40READY FOR CLOSE-UP

Dragon’s Den, Los Angeles restaurant/tavern (Courtesy of Harry Quillen Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)

CAREENING THROUGH the final years of her life with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Anna May acquired yet a new addiction: television. From 1946 to 1951, the number of television sets in use exploded from six thousand to twelve million. By 1955, half of all American homes had at least one black-and-white TV.¹ Anna May acquired hers in the summer of 1953 and became glued to the little tube, suffering from “televisionitis,” a cultural malady that would one day be famously parodied on yet another television show, The Brady Bunch.

Anna May liked watching old movie reruns on TV, but, unlike Norma Desmond, she would avoid any of her own films—that is, if they were even featured. Perhaps the memories of her movie-star days were too painful. One time when Conrad Doerr offered to take Anna May to a revival of her greatest silent hit, Piccadilly, she emphatically refused, claiming that “she had been in too great an emotional state when that film was made to risk the memories.”² Like ghost towns dotting the Old West, dead mines lie deep in human souls.

On New Year’s Day 1955, right before she turned fifty, Anna May stayed home and watched the Tournament of Roses Parade on TV, followed by the Rose Bowl. A rare rainstorm doused Pasadena all day, putting a damper on the festivities. The parade featured a preview of Disneyland, soon to open its door in Anaheim, with floats that included replicas of the castle, Mickey Mouse, and the Dumbo Flying Elephant ride.³ At the afternoon football match, top-ranked Ohio State fought a muddy battle with USC. In driving rain, slimy muck, and a foggy blur, the Buckeyes trounced the Trojans 20 to 7. Watching the parade and the game from the comfort of her home, Anna May felt lucky that she did not have to go out and get soaked at the stadium.

To cheer herself up, she read The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), by Norman Vincent Peale. Combining the old American dogma of self-reliance and Methodist spiritualism with a dash of Freudian psychiatry, the popular self-help book outsold every nonfiction book except the Bible in midcentury. Anna May read the book several times, finding it to be a great help in ridding herself of nervous tensions and in adopting the right attitude toward life’s infinite problems.

However, no amount of positive thinking could alleviate the annoyance caused by the commotion next door. Having chopped down the trees, the developer who had bought the lot began erecting an eighteen-unit apartment building. Besides the dust and noise, she was also irritated by such seemingly trivial matters as the builder trying to borrow her electricity or placing the workmen’s portable potty alongside her property line.

To escape the hectic daily tempo, Anna May traveled to London in September 1955. Returning to her favorite city for the first time since 1937 re-created some thrills, as well as nostalgia for the bygone years. Staying at a new hotel, The Westbury, near Berkeley Square, she found that postwar London had a new look—familiar streets were still there but far more congested, and many buildings had changed. Her old flame, Eric Maschwitz, who had served in secret intelligence during the war, was now married to his second wife and continued to make a name for himself as a songwriter. Besides meeting old friends, Anna May also attended the theatre, including a British musical and an Agatha Christie mystery. A highlight of the trip was her lunch with Somerset Maugham at the Dorchester Hotel, a rendezvous that would soon pay off. She had also planned to visit Paris and possibly Munich, but four weeks in London had burned a hole in her pocket, and she had to curtail her trip and return to America in October. This would be her last journey abroad.

The sad reality of her inability to travel freely made her next action seem like a reasonable step to take. Upon her return from England, she received a generous offer for her house. As much as she cherished the place she had owned for nineteen years, overhead expenses and rising taxes had become too much for her. Besides, the building was in a sad state and needed repairs of all types. In her unenviable financial situation, the offer was too good to pass up. So, she sold the house and bought a much smaller one at 308 Twenty-first Place, just off San Vicente Boulevard. Richard undertook the herculean task of moving everything, with the help of a brawny boy hired for a couple of Sundays. They also needed to remove the furnishings and appliances in her rental units. As a longtime tenant and friend, Conrad Doerr got the desk that used to belong to Judith Anderson, the star of such noir classics as Rebecca (1940) and Laura (1944). Ever frugal, Anna May traded in four refrigerators and four stoves for a pair of new ones. Richard also brought over many of their rare plants from their old place and wallpapered the new rooms with Japanese grass cloth, providing a nice background for their Chinese paintings and furnishings. To take a break from the frenzy of relocation, Anna May binged on going to the movies and saw three newly released films: Picnic, Court Jester, and The King and I.

