11THE THIEF OF BAGDAD

In this torn sea of arabesques,

Looms there no isle of peace?

—SADAKICHI HARTMANN¹

Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong, and Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad, 1924 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

SOMETIME IN 1923, impressed by her appearance in The Toll of the Sea, Douglas Fairbanks offered Anna May a supporting role in his most ambitious film, The Thief of Bagdad. Like Mary—his new better half—Fairbanks had started out as a theatrical actor and made a successful transition from stage to screen. In the early 1920s, he had made a series of escapist costume spectacles, casting himself as a swashbuckling adventurer. In this trilogy of blockbusters—The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921), and Robin Hood (1922)—Fairbanks displayed his exuberant athleticism in sword fights, leaps, somersaults, rope swings, and equestrian stunts.² His new vehicle, budgeted at an eye-popping $2 million and produced by United Artists (a company founded by Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin), was expected to top his erstwhile successes.

There is no other way to say it other than that it was a big deal for Anna May to appear in such a major production. It was as close to superstardom as one could possibly get, the equivalent of playing a supporting role in a Star Wars sequel today. She would be cast as the duplicitous Mongol slave, serving the Arabic princess in name but spying for her Mongol khan in secret. It was in stark contrast to all of her previous roles, either as a timid Chinese maid or the lovestruck, self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly. Also different was her attire: While in her prior appearances she was little more than a live mannequin showcasing traditional Chinese costumes, in this new production she was going to be clad in a revealing two-piece outfit, showing ample amounts of bare skin. Erotically provocative, she would be paired with Fairbanks’s character—a muscular, bare-chested thief, an adult Aladdin dazzling with manly charisma. In a crucial scene, he holds a dagger against the small of her bare back, while she looks back in fear, her seminude body trembling with “a mixture of terror and sensuality.”³

To get eighteen-year-old Anna May to wear such a revealing outfit and act in such provocative scenes, Fairbanks had to write a letter to her parents to obtain their permission and to promise that there would be no impropriety during the production. Her parents must have heard about her earlier relationship with Mickey Neilan, and there was a rumor that Todd Browning had been romantically involved with her during the making of Drifting (1923). In that film, directed by Browning, she made a brief appearance as Rose Li, a Chinese ringleader’s daughter who falls for a white man—another instance of the reel and real colliding in Anna May’s life. Her parents must have lost not a small amount of sleep worrying about older white men preying on their young daughter.

Fortunately, both Fairbanks and Anna May were consummate professionals. In an interview about the film, he described her as “a very hard worker and usually a modest little person.” Ironically, the modest “little” person stood at five feet seven inches, taller than the star himself. More important, she would “give back no chin,” as a journalist put it. Fairbanks recalled an incident during the production: “She chanced to say one day that her name meant ‘Two Yellow Willows’ and a publicity man who had only half heard what she said sent out a yarn saying that Anna May Wong meant ‘Two Yellow Widows.’ It took some time to tell her that it was an error.”⁴

Inspired by The Arabian Nights, the film was yet another Oriental fantasy extravaganza, a feast for the eye. The story involves a lowly thief in Bagdad who lives by the motto, “What I like—I take.” One day, using a magic rope he stole from a street magician, the thief scales the palace walls and enters the boudoir of the princess. At the sight of the sleeping beauty, he is smitten, and he takes her silk slipper as a souvenir. In order to win her hand and defeat the other suitors, he embarks upon a dangerous and mystical journey to bring back the most desirable treasure ever imaginable. An escapist epic on the surface, the film was actually an allegory for the epoch of the 1920s with its insatiable desire for prosperity, for newer gadgets and products. While the other suitors bring a flying carpet, a crystal ball, and a magic apple that can resurrect the dead (think of the newfangled products of the decade like airplanes, radios, and new medicines), the thief secures the ultimate prize: a powder that can turn into anything he wishes for. That was the kind of magic desired by the likes of the Great Gatsby, as Fitzgerald told us in the novel that defined that decade. It’s the beckoning green light, “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” the novelist wrote. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.…”⁵

The Thief of Bagdad certainly went further than any other film, even Griffith’s epic, in creating a magic tale for the historical era that begot it. The New York Times hailed it as “a feat of motion picture art which has never been equaled.”⁶ The elaborate sets, designed by William Cameron Menzies, brought out the full splendor of a Disneyesque wonderland: “Palace and city completed with shiny cupolas and towers, surreal bridges and staircases. The floors were glazed and the buildings were reflected on them. Walls were painted silver to make the city seem to float like a balloon, literally to drift off the ground among the clouds.”⁷

