The Fortunes (19 page)

When she returned to the States, reporters marveled at her classy accent.
London was divine, practically a second home, though the weather was perfectly beastly.
She described it, self-deprecatingly, as her two hundred guineas' worth of English, but it was worth every penny just for the dumbfounded looks she got, a Chinese with a British accent. One interviewer noted she preferred English tea to Chinese now, and went so far as to say she no longer looked quite Oriental. Her voice also ensured she had a career in talking pictures, unlike Constance Talmadge, Blanche Sweet, Mae Murray, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford (who compared adding sound to movies to “putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo”).

She herself had viewed the Venus de Milo in the Louvre with Josephine Baker, the “Bronze Venus.” Baker hailed the statue,
Sister!

She was twenty-five and had begun to lie about her age (in part to defuse questions about her unmarried state). If challenged, she put the discrepancy down to the Chinese way of counting age. A baby was considered one at birth, and years added not on birthdays but at the start of the lunar new year, so that a Chinese could be two years younger by Western reckoning.

 

NEWSREEL

Her cameraman films her coming down the gangway in her mink. When he emerges from behind the lens to wind the camera, she sees he's in his thirties, handsome. Hat pushed back, neat pencil mustache, dark double-breasted suit. Good linen, she thinks approvingly. He cranks the key in his strong fingers, swiftly and emphatically. His name, he tells her, is also Wong. The most common surname in China, he adds as if in apology. He has to lean close—she's wearing a hat with a tiger motif, specially designed for her in London—and shout over the cheers of the crowd, the answering blasts of the ship's whistle. He smells richly of hair oil.

She gives him her hand. “Mr. Wong.”

“Hai-sheng,” he says, “but you can call me Newsreel. They all do. Newsreel Wong.” He explains how his bureau chief had called his hotel once but hadn't remembered—or known how to pronounce—his name. After that it stuck. He's thinking of having it changed legally.

A stage name for a cameraman, she thinks. Whatever next?

“What does that make me?” she drolls. “Hollywood Wong? Film Star Wong?”

But he is already filming again, the camera between them, covering his face.

“Well, all right,” she tells him airily. “Newsreel it is!”

At least it's better than what the grips call her friend the cameraman James Wong Howe—Phil Ming (though wisely never to his face, mindful of Jimmie's early career as a bantamweight fighter). And, she prefers “Newsreel” to plain old “Mr. Wong.” Too much room for confusion there. Already, in her very first interview—a few enterprising reporters had come out to the ship by launch the night before to make their deadline—she's been asked about her love life. She only shrugged, parried (“I'm married to my art”), but the story that greets her on landing says she's accompanied on her trip by her beloved husband, Arthur.

When asked about her single status, she liked to deadpan, “‘A flower need not love, but only be loved,'” a line from
Daughter of the Dragon.

 

NATIVE

She speaks Cantonese—with an American accent, her father has always said—but no Mandarin or Shanghainese. Now she requires an interpreter to tell her hosts how delighted she is to visit her homeland. It's just as well the newsreel is silent, she thinks, the announcer's voice-over to be added later. Besides, didn't she do some of her best work in silent pictures?

Newsreel films her at Yu Gardens framed by a moon gate. He films her on the Nanking Road, shopping and turning heads. In the Sincere Department Store she is delighted to learn that the onomatopoeic Chinese word for the pneumatic tube system is
pung.
He films her on the Bund pointing out junks, rubbing the paw of the bronze lion outside the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank for luck. There are more cars than she expected—though she must try a rickshaw—more telephones, more streetlights. Overhead the telegraph lines make a net against the sky.

“I'd pictured rubble, ruins. We'd heard Shanghai was bombed.”

Newsreel nods. “In '32. But not the foreign concessions. The Japanese wouldn't dare.”

A pair of trams cross in front of her, parting like curtains. She marvels blithely at the modernity. “Why, it reminds me of Berlin. I was expecting old Cathay! But it looks nothing like Grauman's Theatre.”

