22ON THE SPOT

WHEN THE FOUR-FUNNELED Cunarder RMS Aquitania hove into New York’s harbor in late October of 1930, Anna May was astonished to see from the deck that long queues of men were waiting on the street for food and jobs. The bubble of prosperity that had inured the previous decade had now burst; America was in the early throes of the Great Depression. After the 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent failure of 3,600 banks nationwide, millions of people had lost their jobs, in the process sending the unemployment rate up as high as 25 percent. To quote a Chinese saying that would have been familiar to Anna May, “Misery does not travel alone.” That summer, a historically severe drought had hit the Southern Plains, killing people, livestock, and crops across the region and leading to a prolonged Dust Bowl era. Unprecedented economic woes had dug deep into the pockets and the conscience of the nation.

Responding in the only way they knew, politicians panicked and turned to protectionism in order to stave off further losses of American jobs. In June, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, increasing tariffs on foreign imports. Reluctantly signing the bill into law, President Herbert Hoover also proposed a $150 million public works program to create jobs. In September, ground was broken for the Hoover Dam, outside of Las Vegas, a few months before Nevada legalized casino gambling. A former oasis in the desert along the Old Spanish Trail would soon rise as the world’s capital of sin and entertainment.

Other headlines of the year 1930 included the discovery in February of the planet Pluto by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. Even though Pluto turned out decades later to be a dwarf planet, the discovery inspired Walt Disney to introduce a new animated character, Pluto, as Mickey Mouse’s canine companion. In March, the inventor Clarence Birdseye marketed the first frozen foods, while Babe Ruth signed a two-year contract with the New York Yankees. In May, the Supreme Court ruled against Prohibition, effectively opening the spigot to boost the American spirit, or more functionally to soothe the nerves. In June, a Chicago Tribune reporter was gunned down by the henchmen of Al Capone, a killing that once again reminded the public of the ruthless brutality of the gangster boss, who had orchestrated the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre the previous year. Earlier in the month of Anna May’s return to America, the Philadelphia Athletics had won their second straight World Series after beating the St. Louis Cardinals 7–1 in Game 6. In the movie world, Jean Harlow just had her first major role in Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels. After the film’s release in November, the icon of “Blonde Bombshell” was born, charming millions with her platinum hair and irresistible sensuality.

By no means less attractive or less talented, the Chinese American actress who arrived in New York on this October day of 1930 had become a force to be reckoned with. Having left America as a flapper in chic clothing, Anna May returned as a sophisticated woman attired in elegant European fashions and affecting an upper-class British accent and highborn manners. One journalist claimed that Anna could speak Chinese, French, German, and English fluently and could switch easily from one language to the other. She was also particularly fond of American slang. “When the use of Americanisms seems proper in a situation, she discloses an amazing knowledge of the patois,” the journalist wrote. “She will use a French or German word if it describes a thing better than another language.”¹

While still crossing the Atlantic, Anna May had received a telegram sent from New York by stage director Lee Ephraim, offering her a lead role in Edgar Wallace’s play On the Spot. Though little known today, except as the original screenwriter for the classic film King Kong (1933), Wallace was the most popular British writer during the interwar years. A master of the thriller and crime genres, Wallace wrote more than 170 books, a thousand short stories, and twenty-three plays. He sold two hundred million copies of his works worldwide in thirty languages. Such a stunning output, sustained by copious amounts of caffeine and cigarettes and frenzied work schedules, was not matched by literary quality, and he was considered something of a hack. George Orwell called Wallace a manufacturer of fairy gold. In 1930, though, he was still at the height of his career, with one out of every four books sold in the United Kingdom bearing his name in the title.² In the previous year, after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven of Capone’s rivals were brazenly killed in broad daylight, Wallace visited Chicago to scout for material for his new work. He was shown the Hotel Lexington, Capone’s headquarters; the flower shop where the crime boss’s archrival was “put on the spot”; and the restaurants where warring gangs had settled their scores with machine guns. He was also driven around the old red-light district and the flourishing new bawdy houses in the suburb of Cicero.³

