13VAUDEVILLE

THE CINEMA, said the French symbolist poet Paul Valéry, diverts the spectator from the core of his being. What justifies such a striking insight, as the great German Jewish émigré Siegfried Kracauer explains in Theory of Film, is that “film clings to the surface of things.” Rather than being introspective with spiritual concerns, a film tempts us with “kaleidoscopic sights of ephemeral outward appearances.” This is why, Kracauer asserts, “Many people with strong cultural learnings scorn the cinema.”¹

Anna May Wong cigarette card, late 1920s (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

Such observations would resonate with Anna May in 1925, as she, turning twenty, felt a personal crisis brewing. “It is hard to get into the pictures, but it is harder to keep in them,” she stated. “Of course, it is nice enough if one gets a five-year contract as some of the actors do, but freelancing which I do, is not easy. You see there are not many Chinese parts.”² The biggest Chinese part that year was the beguiling character of Charlie Chan, newly born in the Earl Derr Biggers novel The House Without a Key and immediately becoming a sensation. But, as we know, the role of a bumbling Chinese sleuth would eventually go to white actors, following Hollywood’s enduring tradition of yellowface.³ Unable to secure a female lead role since The Toll of the Sea, Anna May felt that she had had enough of teaching white actresses how to use chopsticks. She wanted to strike out on a new path in acting: live theater.

“I have always wanted to act in serious plays,” she said. “In the studio one can act only before the other workers, and can’t get the effect.”⁴ Indeed, in film acting, one does it for the mechanical eye of the camera, which breaks down the human wholeness into fragments, for scenes are shot separately without following any narrative sequence and then put together afterward. “The film actor,” opines V. I. Pudovkin, “is deprived of a consciousness of the uninterrupted development of the action in his work.… The whole image of the actor is only to be conceived as a future appearance on the screen, subsequent to the editing of the director.”⁵ Anna May would agree with such a view. “I think I like the stage better,” she said.⁶

On January 21, 1925, Anna May debuted as a “speaking actress” at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. In front of a full house, she sang a Chinese lullaby and a popular ditty called “Sally.” Her first vaudeville act, exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle, was “pure delight.” After all her pantomime and soundless gesticulations in silent pictures, she felt enlivened by having a voice in front of a responsive crowd that cheered or jeered. Before that night was over, she had already thought about adding more routines: “If I go on with the act, and I think now that I shall, I will put in a Nautch dance after the lullaby, and perhaps do a short dramatic recitation. I love dramatic things, and I have picked out several little poems that I should like to do.”⁷ Always a quick study, Anna May worked hard to expand her repertoire. According to Moon Kwan, a Chinese poet moonlighting in Hollywood, Anna May asked him to teach her how to play the yueqin, the Chinese banjo. She explained that it was no novelty to play the piano or violin in a vaudeville act, but the Chinese banjo might do. And she also learned from Kwan how to recite classical Chinese poems. Later, on stage and screen, Anna May would be seen plucking an outlandish moon-shaped instrument, humming lines from Li Po in Cantonese.⁸

After her successful debut, Anna May went on tour with a vaudeville troupe in the spring of 1925. The group she joined, the Los Angeles–based Cosmic Production Company, consisted mostly of veteran actors who alternated between stage and screen, including the company’s president, Harry Tighe. As we know, many of the film actors in the silent era had roots in theater, including Alla Nazimova, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Before becoming the world’s most famous on-screen tramp, Charlie Chaplin was an obscure English vaudeville actor, and his coach, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, also began as a comedian known for rollicking skits and gags. Among Anna May’s colleagues at the Cosmic, leading man Bryant Washburn was a variety comedy star who had begun his career with the Essanay Studio in 1911 and was known for his “Skinner” character. Ruth Stonehouse, starting out at eight as a dancer in variety shows, had appeared in no fewer than fifty shorts and feature films. And Helen Holmes, hailing from Indiana, had been a photographer’s model before plodding the well-trodden path from Broadway to Hollywood.⁹

On February 14, 1925, bidding farewell to the snowcapped Sierra Nevada, the motley crew of the Cosmic, dubbed “Bryant Washburn and His Hollywooders,” left California for the Midwest. First stop: Kansas City, Kansas. Their advance man had tried to drum up interest by billing the show as “an extravaganza the likes of which the municipality of Kansas City had never seen.” The chosen venue was the city’s august convention hall, a fireproof stone citadel that had recently hosted a series of rousing Ku Klux Klan rallies. On opening day, a marching band and a police squad escorted the performers to the hall, but that great pre-show fanfare failed miserably—or perhaps the place was cursed by the hooded Klansmen. When the troupe arrived at the convention hall, they were shocked to see that, except for a few eager journalists, the eighteen-thousand-seat theater was empty. But the proverbial show must go on; Li Po would wait for no one. The troupe performed for free to entertain the members of the marching band and the local constabulary, who were unfortunately keener on sniffing out the trails of bandits like Charles (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd than on listening to an ancient Chinese poet insinuating in his singsong tongue.¹⁰

The next two stops—Atchison, Kansas, and Omaha, Nebraska—yielded moderate ticket sales, but then the troupe got a free ride to jail. Thanks to a major screwup by the company manager, the troupe left Omaha without paying the hotel bill. When they crossed the state line and arrived in Des Moines, Iowa, the local police were waiting. Rather than being escorted by the uniformed officers with the festive accompaniment of a marching band, Anna May and her associates were marched off in shame to the jail. Eventually the hotel bill was paid off, and the troupe members were released from jail. When the humiliated performers contemplated suing the hotel for defamation and false arrest, Harry Tighe issued an apology instead, taking full responsibility for the mishap. Obviously, the company was on its last legs. Still, the group soldiered on, traveling to Illinois and then Michigan. Their fifty-minute program at an auditorium in Berwyn, Illinois, received a positive review in Variety, with a special mention of the Chinese greenhorn: “Anna May Wong scored the individual hit of the turn with two pop numbers, utilizing the Oriental garb. She possesses a good delivery and would survive in the varieties.” Nonetheless, after their last show in Detroit in April, the group disbanded.¹¹

Besides the good coverage in the trade paper, Anna May could take consolation in the fact that she had picked up vaudeville as a step toward real theatrical work. It was meant to be a transition to something more serious, a higher art. Such a dream eventually would come true—not in America, but abroad. Even then, though, vaudeville would remain a signature repertoire of Anna May’s career as a performer. In subsequent years, she would continue to pick up these gigs to tide herself over during fallow seasons of film acting. And when she finally did appear again on screen, the persona of a vaudeville girl, doing a Nautch dance or plucking a yueqin, would come to the aid of her various characterizations in the pivotal year of 1927.