Peter Davies - The Fortunes

Her maternal grandfather had been a cigar-maker in San Francisco, and sometimes her mother would roll a short cigar and smoke by the window. Sometimes, after she started acting, she would join her and they would smoke together in silence.

Years later, when she heard that her mother had been killed by a car, she couldn’t believe it. What was she doing in the street? Secretly she blamed her father for keeping the woman cooped up all those years. If only her mother had been more used to the streets, she might have known to look out for a car.

ANCESTOR WORSHIP

Her father had been born in a gold camp called Michigan Bluffs. She liked to imagine her grandfather coming to America to seek gold the way she sought fame. But her father corrected her. “He was a merchant, a storekeep, not some gold-digger.” Like me, he meant, not you. She watched him light joss sticks, press them between his palms, bow deeply before the family altar.

Later he told her, “In that same camp at the same time Mr. Leland Stanford also started his first business.” He nodded portentously.

“Actually, I’m not sure that comparison reflects so well on Grandfather,” she observed. The place was a ghost town by then anyway.

THE GOLD CURE

She’s never been seasick a day in her life, likes to take the air at the prow even in rough chop, watch the rabid waves flinging themselves at the hull. The night sky over the Pacific, though, so dark and deep compared to Los Angeles’ with its haze and city lights, makes her dizzy. The stars seem so many and so bright, yet unattainably distant.

In her teens she suffered a nervous breakdown — Saint Vitus’ dance, some have speculated — and she would endure spells of depression (often fueled by drinking) throughout her life. As a child she was “cured” by a Chinese doctor who scratched a gold coin down her arm repeatedly until she bled. The graze, a long white tail ending in an angry red welt, looked like a comet. She asked if she could keep the coin, but the apothecary shook his head. It was an antique, he said. Besides, the gold was already in her blood now.

The real cure was her father’s reluctant agreement to let her pursue acting. He had wanted her to be a secretary, but she was hopeless at shorthand.

“I’ll be famous,” she promised him.

“What is that, fame?”

“Like face, ” she explained. “I’ll make you proud.”

And he’d shaken his head grimly. “Famous, maybe. Proud, no.” Actors, he explained, were lower than coolies in China. How could you be a famous coolie? As for actresses, what was lower than a coolie? A harlot. Who would want to be a famous harlot?

“Fame is not face,” he concluded. “You get famous, I lose face. Ill fame, more like.”

“Rich, then,” she vowed angrily. “I’ll get rich. Isn’t that the same as face?”

He tried to marry her off, but no respectable Chinese would have her. “Perhaps marriage is not her fortune,” her mother suggested. In interviews she would put her unmarried state down to the fact that Chinese men preferred traditional wives.

In the end her father was only persuaded to let her appear in The Thief of Bagdad when Douglas Fairbanks came to the laundry and said he’d personally chaperone her on set. Doug called her a “modest little person,” even promised to lock her in her dressing room between takes. Her father believed him, she is sure. He could no more imagine his daughter taking a white lover than taking one himself. Amalgamation (as he called miscegenation) was “no good for nobody.”

At night, through the slit blinds of the hotel window, the new sign in the hills flashed steadily above the palms: HOLLY. WOOD. LAND.

Her land, she thought fiercely.

“What is it, love?”

“ Horry wood,” she giggled, leaning into Doug’s chest.

In bed he called her the Chink in my amour. On set he liked to twirl the key to her dressing room on his finger.

His wife and founding partner in United Artists, Mary Pickford, was known as “America’s Sweetheart,” “Blondilocks” (though she’d also been among the first to don yellowface as Madame Butterfly in an early silent). “Her real name is Gladys,” Doug whispered around his cigarette. “You couldn’t even pronounce mine,” she scolded him.

Pickford and Fairbanks never had children together; they named their famous mansion Pickfair.

$

The Hoover is part of the Dollar Steamship Line, its twin black funnels banded in red, emblazoned with bright white dollar signs. When smoke billows from them she imagines the stokers below shoveling piles of greenbacks into the boilers like spirit money burned for the dead.

She always had a head for business. She kept the books for the laundry long after she became a star. When invited to be the celebrity host of a mahjong game at a local theater, she refused unless she also got to keep her winnings. She invested in real estate and later, in lean times, lived off her income as a landlady. Her contract with Hearst is paying for this trip to China.

Still, her father considered her a fool — and unfilial — for sending out her own laundry when he and the family would have done it for free.

As a rule he refused all her offers of financial help, but he was happy to let her pay for her siblings’ education. The only one she declined to support was her older half-brother in China. As a student in Japan he’d seen one of her movies and written to his father that he should stop her from disgracing the family. When her mother had sent a newspaper clipping of her modeling furs, her half-brother had asked them to send him the wristwatch advertised on the reverse. Ever since she was a child she’d resented the money her father sent back to his family in China, money she, her brothers and sisters and mother helped earn through their labor at the laundry (though of course in later years her generosity to her siblings enabled her father to send even more to China). What had that money bought? she wonders. Food? Clothes? Love?

Now there’s a new man’s watch in her steamer trunk. A Hamilton Tonneau in white gold. She sets it on the dressing table in her stateroom, watches it glide back and forth with the swell.

THE HIGH HAT

She styled herself a flapper, in beaded dresses and cloche hats. Bobbed hair became her trademark, and the skinny, boyish silhouette — she was five-foot-seven, a tennis player — suited her small chest. In the lingo of the day she was the monkey’s eyebrows, the kitten’s ankles, the goat’s whiskers, the duck’s quack, the cat’s particulars. A tomato, a biscuit, a Sheba; the darb, the berries, the limit. With her keen chassis and swell stilts, she could dance the Charleston — and how! The trick was applying rouge to your knees.

A dapper was a flapper’s father.

Prohibition was all wet. She would come home ossified, spifflicated, oiled, and owled, and her father, the Gimlet, that Airedale, would scream at her to “talk American!”

“Oh, for the love of Mike! Says you! ”

“Who this Mike?” he demanded.

Her second lover, the director Tod Browning, was twenty-five years her senior, a Father Time in the parlance. She called him Daddy, told him his whiskbroom tickled. He was good in the feathers, but he had a fire bell at home and refused to drop the pilot. It was all balled up. Eventually she told him the bank was closed and found herself a new big six in Douglas Fairbanks, twenty-two years her senior (“big six” being a reference to a six-cylinder engine, like that in her own Willys-Knight roadster; Doug actually drove the straight-eight Duesenberg, appropriately enough, she told him, since he was a real Duesie!).

She once said she went a decade without having to light her own cigarettes. But she was never a gold-digger, nor goofy for any forty-niners, the male equivalent. Her many admirers she dismissed as grubbers and duds, pikers and pills, highjohns and hoppers. Men were divided into cake eaters and corn shredders, Smith brothers, hiphounds, and flatwheelers. She was nobody’s blue serge. Engagement rings were handcuffs, marriage was a line.