34THESE FOOLISH THINGS

DESPITE WORLD WAR II still being three years away, November 1936 proved to be an anxious time in twentieth-century history. The noose of fascism tightened on Spain as planes of the German Luftwaffe, acting in support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, began striking Madrid. No doubt, China felt more vulnerable, as Japan and an increasingly militaristic Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in the middle of the month, while Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected president in one of the biggest landslides in American history, signaling the utter despair of a country in the throes of a punishing Depression.

Anna May was not totally unaffected by these developments. After being marooned for two weeks in Honolulu due to a maritime strike, she returned to California on November 28, 1936, determined to do something in support of China. In a Paramount press release, she announced, “Though I am American born of American born parents, I am a full-blooded Chinese and more Chinese than ever.”¹ However, such a sentiment of divided belonging would appear suspect in the eyes of highly racialized American law.

Arriving at the Port of San Francisco, Anna May had to pass through Immigration on the dreaded Angel Island. Dubbed the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island had been a detention station for Chinese immigrants for decades. After the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which effectively banned immigration of Chinese laborers, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had a hard time preventing the arrival of “paper sons,” who claimed to be direct descendants of native-born citizens and therefore could enter the country to become citizens, according to the Fourteenth Amendment. Villages in southern China, like Anna May’s ancestral home, Chang On, developed a sophisticated paper-son slot system and sent over thousands of people every year to claim nativity. Faced with such wide-scale immigration fraud, one federal judge once commented, “If the story told in the courts were true, every Chinese woman who was in the United States twenty-five years ago must have had at least 500 children.”² In order to stop the trend, the INS set up the Angel Island detention center to process all Chinese entering the country from the West Coast. The new arrivals would undergo medical examinations and lengthy interrogations, and many were kept in jail-like wooden barracks, often more suited for a tiger or a panda. (And, interestingly, the first panda had just arrived in the United States in 1936, a cub named Su Lin, triggering a still-unabated American obsession with giant pandas.)³ Even Ai-ling Soong, the eldest of the three sisters of the influential Soong family, was detained for two weeks in 1904 in a cell block that was, in the words of an immigration officer, “not fit for a self-respecting animal.” It was an ordeal Ai-ling would not easily forget, and President Theodore Roosevelt heard an earful of her complaint when she visited Washington a year later.⁴

As a native-born American citizen carrying a re-entry certificate, which she had taken the trouble to obtain prior to her trip, Anna May would not have to suffer the same kind of indignities as most other Chinese passengers. However, because an impostor had stolen her brother James’s identity, she had to spend hours answering questions about each of her family members, identifying them in photos, and filling out forms.⁵ The lengthy grilling brought back the memory of her last run-in with immigration officials. In 1932, when she was going to Canada for a vaudeville tour, Anna May made the mistake of stepping off the train in a border town and was stopped by Canadian Customs. Consequently, her tour group had to continue without her, while she traveled alone for a few hundred miles to enter Canada from a designated port of entry.⁶ The cold shoulders she received from the INS officers in 1936 was a sobering reminder of the benighted status of Chinese in North America.

Settling back into her old apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, Anna May unpacked several trunks of gorgeous Chinese clothes and other goods she had brought back from the trip. At the same time, she started to dispose of her European clothes and other tchotchkes. A sartorial change is always a sign of mental shift. Meanwhile, her father asked her to get rid of some property owned by the family. For the first few months, life was fraught with little things. And then came an unpleasant surprise.

On March 23, 1937, Anna May received an extortion letter demanding $20,000 under a threat of disfigurement, for acid had become a not-infrequent tactic used by American mobsters to disfigure a face or other body parts. We should not forget that, in Daughter of the Dragon, Ling Moy exacts her vengeance on the young Petrie by threatening to disfigure his fiancée with corrosive acid. And what would be portrayed in Touch of Evil (1958), in which Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) is attacked with acid but fights off his assailant, touched upon a major theme in movies and a huge concern for actors in those decades. Especially for women, the threat of disfigurement was all too horrifically real. The fact that, as late as 2012, Saving Face, a documentary about acid attacks on Pakistani women, would win an Academy Award speaks to the pervasiveness and longevity of this evil tactic.

In addition to disfigurement, the extortionist also threatened to maim Anna May’s father and harm those close to her. A similar note was sent to the producer David Selznick, warning him that his two sons would be crippled and blinded if he did not fork over the same amount. Coincidentally, the Golden Age of Hollywood also happened to be a golden time for American mobsters to place chokeholds on the big film studios and manage to extort millions of dollars from Hollywood.⁷ But it seemed that organized crime was not behind the scheme this time. Los Angeles Police Department investigators determined that, rather than being a mobster, the perpetrator had to be a “movie maniac,” for the letters showed a distorted mind fascinated by Hollywood. The letters outlined a film scenario, a proposed cast of biblical characters, and a pipedream that MGM would produce it. To prove his credibility, the writer also claimed responsibility for the attempted assassination of Burton Fitts, district attorney of Los Angeles County, who was shot in the arm while riding in a car. “I can strike quick like I did to Fitts,” the writer bragged. “Had I desired to kill him I could have done so. Look at him; that will be you if you do not comply.” To add more twists to the story, the notes stated that a local chiropractor, Dr. E. J. Foote, had been chosen to play Jesus Christ in the imaginary movie and would be the designated person to receive the funds, while the Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who had orchestrated her own abduction in 1926, was said to be among the cast as well. When the investigators approached Dr. Foote, it appeared that he too had received a threatening letter, to which the signature “The Gang” was attached.⁸

