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Between the Real and the Reel

CHANG APANA AND WARNER OLAND, HONOLULU, 1931 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

To know forgery, one must have original.

—Charlie Chan

IN MAY 1931, a small, wrinkled old man visited the production set of a film on Oahu’s Kailua Beach. He wore a white cotton shirt under a gray suit and tie. In his breast pocket was a black neckerchief with a kukui-nut slide. The wind was blowing very hard in this part of the island, less frequented by tourists. He held a cowboy hat in his hand. According to a New York Times reporter on the scene, the man, “whose features only on close inspection betrayed his Oriental origin,” was none other than Chang Apana, who had been invited to watch the filming of the adaptation of The Black Camel. The film crew, which had extended this courtesy to the real-life detective, encouraged him to attend the shooting as often as he liked.

In fact, Apana missed very few days of filming. As the reporter later described in the Times, Apana “derived great amusement from the words put into his mouth by the author. He roared when Chan, played by Warner Oland, countered the remark, ‘Inspector, you should have a lie detector,’ with ‘Lie detector? Ah, I see! You mean wife. I got one.’ Fortunately it was only a rehearsal, and his laugh did not register on the film.”¹

Despite what the reporter said in print, I find it sad that we have no recording of Apana’s roaring laughter on tape. I honestly would have hoped to hear the wordless laughter of the man who inspired the Chan icon. In a 1982 interview, Apana’s nephew, Walter Chang, underscored his uncle’s love of cinema and described how much Apana loved going to movies. Since he could not read English, Apana would have to take Walter to silent films so that the young man could translate the title cards for him: “He like the movies, Oh, the movies, that’s why I try to tell you. We go movies. Every time when pau school, you know. He used to go work in the morning shift. Two o’clock he gets through the police department. I go down the police station wait for him, then we go the Empire Theater…. Why I go, because I have to explain to him. English, he don’t know how to read and write…. We go to silent, silent kind.”² Not surprisingly, Apana especially enjoyed watching those movies about his fictional double: “Oh, yeah, he see,” Walter explained. “He see the picture. Oh yeah, he like that. He always laugh.”³

 

ACCORDING TO HISTORIAN Robert C. Schmitt, the first motion picture actually arrived in pre-territory Hawaii on February 4, 1897. It was a seven-reel Edison Veriscope, consisting of A Family Scene, A Watermelon Contest, Arrival of the Empire State Express, The Ferryboat Chicago Arriving at the Slip in New York, The Great McKinley Parade, The Spanish Bullfight, and New York Fire Department on Active Duty. At prices ranging from 25 cents to a dollar, the show, a most curious form of newfangled entertainment in an island culture steeped in its own mythological traditions, drew a small crowd at the Hawaiian Opera House but received rave reviews in local newspapers. In the next few years, especially after Hawaii became a territory, movies were presented sporadically on the islands. As the film industry matured, Hawaiians, like people on the mainland, caught the movie-going fever. By 1909, only twelve years after the crude Edison show, there were as many as eleven movie houses in Honolulu, including Apana’s favorite, the 930-seat Empire Theater near the Honolulu Police Headquarters.⁴

Audiences in the days of silent pictures were often noisy and sometimes unruly. On the night of February 10, 1905, a riot by nearly five hundred Chinese broke out in the Chinese Theater on Liliha Street during a kinetoscope malfunction. “There was first a rush to smash the machine,” reads a front-page article published the next day, “wild disorder…the familiar Chinese cry to rush the police…. Then the mob attempted to wreck the box office.” Police eventually restored order.⁵

Given the natural beauty of the islands, it should be no surprise that movies on Hawaiian themes appeared as early as 1898. In June that year, Burton Holmes, a famous traveler, photographer, and film-maker who coined the word travelogue, took the first movies known to have been filmed in Hawaii. Notable later movies included Triangle’s Aloha Oe (1915), Fox’s The Island of Desire (1917), and Lasky’s The Bottle Imp (1917). The latter starred Sessue Hayakawa as a Hawaiian sporting a Japanese grass-coat and Lehua Waipahu, a descendant of Queen Liliuokalani, as a local maid. All these movies were presented in the islands.⁶ After Charlie Chan’s film debut in 1926, the series immediately became a local favorite.

