The Fortunes (22 page)

At night she lies awake, listening to the sizzling buzz of insects. Newsreel won't come to her in her father's house. At least she's brought a flask.

When it's time to leave, she stages a little scene: father and daughter holding hands, moving apart, arms extended until finally contact is broken. And walking backward out of frame.

“Cut,” Newsreel says. She sighs, shakes out her arms. She misses the stark theatricality of silent pictures.

“You were great,” she tells her father, and he looks confused.

She pushes the tears away with the heel of her hand. “They used to say I was the best crier in pictures,” she tells Newsreel. A prized talent in the silent era. “People used to crowd onto the set just to watch me weep.”

At the station, waiting in the flickering shade of a ginkgo tree, her father takes Newsreel's hand. “Thank you for taking good care of this daughter.” He bows stiffly; she notices that the tips of his bushy eyebrows are silvering.

“Sorry about that,” she murmurs afterward, leaning against Newsreel in the compartment. “It's just that he sees us together all the time. He doesn't understand. I hope you weren't offended.”

“Oh, that?” Newsreel says. His cheeks hollow as he draws on his cigarette. “No. Not at all.”

“Ah,” she says, straightening. It's suddenly spelled out like a title card in a silent picture. “You never told me you were married. No wonder you think I'm a slut.”

There's a clatter of applause, and a formation of wild ducks rises from the marshes along the tracks, flies into the sun.

 

PUBLIC

They spend their last two days in Hong Kong, avoiding each other. But back in Shanghai, she insists Newsreel accompany her to the Public Garden in the International Settlement. Its English lawn is said to be as tightly trimmed as the nap on a billiard table. She wants to see the carp pond, the band pavilion, the infamous
NO DOGS OR CHINESE
sign. She wants him to film her beside it, flouting it. When he balks, she tells him, “Oh, don't fret, they won't arrest me. I may be a bitch, but I don't think it applies. Do you?” She twirls her scalloped parasol nonchalantly.

No footage survives, if the excursion ever took place.

 

WONG

She says goodbye to Newsreel at the docks—“Thank you, Hai-sheng,” she whispers—but he continues to film her as she waves from midship, from behind a veil of red-white-and-blue streamers. She blows him a kiss.

She has grown fond of him. They've enjoyed a few laughs.

Between them, she and Newsreel have heard them all.

Wong time.

Wong place.

Wong number.

When she introduces him, they take it in turns, after a beat, to add, “No relation.”

“Newsreel Wong and Film Star Wong—we could be a double act.”

Except she is also Shameless Wong, Spinster Wong, Stinking Whore Wong, American Wong.

“You
really
never saw one of my pictures?” she teased him in the taxi to the ship.

“Some were banned, as you know. And, to be frank . . .” He shrugged. “I don't really care for movies, make-believe.”

“Now it can be told!”

“But which ones should I see? To remember you by. My friends at the studio can get prints.”

“Oh.” She squeezed his hand, smiled wanly. “None of them.”

She plucked the pocket square from his breast before they parted, “to remember
you
by”; flourishes it flailingly now from the deck.

“Fifty million Chinese,” she shouts down to him over the ship's horn.

“What?” he yells from behind the Eyemo. She wishes he'd put it down, let her see his face one last time.

“Fifty million Chinese,” she tries again. He cups a hand to his ear. “Fifty million Chinese can't be Wong!” But he just keeps filming.

And Wong can't be fifty million Chinese, she thinks ruefully as she watches the crowded pier, sailors and stevedores, dwindle into the distance. She waves until he is out of sight, then presses the handkerchief hard to the corner of each eye in turn, as if to stanch a wound.

It's her one and only visit to China.

 

HALF-CASTE WOMAN

The first night onboard, she sings in the lounge—
Drink a bit, laugh a bit, love a little more—
leaning into the curve of the white piano. If Americans think her Chinese and Chinese think her American, the British understand her as Eurasian.

Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes

Waiting and hoping to see?

She met Noël Coward once at a club in London. He'd famously written
Private Lives
while recuperating from flu in Shanghai. She told him how strange it felt to have English hotel staff pressing her gowns, chanced a sally: “Is that what you'd call iron-y?” “What say?” he asked absently, simpering at someone across the room. “Quite so. Irony,” he affirmed, correcting her pronunciation.

Scanning the far horizon,

Wondering what the end will be.

Later, on deck, tumbler in hand, she'll crane over the rail. She searches the moonlit distance for a funnel, for a spout. For a husband, she thinks, but all of
them
might as well be lined up at the Long Bar, longest in the world—
naturally!
—at the men-only Shanghai Club. Plenty more fish in the ocean, ha! Flecked with moonlight, the waves glint like teeth, rings of them radiating outward like the maw of a shark. She hangs further out, gazing down into the water rushing past, trying to imagine those jade depths. What would it be like to dive in? To lie back and watch the towering hull slide past on the screen of the sky and slowly sink into the velvety dark? And yet it's the surface, as ever, waves shimmering like scales, that beguiles her. The chop clapping the hull, the lacy veils of spray, the whirling foam wreaths. And why not? she thinks. We live on the surface, after all. The surface supports us, cradles us, buoys us up. She spies, suddenly, the sleek curves of dolphins running alongside, their dark, shining backs rising and falling, turning like film on a spool. She lets her glass drop into the darkness, brings her gloved hands together in silent applause.

Spurned by a man, spurned by a country. She's not about to kill herself for either.

 

GONG

It storms for four straight days. In the depths of each trough she's pressed into her mattress springs as if by a lover; at the crest of each wave she feels momentarily weightless, as if her spirit were rising out of her flesh. And then it's calm again. The distant dinner gong summons her like a cue.