Two weeks later, Anna May received a second letter that read, “You are not yet safe. What is money compared with your life?” It was simply signed “SHE.” Strangely, this note, as if part of an early Hitchcock psychodrama, was written by perforating cheap writing paper with the point of a pen, each hole being punched into legible form. The investigators believed that the second note was sent by a copycat who had learned from news reports about the first letters. The FBI stepped in, and the agents interviewed Anna May and others involved. J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s director, who had a perversely prurient interest in the lives of Hollywood Babylonians, demanded daily reports on the developments. But the investigation went nowhere, and the case eventually was dropped.⁹

Anna May Wong threatened, 1937 (Courtesy of Herald Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)

Understandably, Anna May was rattled by the extortion threats. Usually cool and calm, she began having trouble sleeping at night. A press photo shows a visibly distraught Anna May holding the wildly scribbled threat letter with one hand and nursing an apparent headache with the other. Looking askance pensively, she wears a worried expression with bags under her Bette Davis–like eyes. Accordingly, she avoided her Wilshire Boulevard apartment and went to stay with friends, preferring to spend each night in a different Hollywood home. The only silver lining was that, as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek newspaper article put it, she acquired a “boyfriend”—a police guard. Lieutenant W. E. Engstrom stood six-feet-four in his stockinged feet. The Caucasian officer said very little, but he carried a gun on his right hip. “Wherever Miss Wong goes, he goes. He always sits so that he can watch the doors and windows.” Everyone wanted to give parties to cheer her up, but her new “beau” put a crimp in all social activities, stopping her from going to costume parties or even to Chinatown for dinner.

“Chinatown! Yeah, where there’s enough dark alleys to hide an army,” he snorted. “You wouldn’t like to go down to the waterfront and play bridge on the docks, would you?”

Being a good sport under duress, Anna May hassled a consent out of him to go to dinner with her at a Japanese restaurant, where guests removed their shoes and sat on the floor with tiny tables. “If you’ve got a hole in your sock,” she teased him, “we can get you some slippers.”

The scene appears almost comical. Imagine the burly policeman trying to squeeze his huge bulk under the short-legged tables without bumping his knees. Having now tortured her own giant cop for hours, she relented at the end of the dinner, “I guess you’ve suffered enough to even the score between us.”

They both roared with laughter.¹⁰

While the bodyguard story was fodder for a good laugh, there was real romance blooming in Anna May’s life. The lyricist of the popular song “These Foolish Things,” Eric Maschwitz was a noted British playwright working for the BBC. A charming, Cambridge-educated man with a rictus, Maschwitz had first met Anna May in the early 1930s. Years later, Maschwitz, in his memoir No Chip on My Shoulder (1957), reminisced fondly that his younger self had been smitten by the woman who had a lasting influence upon his life: “I can see her now, as she opened the door of her apartment to us, a slender exquisite person in a white blouse and long black skirt. I could not have known then what her friendship one day was going to mean to me but I was entirely enchanted and so overwhelmed with shyness that, as far as I remember, I hardly spoke a word.”¹¹

In the spring of 1937, just when the extortion episode was winding down, Maschwitz received a six-figure offer from MGM to adapt Balalaika, his musical play—which had been running successfully at His Majesty’s Theatre in London—for the screen. MGM invited Maschwitz for a discussion, and he took a four-week leave from the BBC to make the trip to California. After a fourteen-day crossing and an overnight flight from New York to Los Angeles, Maschwitz arrived at the Burbank Airport, where Anna May was waiting for him. In the ensuing days, when he made the rounds of the studios, Maschwitz was fortunate to have Anna May as a duenna of sorts, someone who knew the ins and outs of Hollywood. “In the state of mental confusion into which my various small and sudden success had thrown me,” he recalled, “I was glad of her cool commonsense.” Besides the fat check for his play, MGM also made a handsome offer for Maschwitz to join the pool of writers kept on the company’s regular payroll, a roster that included the then-screenwriter William Faulkner. Tempted, Maschwitz nonetheless hesitated, because it meant he would have to quit not only his job at the BBC but also the London theater milieu. Once again, Anna May helped him get out of his dithering. As Maschwitz wrote, “The Chinese are a remarkable people; everyone should know and love at least one educated Chinese person in their lives. Calmly, kindly, shrewdly, Miss Wong analyzed my situation for me, and as we said goodbye at the airport I knew that my time with the B.B.C. was at an end.”¹²

