Rhee’s performing monkey. What I found out later was that all these performing groups that I was singing and doing Vietnamese hat dances with were probably all CIA.”

It was through Jhoon Rhee that Tiana met Bruce Lee. “I read Bruce Lee was coming to town,” she said. “He was already legendary as the guy who showed up at Ed Parker’s Long Beach tournament and did one-finger push-ups. As Tiana the Karate Princess, I asked Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee to introduce me to Bruce.”
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Her first trip to Hollywood was later financed by Lee and Jhoon, but it led nowhere. “Bruce invited me to the Long Beach tournament and picked me up at the airport in his old Porsche and we made a pact about acting.” The pack was to prove both prophetic and historic.

Asians in movies have suffered stereotyping second only to blacks. Even when men wrested roles away from heavily made-up white actors, Asian women had it worse, invariably being cast as geishas while men generally wound up as houseboys or coolies. But not Lee or Tiana. “Bruce Lee and I had a pact,” she said, “that I wouldn’t play any stereotypical girls and he wouldn’t put a braid on — I wouldn’t play whores and he wouldn’t play a coolie. And we didn’t.” As they shared their dreams, “he told me I needed an Oscar-winning writer to write for me, and he had just the guy.”

Her second trip was more successful but also more traumatizing. “I flew from Washington, DC to Hollywood and who did I fly out with? Jack Valenti. He was taking karate with Jhoon Rhee. I’ll never forget this: Jack traveled coach. The two of us were in the back of the plane. And he said he would introduce me to Kirk Douglas and everybody, that everybody would love me, that they were going to make a lot of Vietnam movies. They had made
The Green Berets
(with John Wayne, 1968) and I had all this to offer. I was going to say, ‘Hi! I’m Vietnamese!’ and they were all going to hire me. It was quite the contrary.” Douglas leaned on his agency, CMA (Creative Management Associates, later International Creative Management) to represent Tiana, which they did, but little came of it. “They were so painful, those years,” she recalled. “A lot of casting couches. I remember one producer [name deleted]. I had an appointment with him, had my book and all my pictures — it cost a lot of money to put one of these books together, 11x14s, deal with photographers and agents who are all on the make. Then I’m dealing with [him] who is totally on the make.”
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Tiana found herself in the same position as countless other young women in Hollywood, except that her contacts allowed her to enter at a higher level, which only meant that the compromises came at a higher price. “I had the best,” she said. “I had CMA. The best: Ted Ashley. I had the best, and they all just gave me lip service. I’ve always had the knack to get in to the top but I can’t close. I got in to the top, I wowed them, and then I opened my mouth and they said, ‘She’s trouble.’
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“Dino De Laurentiis saw me in a film where I played an intelligent career woman, one of the rare roles that an Asian woman was asked to portray. I was very flattered: Dino De Laurentiis, king-maker. But when I went in to see him, he wanted me to do a film called
Tito and the Shark
about a girl who would be romping naked on the beach with a shark. I read the script and I said, ‘Dino, is there any way we could get rid of the shark?’ and he said, ‘No, we get rid of the actress!’ So I didn’t work for Dino.
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If I was a blond I would have ended up as Marilyn Monroe: suicide. Thank God I wasn’t. But it was really, really hard. There you are, sixteen — they don’t give two shits. They’ll sell you to anybody, anything. And considering that the day we left Vietnam a woman was trying to sell a baby to my father so that we would take it with us to give that child a better life, I felt like I was being bought and sold in Hollywood. And who was selling Tiana?
Me! I
was driving to the studio, fighting with the guard to get in the gate and meet with [producer] who locked the door and lounged on the couch and said, ‘Aren’t you going to give me a massage?’ I said, ‘Why did you lock the door?’ There was a window there — I figured I could get out, it was on the first floor of the lot. I could just walk out, don’t even have to jump down six stories. But why did I have to think about ‘How do I get out of here? How do I escape?’ when I should be concentrating on the character, the script. I didn’t get it. I hated them.”
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According to Silliphant, he met Tiana while at a Washington, D.C., martial arts tournament. “Bruce Lee had told me that, when I went east, I must meet his dear friend Jhoon Rhee,” Silliphant said. “In 1969, there was a tournament at which Bruce was a judge, Jhoon had sponsored it, and Tiana was Miss International Karate Princess complete with hot pants and a diamond tiara. I met her at the tournament and was instantly smitten by her beauty… . and I have to tell you I was just gone on sight. I figured here was the lady I’d been looking for all these years. But I wasn’t really able to get very close to her because, as you know, it’s difficult when you first meet an Asian girl if you’re Caucasian, just to come breezing up, particularly if she’s from a good family, and try to make time. There’s just no way.”

