39THE BIG NOWHERE

Portrait of Anna May Wong holding a porcelain cat (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-135267)

WHILE JAMES ELLROY—a childhood witness to the darkest side of his native city when his mother was raped and murdered—dubs Los Angeles “the Big Nowhere” in an eponymous novel, Kevin Starr, the most celebrated chronicler of California dreams, aptly captures the malaise plaguing the postwar city in Embattled Dreams. With a historian’s keen eye, Starr describes that, in the years after the defeat of Hitler and the dropping of atomic bombs, Los Angeles became “a city of cops, crooks, and defense lawyers; a demimonde of rackets, screaming headlines, and politicians on the take; a town of gamblers, guys and dolls, booze and sex; a place for schemers, also-rans, suckers and those who deceived them: the kind of city in which a private detective such as Philip Marlowe might make his way down mean streets in search of the ever-elusive truth and get sapped with a blackjack for his effort by parties unknown.”¹ Los Angeles was fast becoming the new Rome, cursed by all the wealth, sins, and decay that had once defined that ancient imperial city.

As for the nation, postwar America has usually been characterized as a period of unprecedented boom. Thanks to defense spending and hard-won victories in the war, the United States now commanded the world’s strongest military power. The return of veterans benefiting from the munificent GI bills, the construction of interstate highways and public schools, and the manufacture of new cars, track houses, and military weapons, all contributed to a lasting economic growth. With the suburban sprawl, seventy-seven million baby boomers were born into a time capsule featuring white picket fences and postage-stamp lawns—that is, if you were largely Caucasian.

Under the veneer of affluence and stability, however, there lay an underbelly of tension and paranoia. The Cold War would cast a long shadow on the American psyche, and the Korean War opened another festering wound. Haunted by McCarthyism and the lingering legacy of institutionalized racism, America experienced major social unrest and changes, starting with the civil rights movement. Symptomatically, while the Golden Age of Television painted whitewashed images of America with family-friendly shows such as Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy, noir fiction and films suggested that there are always dead bodies hidden somewhere. On the silver screen alone, The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), The Third Man (1949), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), and Dial M for Murder (1954) were all made during this postwar period. Similarly, the popularity of Confessional poets and the Beats, such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg, also showcased America’s addiction to dark matters like suicide, depression, and dysfunctional relationships, reflecting a spiritual exhaustion from the increasingly commercialized, militarized, and technocratic world.

For Anna May, the end of World War II portended a period that began in euphoria but quickly turned into depression and decline. Celebrating the victory like everyone else in the country, she was especially happy to see Richard return safely from the war. Unlike his older brother, James, whose education at the University of Southern California Anna May supported, Richard would attend the same institution and study photography courtesy of Uncle Sam. The overnight mushrooming of aerodynamics and defense plants in Southern California brought workers from all over the country, creating acute housing needs in the area. Consequently, Anna May’s apartment complex was fully occupied, providing her with a steady income. No fan of housekeeping, she decided to put the property on the market to cash in on the real estate boom. After the for-sale sign was up for a month, she had several prospective buyers, but she did not like any of the philistines. Then one day a windstorm blew down the sign. Superstitious like her film characters, she took it as an omen not to sell and decided to continue to live contentedly as a landlady.²

As someone who had debuted on Hollywood’s social scene at those wild soirees at Alla Nazimova’s 8080 Club, Anna May, in her forties, was essentially all partied out. Even before the war, when her film career had begun to plateau and the phone got quiet, she had done a little soul-searching. “I know that when I used to go to many big parties, I found that I was talking too much,” she once confessed to a journalist. “There is an atmosphere at many big affairs that is almost malicious. Light, gay but malicious gossip is the spice of the evening.… You think of something smart, something witty, something not quite kind about a figure in the public eye or a mutual acquaintance or someone connected with pictures, if you are in pictures. At the moment, you are amusing, gay; you make people laugh and they look at you admiringly for the time being, or they seem to do so. I have done things like that, and afterward I have suffered terribly because of what I had said. I’ve wished the words unsaid, but I couldn’t unsay them. So, I do not go to many big parties now.”³

