The Bitter Tea of General Yen (2 page)

“In all the houses of the Owen descendants,” said Grace Zaring Stone, “there were many books being very thoroughly read and almost everyone kept diaries. Diary keeping, writing in general, was just something one did. Then I married into the Navy and of course that was very, very different. The Navy doesn’t express itself in diaries.”

When her husband, Ellis Stone, was stationed at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, “the place seemed to get me started,” said Stone, and an account she wrote of a hurricane was published in the
Atlantic Monthly
, soon followed by a short story. Bobbs-Merrill wrote to ask if she had a novel in mind. “That was a most surprising question to me. I’d had a novel in mind practically forever.”

The Heaven and Earth of Doña Elena
was critically admired. “It has a bright direction like a silver arrow in flight,” said the
New York Herald Tribune
.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, written with the same subtle magic of
Doña Elena
and the same combination of delicacy and strength, was a more ambitious novel (“Remarkable,” said the
Nation
of it [Jan 7, 1931]) and was completed during the two years Stone lived in China, when her husband was commander of the US Navy ship
Isabel
, stationed on the Yangtze River.

Within a few years of its publication,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
had appeared in twenty editions.

What interested Stone in the writing of
The Bitter Tea
, as it did Edith M. Hull in her 1919 novel
The Sheik
, was the idea of
taking a white woman of good standing out of her safe milieu, putting her into a wild, exotic setting, still under the rules of “civilized” society and the protection of men, and then thrusting her into a world where most (white) men would dare not venture, or gain entry: a world beyond white colonial law.

At the heart of the novel are two civilizations, two people who come together from different worlds: an American with a belief in a Christian ethic instilled through generations of teaching, brought up to cherish the notions of goodness and mercy and forgiveness, and a Chinese warlord of rarefied tastes—elegant, educated, wise, unsentimental. Each a creation of circumstances, as Stone’s great-grandfather put forth. For three days Megan comes up against Yen’s superior mind. (“Have you read any of our poetry?” he asks her. “Do you understand our music? Do you know that there has never existed a people more purely artist and therefore more purely lover than the Chinese?”)

Megan is shaken by the violent ways of the unchristian general Yen and at a critical moment in his campaign begs him to forgive, not execute, one of his traitorous concubines, Mah-Li, educated at the Presbyterian Mission School in Soochow and taught there to speak English, embroider, cook, and use a typewriter. Mah-Li pampers General Yen and receives his gifts of luxury and precious jade only to betray him by her revelations of the general’s plans and strategies to her clandestine lover, Captain Li, Yen’s closest aide. For saving Mah-Li (“I must make the General see as I do,” says Megan to Mah-Li, “that you are a child and haven’t understood right and wrong any more than a child, that he must forgive you and do what he can to help you.”), Yen asks Megan if what she is after is understanding or changing him, “to make me over into some new image; the image of God, but also, slightly, the image of Miss Davis.”

The questioning of Megan’s Christian ethic and her attempt to make Yen over into a humanist, or sentimentalist, come at
little cost to her, but her self-discovery and enlightenment come at a high price for General Yen.

Stone’s novel has no hint of romantic attachment between General Yen and Megan Davis. But the script of Frank Capra’s 1933 movie by Edward Paramore, based on Stone’s novel, is about their impossible love: a sheltered New England woman from the West and a romantic, worldly, “inscrutable” man from the East who briefly shatter the barriers of convention, race, and custom but cannot thrive in a conventional world.

The Bitter Tea
was a lavish picture for Columbia Studios. Harry Cohn, the studio’s production chief, had told Capra that the Motion Picture Academy would “never vote for that comedy crap you make. They only vote for that arty crap.”
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Capra set out to make an “arty” film; it was as well a story on the edge of Hollywood acceptability (a picture about a forbidden interracial love) that might have a chance of winning an Academy Award.

