12HER OWN COMPANY

IN THE SPRING OF 1924, when The Thief of Bagdad was playing to great fanfare, captivating audiences with its splendid arabesque displays and fantasies about a distant land, America was shutting its doors to foreigners. A landmark anti-immigration bill, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed by Congress with overwhelming support and swiftly signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge that May. While the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had already halted Chinese immigration, this new law would bar all Asians and drastically reduce the number of immigrants from other parts of the world, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe. The passage of this exclusionary act resulted from several factors, but particularly from the rise of nativism and the changing structure of global geopolitics in the wake of the Great War. Rejecting the melting-pot concept of the previous decades and envisioning America as a nation that embodied a hierarchy of races and nationalities, the law encapsulated the xenophobic frenzy of the 1920s and deeply impacted the cultural life of America for the next four decades. In the words of John Higham, the Johnson-Reed Act meant that “the old belief in America as a promised land for all who yearn for freedom had lost its operative significance.”¹

Toxic social milieu notwithstanding, Anna May began the year of 1924 with hope and excitement. In January, she used her income from The Thief of Bagdad to buy a bungalow in the 1400 block of North Tamarind. Even though she had been bluntly reminded of her ethnic status during her house hunt by the fact that certain areas of Los Angeles were off-limits to Chinese, she was eager to leave her family’s crowded residence and find a place of her own. According to a journalist who visited her, Anna May decorated her new house with a distinctly Oriental touch—sandalwood, ivory, and burning incense. She also appeared, in the words of the journalist, to be “re-Chinafying herself” with traditional Chinese attire and makeup, including long fingernails, an old lacquered vanity case, orange-blossom perfume, and golden hair ornaments.²

What this journalist saw, however, was only one side of Anna May, or one side of a Chinese American identity that was always caught up in a tug-of-war between two traditions, two almost-irreconcilable ways of life. In fact, to her Hollywood friends, Anna May was known for her flapper style, often sporting “a tip-tilted hat, pure Parisian heels, sheer silk stockings, and a Persian lamb wrap.” To attain the ultimate symbol of the American Dream in a city that was fast becoming the capital of automobiles, she bought a Willys-Knight six-cylinder car, a relatively low-priced but high-quality model made in Toledo, Ohio.³

Trouble, goes the old adage, is a dog nibbling at the heels of fame. As her reputation rose, Anna May soon attracted some Tinseltown hucksters looking for a quick buck. In March 1924, Anna May signed an agreement with a Hollywood self-promoter, Forrest B. Creighton, to start a company called “The Anna May Wong Productions.” At nineteen, Anna May was actually no greenhorn in business. At her father’s laundry, from making delivery runs to assisting with management and bookkeeping, she had acquired some business acumen. According to Creighton’s pitch, her production company would make a series of films about ancient Chinese legends, and he would raise $400,000 to bankroll the productions.⁴ It sounded like a great idea for Anna May to make films about China in ways not dictated by the big studios. And she was not alone in thinking this way.

From the very beginning, dismayed by racially dehumanizing on-screen stereotypes, Chinese in America had tried to make their own films to counter the preponderance of those popular “yellow flicks.” In 1916, twenty-one-year-old Marion Wong formed the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California. Born in San Francisco to a wealthy family, Wong showed an early interest in theatrical arts and had appeared on stage as a singer, earning the epithet “Chinese Song Bird.” “I have never seen any Chinese movies,” Wong said, “so I decided to introduce them to the world.” She wrote the script for a love story and added scenes depicting people and manners in China. Working on a shoestring budget provided by relatives, she drafted her sister-in-law and her mother as cast members, built a makeshift studio in the back of their home, and borrowed furnishings from neighbors and local shops as props. Her heroic efforts resulted in The Curse of Quon Gwon (1917), the earliest known film written, produced, and directed by a Chinese American. But the film failed to find a distributor, and the company folded. Wong moved on to establish a successful restaurant career.⁵

The baton of Chinese filmmaking was then handed, symbolically, to James B. Leong, newly arrived from China. Born in Shanghai, Leong came to the United States in 1913 and attended college in Muncie, Indiana. After graduation, he went to try his luck in Hollywood around the time “yellow flicks” were becoming a fad. He found work at a number of studios and performed various tasks, including working as a technical adviser and interpreter for D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. In the early 1920s, after a period of apprenticeship, Leong formed a Los Angeles–based film company financed by the local Chinese community: James B. Leong Productions. According to the Los Angeles Times, his goal was to create films that were “made by Chinese for Chinese, but employing American methods and American players until such time as Chinese actors and technicians may be developed to take their places.” The first film Leong produced was Lotus Blossom (1921), its title an apparent throwback to Griffith’s film. Like Broken Blossoms, Leong’s film, which he codirected and cowrote, was a tragic tale (weren’t they all?) adapted from a Chinese legend about a young girl trying to salvage her father’s reputation as an artisan. She gives her life so that the sacred bell he is making can be sweet-toned when it calls the people to prayer. Casting the vaudeville singer Lady Tsen Mei as the lead, the roster also included James Wang (the ex-minister who got Anna May her first part) and Noah Beery and Tully Marshall in yellowface!⁶

