21

Yellowface

WARNER OLAND AND ANNA MAY WONG ON THE SET OF OLD SAN FRANCISCO, 1927 (Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison)

How could blacking up and then wiping off burnt cork be a rite of passage from immigrant to American?

—Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise¹

BEFORE HE BECAME Charlie Chan, Warner Oland, the Swedish silent film actor, already had made a name for himself by playing an orthodox Jew—and no ordinary orthodox Jew. It was Cantor Rabinowitz in the first talkie ever made in Hollywood, The Jazz Singer (1927).

Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, The Jazz Singer featured Broadway’s leading blackface entertainer, Al Jolson. The plot involves a Jewish boy named Jakie Rabinowitz, who is taken by jazz singing. Jakie’s father, however, is a cantor who has always cherished the dream that Jakie would one day take his place in the synagogue. Furious with his son’s distasteful obsession with Negro music, Cantor Rabinowitz physically punishes Jakie. After running away and being reborn as Jack Robin, Jakie makes a splash on Broadway as a blackface jazz singer. When he returns in glory to sing Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” to his mother, his father comes home; in the middle of Jakie’s crooning, he screams, “Stop!” The son is thrown out of the house until the father’s death brings him home and back to the synagogue. To fulfill his father’s last wish, Jakie takes the cantor’s place and sings the Kol Nidre for his synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur. The film ends with Jakie, in a wool cap and covered with burnt cork, performing a Negro number, “My Mammy,” in front of his proud mother and an admiring Broadway audience.

Both Jolson’s blackface and Oland’s “Jewface” in the movie have provided ample fodder for analysis by cultural historians, who trace racial ventriloquism back to minstrelsy, the first and most important popular form of mass culture in nineteenth-century America. Whether in the form of comic skit, variety act, dance, or music, minstrel shows, as they were called, were vaudeville entertainment of racial parody performed mostly by cross-dressing white actors. Around the turn of the twentieth century, minstrelsy gave rise to a new form of popular entertainment: blackface. Even though whites in blackface and blacks in blackface had always been a key feature of minstrelsy, the new popularity of faces painted with burnt cork attained a new vogue at the height of the Eastern European immigration wave. As Michael Rogin argues in Blackface, White Noise, blackface in the early decades of the twentieth century gave whites an opportunity to act out and solidify their whiteness by playing and parodying blacks. James Baldwin puts it poignantly:

No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations and a vast amount of coercion before this became a white country…. There is an Irish community…. There is a German community…. There is a Jewish community…. There are English communities. There are French communities. Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here in part because they were not white…. Everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket, the price was to become “white.”

To turn European greenhorns in essence into white Americans, the melting pot, as Rogin points out, used racial masquerade to promote identity exchange but also to exclude unwanted racial groups.²

It is no surprise, then, that Hollywood’s first blockbuster picture, The Birth of a Nation, featured blackface, as did Hollywood’s first sound film, The Jazz Singer. If American literature established its national identity in the epic struggle between Indians and whites (consider Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, to name just a few), American film, as Rogin suggests, “was born from white depictions of blacks.”³

In the workings of such a melting pot—or, rather, melting plot—yellowface, like blackface, redface, and Jewface, also played an important role. In The Jazz Singer, Cantor Rabinowitz’s paternal “Stop!” marks a critical moment not only in the movie but also in the history of American motion pictures. “Stop!” is the last spoken word in The Jazz Singer, for thereafter the film reverts to the silent, pre-talkie mode. Oland’s patriarchal Jew might have had the power to stop speech in the film, but the silent movies, with their pantomime gestures and intertitles, would soon die an unceremonious death, paving the way for the golden age of talkies in which the likes of Oland’s Charlie Chan would charm viewers directly with their racial ventriloquism. The transition from silent movies to talkies was a radical break, but Oland’s swapping between Jewface and yellowface, between a patriarchal Jew and an exotic Chinaman, whether evil or benign, was almost seamless.

The eminently versatile Warner Oland was born Johan Verner Ölund on October 3, 1879, in the rural village of Bjurholm, Sweden. His parents, Jonas Ölund and Maria Jojana Forsberg, were Lutheran shopkeepers with a modest income. At the impressionable age of thirteen, Oland emigrated with his parents to the United States. The family lived first in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then in New Britain, Connecticut, both areas with large Swedish populations. Having dropped the umlaut and Anglicized their name, the Olands were eager to immerse themselves in the American way of life, taking evening classes and learning English.

From the beginning, the young Swede wanted to be an actor. After graduating from drama school in Boston, he went to work on Broadway. In 1906, he toured with the Shakespearean company of actress Alla Nazimova and amassed considerable wealth from his success on stage. But after producing his own plays at the Hudson Theatre in New York, he lost the money, forcing him to drift into films.

Oland made his motion-picture debut playing John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1910, but due to his vaguely Asiatic features, he subsequently played many Oriental roles as well as the occasional Caucasian “heavy.” “I owe my Chinese appearance to the Mongol invasion,” Oland once said, referring to the fact that he had inherited a dollop of Asian blood from his Russian mother.⁴ Throughout his career playing Asians, Oland never needed elaborate makeup. All he had to do was put a little goatee on his chin, push the ends of his mustache downward, and brush his eyebrows upward.

