The Fortunes (18 page)

At night, through the slit blinds of the hotel window, the new sign in the hills flashed steadily above the palms:
HOLLY. WOOD. LAND.

Her
land, she thought fiercely.

“What is it, love?”

“
Horry
wood,” she giggled, leaning into Doug's chest.

In bed he called her the
Chink in my amour.
On set he liked to twirl the key to her dressing room on his finger.

His wife and founding partner in United Artists, Mary Pickford, was known as “America's Sweetheart,” “Blondilocks” (though she'd also been among the first to don yellowface as Madame Butterfly in an early silent). “Her real name is Gladys,” Doug whispered around his cigarette. “You couldn't even pronounce mine,” she scolded him.

Pickford and Fairbanks never had children together; they named their famous mansion Pickfair.

 

$

The
Hoover
is part of the Dollar Steamship Line, its twin black funnels banded in red, emblazoned with bright white dollar signs. When smoke billows from them she imagines the stokers below shoveling piles of greenbacks into the boilers like spirit money burned for the dead.

She always had a head for business. She kept the books for the laundry long after she became a star. When invited to be the celebrity host of a mahjong game at a local theater, she refused unless she also got to keep her winnings. She invested in real estate and later, in lean times, lived off her income as a landlady. Her contract with Hearst is paying for this trip to China.

Still, her father considered her a fool—and unfilial—for sending out her own laundry when he and the family would have done it for free.

As a rule he refused all her offers of financial help, but he was happy to let her pay for her siblings' education. The only one she declined to support was her older half-brother in China. As a student in Japan he'd seen one of her movies and written to his father that he should stop her from disgracing the family. When her mother had sent a newspaper clipping of her modeling furs, her half-brother had asked them to send him the wristwatch advertised on the reverse. Ever since she was a child she'd resented the money her father sent back to his family in China, money she, her brothers and sisters and mother helped earn through their labor at the laundry (though of course in later years her generosity to her siblings enabled her father to send even more to China). What had that money bought? she wonders. Food? Clothes? Love?

Now there's a new man's watch in her steamer trunk. A Hamilton Tonneau in white gold. She sets it on the dressing table in her stateroom, watches it glide back and forth with the swell.

 

THE HIGH HAT

She styled herself a flapper, in beaded dresses and cloche hats. Bobbed hair became her trademark, and the skinny, boyish silhouette—she was five-foot-seven, a tennis player—suited her small chest. In the lingo of the day she was the monkey's eyebrows, the kitten's ankles, the goat's whiskers, the duck's quack, the cat's particulars. A tomato, a biscuit, a Sheba; the darb, the berries, the limit. With her keen chassis and swell stilts, she could dance the Charleston—and how! The trick was applying rouge to your knees.

A
dapper
was a flapper's father.

Prohibition was all wet. She would come home ossified, spifflicated, oiled, and owled, and her father, the Gimlet, that Airedale, would scream at her to “talk American!”

“Oh, for the love of Mike! Says
you!
”

“Who this Mike?” he demanded.

Her second lover, the director Tod Browning, was twenty-five years her senior, a Father Time in the parlance. She called him Daddy, told him his whiskbroom tickled. He was good in the feathers, but he had a fire bell at home and refused to drop the pilot. It was all balled up. Eventually she told him the bank was closed and found herself a new big six in Douglas Fairbanks, twenty-two years her senior (“big six” being a reference to a six-cylinder engine, like that in her own Willys-Knight roadster; Doug actually drove the straight-eight Duesenberg, appropriately enough, she told him, since he was a real Duesie!).

She once said she went a decade without having to light her own cigarettes. But she was never a gold-digger, nor goofy for any forty-niners, the male equivalent. Her many admirers she dismissed as grubbers and duds, pikers and pills, highjohns and hoppers. Men were divided into cake eaters and corn shredders, Smith brothers, hiphounds, and flatwheelers. She was nobody's blue serge. Engagement rings were handcuffs, marriage was a line.

To be given the high hat, in the jargon, was to be snubbed.

 

SIAMESE

“She never wanted to be just famous,” Browning said once. “She wanted to be white. I told her she was going to have to settle for being famous for being Chinese.”

Tod went on to make
Dracula
with Bela Lugosi, but his career had been all but ended by
Freaks,
his gothic circus melodrama featuring real sideshow performers, including a pair of Siamese twins.

She'd heard he'd considered Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow for the lead, but he'd never called his former lover. The Siamese twins were played by the Hilton sisters, Daisy and Violet, originally from Brighton, England. At parties, when she heard others express their outrage about the picture—one woman was suing MGM, claiming it had caused her miscarriage—she nodded, kidded,
They couldn't even get real Siamese!

 

SCRAPES

Browning was her second lover but the first to knock her up. A “flusher,” the whore in Chinatown she paid for pennyroyal pills called it. In England it was known as a “scrape,” back East “riding the Lightning” a reference to the notorious roller coaster. In France was best, she thought. There you saw the
faiseuse d'anges,
the angel-maker. But after that one, she was only able to get pregnant in movies.

There is a point on the sundeck, above the children's playroom with its sandbox and slide, rocking horses all in a row, where she likes to linger, listening to their happy shrieks.

 

QUEUE

Her earliest memory was her father cutting off his queue. She was six. They were still in the house on Flower Street where she was born. News of the 1911 revolution was spreading through Chinatown. Three years earlier her father had given money to Sun Yat-sen, Father of the new Nation, at a rally. She cried when he cut it off, thought he was hurt, but he laughed, teeth bared, and told her he didn't need it to go home any longer.
Home?
she said, and he said
China,
and she cried again because she thought he was leaving.