An Orientalist fantasy that cemented Fairbanks’s status as a matinee idol and immeasurably boosted Anna May’s reputation, The Thief of Bagdad also cast several other Asian actors to spice up the arabesque flavors, particularly Kamiyama Sojin and Sadakichi Hartmann. Playing the avaricious Mongol prince with a Fu Manchu look, Sojin had been the foremost Shakespearean actor in Japan before arriving in Hollywood. In a few years, he and Anna May would work together in The Chinese Parrot (1927), a Charlie Chan film based on Earl Derr Biggers’s popular novel. Sojin would impersonate the inscrutable, wisecracking Chinese detective from Honolulu, and Anna May would play a Nautch dancer.

The other Asian actor in The Thief of Bagdad was, strictly speaking, Eurasian. Born in Dejima, an artificial island in the Bay of Nagasaki—the site of the original Madame Butterfly story, Sadakichi Hartmann was the child of a German businessman and a Japanese woman, possibly a geisha, who died soon after his birth. Virtually abandoned by his father and raised in Germany, Hartmann became, in the words of his biographer, “a soul adrift.” Self-taught and tenacious, he arrived in the United States in 1882 and dabbled in theater, art criticism, and poetry. A devotee of Walt Whitman, he published several poetry volumes that showed the influence of the French Symbolists and Japanese haiku, including Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904), My Rubaiyat (1913), and Japanese Rhythms (1915). Living a precarious existence in the libertine circles of New York, Hartmann was crowned “The King of Bohemia” in Greenwich Village.⁸ And, inspired by the Japanese tradition of “listening to the incense,” he once did a stage performance in New York, a synesthetic attempt in which he released squirts of perfume timed to the musical notes in a symphony. Such a quixotic act not only intrigued the Anglo-American modernists such as William B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, but it also made Hartmann the perfect impersonator of the court magician in The Thief of Bagdad. Sporting a bejeweled turban and a buoyant Houdini cape, the trickster helps the Mongol prince locate the magic apple. Hartmann’s skits, whether on-screen, on stage, or in real life, were so entertaining that one day Pound, jailed in Pisa and awaiting extradition to the United States to face trial for treason, would recall fondly his Japanese friend’s “vagaries.” Sitting in an outdoor steel cage like an animal, Pound wrote that a few more characters like Sadakichi “would have enriched the life of Manhattan.”⁹ To be thus remembered by the poetic maestro in his darkest hours certainly speaks to Hartmann’s charisma as a talented raconteur.

Led by a superstar, supported by Anna May and other Asian actors, The Thief of Bagdad premiered at New York’s Liberty Theatre, on West 42nd Street, on Saint Patrick’s Day of 1924. Fairbanks deliberately turned the opening event into a theatrical extravaganza by providing a memorable “Arabian” atmosphere for the audience. He hired the famous theater producer Morris Gest as the impresario for the screening. At the sold-out theater, hordes of moviegoers pushed their way into the lobby. Police were hired to clear the jam and assist people to their seats, where they were sensorially assaulted by the beating of drums, droning voices singing dirges, and the odor of incense emanating from unknown corners of the theater. During the intermission, as the New York Times reported, “ushers in Arabian attire made a brave effort to bear cups of Turkish coffee to the women in the audience.”¹⁰ After the premiere, Gest was paid a salary of $3,000 per week to travel far and wide to present the film. The theatricalized screenings went as far as London, Paris, and Moscow. The biggest hit was in Germany, two years later. In fact, The Thief of Bagdad became the longest-running American film in Berlin, with an exclusive one-month engagement at the Capitol am Zoo, followed by showings in forty-five theaters across Germany.¹¹

Incidentally, the film’s popularity in Germany would, as we will see, be vital in shaping Anna May’s career. When the New York Times ran a story titled “Fairbanks Wins Berlin” on January 23, 1926, they should have, if they had known any better, rephrased the headline as “Anna May Wong Wins Berlin.”¹² While German moviegoers were bedazzled by Fairbanks’s acrobatics and the extravagant sets, some important directors in the audience, working for the burgeoning German film industry, took notice of the exotic beauty and superb talent of the young Chinese actress. For them, the Mongol handmaid had upstaged the Bagdad thief. Unlike their Hollywood colleagues blindsided by America’s racial politics—notwithstanding that Weimar Germany had its own share of race problems (more on which later)—they recognized the ascension of a shining global star.