Mostly, though, there are more Chinese than she ever imagined—compradors in tang jackets, black-and-white amahs, monks in their yellow robes—crowding everywhere, more than she's ever seen. And this she keeps to herself: secretly she feels like an extra again, is glad of her chic Western wardrobe, Chanel suits, for helping her stand out.

The Mayfair Mannequin Academy of New York named her “the World's Best-Dressed Woman” in 1934.
Not bad for a laundryman's daughter,
she wrote to her father at the time, but he didn't reply.

She finds herself waiting for Newsreel to say “Action!” Pausing at the edge of the frame, her weight tipped forward, but catching herself. They laugh when she explains it to him. Yet she still wants him to tell her what to do. “Was that good?” she asks after a take, and he says, “Sure.” She feels naked without stage makeup, lighting. She asks to redo a moment when she bumps into someone. “If you like.” She repeats a particular gesture, a little turn of the wrist as if she's presenting the scene around her, practicing between takes and then repeating it to make sure he captures it, until he looks up and over the camera and asks, “What are you doing?”

Newsreel's Eyemo camera runs for twenty seconds, fully wound, and she begins pacing her movements to his rhythms. From the taxi to the hotel lobby, twenty seconds. Greeting a fan, twenty seconds. Admiring a bolt of silk, twenty seconds. And then it's time to change the reel.

She feels as if he's winding her up like a tin toy.

Finally she leans on a rail overlooking the river, waiting for him, and when he raises up, she lifts her own Leica to take a picture of him.

“You look like a tourist,” he tells her, and she frowns. On the Whangpoo the sails of junks unfurl like fans, raised as if in modesty to hide them from gaze.

She outfits herself with a new wardrobe. She sheds her Western dresses and suits for sleek qipao. The milky-eyed tailor who measures her wraps a knotted string around her bust and waist and hips. She used to work as a seamstress at her father's laundry when she was a child, she says, and he nods when someone translates. Afterward she shows off her new gowns for the camera, accessorizes with a jade cigarette holder. “Going native,” she tells Newsreel. He touches a finger to the knot of his bow tie as if it were a button.

She blends in better, at least until people address her in Mandarin. She can't recall the last time she felt invisible like this. But she fears getting lost in the crowd. She relies on Newsreel to pick her out, on the camera to make her stand out.

In later years she'll wear those dresses in movies and charge the studios an extra fee to rent her wardrobe.

 

LIFE AND ART

The decision to make a movie of her own life proves ill-starred. While greeted warmly at first in Shanghai—one newspaper, describing her beauty, speaks of her eyebrows like “tender moth caterpillars,” her eyes “like kernels of apricots”—and feted by high society, flashbulbs sizzling in her wake, there have long been disparaging murmurs, often from Nationalist critics, about her roles and their depiction of the Chinese. She is most famous for playing a prostitute in
Shanghai Express,
notorious for her scanty costume in
The Thief of Bagdad.
Both have been subsequently banned in China, denounced as “ghost films.”

Those were only roles, she tries to explain. The only ones she could get. It was acting.

But it's a difficult distinction to make while a newsreel camera follows her everywhere, whirring gently in the background.

Shameless, they call her at a film board banquet in Peking. Lewd. A disgrace to Chinese womanhood. A Yankee puppet.

She nods politely, smiles shyly, unsure of their Mandarin.

“Too American,” Newsreel translates tactfully.

Her familial disgrace is now a national one.

“It's just acting,” she repeats, but it's a difficult distinction to make to a newsreel man.

“People believe what they see.” He shrugs. “I'd be out of work otherwise.”

