Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (41 page)

Lee accepted, and then over the course of the next three minutes gave Wong Jack Man the beating of his life. Other fighters might have been content with such a victory, but Lee wasn’t—he figured he should have been able to drop Wong after the first couple of blows. The experience caused Lee to question his entire approach to martial arts. Until then he had been a devotee of the wing chun school of kung fu (he spelled it
gung fu
), but now he began to study all forms of martial arts, including fencing, Western-style boxing, and Greco-Roman wrestling, incorporating anything he thought was useful and discarding everything else.

NO NONSENSE

Lee had little interest in classical fighting stances, black belts, breaking boards with his fists, and other kung fu clichés. He just wanted to win fights, as quickly and as skillfully as possible. Everything else was fluff—or as he once put it, “ninety percent of Oriental self-defense is baloney.” Over the next two years, Lee developed his own stripped-down, back-to-basics style of fighting that he named
jeet kune do
, or “way of the intercepting fist.”

Meanwhile, Lee was also beginning to find work in Hollywood. In August 1964, he gave a demonstration at a martial arts exhibition in Long Beach, California. One person who saw his performance was Jay Sebring, a top Hollywood hair stylist who had a TV producer named William Dozier as a client. Dozier had produced
The Tammy Grimes Show
and
Studio One
, and his new show
Batman
would soon hit the airwaves. When Dozier mentioned that he was looking for an Asian actor to play the part of Charlie Chan’s “number-one son” in a new project, Sebring told him about Bruce Lee.

Mmm! There is a British beer called Old Fart.

BECOMING AN ACTOR

The Charlie Chan project never materialized, but when
Batman
became a smash hit, Dozier decided to follow up with a similar show called
The Green Hornet
. Dozier cast Bruce Lee as the Hornet’s Asian sidekick, Kato. Lee moved his family to Los Angeles, and in addition to working on the TV show, he began giving private martial arts lessons to celebrities such as James Coburn, Steve McQueen, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The Green Hornet
aired for only one season: it premiered in September 1966 and went off the air in July 1967. Lee earned good reviews for his performance, but it was difficult for an Asian actor to land big parts. Three years passed and his career went nowhere. Lee’s celebrity friends helped him land small roles in movies and TV shows, but they weren’t the kinds of jobs that would advance his career. He helped develop the TV series
Kung Fu
only to learn in 1971 that he’d lost the lead role to David Carradine, a white guy who didn’t know much about kung fu.
Kung Fu
’s producers felt that Carradine was a better choice for the role because he had the calm personality that they were looking for in Caine, but Lee’s chances were also hurt by the fear that if an Asian actor were cast in the lead, fewer people would watch the show.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

Lee didn’t know it at the time, but while he was struggling in Hollywood, his star was beginning to rise in Hong Kong. By now
The Green Hornet
had been off the air in the United States for more than three years, but it was still playing in Hong Kong—where it had been renamed
The Kato Show—
and it was one of the most popular shows on the air. Viewers in Hong Kong were thrilled that one of their own had landed a major role in an American TV show.

Q: What is
punctate pruritus
? A: The medical term for an itchy spot.

When Lee took a quick trip back to Hong Kong to make arrangements for his mother to come to the United States, he was surprised to learn that he was famous there. Not only that, but two Hong Kong studios wanted to hire him to star in their movies. Lee was still determined to make it in Hollywood, but he decided that when he couldn’t find work there, he’d turn to Hong Kong.

UP, UP, AND AWAY

In 1971 and 1972, Lee made three films for Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest Studios:
The Big Boss
(U.S. title:
Fists of Fury
),
Fist of Fury
(U.S. title:
The Chinese Connection
), and
The Way of the Dragon
(U.S. title:
Return of the Dragon
), which Lee wrote and directed himself. They were all smash hits:
The Big Boss
made $3.5 million in Hong Kong in its first 19 days alone, making it the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history.
Fist of Fury
smashed that record by making $4 million in about the same amount of time, and
Return of the Dragon
made $5.4 million.

Now that Bruce Lee was Asia’s biggest film star, Hollywood finally began to take notice. In late 1972, Warner Brothers agreed to co-produce
Enter the Dragon
with Golden Harvest Studios, the first time that a Hollywood studio had ever partnered with a Hong Kong studio to make a film.

TROUBLE

It took about 10 weeks to shoot
Enter the Dragon
. By May 1973, Lee was back in the Golden Harvest recording studio to dub the sound for the film. It was hot and humid at the studio on May 10—the air conditioners were turned off to keep the noise from interfering with the sound recording. Lee was exhausted from working nonstop on the film. At one point he excused himself and went to use the restroom. When 20 minutes passed and he didn’t return, the recording crew went looking for him and found him passed out on the restroom floor. Lee regained consciousness, then passed out again and went into convulsions. The studio rushed him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed cerebral edema (swelling of the brain). Lee made what was thought to be a full recovery, but in the weeks that followed he continued to complain of headaches.

Pigs have 16 blood types, the most of any mammal. Cats have the fewest, with two.

EXIT THE DRAGON

Two months later, on July 20, 1973, Lee went to the apartment of an actress named Betty Ting Pei to go over some script changes in an upcoming film called
The Game of Death
. While there he got a headache, so Ting Pei gave him a tablet of Equagesic (a combination of aspirin and a tranquilizer called meprobamate). The 32-year-old Lee went into the bedroom to lay down and never regained consciousness.

That evening Ting Pei tried to wake him, and when she couldn’t she called for an ambulance. Lee was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital. The cause of death was ruled to be cerebral edema, this time possibly brought on by an extreme allergic reaction to the Equagesic.