As Americans were mesmerized by the film adaptation of the Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, in which Russian-born Yul Brynner impersonated a half-naked, barefooted Siamese king romancing a British governess known simply as “Anna,” Anna May also had a chance that year to titillate TV viewers’ Oriental imagination. Thanks in part to her London lunch date with Somerset Maugham, she landed a gig to play a Chinese mistress in the NBC-TV film The Letter, based on the British writer’s short story and directed by William Wyler. In fact, when Wyler made an earlier version of the film in 1940, starring Bette Davis with the able assistance of Otto Yamaoka, Anna May had been considered for the same secondary role, but she was rejected by Wyler because he thought she was “kind of a sex kitten and too young.”⁴ That film ended up casting the first recipient of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Gale Sondergaard, in yellowface.

Getting redemption sixteen years later, Anna May gave a memorable performance that cemented her legacy as an actress who became known for her prowess in playing powerful, mysterious Oriental roles. The story was set in Singapore—or, as the title card says, “a teeming Oriental city”—where Anglo-European colonialists get rich from “liquid white gold,” i.e., rubber. In a rage of jealousy, Leslie Crosbie (Siobhan McKenna) kills her lover, Geoff Hammond, and then claims that Hammond tried to rape her. Leslie is tried for murder and is about to walk free when a copy of a letter appears that reveals the truth. It is Leslie’s note to Hammond that somehow has fallen into the hands of his mistress, a Chinese woman. In order to suppress the incriminating evidence, Leslie and her lawyer have to bribe the woman with a large sum of money. After her acquittal, Leslie confesses to her husband not only her undying love for the man she has killed, but also the inconvenient truth that her husband’s entire rubber fortune has been spent on the purchase of that letter.

As in Impact, where Anna May’s character as a meek maid holds the key to a mystery, her role of “the other woman” in The Letter is also the linchpin of the entire plot. In the two scenes where she appears, the Chinese woman speaks only two lines in barely comprehensible Malay Chinese, but her expressive eyes and grief-stricken face are as meaningful as theatrical gestures in a Chinese opera. Her dramatic entrance into the back room of a Chinese shop is highly stylized like a noir mystery, her shadow on the floor preceding her figure behind a beaded curtain. “As in the old days,” exclaimed a reviewer for the New York World-Telegram, using stereotypical language to describe an Asian femme fatale, “Miss Wong was beautiful—and savage! Her eyes were dagger points and her silken shoulders quivered with hate.” Assuming a role that was marginal and yet impactful, Anna May continued to radiate her vintage allure.⁵

Following the release of The Letter, Anna May finally fulfilled her longtime wish of presenting the film of her China trip to a national audience. Featured as an episode of the television series Bold Journey, “Native Land” aired on ABC on February 14, 1957. Earlier, during her war relief work, she had screened the footage at fundraisers as Where the Wind Rocks the Bamboo. The new label worked just as well. Displaying scenes of her visits to a tailor shop in Shanghai, a drama school in Peking, and her ancestral village in Canton, the episode was introduced and narrated by Anna May herself.⁶ Sounding rather like Meryl Streep’s magnetic voiceover in the opening scene of Out of Africa (“I had a farm in Africa …”), Anna May’s sotto voce mid-Atlantic accent evoked a sense of nostalgia and affection for a distant land. For many Americans still mourning “the loss of China” to Communism and still reeling from the frenzy of McCarthyism, the country revealed by Anna May on television in 1957 represented an old China a galaxy of light-years away.

Anna May’s excitement over the television show did not last. The tedium of the daily routine soon set in. “Why not, buy a goddamn big car,” as Robert Creeley suggested in a 1955 poem that captured the materialistic gestalt of postwar America.⁷ Indeed, why not? Anna May bought an Oldsmobile in gray and red, the same colors as her house. Richard had begun earnestly pursuing his dream of a gift shop. After a trial period at a local farmers’ market, he finally opened his store, Kim Wong Oriental Specialties, at Barrington Walk in Brentwood. On the day of the grand opening in July 1958, Anna May arrived in her Oldsmobile as the first customer and pretended to make a deal on a brass lotus lamp.⁸ Later on, whenever Richard was away, she would help him by holding down the fort. It is almost too ironic—indeed, outrageous—that a global icon who would be admired by the likes of Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag was now reduced, in effect, to being an old maid running around a small shop with a Chinese feather duster.