“SS did embellish from time to time, like meeting me in 1969,” Tiana countered. “It was not possible, as I did not meet Bruce until the ‘70s and had not heard of [Silliphant], although I loved
In the Heat of the Night.
I met SS in Beverly Hills, where I only met Bruce when he invited me to join him for the famed Ed Parker Long Beach tournament.
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He never did like me at first,” she added, “because he said, ‘I don’t like girls who want to be tough, who want to beat up men.’ And I was telling him ‘No, I’m doing it for the exercise.’ Because truly, it’s meditation, and it is very good exercise, and I do dance, ballet and everything, and it all relates.”
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Despite his infatuation with Tiana, Silliphant was still married to Margot, with whom he desperately wanted to have children. Nevertheless, while
Longstreet
was being shot, he asked Lee to help him find out more about Ti-ana. Lee related what he had learned from Jhoon: That she was still a teenager fresh out of junior college and wanted to come to Los Angeles to break into movies. Lee made the introduction, and the two started seeing each other.

Silliphant and Margo divorced on September 6, 1973, and it became final on January 16,1974. Stirling and Tiana married on July 4, 1974, at Chasen’s, the legendary status-conscious Beverly Hills restaurant. True to form, Silliphant wrote on their wedding day but deferred to the occasion by turning off his Selectric early, delivering a twenty-page, single-spaced treatment of
The Swarm
to Irwin Allen, whom he’d be seeing among the invitees in a few hours anyway. He promised to keep his typewriter in the “off ” position for five weeks.
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In the Chasen’s garden,
Tarzan
Producer Sy Weintraub and his wife, Lindy, acted as best man and maid of honor; Melissa Mayo — Tiana’s daughter from her first marriage, to Kent Mayo, had ended on May 3 — was flower girl. Both Tiana’s father and Abe Lipsey (furrier to the stars) gave her away, and Muriel Lipsey served as witness. The bride’s wedding dress was a full red Chinese silk coat embroidered in coral and turquoise over a fitted satin dress designed by Bill Gibbs of London, and she held coral red Abbey roses and baby’s breath by Fran Pally of Beverly Hills. Superior Court Judge Larry Rittenband officiated.

Wedding guests dined in the restaurant’s Chestnut Room on Squab Montmorency with cherry sauce and (of course) Chasen’s chili. Partiers included
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Gwen and Arthur Hiller, Irwin and Sheila Allen, RJ Wagner and Natalie Wood, Joseph and Dee Wambaugh, Ernest and Tove Borgnine, Andrea Eastman and Doug Cramer, Kirk and Anne Douglas, and the James Aubreys, Irwin Winklers, Robert Chartoffs, David Begelmans, Elliott Silver-steins, Joseph Sargents, Sherrill Corwins, Leonard Goldbergs, Gordon Stulbergs, and William Holden. Instead of guns, Asian fire crackers were set off. A rock version of the Lord’s Prayer was sung by Shirley Mills backed by the Bernie Richards orchestra, then she segued into the theme from
Shaft
as the newlyweds’ wedding dance.

After their ten-day Hawaiian honeymoon, the Silliphants took up residence at 815 Camden Drive in Beverly Hills. He bought her a yellow Rolls-Royce, ordered her custom-made lingerie, and shopped with her at the finest boutiques. Stirling, Tiana, and Melissa made an instant family. “SS loved her like his own daughter,” Tiana said. “We lived a dream, each night dressing for a premiere with Sy and the David Begelmans and David Wolper, who brought Alex Haley to the house, and David Brown and Helen who sat me down and said quotable things. I was in hair and makeup at Elizabeth Arden’s daily, and he shopped for the gowns for me in London and San Francisco — ‘nobody’ designers he discovered and who became the biggest names. He took me into a Hollywood fairy tale life. We lived at the highest level, especially for a writer in those days. He pitched only to network presidents or chairmen of the board.”
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Often she would accompany him to those meetings.