Four weeks later,
Enter the Dragon
premiered in Los Angeles. It was one of the highest-grossing films of 1973. Over the years it has gone on to earn more than $150 million, making it one of the most successful martial arts films in history.

So did Bruce Lee’s story end when he passed away in July 1973? Not exactly—the rest of his strange tale begins on
page 339
.

56 THINGS FROM BATMAN COMICS, MOVIES, AND TV SERIES WITH “BAT” IN THEIR NAME

Batalarm, Batanalyzer, Bat-a-rang, Bat-armor, Bat awake, Batbeam, Batbeam Firing Button, Bat Blowtorch, Batboat, Batcamera’s Polarized Batfilter, Batcave, Batcentrifuge, Batcharge Launcher, Bat-claws, Batcommunicator, Batcopter, Batcostume, Batcuffs, Batcycle, Batcycle Go-cart, Batantidote, Batparachute, Emergency tank of Batoxygen, Bat earplugs, Bat Gas, Batguage, Bathook, Batkey, Batknife, Batladder, Batlaser Gun, Batmagnet, Batmissile, Batmobile, Batmobile Antitheft Device, Batmobile Mobile Crime Computer, Batmobile’s Superpower Afterburner, Bat-o-meter, Bat-o-stat Antifire Activator, Batphone, Batpole, Batram, Bat Ray Projector, Batresearch Shelf, Batrope, Batscanner Receiver, Batscope, Bat-shield, Batsleep, Batsignal, Bat Terror Control, Batzooka, Compressed Steam Batlift, Homing Battransmitter, Memory Bat Bank, Superblinding Batpellets

It takes Pluto 248.53 years to travel around the sun. It takes Mercury 88 days.

We might assume that the common names we have for things are accurate descriptions of them, but that’s not always true
.

B
IRTHDAY PARTY.
You can only have one birth day—the day you were born. After that, every time you celebrate your birthday you’re really throwing an
anniversary
party.

WILD RICE.
It’s neither wild, nor rice. Officially known as
Zizania aquatica
, this once-wild grass seed is now cultivated by farmers worldwide.

KILLER WHALE.
They’re neither killers nor whales. They were once thought to be man-eaters. The 1973 U.S. Navy diving manual even warns that killer whales “will attack human beings at every opportunity.” But they were wrong—there are very few documented cases of attacks on human. (Seals and penguins are a different story.) And they’re members of the dolphin, not the whale, family.

RADIATOR.
Whether it’s in your home or in your car, radiators work by
convecting
heat—moving it via a liquid or gas, not by radiating. The radiator in your home heats the air currents around it until enough is heated to make the room feel warm. The one in your car transfers heat from the engine to water, which passes it to the atmosphere. The “radiators” radiate a little, but not much.

POISON IVY.
It’s not a poison, it’s an allergen. Poisons are harmful to everybody; allergens only affect some people. Poison ivy can cause severe itching and swelling, but many people aren’t even affected by it. It’s not ivy, either—it’s a member of the sumac family.

RINGWORM.
This infection makes “ring-like” marks on skin—but there’s no worms involved. It’s caused by a fungus.

HEAVY CREAM.
When milk producers say “heavy,” they actually mean “full of fat,” and the fat is the lightest part of the milk. That means that “heavy cream,” which contains as much as 30% milk fat, is actually a lot lighter than skim milk, which contains only trace amounts of fat.

False advertising? The Cape of Good Hope was originally named the Cape of Storms.

Sometimes things that seem like good ideas at first don’t live up to their expectations. Take these duds, for example:

T
HE RONSON VARAFLAME

Brilliant Idea:
One of the problems of being in the butane lighter fuel business is that as soon as a smoker lights their cigarette, they stop using your product. In the late 1960s, the Ronson lighter fuel company formed a consumer products division to dream up new ways to for people to use butane. What’d they come up with? The Varaflame Butane Candle. The Varaflame offered many advantages over traditional wax candles: they weren’t smoky, they didn’t drip wax, and the size of the flame could be adjusted to suit the occasion: “Low for intimate dinners, medium for dinner parties, high for swinging soirees,” as one ad put it. When full, a Varaflame could burn for hours—not bad if you’re in the butane business.

Oops:
Varaflame Butane Candles cost as much as $30; a lot of money in the late 1960s. Wax candles cost less than a buck and people liked them better. In 1981, after more than a decade of disappointing sales, Ronson extinguished its consumer goods division.

THE PONTIAC AZTEK

Brilliant Idea:
Billed by Pontiac as a “party on wheels,” the Pontiac Aztek looked great on paper when it was introduced in 2000. The minivan-based SUV had a fold-down tailgate specially designed to be comfortable to sit on, complete with built-in cup holders and rear stereo controls for tailgate parties. For camping, Pontiac offered an optional air mattress and a “tent extension” that wrapped around the open tailgate. There were four power outlets and the front seat center console even doubled as a removable ice chest.

Oops:
The Aztek was also one of the goofiest looking cars ever made. It was met with stunned silence when it debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in 2000—one executive from a rival automaker called it the Pontiac “A** Crack,” and when it arrived in showrooms things didn’t get any better. “The back end of the Aztek is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pontiac salesman Brad Hernandez told the
Los Angeles Times
. “It looks like time was up and they stopped working on it. But we back it up against a wall and it looks great.” Consumers didn’t think so—first year sales were less than half what Pontiac had hoped for, and when the company redesigned the Aztek to make it less goofy-looking, sales dropped even further. Pontiac quietly phased out the Aztek in 2004.