Capra took over the picture from the heralded silent director, Herbert Brenon (his more than one hundred silents included
Peter Pan
, 1924;
Beau Geste
,
The Great Gatsby
, 1926;
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
, 1928), struggling to make his way with sound pictures and with Harry Cohn. Capra replaced Constance Cummings (she’d appeared in the director’s previous picture,
Faith
, later
American Madness
, 1932) with Barbara Stanwyck. It was their fourth picture together, following
Ladies of Leisure
, 1930;
Miracle Woman
, 1931; and
Forbidden
, 1932. Nils Asther, the six-foot-tall Swedish actor, was General Yen. Asther had studied acting at the Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy in Stockholm with Greta Garbo (he asked her to marry him three times; each time she refused) and came to the United States in 1925, the same year Mauritz Stiller
accompanied Garbo to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and to international stardom, beginning with her first American picture,
Torrent
(1926). Walter Connolly, the sublime character actor in his first motion picture, was brought out to Hollywood specifically for the part of Shultz (Jones in the film); each of the studios had tried for fifteen years to lure Connolly away from the Broadway stage. The twenty-year-old Toshia Mori was Mah-Li (Anna May Wong was originally to have played the part). Clara Blandick, uncredited in the picture, is the Midwestern missionary wife giving the wedding party for Dr. Strike and Megan Davis. Seven years later she was the stern, fretful Auntie Em in
The Wizard of Oz
. Blandick, a well-known former Broadway actress, always played “old” in pictures.
Bitter Tea
was her forty-second film.

In Capra’s picture, as in Stone’s novel, the portrait of China is that of empire. In the film, the West is seen as civilization; the rest of the world, primitive and savage. Stone’s novel is much more an education of a rarefied world.

In the film, during the course of Megan’s three days in captivity, she forgets the missionary doctor she’s traveled to China to marry. She finds Yen alluring; her bigoted, puritanical ways disappear as she feels a sexual yearning she’s never felt before. Yen is warned by Jones, “Don’t forget she is a white woman.”

“I have no prejudice against her color,” says Yen, tugging at the brim of Jones’s hat. Yen is captivated and willing to risk all for her. Jones’s response: “It’s no skin off my nose.”

In keeping with Capra’s thwarted feelings for Barbara Stanwyck, he turned his picture into a fantasy of ill-fated love that becomes ruinous for the one who seems to make the rules.

Yen to Megan in Stone’s novel: “It is true that in China … we have a sense of harmony and just proportion that you can never understand.… To love my neighbor as myself has always seemed to me a very disgusting injunction.… Your tenet carried out, would lead to an inconceivable state of disorder. It is possibly the theory
most dangerous to humanity at large that has ever come into the world.”

During the making of
Bitter Tea
in the summer months of 1932, Grace Stone was living in San Diego, where her husband, Commander Ellis Stone, in charge of the destroyer USS
Barry
, was stationed. The studio invited the writer, her husband, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Eleanor, to spend a day in Hollywood and visit the Columbia set. Stone marveled at its realism and felt as if she were back in China.

She said nothing to Capra but thought the movie was “grotesquely miscast,” that Stanwyck was all wrong for the New England young woman, that her accent was “crude,” her voice “uneducated.”
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Stone was not at all happy that a Swede was playing the role of a Chinese general.

Capra took great pains with
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, carefully planning each detail of the production. The extraordinary sets were designed by Stephen Goosson, Columbia’s art director who’d worked with Capra on
Platinum Blonde
and
American Madness
. Interesting to note that the signature wall-high octagonal window of Yen’s palace—and Megan Davis’s bedroom—so identified with the film, and assumed to be an art director’s extravagant, inspired notion, is first described in Grace Stone’s novel.

The stylized look of
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
—dreamy, exotic, otherworldly—was achieved through Joe Walker’s camera work and innovation and Capra’s direction.

The film opened in Los Angeles in January, 1933, at the RKO Hillstreet Theatre. In New York,
Bitter Tea
inaugurated the newly redesigned $8,000,000 Radio City Music Hall, which went from being the world’s largest two-a-day theater with a seating capacity
of 6,250 (the stage was deemed too cavernous), to a motion picture house with a newly installed screen, seventy by forty feet.