Prior to his role as Charlie Chan, Oland played an Oriental villain in half a dozen mostly silent films, including Wu Fang in The Lightning Raider (1918), Li Hsun in Mandarin Gold (1919), Okada in The Pride of Palomar (1922), Fu Shing in The Fighting American (1924), and Shanghai Dan in Curly Top (1924). All this culminated in his starring roles in the talkies: The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1930). By the late 1920s, Oland was indisputably Holly wood’s top man for an on-screen Oriental.⁵

In 1930, following the second Paramount Fu Manchu picture, Fox hired Oland to play the role that would eventually make him famous. The idea of casting Oland as Chan might have originally come from Earl Biggers. After three unsuccessful attempts to film Biggers’s novels, producers had been looking for an ideal lead man. In a letter to his publisher on January 7, 1931, Biggers wrote:

I have completely lost touch with Fox, and haven’t yet felt well enough to get involved in their troubles. I note with amusement that Warner Oland is playing Charlie. When I suggested him in October, Al Lewis, head of production on the Fox lot, roared at me: “A ham actor. I wouldn’t have him on the lot.” Well, I guess they changed their minds. Since he is the man that all the Post letter writers are pining to see in the role, I am glad that he is to try it at last. But hope to heaven he understands what sort of character Charlie is—not a sinister Fu Manchu.⁶

Biggers’s worry was not unwarranted. The smiley, soft-spoken Charlie Chan was indeed a far cry from the satanic, green-eyed Fu Manchu. But Oland, the consummate professional, adapted well. To prepare himself for the role, Oland studied the Chinese language and read up on Chinese art and philosophy. In some of the later films, he was even able to deliver lines in his adopted “ancient language,” albeit sounding a bit singsong.

In fact, Oland had become so steeped in the character that he often would assume the identity of Charlie Chan in real life, so much so that he could speak unscripted in Chan diction. Over a lunch of mandarin chicken and yellow tomato juice in the Fox commissary, Oland once commented to a reporter on his characteristic reticence to give interviews: “Don’t talk too much. Words like sunbeams. The more they are condensed the more they burn.” Moving on to other topics, such as his marriage to Edith Shearn, Oland spoke about himself in the third person as if he were Charlie Chan observing the life of Warner Oland:

It is a marriage which is enduring because it is joined by the treasures of the mind which neither rust nor corrupt. They are as much married in their tastes and interests as in their affections…. He has habit, for instance, of putting lighted cigarettes—at all times he resembles a lighted chimney rather than a portly gentleman of some 200 pounds—on desks, tables, ancient books, choice prints. Accidents occur. I would like to tell him that he should pay attention to detail. Insignificant molehill sometimes more worthy of notice than conspicuous mountain.⁷

In preparing for his yellowface performance, Oland found comfort in the bottle. Unlike Charlie Chan, a teetotaler who takes an occasional sarsaparilla (an herbal, nonalcoholic drink), Oland had a serious drinking problem. At the beginning, having a nip, so to speak, before the shooting of a film actually improved Oland’s characterization of Chan. It put a perennial grin on his face, making him look even more like the congenial Chan; it also slowed his speech, befitting a character whose fumbling for English words became a cinematic asset.

Watching Charlie Chan Carries On in the Fox production room on February 11, 1931, Biggers was very pleased with the film adaptation, as he told a friend the next day:

I can give you the happy news that at last, after all these weary years, they have got Charlie right on the screen. Warner Oland is perfect in the part, he dresses it correctly and looks it beautifully, and he acts it charmingly and graciously, so that the spectators are bound to like him. That’s a big step forward, of course. The boys who made the pictures were loud in their tales of how, at the preview in Riverside, two thousand people ate it up, sitting on the edge of their seats and gasping with excitement, hanging on Charlie’s every word and laughing at most of them.⁸

The reviews affirmed Biggers’s reaction. Even though Oland received only third billing and Chan did not appear until midway through the picture, the New York Times approved Oland’s portrayal of a Chinese who was not a stereotypical villain or dimwit but a hero: “Mr. Oland’s conception of Chan’s manner of speaking is quite acceptable, and he relies on very little change in his appearance to play his part.” The reviewer was especially taken with Chan’s pearls of wisdom that dotted the film, “Only a very brave mouse will make its nest in a cat’s ear,” “He who feeds the chicken deserves the egg,” and “Only a very sly man can shoot off a cannon quietly.” The reviewer further enthused that the audience was so charmed by these Chan isms that “one could have listened to Charlie Chan for an hour longer.”⁹ Another review in Film Daily praised Oland’s rendering of Chan: “The adaptation of this Earl Derr Biggers novel proves to be a natural for the screen and Warner Oland a perfect selection for the part of Chan…. Charlie is more than a detective. He is a witty philosopher and in this characterization Oland is at his best. Well cast and excellently directed by Hamilton MacFadden.”¹⁰

“This picture,” Biggers predicted, “is sure box-office, and that means there will be more Chan pictures.” And he was right.¹¹

Following the success of Charlie Chan Carries On, Fox bought the rights to The Black Camel in 1931 and adapted the novel for the screen, making Oland’s Chan the central character. The company was so committed to the Chinese sleuth that it took the production on location to Honolulu, a far more costly operation than studio programming. It was there, on the glittering beaches of Oahu, that the real and the reel Charlie Chans would meet.