The lull in Anna May’s social life, resulting from her growing unease with Tinseltown gossip and gabble, was in fact symptomatic of a far more pervasive issue in Hollywood: ageism. Hollywood has never been kind to aging actors; actresses, in particular, bear the brunt of age discrimination. “The camera was a cruel observer,” writes Jeanine Basinger in her canonical work, The Star Machine, “and it saw age: wrinkles, thickness, the loss of that glistening shine of the first blush of ripe sexuality.”⁴ In a culture obsessed with youth, women are subject to even stricter standards of beauty than men, giving credence to Meryl Streep’s outcry that “once women passed childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”⁵

In fact, female stars often face “double jeopardy,” a sociological concept originally introduced to describe the combined effects of sexism and racism on the experiences of minority women. Scholars have argued that the joint effects of gender and racial biases tend to be “more deleterious than the sum of their separate effects.” Applied to Hollywood, double jeopardy means that the combination of ageism and sexism has made aging female stars far more susceptible to neglect and downright erasure than their male counterparts.⁶ According to studies based on data available from silent Hollywood to the present day, there is a persistent age gap between female and male stars. One study shows that the average age of female stars in 1917 was 24.6, as opposed to 33.9 for males. A century later, in 2021, the average age for lead females increased to 35, while it rose to 42 for males. In the 1950s, the decade in which Anna May saw her career grinding to a halt, the median age for female stars was 32 or 33 years, with a quarter of the top roles going to actresses under the age of 27. According to Robert K. Fleck and F. Andrew Hanssen, not only do female stars tend to be younger than their male counterparts, they also start and finish their careers at substantially earlier ages: “At the beginning of their careers women in their early 20s received 80% of the leading film roles; by age 30 it was 40%; but past age 30, women only had 20% of the leading roles while men had 80%.” The controversy over the Academy Award nominations in 2020 was particularly illuminating: For the nominees in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories, there was a 21.6-year gender age gap—61.3 years in median age for men and 39.8 for women. Every study, every iteration of facts, reveals that there is a specter of ageism that continues to haunt Hollywood’s women, creating a revolving door of youth churning endlessly through the movie grist mill.⁷

Even the biggest stars are not immune to the impact of double jeopardy. The handful of actresses able to defy Hollywood’s time machine have become true legends: Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and, more recently, Meryl Streep.⁸ Most of the other so-called yesterday’s glamour queens were not so lucky. Although Marlene Dietrich, after turning fifty, did appear in a few unforgettable movies, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) and Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the Blonde Venus became mostly a cabaret artist from the 1950s to the 1970s, charming the crowds with her musical talents and vaudeville skits. The same situation occurred for Mae West, the so-called sex goddess of the 1930s, who in her middle years tried to maintain her Aphroditic image by performing on stage in Las Vegas and on Broadway, peddling naughty jokes and barroom humor amid a squad of scantily clad musclemen in various states of adoring repose. Greta Garbo, born in the same year as Anna May, virtually disappeared from the screen after Two-Faced Woman in 1941, when she was only thirty-six—although, in her case, much of this was self-imposed. Lana Turner did beat the rap, if you will, and enjoyed a miraculously long career. But after a yearlong scandal in 1958, her triumphant comeback in Imitation of Life (1959) was riddled with the age question. In this Douglas Sirk satire of the racial complexities of American life, thirty-eight-year-old Turner, no longer the fresh-faced “sweater girl” discovered at fifteen while playing hooky from Hollywood High, inhabited the role of Lora Meredith, a late-blooming stage actress on Broadway. As Steve, the leading man, bluntly says to Lora, “Time isn’t on your side.” It was a brutal reminder more for Lana than for Lora—by then, as Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair point out in their study of Hollywood in the 1950s, “the bombshell baton was being passed to younger stars like Marilyn Monroe.”⁹