Upon his return to England, Wallace wrote the play On the Spot in four days, crafting a saga of sex and crime involving a “Scarface”-type character, Tony Perelli, and his Chinese mistress, Minn Lee. Starring Charles Laughton as the gangster boss and Gillian Lind in yellowface as Minn Lee, the British play lasted for 342 performances on its initial run in the West End and became Wallace’s greatest theatrical success. Anna May had watched the show in London and even went out to lunch with the portly English playwright. As she recalled the rendezvous, “The exceedingly busy Mr. Wallace, like the eternal beaver he is, could grant me only an hour for lunch. During that time he invented three new plots, two for books and one for a play. He insisted on beginning to work on them at once, knowing that it is always well to follow one path to the end. I’m sure the Son of Heaven had three men in mind when he created Mr. Wallace.”⁴

After its successful run in England, the play traveled to America with a new cast. Engaging Anna May, who had made a splash in Europe and commanded a virtual monopoly on lead Oriental roles, would certainly be a boost for the theatrical production. To Anna May, this would be her first appearance in front of the footlights on the legitimate stage in America. Mindful of fame’s fickleness and uncertain about Hollywood’s reception, despite her overseas successes, Anna May knew the importance of Broadway. Therefore, when Lee Ephraim rushed to the docks to meet her, carrying a script in one hand and a contract in the other, Anna May signed the agreement even before she had cleared customs.⁵ And when Ephraim got a bit overzealous as he explained to her the high stakes of the production, Anna May retorted, “Quite true. But one actor does not make a play.”⁶ At twenty-five, she showed a kind of imperturbability that was equal parts innate personality and affected public persona, a quality quite befitting the character she was going to portray.

A creation of Wallace’s pen, Minn Lee is a small and lovely woman “with slanting brown eyes and a rosebud of mouth. Skin—like satin. When you saw it, you felt it. Her hair, not the blue-black of the Oriental but a sheeny black.”⁷ Born of a white father and a Chinese mother, the half-caste Minn was a Barnard College graduate who carried herself in Chicago’s crime underworld like a pristine lotus flower rising out of mud.⁸ If the playwright’s imagination was obviously tinged with clichés, a New York Times critic was no better in calling Anna May “an inscrutably loyal jade.”⁹ Likewise, during the rehearsal, Ephraim insisted that the Minn character walk “short, hesitant steps,” in the manner of a geisha with bound feet, but Anna May reminded the director that the dainty gaits of the geisha were to be found only in Japan. Always bold to speak her mind in the face of ignorance, she was also well versed in the art of colloquy, doling out wisdom in nuggets of flowery diction like a female Charlie Chan. On the opening night of On the Spot, when the usual jitteriness was palpable among the crew, Anna May told them, “If the play fails, our work merely goes to the four winds.” When the premiere was successful, she said to them, “The gods have indeed been kind to us.”¹⁰

The gods might have been kind to Anna May, but they also had a cruel way of evening out the score. Just as Anna May was receiving a standing ovation at a curtain call in New York on the night of November 11, a tragedy befell her family back on the West Coast. Her mother, Lee Gon Toy, was hit by a car in front of their family laundry on North Figueroa and died from her injuries at the hospital. In those early decades of the twentieth century, most American urban roadways were still designed for foot traffic, not automobiles, leading to a high rate of traffic accidents involving pedestrians. Researchers have reported that between 1930 and 1932 there were sixteen thousand pedestrians killed by cars per year nationwide, accounting for almost 40 percent of all traffic-related deaths (compared to about 14 percent today). According to witnesses, the forty-three-year-old Lee had stepped in front of a passing car driven by a man named Joe Rondini, who was unable to avoid striking her. Anna May’s Jane Eyre nightmare in London had come to fruition.¹¹

In the millennia-old Chinese tradition, it remains every parent’s wish that as they lie dying, their children will sit at their deathbed and hold their hand one last time, just as that parent had once held the children’s hands when they learned to walk. Anna May was traumatized that she could not be at her mother’s bedside. Compounding the situation was the fact that On the Spot had just had a phenomenal run. Leaving the show and returning to Los Angeles for the funeral would be disastrous. Painful as it was, the dutiful daughter could not attend the last rites. She had to mourn her mother from afar, just as her dream had foretold—with the girl weeping under the willows, only able to shed silent tears.