 

HOME AGAIN

The
Hoover
steams under the partially constructed Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco on October 16, 1935. There's still no roadway, but the first long swoops of cable have recently been draped across the bay like a garland. “Welcome home!” passengers call to one other. Beyond the bridge, everyone clusters to starboard to watch the white city rising up Telegraph Hill like a cloud of fog around another new marvel, the Coit Tower. Only she stands to port, studying Angel Island, the immigration station where thousands of Chinese have been detained over the past three decades, as it slips astern. It's as close as many of them have come, she knows: able to see Gold Mountain but never touch it.

The great ship beneath her slows and settles into a filigree scum of froth.

 

DREAMS

Throughout her career she'd occasionally steal into theaters to watch her own movies with an audience. She liked to sit toward the front and side near the organ. The Mighty Wurlitzer at the Chinese Theatre was decked out in red and gold to match the decor, the curved tiers of keys like stalls and circle and balcony in miniature, and she would imagine the crowd settling into their velvet seats behind and above her. And then when the lights went down she would turn and watch their faces. She enjoyed their looks of shock when the house lights came up and they recognized her, but even better was the moment of confusion just before that, before they placed her, when they smiled, half consciously knowing they knew her but not from where. They looked so shyly vulnerable for a moment, as if they thought she knew something about them. She felt like she was waking them from a dream.

But in later years, in smaller roles, she could stand in the gilded lobby of the Chinese Theatre as they filed out and not a single person would glance at her as they hurried out into the night. She might as well have been one of the art deco figures adorning the walls, their smooth mirrored faces stoically blank. By then the organ had been removed. She missed the terraced keyboard, the neat black-and-white ranks like a tuxedoed audience for a premiere.

Once, in 1936, she goes incognito, in turban and sunglasses, to attend a screening of her old acquaintance Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will,
and while she knows better than to advertise their relationship, she finds herself secretly envying Leni her ecstatic patriotism.

 

AND THE WINNER IS . . .

Luise Rainer accepts the 1936 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in
The Great Ziegfeld.
Luise Rainer accepts the 1937 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in
The Good Earth.

Rumor has it that Rainer was so sure she wouldn't win a second time she stayed home in her pajamas. Called with the news of her win, she dashed to the ceremony without even putting on makeup, but fought with husband Clifford Odets on the way and had to pace five times around the Biltmore before she was steady enough to enter and receive her award.

Between 1936 and 1937 the Rape of Nanking, among other atrocities, has put acting prizes in proper perspective. Yet still it stings when Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Nationalist leader, remarks after a specially arranged screening that she can't believe Rainer isn't Chinese.

 

“BLOODY SATURDAY”

During the bombing of Shanghai in 1937, Newsreel Wong will take one of the most famous images of the war: a baby, bloodied and crying, in the ruins of the railroad station. “My shoes were soaked in blood,” he'll recall later. By the time
Life
reprints it in October, an estimated 140 million people will have seen it. Eventually it will be credited with turning the tide of Western public opinion against Japan. For years afterward rumors will swirl that the photo was posed, the image manipulated.

All in a good cause, she'll think, though how could he have stood to take it and not immediately scoop up the wailing infant?

The fate of the crying baby, an orphan—or
warphan,
in the famous coinage of the childless Madame Chiang—is unknown.

The next year MGM will release a film called
Too Hot to Handle,
about a newsreel cameraman in China faking footage of an aerial attack. Starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy.

 

FATHERS

Warner was right about Luise, but she'll never have the chance to tell him. He'll walk off the set of
Charlie Chan at Ringside,
his eighteenth Chan film, in 1938. After disappearing on a weeks-long bender, followed by a spell in a drying-out hospital and an acrimonious divorce, he'll leave the country, reemerge months later in his native Sweden, only to succumb to pneumonia.

At least he died at home, her father will note.
His
sojourn in China will last only a year beyond her visit. He'll be forced to return to Los Angeles after the Japanese invasion of China, forced to leave her stepmother, her half-brother. She'll greet him off the gangway—
Welcome home!
—and he'll look at her as if it's her fault. She'll throw her arms around him anyway.

Gold Mountain was only ever where he planned to live and work until he got rich. But he'll die there, in 1949, and she'll attend his funeral and arrange his interment beside her mother, whose bones had never been sent to China. She won't go out to Rosedale to visit them as often as she should, but sometimes she'll sit in the vast, cool barn of the waiting room at Union Station, thinking of them and the home they made nearby, listening to the click of heels on the terra-cotta tiles echoing back off the travertine walls (a temple to trains, her father called it once) until she grows self-conscious about having no one to meet, no train to catch.

Near the end of their affair, when she was blue, Doug used to call her Sum Ting Wong; at the start, he'd told her she was really something. When he dies, in 1939, she'll read that his real name was Douglas Ullman. His last words: “I've never felt better.”

Irving Thalberg hadn't lived to see
The Good Earth
open.

Walter Benjamin, who wrote that her name unfolded like “a moon-filled blossom in a cup of tea” but also misspelled it as Anne May Wong, committed suicide in 1940 rather than fall into Nazi hands.

Even Carole Lombard, the profane angel, will die: in a plane crash in 1942.

Only Charlie Chan will live on, a new yellowface actor, Sidney Toler, taking on the role vacated by Warner. Even the footage from
Charlie Chan at Ringside
will enjoy a second life, Warner's scenes reshot with Peter Lorre in yellowface as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto, the film released as
Mr. Moto's Gamble.

Poor Warner was right about that too. He was never the star.

 

THE UNDERSTUDY