She tries to tell him that she refused a different role in
The Good Earth,
that of Lotus, the teahouse dancer, another young seducer. He is loading a new canister of film. “I told them, ‘You're asking me as a Chinese to play the only unsympathetic character in the movie!'” But the truth is she wasn't offered it, despite testing for it. Already at thirty she was too old for the part. Perhaps it was for the best, she tells herself. She's not sure she could have borne it. To stand so close, day after day on set, to the role she craved. Her sister Mary had no such qualms. She happily took the minor role of Little Bride. “It could be
my
big break!” She'd never known how much her sister coveted her career, nor how much she could covet her sister's youth (if not her flat nose). “Have you no shame?” she'd retorted.
No loyalty?
she meant. “They're just using you.” She bit her tongue. In a more conciliatory spirit she had offered this trip as a lure to tempt Mary away, just as she'd once invited her along to Europe. But the girl had shaken it off petulantly. “It's
your
turn to play daughter.”

“It's true,” she tells Newsreel abruptly. “I am a bad example.”

Beneath the camera, all she can see of him is his mouth, the cigarette jutting to one side so that smoke doesn't float in front of the lens. It twitches slightly.

 

SPIRIT WAY

At the Ming tombs outside Peking, a guide encourages her to toss a rock up onto the curved back of one of the stone elephants along the Spirit Way.
For luck,
the guide says, clapping when she lands one. Later Newsreel tells her,
It's for fertility,
and she wishes she had the cool dry heft of it in her hand still.

 

Dan

Back in Shanghai she meets the Chinese star Butterfly Wu, the so-called Empress of Cinema. They exchange autographs while the cameras roll. “Can you read Chinese?” Wu asks sweetly beneath her breath as she inscribes a photo.

She meets Mei Lanfang, the great
dan
actor of female roles. He explains the different kinds of
dan
in the opera.
Hua dan,
vivacious young women. “Like you,” he says, giggling.
Daoma dan
and
wu dan,
the warrior women.
Lao dan,
the older women.
Cai dan,
the female clowns. “And which are you?” she asks. He specializes in
guimen dan,
he explains, virtuous ladies. “Though I have played the others too.” She nods. They compare hands—hers have been called the most beautiful in Hollywood—but she envies his elegant fingers, delicate wrists.

Butterfly Wu's great rival in the Shanghai film world, Ruan Lingyu, will commit suicide later that year, driven to it in part by vicious press coverage of her unhappy love life. Wu is rumored to have laughed on hearing the news.

 

INTERMISSION

Newsreel attends an open-air cinema with her. “Where the stars compete with the stars,” she quips. “Where the Chinese go to the pictures,” he says.

The film is in Mandarin and she leans in close to hear his whispered translation until someone hisses,
Xu!
“Hush,” Newsreel murmurs, and she giggles, leaves her shoulder pressed against his.

At the intermission he sits up straight and she does the same. He snaps his fingers for the cigarette girl. She tells him, “It's chilly. I'd like to leave now.”

 

FOOTAGE

“What happens if you run out of film at a crucial moment?” she asks once while he reloads.

“Sometimes I carry two cameras. Though I don't always load them both,” he admits.

“Why not?”

“Some people just want to be filmed. Generals, mostly.”

“Generals!” she says, because she can see he wants to impress her.

But what she wonders is if there's anything in the camera now. If any of this is actually happening if it isn't being filmed.

He raises the Eyemo again.

“Say, when are we going to see some footage?” she asks.

He blinks. “Oh, I don't get to see it. I shoot it, I send it off. Someone else edits it, writes the voice-over. Often the only time I see it is in the lens finder.”

The clockwork of the camera starts to tick down.

“Sounds like the movies,” she tells him. “We shoot scenes out of sequence, so we don't even know how the stories will turn out when we're making them.”

“Sounds like life,” he says, and she laughs.

“I guess.”

Still, it unnerves her somehow. Not getting to see herself. What has he captured? The cameras and cameramen she's used to make her look good (even when she's being bad), but this time she's not so sure. What is he seeing through that lens? It makes her self-conscious suddenly, for the first time in years.

This is not why she became an actress; this is not why she became famous.

“Stop staring,” she whispers, but he can't hear her over the mechanism.

 

MAKE LOVE TO THE CAMERA