In her final years, Chinatown remained Anna May’s most frequent destination, as it had been since the day she had learned to walk. When he was still her tenant, Conrad Doerr remembered seeing his landlady return from Chinatown with bags of groceries and cook a feast in the kitchen, her big pots filled with bits and pieces of things. “Most of it tasted wonderful,” he recalled, “and I soon learned not to ask what I was eating.”⁹

Idle evenings often found the former Daughter of the Dragon relaxing, coincidentally, at a place called the Dragon’s Den. A restaurant and tavern run by Eddy and Sissee, both scions of the See family, the Den was a brick building sloping down a hill, with the sign painted in Chinese and English on the outside wall. Sporting dragon murals and funky music inside, the place, according to Lisa See, had become a haven for gays and lesbians.¹⁰ There Anna May, now a lonely celibate who had once liaised with countless men and occasionally women, could meet old friends like Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son; or James Howe and his Caucasian wife—the interracial couple still hiding their “illegal” union from the authorities in the years before Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that would legalize interracial marriage. In casual sweaters-and-slacks, or occasionally a flashy silk gown, she would eat, drink, smoke, play poker with the boys—all while cracking corny jokes. A veteran of vaudeville, she would blow a smoke ring, let it sashay in the air, and then mutter, “You know, fifty million Chinamen can’t be Wong.” Her favorite joke was about a fisherman catching a beautiful mermaid. After reeling her in, he took a good look at the gorgeous thing and then tossed her back into the sea. A fellow fisherman was surprised, asking, “Why?” He replied, “How?”¹¹

Besides the bottle and these friendships, Anna May found consolation in religion. Attending classes at the Unity School of Christianity in Santa Monica, she felt inspired by the calming and wise words of the minister and teacher Sue Sikking. In 1944, after surviving a near-fatal automobile accident, Sikking had turned to God and founded the Unity by the Sea Church. Since then, she had been an influential evangelist not only to her congregation but also on radio and television, in addition to lecturing all over the world and writing books.¹² To Anna May, Reverend Sikking spoke a simple, sensible, and inspirational language against a madly chaotic world that worshipped Moloch, the demon condemned by Allen Ginsberg in his famous 1956 poem “Howl.” The teachings of Reverend Sikking gave Anna May a happy and joyful outlook on life when she was down and not yet out, depressed by the passing of youth and fame, the flagging of her career, and her deteriorating health.

Perhaps her prayer was answered. Like a flaming sunset, Anna May’s prospects suddenly brightened with a flurry of television and film jobs in the final year of her life. In November 1959, she appeared on the new ABC series Adventures in Paradise, adapted from the popular South Seas stories by James Michener. In two sixty-minute episodes, starring Gardner McKay and veteran actress Paulette Goddard, Anna May played Madame Lu Yang, a moneychanger who operates across the entire Pacific region. Her adept portrayal of a dragon lady with a heart convinced ABC to put her in the long-running Western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. In the “China Mary” episode, while Hugh O’Brian impersonated the legendary rough-and-tumble lawman in Tombstone, Anna May starred as a leader of the Chinese community in the crime-ridden mining town, sort of an older-and-wiser daughter of Fu Manchu trafficking on both sides of the law. The thirty-minute installment—the only episode she was in—gave her ample airtime, and she received excellent reviews.

Anna May’s last film role was in Portrait in Black (1960), directed by Michael Gordon and starring Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn. A noirish melodrama of infidelity, murder, and superficial suspense, the film cast Anna May as a silent housekeeper who has little to do with the story. Appearing in nine scenes, she always hovered in the background, like an extra hired from the street. We may recall that Anna May’s film debut was as an uncredited Chinese lantern carrier in The Red Lantern, a proverbial face-in-the-crowd where she could not even identify herself. Now, after four decades in global cinema, she ended up the same way she had started: Portrait in Black was a portrait of Anna May in absentia. She loomed in the background like those faceless characters with stereotypical Chinese names who populate the hard-boiled world of midcentury film noir and detective fiction, figures who are there for no other reason than to provide an eerie atmosphere or comic relief. Even the most finicky critics felt scandalized by the indignity, with the Variety reviewer, among others, believing that Anna May had “chosen a thankless vehicle.”¹³