Hollywood’s most poignant portrayal of its own chronic ageism is Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Starring Gloria Swanson, the now-classic film tells the story of Norma Desmond, once a screen celebrity in the silent era and now an aging recluse hiding out in a decrepit mansion, attended to by a butler named Max, who is, in fact, her ex-husband and a failed director. Childless, her only other companion is a pet monkey, which has just died. Forgotten by the world, Norma whiles away her lonely hours by relishing old memories, rewatching her old films, playing cards with over-the-hill “waxworks,” and daydreaming about her glorious return to the big screen. Into this crumbling palazzo of delusions enters Joe Gillis (William Holden), a young and struggling screenwriter on the run from repo men, intent on reclaiming his car. In Joe, Norma thinks she has found the perfect man who can not only rekindle her love life but also reboot her film career. But Joe finds Norma’s romantic-turned-obsessional attraction creepy and her desire for a cinematic comeback delusional. “You’re a woman of 50,” he yells at Norma. “Now grow up!” Echoing Steve’s snide remark to Lora/Lana, Joe’s words actually reveal his own hypocrisy: Over thirty, he is not really a budding young thing himself, yet he is infatuated with twenty-two-year-old Betty Schaefer. Here the ugly truth about Hollywood’s age bias against women is laid as bare as the face of the dead monkey on the table: While it is common to see grizzled men consorting with barely legal-age girls on screen (Humphrey Bogart romancing Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, for example), mature women of Norma’s age are not only not depicted as romantic, but rather as histrionic and pathetic.¹⁰ As Joe, reflecting the biases of the time, quips again, “There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.” Predictably, the story of Sunset Boulevard begins and ends tragically. Consumed with jealousy and desperation, Norma shoots Joe dead near the pool. Then she descends her grand staircase, ready for her “close-up,” accompanied by the swirling music adapted for the score from the mad scene of the Richard Strauss opera Salome.

Notably, it was an outsider such as Wilder, a German émigré, who was able to shed light on the darker side of the world’s grandest Dream Factory. An insider like Louis B. Mayer, for instance, was furious at Wilder for making the exposé. The MGM mogul allegedly threatened to run the former Berlin taxi dancer out of Hollywood in tar and feathers. If we look closely, it is not hard to see why the Tinseltown elders felt so scandalized by Sunset Boulevard—it cut too close to the truth. In fact, several of the actors play themselves in the film, as if this were in part a thinly veiled documentary, or a wax museum display of Old Hollywood: The comedic genius Buster Keaton, for example, appears as himself, with his facial features ravaged by time and alcoholism. The same with Cecil B. DeMille, a little stooped in the shoulders, while still dominating as the big boss. Erich von Stroheim, playing Max, is also reprising a version of himself as the director who had made some of the earliest Swanson flicks. Even Hedda Hopper, the imperious gossip columnist, cameos as herself, calling her paper’s copy desk from Norma’s bedside phone to dictate her predictably sensationalized lines.¹¹

The ultimate verisimilitude in Sunset Boulevard is, of course, the extent to which Norma Desmond’s story resembles Gloria Swanson’s life. Not only did many props used in the film come from Swanson’s private collection—including publicity photos, film stills, decorations, and artworks—but key facts were also borrowed from the career of the silent-film star. Born in the penultimate year of the nineteenth century, Swanson debuted on screen at the tender age of fifteen and worked at the Essanay Studio alongside Charlie Chaplin in Chicago before arriving in Hollywood. After several slapstick roles in Mack Sennett Studio productions, she moved on to Famous Players–Lasky and began her long professional relationship with Cecil B. DeMille, who helped turn her into a silent-screen star. One of the most bankable stars of her epoch, she had the audacity to turn down a million-dollar-a-year contract with Paramount to join United Artists in 1925. Her performance in Sadie Thompson (1928), which garnered her a Best Actress nomination for the first Academy Award, represented her crowning achievement in the silent era. However, the combination of Hollywood’s transition to sound, her repeated failures in marriage, and her physical aging left a shining star of the previous decade struggling to find film jobs in the 1930s.¹² Not yet forty, she became, in Ross Macdonald’s hard-boiled, sexist lingo of the time, “a woman on her way out.”¹³ Like Norma Desmond, Swanson also dreamed of a comeback. After a fifteen-year hiatus, her opportunity finally arrived when Wilder was getting ready to make what would be widely interpreted as a cinematic indictment of the company town for its disgraceful treatment of the distaff population, who had always, as the Chinese would say, “held up half the sky.”