Among the forty-seven Chan film titles, The Black Camel has the distinction of being the only one actually filmed in the islands. Published as a novel in 1929, just a few months before the Great Crash, The Black Camel was Biggers’s fourth Charlie Chan book but only the second set in Hawaii. The plot involves the murder of Shelah Fane, a Hollywood star with a dark secret in her past. After arriving on the island with a film crew, she is soon found stabbed to death at her beach house; hence the book title. “Black camel” is a Chinese metaphor for death. Several suspects mill around in the background: an ex-husband who still carries a torch for Fane, a jilted millionaire lover, a sleek and manipulative fortune-teller, and a disgruntled costar. In the course of the investigation, as Chan puts it, “Deceit sprouted everywhere and thrived like a weed.” But Chan knows that “a gem is not polished without rubbing nor a man perfected without trials.” Eventually he discovers a link between the Fane murder and another unsolved mystery in Hollywood, and he catches the killer by recovering the broken tip of a brooch pin in her shoe.

Despite making this movie during the depths of the Depression, Fox did not cut back on expenses. Besides paying Warner Oland $12,500 for the lead role, the company hired Bela Lugosi, who had just finished his role in the sensational Dracula, to play the slippery psychic Tarneverro. The decision to allow location shooting rather than to palm off Santa Monica as a makeshift Honolulu—especially at a time when most movie studios were strapped for cash—reflected Fox’s determination to make the film into a blockbuster.

On the last day of shooting, Warner Oland and Chang Apana appeared in a photograph together. In it, the two detectives—one real-life and the other on-screen—stand against a backdrop of tropical flora, with Oland’s strong arm wrapping around Apana’s lean shoulder. At the bottom of a copy of the photo that once was kept in the Apana family, Oland inscribed, “To my dear friend, Charlie Chang, ‘The bravest of all,’ with best of luck from the new ‘Charlie Chan,’ Warner Oland.”⁷

Two months after the departure of the Fox crew, Biggers arrived yet again on the island on July 2, 1931, for a monthlong summer vacation, and he renewed his friendship with Apana. Since their previous meeting, much had taken place. Biggers had suffered two heart attacks and had lost a great deal of money in the 1929 Great Crash. In June 1929, caught up in the frenzy of the first half of the year, Biggers bought, on the recommendation of Laurance Chambers, 100 shares of common stock of Meyer-Kiser Bank, an Indianapolis-based company that had close financial ties with Bobbs-Merrill. In May 1931, just two months prior to his departure for Hawaii, Biggers received the distressing news that Meyer-Kiser had closed its doors, one of the 3,600 bank failures across the country within two years after Black Tuesday. Fortunately, the new Chan books paid off and soon made up for Biggers’s financial losses: Charlie Chan Carries On, published in the fall of 1930, sold 35,400 copies in four months, and the royalty statement shows that Bobbs-Merrill paid Biggers $17,140 in 1930 alone.

By contrast, Apana, now over sixty, was still making $250 a month as a detective. As Charlie Chan puts it in The House Without a Key, “I am policeman on small remuneration.”⁸ Apana never received any royalty for his Charlie Chan inspiration, and, according to Walter Chang, he never asked for any. “You know how much Apana get?” Walter said angrily in the interview. “Not even nickel! How you like that, not even five cents.” At one point, Biggers tried to get Fox to hire Apana for a movie role for $500, but Apana turned it down. As Chang explained, “They offer him a job to go up the states and to play the picture. He say I cannot speak English, why I go. You know what I mean, I’m not an actor. I don’t know how to speak English.”⁹

During this meeting in 1931, Apana took Biggers for a long car ride during which they visited the scenes of Apana’s greatest triumphs as a detective. In Chinatown, Apana pointed out the places where he used to leap from roof to roof like a human fly, busting opium dens and gambling parlors and chasing down criminals. “He went into them in great detail,” Biggers recollected a year later. “He had more than bravery, this detective. He had brains. There was a robbery that he solved by finding a silk thread on a certain bedroom floor. A murder that was run down within twenty-four hours, because the Filipino who did it got mud from a certain section of the town on his shoes, hid them, and bought a new pair. I didn’t get all this, but ‘I say to him, why you wear new shoes this morning?’ was the big dramatic climax.”

Apana also showed Biggers his favorite restaurants, Wing Sing Wo and Wo Fat, both on Hotel Street. The former was run by folks from Apana’s hometown. The latter, a chop-suey dive, would become famous one day, thanks to the popularity of the TV series Hawaii Five-O.^*

On August 1, 1931, the day of Biggers’s departure, Apana arrived at the dock to see his friend off. In the midst of aloha music and hula dancing, Apana hung a crimson lei around Biggers’s neck and waved good-bye in his broken English: “Old man now. Maybe I no be here when you come back. Aloha!”¹⁰

WO FAT RESTAURANT, CHINATOWN, HONOLULU (Photo by author)

Sounding like a Chanism, the last words uttered by the humble detective to the celebrated mystery writer proved to be prophetic.