He'd taken, for a time, to wearing the fez of the fraternal order of laundrymen. She used to marvel at how he balanced it, wanted desperately to stroke the golden tassel.

She wore her own hair in braids as a child. In school, she told Doug, the boy sitting behind her used to dunk the tips in his inkwell, stick pushpins in her, tell her she had dirty ears.

“It ain't your ears they're going to be looking at now!” Doug beamed his famous grin.

She was smacked by her teachers if she spoke Chinese, but her father enrolled her in Chinese school when classes let out. Ten hours of studies each day.

“No wonder I played hooky, what?”

“Bad girl. You should be spanked.”

By then she was wearing her hair in the Child Flower style, lustrous bangs covering her forehead. It was to become her look, her take on the flapper's bob. She wore it long past the point when she lost the virginity it traditionally denoted.

Combing it now before bed in the round vanity mirror that makes her look like she's staring out a porthole, she recalls an even earlier memory: her father playing with her as a child, holding the tip of his queue to his lips, fluttering his fingers over it as if it were a flute, whistling music while she clapped, delighted. She searches the mirror for a trace of that child, but it's as if she's been smoothed away with cold cream.

She returns to her brushing, static sparking around her head as if in answer to the flicker of lightning on the dark horizon.

 

COSTARS

It's hard to be a leading lady without leading men, and there were no Asian leading men. But over a thirty-year career she worked on stage and screen and radio in the U.S., England, and Germany with Douglas Fairbanks, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Lon Chaney, “man of a thousand faces.” She made a short with Laurel and Hardy and played vaudeville with Jack Benny. Alfred Hitchcock once threw a pie in her face. She taught Myrna Loy how to use chopsticks. She met Sinclair Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston, Somerset Maugham, Walter Benjamin (who described her hair, let down, as like “a dragon romping in water”), and the Prince of Wales. She stayed at the Algonquin at the same time as Gertrude Stein. She taught Constance Talmadge how to use chopsticks. Man Ray took her portrait. Cecil Beaton photographed her for
Vanity Fair.
Her supposed lovers included Fairbanks, Vincent Price, Tod Browning, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl. Men and women, all white. She taught Loretta Young how to use chopsticks. When rumored to be engaged to the Korean contract player Philip Ahn, she said that “kissing him was like kissing her brother.” (Chinese boys, it seems, felt the same about kissing her, she was such a tomboy at school.) She never married. It would have been illegal for her to marry a white under California's anti-miscegenation laws. “The only happiness is with one's own race,” she affirmed in interviews. She taught Renée Adorée how to use chopsticks.

“Chinese in movies aren't inscrutable,” she lamented drily. “They're un
screw
able.” But in life the ban on mixed marriage made her the perfect mistress, one who could never expect to wed her lovers.

 

TRUTH AND BEAUTY

Such was the interest in her love life that she used to open press conferences by calling out over the reporter's clamor, “It's not true!”—a witticism that became her catchphrase. At premieres she'd climb out of her limousine and fans and reporters alike would chorus her name, just to hear her deliver the line. Searchlights scissored overhead. Like chopsticks, she thought, about to pinch up the morsel of the moon.

“We have a lot in common,” she used to kid the reporters. “My family business was dirty laundry too.”

 

FOOLISH THINGS

On their last night aboard, they beg her to sing with the band.
Any requests?
she asks, accepting another drink, and someone calls, “These Foolish Things.” It's said it was written for her by a lover, the screenwriter and lyricist Eric Maschwitz. But she pouts, tells them she can't quite recall the words.

A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces

A something, something, something, some-thing something

Oh how the ghost of you clings

These foolish things remind me of you

In bed one bright morning, Eric had told her the sun through the slit blinds ruled her skin like staff paper. He had written on her with his index finger.

But she knows the bawdy parodies and fears others do too:

Lipstick traces on an old French letter

A bout of pox that won't get better

Oh, when I piss it stings

These foolish things remind me of you

Instead she offers them Noël Coward's “Half-Caste Woman,” a staple of her cabaret act. The next morning they'll dock in Shanghai and she'll set foot in China for the first time.

 

ABROAD

She took a trip like this the last time her career stalled. That time to Europe. It was the making of her. “Everyone comes to Los Angeles to become a star,” she said on another occasion. “I had to leave.”

She met Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker.

She saw her first white prostitutes on the streets of Berlin.

She got to kiss her leading man on film.

She loved Europe, she concluded, because she found “absolutely no race prejudice” there.

She was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt at the Berlin Press Ball alongside Marlene Dietrich, cigarette holder clamped between the teeth of her smile, and Leni Riefenstahl.

The kiss was later cut “on moral grounds.”

There were fewer than eight hundred Chinese in Germany at the time, less than a thousand in England and France. Fewer in all three countries combined than at home in Los Angeles. She was less bound by stereotypes, more free to create her own.

The “Wong haircut” became all the rage. English girls tinted their faces with ocher to get the “Wong complexion.” Embroidered “coolie coats” were the height of that season's fashion, though she herself sported the finest French designs.

She burned incense in her hotel rooms before interviews. “To ward off bad press,” she joked.

In Germany and France and England she was still Chinese, of course, but also glamorously American. When the English reviewers complained about her Yankee squeak in a play, she laughed in delight (though she noted they offered no criticism of her costar Olivier's “Chinese” accent) but made sure to take elocution lessons from a Cambridge tutor.
I should play Eliza Doolittle,
she wrote in her diary.

She filmed her first talkie in three languages, German, French, and English, reshooting each scene thrice over, each in a different language.