Peter Davies - The Fortunes

She blends in better, at least until people address her in Mandarin. She can’t recall the last time she felt invisible like this. But she fears getting lost in the crowd. She relies on Newsreel to pick her out, on the camera to make her stand out.

In later years she’ll wear those dresses in movies and charge the studios an extra fee to rent her wardrobe.

LIFE AND ART

The decision to make a movie of her own life proves ill-starred. While greeted warmly at first in Shanghai — one newspaper, describing her beauty, speaks of her eyebrows like “tender moth caterpillars,” her eyes “like kernels of apricots”—and feted by high society, flashbulbs sizzling in her wake, there have long been disparaging murmurs, often from Nationalist critics, about her roles and their depiction of the Chinese. She is most famous for playing a prostitute in Shanghai Express, notorious for her scanty costume in The Thief of Bagdad. Both have been subsequently banned in China, denounced as “ghost films.”

Those were only roles, she tries to explain. The only ones she could get. It was acting.

But it’s a difficult distinction to make while a newsreel camera follows her everywhere, whirring gently in the background.

Shameless, they call her at a film board banquet in Peking. Lewd. A disgrace to Chinese womanhood. A Yankee puppet.

She nods politely, smiles shyly, unsure of their Mandarin.

“Too American,” Newsreel translates tactfully.

Her familial disgrace is now a national one.

“It’s just acting,” she repeats, but it’s a difficult distinction to make to a newsreel man.

“People believe what they see.” He shrugs. “I’d be out of work otherwise.”

She tries to tell him that she refused a different role in The Good Earth, that of Lotus, the teahouse dancer, another young seducer. He is loading a new canister of film. “I told them, ‘You’re asking me as a Chinese to play the only unsympathetic character in the movie!’” But the truth is she wasn’t offered it, despite testing for it. Already at thirty she was too old for the part. Perhaps it was for the best, she tells herself. She’s not sure she could have borne it. To stand so close, day after day on set, to the role she craved. Her sister Mary had no such qualms. She happily took the minor role of Little Bride. “It could be my big break!” She’d never known how much her sister coveted her career, nor how much she could covet her sister’s youth (if not her flat nose). “Have you no shame?” she’d retorted. No loyalty? she meant. “They’re just using you.” She bit her tongue. In a more conciliatory spirit she had offered this trip as a lure to tempt Mary away, just as she’d once invited her along to Europe. But the girl had shaken it off petulantly. “It’s your turn to play daughter.”

“It’s true,” she tells Newsreel abruptly. “I am a bad example.”

Beneath the camera, all she can see of him is his mouth, the cigarette jutting to one side so that smoke doesn’t float in front of the lens. It twitches slightly.

SPIRIT WAY

At the Ming tombs outside Peking, a guide encourages her to toss a rock up onto the curved back of one of the stone elephants along the Spirit Way. For luck, the guide says, clapping when she lands one. Later Newsreel tells her, It’s for fertility, and she wishes she had the cool dry heft of it in her hand still.

Dan

Back in Shanghai she meets the Chinese star Butterfly Wu, the so-called Empress of Cinema. They exchange autographs while the cameras roll. “Can you read Chinese?” Wu asks sweetly beneath her breath as she inscribes a photo.

She meets Mei Lanfang, the great dan actor of female roles. He explains the different kinds of dan in the opera. Hua dan, vivacious young women. “Like you,” he says, giggling. Daoma dan and wu dan, the warrior women. Lao dan, the older women. Cai dan, the female clowns. “And which are you?” she asks. He specializes in guimen dan, he explains, virtuous ladies. “Though I have played the others too.” She nods. They compare hands — hers have been called the most beautiful in Hollywood — but she envies his elegant fingers, delicate wrists.

Butterfly Wu’s great rival in the Shanghai film world, Ruan Lingyu, will commit suicide later that year, driven to it in part by vicious press coverage of her unhappy love life. Wu is rumored to have laughed on hearing the news.

INTERMISSION

Newsreel attends an open-air cinema with her. “Where the stars compete with the stars,” she quips. “Where the Chinese go to the pictures,” he says.

The film is in Mandarin and she leans in close to hear his whispered translation until someone hisses, Xu! “Hush,” Newsreel murmurs, and she giggles, leaves her shoulder pressed against his.

At the intermission he sits up straight and she does the same. He snaps his fingers for the cigarette girl. She tells him, “It’s chilly. I’d like to leave now.”

FOOTAGE

“What happens if you run out of film at a crucial moment?” she asks once while he reloads.

“Sometimes I carry two cameras. Though I don’t always load them both,” he admits.

“Why not?”

“Some people just want to be filmed. Generals, mostly.”

“Generals!” she says, because she can see he wants to impress her.

But what she wonders is if there’s anything in the camera now. If any of this is actually happening if it isn’t being filmed.

He raises the Eyemo again.

“Say, when are we going to see some footage?” she asks.

He blinks. “Oh, I don’t get to see it. I shoot it, I send it off. Someone else edits it, writes the voice-over. Often the only time I see it is in the lens finder.”

The clockwork of the camera starts to tick down.

“Sounds like the movies,” she tells him. “We shoot scenes out of sequence, so we don’t even know how the stories will turn out when we’re making them.”

“Sounds like life,” he says, and she laughs.

“I guess.”

Still, it unnerves her somehow. Not getting to see herself. What has he captured? The cameras and cameramen she’s used to make her look good (even when she’s being bad), but this time she’s not so sure. What is he seeing through that lens? It makes her self-conscious suddenly, for the first time in years.

This is not why she became an actress; this is not why she became famous.

“Stop staring,” she whispers, but he can’t hear her over the mechanism.

MAKE LOVE TO THE CAMERA

If you’re trying to seduce a nation you have to start somewhere.

She walks toward him as he films, and pouts.

She walks toward him and stares into the lens, one eye squinted closed as if trying to peer through it at him. “You’re too close to pull focus,” he complains, backing up. She follows and blows a kiss. He wipes the fogged glass, starts over.

She walks toward him and smooches the lens. He rubs it clean, patiently. “I can’t use this.”

After they sleep together, she thinks it’ll be easier, but he looks at her over his cigarette as if he’s expected it.

“Was it all you imagined?” she asks him in the mirror of her dressing table.

“I didn’t imagine it,” he says.

“Really?” She flares her eyes to apply makeup. “Yet my films are so lewd.”

“I’ve never seen any of your films.” He closes his eyes against the smoke. One finger scratches at the seam of an eyelid. “Only read about them.”

For a moment she looks at him with unfeigned astonishment, and then she slips back between the sheets, presses herself against him.

She is the first Chinese movie star. He is her first Chinese lover.