Like Swanson, and her doppelgänger, Desmond, Anna May was seen as having passed her prime by conventional Hollywood standards. Not exactly trying to be twenty-five again, she was nonetheless eager for imaginative and rewarding work in the postwar era. To seek relief from the doldrums in her career and life, she studied drawing and costume design with Hugo Ballin, a famous artist and muralist who lived across the canyon from her in Pacific Palisades. She learned to draw facsimiles of the female form. Increasingly interested in the subject, she even considered enrolling at one of LA’s art institutes but decided against it due to the number of courses required to get through the program.

Like fishing out of season, sometimes a movie gig, albeit not the expected kind, would nibble at the line. In 1948, Anna May was tapped by the director Arthur Lubin to cameo in Impact (1949). Starring Brian Donlevy and Helen Walker, the film was a noirish story of infidelity, murder, and courtroom drama that purported to be in the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice or The Lady from Shanghai, but it had little of their artistry. Set in San Francisco with an interlude in small-town Idaho, the film cast Anna May once again in a subservient role, as Su Lin, a timid Chinese maid struggling with the English language, while Philip Ahn played her uncle. Coincidentally, Su Lin, as noted earlier, also happened to be the name of the first panda cub brought to the United States from China in 1936. It was a humiliating role for a global star who was now regarded as a washup. In fact, the part originally called for a Swedish maid, but the character’s nationality was altered to take advantage of the setting of San Francisco’s Chinatown—a favorite locale for film noir, as it had been for early movies, to evoke a mysterious, sinister ambience. In the story, the detective has to comb through the rabbit warrens in Chinatown in order to locate the missing key witness named after a panda. Sensing the irony, Anna May quipped that as much as she was happy to see the director letting a Chinese play a Chinese part for a change, she would not have minded impersonating a Swede and returning the favor after Warner Oland had played so many Chinese roles.¹⁴ Despite the impressive lineup, Impact was, as Harrison’s Reports put it, “hampered by a long drawn-out story.” The New York Times considered the leading man as having “all the animation and charm of an automaton” and the female lead as convincing as Idaho’s most famous crop. Passing over the Chinese maid in its review, the paper labeled the film “a dull thud.”¹⁵

Philip Ahn and Anna May Wong in Impact, 1949 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

Unsurprisingly, getting a bit part did little to boost Anna May’s confidence. In some ways, she came to share Norma Desmond’s situation: There was always talk of a new scheme, something stewing, a magic pill to get one’s mojo back, making a triumphant return to the big screen. But then nothing would pan out; everything fizzled like foaming bubbles in a surging sea, after the mermaid disappeared. One recurrent thread was the promise of a television series. As an actor who had made a successful transition from silent films to talkies two decades earlier, Anna May now lived through another seismic shift in the film industry: Television was drastically changing the cultural landscape of America. After attaining the highest rate of theater attendance in 1946, Hollywood was dismayed to see shrinking box-office returns in the following years, realizing that movies were losing patronage for the first time since the Great Depression.¹⁶ Television programs began to cut into the lion’s share of the entertainment business that had been enjoyed by Hollywood moguls for decades. As Samuel Goldwyn admitted begrudgingly in 1949, “It is a certainty that people will be unwilling to pay to see poor pictures when they can stay home and see something which is, at least, no worse.”¹⁷ Always alert to any new streak in the cinematic Klondike, many studios began to produce programs exclusively for television.

Unlike Norma, who frowned upon the new medium by quipping, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” Anna May saw the future in television. She understood that whether one liked it or not, television was here to stay. Compared to live theater, which uses crude lighting and thus exposes signs of aging (a major concern for her now), she thought the filming of television programs could give an actor an opportunity to correct any fluffs.¹⁸ Her first television work was in the fall of 1951, when the Dumont Network offered her a thirteen-week series. According to Conrad Doerr, who was renting the room above her garage (sort of reprising a scene in Sunset Boulevard, where Joe lives in a room above Norma’s garage), Anna May had some friends over at her place on the night before leaving for the East to do the series. In the middle of the dinner, she fell apart, “terrified not only over returning to work but over doing so in a new medium.”¹⁹ The series that eventually was produced —The Gallery of Mme. Liu-Tsong—had twelve episodes. Using Anna May’s Chinese name directly in its title, the show featured her as the owner of an art gallery who gets dragged into an international intrigue of crime and mystery. A pioneer in the early days of live television, Dumont broadcast programs in New York City and Washington, DC. The first episode of The Gallery of Mme. Liu-Tsong aired on September 3, and the last on November 21, 1951. Unfortunately, when the Dumont Network folded in 1956, its kinescope archives were dumped into New York’s East River, depriving us of any opportunity to assess the series.²⁰ If a contemporary review was any indication, though, Anna May’s first venture into TV-land was not too successful. As Variety opined, the show was “strictly out of the pulp mill.… Neither the acting nor the direction contributed toward its enhancement as a major TV contender.”²¹

