7THE RED LANTERN

AS THE GREAT WAR was coming to an end and the Spanish Influenza was causing millions of deaths, Hollywood had two major productions in the popular genre of “yellow films” in that epic year of 1918. Ever since Jack London coined the term in 1904, “Yellow Peril” became a popular, if not titillating, motif for Hollywood producers, who in response cranked out a spate of Chinese-themed pictures, including The Chinese Lily (1914), The Yellow Traffic (1914), The War of the Tongs (1917), Mystic Faces (1918), and City of Dim Faces (1918). All flicks that portrayed Chinese people as opium addicts, white slavers, lawbreakers, thugs, and debauchers, they were awash in the pernicious stereotypes of the era.¹ Each production needed extras from Chinatown, as would two other new ones, Broken Blossoms and The Red Lantern, both in production in 1918 and released in 1919.

Based on a short story by Thomas Burke, the British master of Limehouse slum fiction, Broken Blossoms was directed by none other than D. W. Griffith, whose taste leaned toward the exotic. In addition to The Birth of a Nation, the flamboyant auteur had made films about Native Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, and South African Zulus. All were played by white actors and actresses who were made up—crudely for the most part, though expertly on occasion—for the roles.² In Broken Blossoms, subtitled “The Yellow Man and the Girl”—a subtler variation of Burke’s original title, “The Chink and the Child”—the fledgling silent-screen actor Richard Barthelmess played Cheng Huan in yellowface. The story is set, of course, in London’s notorious Limehouse district, where the Chinese congregated. The storekeeper Cheng Huan has come to England from China with the idealistic hope of bringing the Buddhist message of tolerance and passivity to the warring nations, but he falls on hard times and becomes addicted to opium. Lucy (Lillian Gish), a white girl who suffers daily abuse from her father, Burrows, comes to visit his store, and Cheng becomes infatuated with her. One day when Lucy escapes from yet another beating and collapses in front of the store, Cheng takes her in and nurses her back to health. Barely able to control his desire for her virginal body, he treats her like a goddess and goes only so far as kissing the hem of her sleeve. As the title card states, “His love remains a pure and holy thing.” Yet, when Burrows learns of this, he gathers a lynch mob, attacks the store, takes Lucy back to his slum quarters, and beats her to death. Devastated, Cheng—The Yellow Man—exacts revenge by shooting Burrows and then, in Wagnerian overdrive, commits suicide next to Lucy’s body.

Ingeniously using the soft-focus Sartov lens and diffuse lighting to render Cheng’s features less angular and more androgynous in contrast to Burrows’s brutish masculinity and Lucy’s angelic femininity, Griffith turned Thomas Burke’s purple prose and atmospheric sketch of slum life into a melodrama of forbidden love and illicit desire, an admonitory tale against interracial romance. “Drama is exploration; melodrama is exploitation,” writes Kevin Brownlow. Like most “yellow films” of the time, Broken Blossoms successfully exploited the themes of Chinese exoticism and inscrutability. To help him play the Chinese character, Griffith took Barthelmess slumming in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, where they visited restaurants, shops, opium dens, gambling parlors, and temples. In the film, Barthelmess’s eyes are demonstrably narrow, an effect achieved by wearing a tight rubber band underneath his Chinese skullcap, thus becoming a pioneer of what renowned cinematographer James Wong Howe would dub “adhesive tape actors”—whites who played Chinese roles with the assistance of a painted, adhesive bandage.³

Even though Anna played no part in Broken Blossoms, one person who would be instrumental in lining up her first screen role, Reverend James Wang, was in the film. A Christian minister who had arrived from China in the 1880s, Wang found his true calling in the business of motion pictures. Moonlighting at first and then relinquishing his Baptist collar, Wang became an actor, casting agent, and technical adviser. He was effectively the honcho who connected Hollywood to Chinatown.⁴ Ironically, in Broken Blossoms, Reverend Wang played a Buddhist monk, who fingers his prayer beads while giving Cheng Huan the blessing for his ill-fated journey to the West.