The reviews were admiring of Capra’s work—“a triumph of repression; the more spectacular sequences [are] irreproachably conceived”—as well as Nils Asther’s and Walter Connolly’s “unusually clever performances” (
New York Times
). The picture really belongs to Asther. Of Barbara Stanwyck’s Megan Davis, made somewhat muted by Capra’s complicated, recently replaced feelings for his star (he’d married Lucille Rayburn six months before the film’s production), the critics described Stanwyck’s work as “a brittle impersonation of the missionary girl, a portrait which lacks warmth and depth.”
*
⁴
One critic said of Capra’s
Bitter Tea
itself, “No picture half so strange, so bizarre, has ever before passed outward through the astonished doors of the Columbia Studio.”
*
⁵

In 1934, Grace Zaring Stone published a much-admired novel
The Cold Journey
, set in eighteenth-century New England and Quebec, based on a French and Indian raid of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a kidnapping of some of the town’s inhabitants, a kind of allegory of Europe in its then present times. Carl Van Doren called the book “a novel of shuddering force, of concentrated power and sensitive beauty.”

Five years later, Stone, then living in Paris where her husband was naval attaché, wrote an altogether different kind of novel—an anti-Nazi suspense—using the pseudonym Ethel Vance.
Escape
became the first of many admired Ethel Vance novels, spellbinding thrillers written with a sense of excitement; a facility of construction; and a smooth, sleek, quicksilver narrative written in another voice altogether.

The
New York Times
called
Escape
a novel of “compelling and almost breathless immediacy” (November 22, 1943). Lewis Gannett in the
New York Herald Tribune
described it as “a novel with the agonizing suspense of
Rebecca
and the deep compassion of
Reaching for the Stars
,” and Rose C. Feld wrote, “If it were possible to imagine a perfect collaboration between Willa Cather, Nora Waln, and Dorothy Sayers, it could be no better.”

Escape
takes place in an unnamed but recognizable totalitarian country (“We meet in an evil land that is near to the gates of Hell …”) about people caught up in the war in Europe trying to get to freedom, about a rescue from a concentration camp of one of Germany’s greatest stage actresses by her American son and their desperate efforts to flee the country.

The novel sold more than two hundred thousand copies in its first three months and was a selection of the Book of the Month Club. MGM bought the film rights knowing that Ethel Vance was a pseudonym. For two years many speculated on the author’s identity and rightfully assumed that the novel was written by a woman—Erika Mann? Dorothy Thompson? Rebecca West?—who’d taken another name to protect some relative or friend living in Germany. And indeed, at the time, Stone’s daughter, Eleanor (then Baroness Zsigmond Perényi; later author of
More Was Lost
, 1946;
The Bright Sword
, 1955;
Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero
, 1974; and
Green Thoughts
, 1981) was living in the midst of dangerous circumstances, in Nazi-occupied Hungary. When Eleanor, pregnant, had no choice but to flee her adopted home, she and her mother, then visiting, both trapped in Hungary with the Germans invading Belgium, made their way out to Genoa as the RAF bombed the city.
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⁶
A small American boat took them away from a Europe at war and brought them to safety and New
York City. MGM’s
Escape
, produced in the fall of 1940, starred Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer, Alla Nazimova, and Conrad Veidt and was directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

Stone said she chose the name Ethel Vance “because it sounds like a name you were born with and can’t get rid of.”
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⁷

The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, more than eight decades later, is an extraordinary film for what it reveals of Hollywood’s—and America’s—attitudes about race in the 1930s; for the look of the picture and Capra’s ambitious vision and commentary about the West’s insular, unknowing view of the world; and for what it brings to life of Grace Zaring Stone’s subtle and illuminating portrait of a colonial China set against its two-thousand-year history, caught in time between its fierce struggle to establish democracy and its equally passionate pull toward communism.

“I don’t try to imitate genius—naturally. Why should I?” said Stone. “I work terribly hard to tell a story effectively, and do a good, tight construction job, because I can do that much. I can be a craftsman.”
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⁸

The Bitter Tea of General Yen
is not a great novel; it is a well-crafted novel, written with a delicate hand, a book that has dignity and elegance and an intensity of vision.