Before sailing into the gloaming, Anna May repeated her subsidiary role one more time. In the Barbara Stanwyck Theatre on NBC, she appeared in an episode titled “Josephine Little: Dragon by the Tail.” The story was set in Hong Kong, where Jo Little (Stanwyck), an adventuress born in China of a missionary mother and a newspaperman father, commits petty crimes ranging from cheating at cards to fencing stolen goods. Anna May played Jo’s faithful amah, Ah Sing, who tries hard to keep her impetuous mistress out of trouble. Every time Jo falls victim to a honey-tongued crook, Ah Sing helps her see through the ruse. Impersonating such a woman of wisdom and pragmatism, Anna May, now fifty-five years old, wore long braids and a shapeless servant’s blouse, with crow’s feet clearly stamped around the edges of her haggard face. Such would be our last glimpse of her on the screen during her lifetime. Serendipitously, the woman born at the tail end of the Year of the Dragon would conclude her acting career with a television episode called “Dragon by the Tail.”

In January 1961, when the taped episode was ready to air on NBC, Anna May was spotted by Conrad Doerr at a bank in Santa Monica. According to her former tenant, she looked ill. Sessue Hayakawa, who had regained his corona with the Oscar-nominated film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in which he takes on the role of a ruthless Japanese general, visited his former costar and described Anna May as being “very thin and pale.”¹⁴ In fact, she had come down with a virus before Christmas and had just gotten back on her feet around the New Year. Because of her work in Portrait in Black, she had built a rapport with the producer, Ross Hunter, who had just purchased the rights to Flower Drum Song in order to adapt to the screen the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Hunter had offered Anna May one of the lead roles, as Madame Liang, with the production to begin in February. It was an ideal job for Anna May, to display her consummate skills on both the stage and the screen. Having missed out on The Good Earth, she would now get another shot at starring in a blockbuster Chinese-themed production.

This was not to be. Two weeks after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president of the United States, on the afternoon of February 3, 1961, while she was taking a nap in her Santa Monica home, Anna May unexpectedly died of a heart attack, caused possibly by her chronic liver disease. She was only fifty-six.

The obituaries repeated most of the ethnic tropes that had immured Anna May throughout her career. Time magazine labeled her “the screen’s foremost Oriental villainess,” while the New York Times dubbed her “one of the most unforgettable figures of Hollywood’s great days” and “a movie symbol of ‘the mysterious East.’ ” The Los Angeles Times was the most appreciative of the hometown star, calling her “one of the first to bring the charm of the Orient to the American screen,” “a symbol of Oriental mystery,” and “a beauty of poise and culture.” These major publications poured much ink to describe Anna May’s “exotic” looks in a vernacular typical of the era, dripping in stereotypes. As usual, the New York Times spearheaded the charge, portraying her as “tall, slim and sloe-eyed,” with a complexion of “rose blushing through old ivory,” which “shone on the screen like the texture of an old Ming vase.”¹⁵

None of the eulogies drew attention to the troubling fact that, charming and talented as they said she was, she had been unable to get a meaningful part in any film since 1942. Conveniently consigning her to a bygone era, America had by then moved on with other, obviously younger, female icons or symbols of “the mysterious East.” Two phenomenally successful films, The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Flower Drum Song (1961), marked 1960–61 as the banner year of Hollywood’s Orientalism and led to the meteoric rise of Nancy Kwan and Miyoshi Umeki. While relishing the Oriental flavors from these Suzie Wongs, Mei Lings, or Linda Lows, America also spiced things up with its own favorite sauce—yellowface. Produced in the same epic year of 1961, Paramount’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn, scandalously cast Mickey Rooney as a buck-toothed Japanese man named Mr. Yunioshi. Racial humor has always been America’s tonic or opiate.

In the “real East,” the going was tough, to say the least. Under the Great Helmsman, red China was reeling from the aftermath of the “Great Leap Forward,” a three-year utopian campaign that had commenced in 1958 and ended with millions of people starved to death. In Taiwan, where the defeated Nationalists had taken refuge under the protection of the Pacific fleets of the US Navy, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ruled the island under martial law, suppressing political opposition with military tribunals and “White Terror,” while plotting to reclaim his lost domain. Mainland and island newspapers were too preoccupied with domestic woes to notice the passing of an aging star in faraway Hollywood. Only newspapers in Hong Kong, still a British colony, reprinted bits of the obituaries pulled off the English-language newswire.¹⁶

Anna May Wong in Portrait in Black, 1960 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

Reportedly, when Anna May died, lying next to her was a copy of the Flower Drum Song film script. In her final hours, she was still assiduously preparing for her big comeback in Hollywood’s Dream Factory. Or, as Norma Desmond says in the climactic scene of Sunset Boulevard, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”