After its premiere at the Alhambra Theatre in Los Angeles on November 26, 1921, Lotus Blossom received positive reviews in trade papers. Writing for Picture-Play Magazine, Emma-Lindsay Squier applauded Leong’s worthy attempt “to produce motion pictures that will show us China as it is,” a radical departure from typical Hollywood films that “show us opium dens, singsong girls, slant-eyed Mandarins with queues and long finger nails, mysterious temples where strange gods hold sway.” Squier entitled her piece “The Dragon Awakens,” presaging a new era of young Chinese such as Leong rising in the film industry.⁷ Unfortunately, like Marion Wong’s trailblazing venture, Leong’s was also a short-lived experiment. Lotus Blossom was the only film he made.⁸ The dragon awoke but then dozed off again. Leong went on to become an actor, appearing in several Hollywood classics, including Shanghai Express (1932), in which Anna May would play a significant part; The Hatchet Man (1932), starring Edward G. Robinson; and The Good Earth (1937).

Besides the Chinese, ambitious filmmakers of other ethnicities also tried to loosen Hollywood’s stranglehold on racial representations by making their own independent pictures, including Sidney Goldin (Yiddish), Guillermo Calles (Mexican), Oscar Micheaux (African American), and Sessue Hayakawa (Japanese). Hayakawa, who crossed paths with Anna May on screen, was a particularly good model for her to follow in the enterprise of filmmaking. Arguably the first matinee idol, the Japan-born Hayakawa became the symbol of exotic charm and forbidden love with his starring role in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915). As he became increasingly unhappy with the parts he had played, in 1918 Hayakawa established his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, which made twenty-three films in three years. However, as racial animosity toward Japanese heightened in America, Hayakawa left the country in 1922 to pursue his career in Japan and Europe.⁹

The travails of these predecessors were both inspirations and deterrents for Anna May as she pondered the future of The Anna May Wong Productions. But she did not need to ponder for long. It was soon revealed that Creighton’s business proposal was no more than a ploy to use Anna May’s name for his own benefit. In fact, Creighton had reworded his copy of the agreement signed by Anna May, binding her to a three-year service term as well as her liability for certain debts he might incur. Recognizing the Barnum-like scheme, Anna May had to go to court, where a judge issued a temporary injunction, prohibiting Creighton from continuing with the fraudulent operation. It effectively ended her dream of having her own company.¹⁰

Smarting from the fallout of the deception and legal wrangling, Anna May played bit parts in three Paramount films in 1924: as a jealous queen in an Egyptian tale, The Fortieth Door; as an Eskimo girl in The Alaskan; and then as another Native American character, Tiger Lily, in Peter Pan. Despite her phenomenal performances in The Toll of the Sea and The Thief of Bagdad, as well as her growing international fame, Anna May suddenly was no longer able to find a real part in other American films, the new censorship decrees revealing their long reach. Even though the infamous Production Code would not come until a decade later, the industry had always been mindful of those “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” long before their official codification. One taboo, in particular, became a roadblock for Anna May’s career: miscegenation, which includes romance or kissing between an interracial couple on screen. Such prohibitions caused filmmakers to pass her over, condemning her almost permanently to secondary roles in romance films, whether comedy or tragedy.

Still, she soldiered on. Her impersonation of an Eskimo in The Alaskan received a nod from Variety: “Anna May Wong as an Indian girl scored nicely.”¹¹ And during the making of Peter Pan, she deepened her friendship with cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose reputation was on a steady rise. Hailing from Anna May’s ancestral home of Canton, Howe came to America in 1904 when his father, a former laborer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, had saved enough money to send for him. Growing up in Pasco, Washington, where his father ran a general store, Howe was the only Chinese boy in town. Wearing a pigtail, he naturally became the butt of jokes and a target for bullying by white children. He could play only with Native American kids, who often asked about his queue or what tribe he belonged to. Small in stature but feisty in spirit, Howe became a bantamweight boxer in the Pacific Northwest after quitting high school.