One would think it challenging to compete with the melodrama of star-studded Broken Blossoms, but The Red Lantern, directed by Albert Capellani and starring Alla Nazimova, proved to be an even bigger production. Unlike the Ohio-born Lillian Gish, Nazimova was a renowned international personage with a storied past and a colorful presence in Hollywood. Originally named Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon, Nazimova possessed an exotic background as a child of a dysfunctional Jewish family in Yalta, Crimea. Leaving behind a wretched childhood that saw her shuttling among boarding schools, foster care, and charitable relatives, she went to Tsarist Moscow at seventeen and apprenticed herself to Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Rising to stardom on stage and touring widely in Europe, she arrived in New York in 1905 and debuted to critical acclaim on Broadway. Her talent and beauty attracted the attention of a fellow Ukrainian and former jewelry dealer from Kiev, Lewis J. Selznick (father of future Hollywood legend David O. Selznick), who in 1915 made her a handsome offer of $30,000 to act in a film. By the time The Red Lantern was in production in 1918, Nazimova had become so rich and successful that she was able to buy a sprawling Spanish-style home on three and a half acres at 8080 Sunset Boulevard, where she remodeled the interior and built a pool in the shape of the Black Sea that was surrounded by lush, semitropical landscaping. Dubbed the “Garden of Alla,” her stylish residence was a classic movie star’s showplace: an immense tiled hallway with a Mexican chandelier, a vast living room with another tiled floor, beamed ceilings, and lavish furnishings upholstered in purple velvet. As if this was not enough, the mansion had a gilded wall sconce, a baronial fireplace, a grand piano, and a broad stairway leading to the upper floor. The garage housed a new Rolls-Royce, while the staff consisted of a chauffeur, a gardener, a cook, a housemaid, and a butler. The place became a popular spot for Hollywood soirees, attracting a largely lesbian following. In fact, Richard Barthelmess, the yellowface actor in Broken Blossoms, owed his film career to the encouragement and tutelage of Nazimova, who had studied English with his mother. Young Anna, as we shall see, would also fall under the spell of the prima donna credited with the coinage of the term sewing circle, a discreet code for a gathering of lesbian and bisexual thespians.⁵

Mixing history with fantasy, The Red Lantern was set in the ancient capital city of Peking during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). Nazimova played the double roles of the Eurasian Mahlee and her white half-sister, Blanche. Mahlee is the illegitimate child of a British man, Sir Philip Sackville, and a Chinese woman who died in childbirth. Abandoning the newborn, Sir Philip threw some money at the Chinese grandmother with the instruction: “You shall never bind her feet.” As a result, Mahlee grows up with natural, unbound feet, drawing endless scorns and jeers from neighbors and everyone else. “Big feet—bad luck—everyone knows. Calamity hangs from the tips of the toes,” says a cobbler in the film via a Chinese title displayed erroneously. (Occasionally, Chinese words, merely decorative for most viewers, are upside down or flipped in the titles.) After the death of her grandmother, Mahlee goes to live with an American missionary couple and is converted to Christianity. She soon falls in love with the couple’s son, who cannot reciprocate her feelings because of her mixed-blood heritage. Instead, he loves Mahlee’s white half-sister, Blanche Sackville. Brokenhearted and resentful, Mahlee is lured by an evil Eurasian, Sam Wang (Noah Beery), to join the Boxer Movement. Wang disguises Mahlee as the Goddess of the Red Lantern and incites an uprising against white foreigners. When the allied forces of the Western nations crush the Boxers, Mahlee commits suicide on her peacock throne, muttering her final words: “East is East and West is West.”

Billed as “the greatest production of [Nazimova’s] amazing career on screen and stage,” The Red Lantern was produced in the midst of a raging global pandemic. Like COVID-19 almost exactly a hundred years later, the Spanish Influenza brought the world to a standstill. Factories closed, schools went on recess, theaters shuttered, and people were afraid to go out. At the competitor’s studio, the leading lady, Lillian Gish, caught the bug. When she recovered and returned to work, germophobic Griffith insisted that Gish wear a face mask whenever possible. As Gish described the horror on the streets, “they were dying so fast in California that they couldn’t build caskets, and they were burying the victims in one grave.”⁶

Fortunately, no one got sick on the set of The Red Lantern, but the need for six hundred Chinese extras was a tall casting order under any circumstances. This nearly impossible task fell to the film’s technical adviser, Reverend Wang, who had to knock on doors in Chinatown to scare up live bodies. And that was how luck turned for young Anna. “I ran around to an old Chinese who helped out the movies by getting Chinese actors for them.” She remembered her encounter with Wang: “He looked me over critically. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are a big girl and you have big eyes; you will do.’ I felt flattered until I learned that he had just had an order for 600 Chinese actors in a hurry and hadn’t been able to find but fifty.”⁷

When Anna broke the news to her parents that she was going to be an extra, they, as the Chinese would put it, flew off the roof. They had always assumed that her playacting in front of the mirror and skipping school to go to the movies was a passing phase. They did not realize how serious she was about becoming an actor. Besides the long Chinese tradition that looked down upon women employed in the entertainment industry, there remained the superstition that every time you have your picture taken, you lose a bit of your soul: The camera was a soul-snatching machine. But for Anna, Chinese beliefs be damned; they were now in the New World, and many of their Chinese friends, as Anna reminded her parents, were engaged in the movie business, even the honorable Reverend Wang. “Just then a squadron of buses stopped at our house to pick me up,” she recalled. “There were about 150 Chinese on the way to the studios to play extra parts and my father and mother knew most of them. They stayed so long gossiping in front of the house that the picture was kept waiting; but meanwhile I had slipped without further objection into the bus.”⁸