It was not a long good-bye, at least not yet. After Maschwitz’s departure for Britain, Anna May did some theater work on the East Coast, showing off her newly acquired Chinese wardrobe and musical skills. She performed for a week at Loew’s Capitol Theatre in Washington, and then a week at Loew’s State in New York. Afterward, she beelined across the ocean to London, where Maschwitz was wrapping up his business at Savoy Hill, then the BBC’s headquarters. He took her to see his play Balalaika, after which they went on a quick trip to Paris on July 1, staying at the elegant Hotel Crillon. Unlike most film stars who exploited their romances or scandals for publicity, Anna May was a very private person and kept her love life out of the prying eyes of the public. In the letters to her most frequent confidantes, she mentioned Maschwitz only once in passing.¹³ In fact, Maschwitz at this time was still married to his first wife, Hermione Gingold, although the couple had been apart for some years. It seemed to have been a tragic pattern for Anna May to fall for married men, an eerie reflection of the fate of her lovelorn characters.

After Anna May returned home, Maschwitz soon followed her, arriving in Los Angeles in September. To welcome the newest addition to its New Writers’ Block, MGM sent out a flock of reporters and cameramen to greet him at the airport. But he was happiest to see Anna May, who drove him to the Roosevelt Hotel and then to Culver City, where he reported for duty at the studios. In the following days, she helped him find a house, a charming Spanish bungalow in Beverly Hills, near her Wilshire apartment. He also bought a secondhand black Packard, and, through her connections, hired a chauffeur and servant, a Korean man named John, who was also an excellent cook. As Maschwitz put it with a touch of his wry British humor, “I now had everything that a new young writer could aspire to, apart from a swimming pool and a British butler!”¹⁴

Those were the boom days of the movies, when studios hired writers profligately and seldom had enough, if anything, for them to do. It remains Hollywood lore, even today, that Faulkner, on being told to “go home and take it easy, feller,” packed his bag and returned to Mississippi, while MGM was unaware for months that he had gone missing. With exorbitant time on his hands and a not-insubstantial paycheck, Maschwitz was thoroughly enjoying Southern California in the company of Anna May. The two went sunbathing on the beach in Santa Monica, visited the racecourse at Santa Anita, explored the desert oasis of Palm Springs, flew up to San Francisco, and drove south over the Mexican border to gamble at Tijuana. Hollywood, an artificial Paradise with no water of its own, was a surreal place for the Briton inured to a very different clime. With hyperbolic British overstatement, Maschwitz wrote that it was “a pantomime Garden of Eden where the huge vegetables have no flavor, the giant flowers no perfume! Nevertheless for a while it had the appeal of novelty; I had never known a town so neatly beautiful, nor so rich.” Creating almost parodic images, he described the endless parties, café-crawling, or just “doing the town” in the evening, hitting the Clover Club, Trocadero, Perino’s, Cocoanut Grove, Cock’n Bull, Chasen’s, Tropics, and Seven Seas in the neon moonlight of the Sunset Strip. The couple also dined frequently at Chinese restaurants downtown, allowing him to try his luck with chopsticks and “a few halting phrases in Chinese.” When Maschwitz’s friend and former BBC colleague Val Gielgud (brother of John) came to town for vacation, the trio drove to Santa Barbara for fun, stopping by Charlie Chaplin’s Flying A Studio in downtown, visiting the quaint Danish colony in Solvang, or just doing 90 mph on the highway passing Ventura.¹⁵

All, however, was not well in paradise. Two Pacific storms brought a once-in-a-fifty-year flood to the Los Angeles Basin in early 1938. Maschwitz saw firsthand the devastation caused by floodwaters hurtling down the canyons, ripping houses from their foundations, and sweeping them out to sea. Alarmingly, cracks appeared in the walls of the Hollywood Hills reservoir, and police launches sped through streets to rescue those trapped inside houses. The natural disaster led to the loss of more than a hundred lives and unprecedented damage to the area. Fortunately, Maschwitz’s rental house on the hill was safe—rising water merely submerging the sidewalks and lapping at his front door. Anna May’s Wilshire apartment building also stood unscathed above the deluge.

We do not know whether the storm had anything to do with it, but the novelty began to wear off, and Maschwitz itched for London. In April 1938, as Los Angeles, still caked in mud, was recovering, Maschwitz left for England. At the train station, as if in a cinematic scene, he bade farewell to friends and to the woman who had meant so much to him. “Most of all I hated leaving Anna May,” he confessed in his purplish memoir. “As the reader may have realized, she was somebody very precious to me, a friend, a counselor, a piece of porcelain too delicate for my rough hands to handle with any safety. The bell sounded, the last confused farewells were said, and, all of a sudden, knee-deep in chocolates and novels by Pearl S. Buck, with tears in my eye, I was on my way!”¹⁶

One of Maschwitz’s lyrics memorialized the occasion, for it is widely believed that he had written the song “These Foolish Things” for Anna May, a song rendered timeless by the golden voices of jazz singers from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Nat King Cole:

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces

An airline ticket to romantic places.…¹⁷