At the same time that the television series failed to provide Anna May with a comeback, she hit menopause at the age of forty-seven. As she confided to Fania Marinoff, it was a very strange experience. She did not know how she was going to feel from one day to another, as the physical changes in her body affected her mentally and worsened her depression.²² Consequently, she turned to the bottle. According to Doerr, his Chinese landlady “was often tipsy during the day, frequently buying bottles of vodka.”²³ In the amphetamine-ridden, pill-popping milieu of Hollywood, where some were overworked under pressure and others became dejected for lack of work, Anna May was certainly not alone in seeking the consolation of Bacchus. As Josef von Sternberg, by no means a teetotaler himself, observed in his memoir, “A clear record of the trail left by those who formed the tradition of the theater today favors the impression that there was a constant leaning toward inebriety.”²⁴ Warner Oland was under the influence of alcohol most of the time when he was impersonating the amiable Chinese detective. In fact, his slurred diction resulting from drinking became in essence part of the character. As success and stress continued to build, his drinking problem had gotten worse till he walked off the set one day and died of alcoholism at age fifty-eight. Even more famously, Judy Garland struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction throughout her career and would perish at the age of forty-seven. In fact, on the set of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Garland’s fellow actors portraying the Munchkins were a wild, booze-guzzling bunch. In other words, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories were as much a self-mocking portrait of a down-and-out alcoholic hack as a composite profile of Hollywood down-and-outers.

Daily inebriety, compounded by depression and stress, finally sent Anna May to the hospital on December 10, 1953. The diagnosis was a serious liver disease called Laennec’s cirrhosis, and her doctor at Santa Monica Hospital had to transfuse eight pints of blood into her. Upon release, and on the doctor’s recommendation, she checked herself into Sierra Madre Lodge, a sanitorium in Pasadena. Located at the foot of mountains on Barhite Street and surrounded by picturesque trees, the convalescent home was run by a Dr. Pearson, who sounded like a character out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Keeping a regular office in the valley, the doctor would check on his lodgers on Mondays and Wednesdays, and sometimes on Saturdays if a new quarry arrived. The capacity of the lodge was kept tidily at nineteen, so that the patients would feel neither crowded nor neglected. Some of them would even go to work during the day while taking their meals and treatments at the lodge, as well as sleeping there at night. With no work to go to, Anna May spent her days sleeping in, lazing under a palm tree, writing letters to friends, and eating plenty of nutritious food professionally prepared by the doctor and his staff.²⁵ Of course, Anna May was not alone among artists of her generation who resorted to substance abuse and were consequently institutionalized at mental asylums or rehab centers.

Sierra Madre provided Anna May a much-needed respite from the fruitless rush and mental wear and tear. But the expenses for the hospital and the sanitorium were shockingly steep. To cover the bills, she was forced to part with a few pieces of fine jewelry. She discreetly asked friends for help, hoping that the forthcoming Valentine’s Day would make it easier to dispose of the rings and watches, which would make ideal gifts for young women. Eventually, an old acquaintance running a jewelry shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel came to her rescue by accepting her prized items on consignment. But the jewelry sale failed to relieve her other financial burdens, such as keeping a sizable house on two lots in a prime location and paying skyrocketing property taxes. Richard had been working the swing shift at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica to save money for a Chinese gift shop. The siblings talked over the situation and decided to sell the empty lot to developers, while retaining the apartment complex.

With the real estate boom still going strong, the sale was quick and lucrative, but it greatly upset Anna May to see her own hacienda torn apart. The new owners immediately went into action, bringing in roaring bulldozers and chopping down majestic old trees. Even worse, the workers left the uprooted trees lying in the yard for days. The dead limbs flapping in the wind haunted Anna May, delivering a dreadful reminder of her evaporating fame and faded glamour.