Anna’s long-anticipated moment, like most beginnings, was anticlimactic. “That first day I simply walked around with a mob of Chinese,” she recalled. But the second day promised to be more exciting, as the director told her to come back and play a part as one of the three girls carrying lanterns. With a bit of adolescent self-aggrandization, she felt “the responsibility of the whole movie industry on my shoulders.” Having seen how actresses were made up on the sets, Anna decided to produce a “grand scenic version” of herself: “I borrowed my mother’s rice powder rag and fairly kalsomined my face. With the most painstaking effort, I managed to curl my straight Chinese hair. As a finished touch, I took one of our Chinese red papers, wet it and rubbed off the color onto my lips and cheeks.”

As she showed up on the set, the director looked at her and gasped: “Good God!” He immediately ordered the costumers to grab hold of her, rub the red off her cheeks, and wash down her hair until they got the curl out of it.

When the film finally was released, she treated five girlfriends to the movie with the lunch money she had saved for more than a week. They went up to the top gallery of the old California Theatre on Main Street to witness her triumph. But they were utterly disappointed: “All we saw were three dim Chinese girls walking by with lanterns. ‘Which is you?’ my girl friends asked. ‘I … I don’t know,’ I faltered. ‘I think I must be the outside one.’ ”⁹

Even though Anna was uncredited and failed to pick herself out of the crowd, it was the opening she had long dreamed of. Unlike the other Chinese extras who gleefully walked away with $7.50 per day (fifty percent more than the usual five dollars, due to the difficulty of finding actors during the pandemic), Anna craved more.¹⁰ And the person who would introduce her to Hollywood was none other than Alla Nazimova, whose scandals in her art and lifestyle continued to defy social norms.

An extant photo shows fourteen-year-old Anna sitting by the pool in the Garden of Alla. Wearing a two-toned swimsuit and a pair of flat-heeled shoes with buckles, she smiles sweetly at the camera. Her naked legs look strong, arms slender, and, under a white bandanna, her signature bangs brush against her new-moon eyebrows. In another photo, she stands on the roof of the bathhouse by the pool, tall like a statue, as if playing a game of truth or dare. Even though she was one of the six hundred Chinese extras on the set of The Red Lantern, Anna’s youthful charm must have caught the eye of Nazimova, who invited the adolescent to the Garden of Alla, also known as the 8080 Club. At the movie colony’s first salon, the guests would drink, gossip, and listen to Nazimova rattling off in her linguistic trifecta of English, Russian, and French about memories of Yalta and Moscow, and her coach Stanislavsky. Maintaining the façade of marriage to a man while romantically involved with various men and women, Nazimova was openly bisexual. “Most of my friends are young girls,” she once told journalists, adding, “My friends call me Peter and sometimes Mimi.” In addition to splashy gatherings at night, Nazimova hosted poolside parties on Sunday afternoons for young girls only. She also owned Mary’s, a dyke bar on the Sunset Strip.¹¹

Anna May Wong by the pool at the Garden of Alla, 1919, photo by John Springer (Courtesy of Corbis Historical Collection / Getty Images)

It would be foolish, or perhaps distasteful, to speculate on the nature of young Anna’s relationship to Nazimova as anything other than that of a protégé to a mentor. As Gavin Lambert writes in his masterful biography, “Nazimova was the first to cultivate an image of the ‘foreign’ sexual sophisticate, and supplied the original theme on which Pola Negri, Garbo, and Dietrich created variations.” One day, as we shall see, Anna would enter the intimate circle of Marlene Dietrich, perhaps in the same ingenue way she entered the 8080 Club. Regardless, it would not be so hard to imagine how those poolside soirees could affect and transform a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl. The Garden of Alla, as Axel Madsen describes it in The Sewing Circle (1995), was a notorious spot for celebrity trysts: It was where Nazimova induced two of her young lovers, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova, to marry, in succession, Rudolph Valentino.¹²

If nothing else, socializing with the First Lady of the Silent Screen would open doors, as it did for Mildred Davis, Virginia Fox, and Lois Wilson—all young hopeful actresses who frequented Nazimova’s parties and later achieved a measure of fame. The list also includes Nazimova’s goddaughter, Nancy Davis, later known as Nancy Reagan. Anna was no exception. Soon she became acquainted with many of the important people in Hollywood and was given roles ranging from bit parts to minor characters, and later lead roles. The daughter of a Chinese laundryman was ready to emerge from her cocoon.