Lured by reports of opportunities in California, seventeen-year-old Howe arrived in Los Angeles in 1916. He picked up odd jobs—one stint as a delivery boy in a photography studio and another as a bellhop at a hotel in Pasadena. He was fired from the latter position after a fistfight with a Korean employee. Drifting, he spent much time in Chinatown, an area that continued to attract Hollywood filmmakers. A chance encounter with a former boxing opponent, who had become a cameraman doing location shooting in Chinatown, helped Howe land a job as a janitor at the Lasky Studio. Cleaning out the camera room and sweeping the sets every day, Howe was always the last person to leave the studio at night. When he missed his bus, he would simply sleep on the set in a bed where Gloria Swanson played her bedroom scenes.

Inhaling the aura of the star actress might have worked wonders. During the making of the Cecil B. DeMille film Male and Female (1919), starring Swanson, there was a need for an extra man to carry the fourth camera. That was how the former bantamweight boxer emerged from his janitorial closet and became a clapper loader for the cameraman. When DeMille saw Howe, he was tickled by the sight of a puckish Asian, who wore a gaudy floral shirt and held the slate, while gritting a large cigar between his teeth. “I like his face,” said DeMille to his underlings, and he kept Howe on as a camera assistant.

Eventually becoming an award-winning cinematographer—ten Oscar nominations and two Oscars in his long career—Howe in the 1920s was the most sought-after photographer for publicity stills. The secret of his success was his ingenious use of shadows to make actors look their best. It remains Hollywood lore that Mary Minter—an enormously popular actress before a murder scandal sank her career—was so pleased to see Howe make her pale blue eyes “go dark” in photos that she insisted on him as her cameraman for her next films. Having no need for any special effects, Anna May had also ordered some head shots from her illustrious kinsman. By this time, Howe had become so rich and famous that he could afford a $37,000 Duesenberg, and when he gunned it down West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, onlookers would stare in disbelief, wondering what family would let their Chinese houseboy drive around in such an expensive car.¹²

As the cinematographer for Peter Pan, a fairy tale about a boy looking for his lost shadow, Howe worked his magic again and adopted the technique of deep focus to bring out both the foreground and distant planes. In addition, he used the diffusion of light to create “an ethereal quality that helps establish the unreality of the fantasy land.” Gifted with Howe’s elfish sparkle, Peter Pan landed on that year’s New York Times Ten Best Films list.¹³

Besides The Alaskan and Peter Pan, Anna May was also thrilled to be chosen by Columbia Pictures for its Screen Snapshots series, which, as the program notes stated, was intended to “offer a glimpse into the heart of the movie world revealing intimate and unusual views of your favorite stars ‘on location’ and in the privacy of their homes.” The luminaries included D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Sid Grauman, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Anna May’s segment was titled East Is West and ran about one minute. It showed her changing from a Chinese outfit to a Western dress and then doing a spirited Charleston, before sitting down on a swing lounge. As she wipes her brow in a medium-close shot, the title card reads: “Whew! That’s work but I like it.”¹⁴

While Anna enjoyed her work and never tired of fighting against all odds, her personal life as a nineteen-year-old suffered. By Chinese custom, she was old enough to be a bride, and her parents had been nagging her about it. But she was caught in a dilemma, a plight experienced by many Chinese American women navigating a bicultural universe. As Anna May confessed, “Where am I to meet the men who might wish to marry me, from whom I could choose a mate with assurance of happiness? I am tall, and I have large eyes. Both are considered defects in the beauty standards of my race. I am independent, and Chinese men do not like that. Many possible suitors seem afraid of me because I seem too modern. Because of my position, I must be careful with whom I go about.”¹⁵ These factors made it difficult for her to date Chinese men.

As for men of other races, the antimiscegenation laws made such marriages unwise, to say the least. Her friend James Howe had been going out with white women. When he eventually married his beloved Sanora Babb in France, the union was not recognized in the United States, and the couple had to keep it secret for years. Anna May had attracted droves of white men and would continue to do so in the future. In addition to her earlier affairs with Mickey Neilan and Todd Browning, there were rumors of her going out with the actor Brent Romney, and later with the English songwriter Eric Maschwitz. But Anna May was determined not to lose her head. “With American men,” she told an interviewer, “who seem to like me and whose ideals I like and whose friendship I value—well, what’s the use to let one’s heart go when nothing can come of it?”¹⁶

Neither Chinese nor American men, therefore, were feasible options for Anna. And even if she had bisexual desires or experience, she would not let on in a world where she had yet to find her footing or in a profession laden with booby traps. “I have very little social life—am very lonely,” she sighed.¹⁷ In short, Anna May had to keep her own company.