What I Am Reading: "Delayed Rays of a Star" by Amanda Lee Koe

“A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow (…) On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Besides the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A HOT TIME, THE BACHELOR’S SURPRISE, THE STOLEN GARTER … wastebasket of tornup daydreams… A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays.”

- John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

I found this book searching for something to read about Old Hollywood. Here in quarantine, I’ve been dipping my toes in unfamiliar cultural waters, and one of these is streaming old movies on the Criterion Channel. At first I stuck to their series on German Expressionism, to chase my Weimar high. After that was finished, I eased back into the topic of film sideways through a familiar avenue, the podcast You Must Remember This. Inspired by an article on Marilyn Monroe I came across, I listened to the season on Dead Blondes (I was most taken with Veronica Lake).

Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong are not among the dead blondes in question, so that note on the genesis of this read is tangential at best. They were however brought together in a photograph at a Berlin party in 1928, and that photograph was the inspiration for this novel, which explores scenes from each woman's lives while looping in some fictional characters. It is the first novel of a writer from Singapore, living now in the US.

Marlene Dietrich is the main focus of the book, just as she was the most famous of the three in real life. If anything is the anchor of the novel, it is Marlene sequestered in her apartment in Paris in the late '80s and early '90s, retaining her difficult, glamorous outlook even as she succumbs to the indignities of old age. The fictional characters introduced in these segments are Bébé, her maid, and Ibrahim, a young man who calls Marlene on the phone every Sunday night.

These characters are what make the book more than just fanfiction. The book in fact won me over with the end of the first chapter, while explaining Bébé's backstory. She was a girl in a Chinese village, living a life with no future, when she decided to leave home to pursue an apparent factory job in France. This job turned out to be a human trafficking scheme, and she was put to work as a prostitute in Sardinia. After enduring this for a time, she had one john who was a Chinese businessman. He told her a story about how he was a small press publisher, putting out Chinese editions of European classics. His firm had published Madame Bovary, and this novel was taken up by a young man who traveled through the provinces, "preaching" it to young women. While having sex with them, the young man would ask: do you want to go the way of Emma Bovary? They did not. Eventually, the young man and his sex cult joined the crowd at Tiananmen Square, and after the movement was crushed, the Chinese authorities traced the chain of "guilt" back to the publishing firm, and the businessman had to flee China. Bébé had not even heard of the Tiananmen Square protests at that point. Later, after her traffickers end up in a shootout, Bébé (who has not taken that name yet) escapes. She ends up in the custody of the French police, and goes before an immigration judge with a do-gooder lawyer to represent her. Instead of telling her story, she tells the judges that she fled the Tiananmen Square protests herself, and was inspired to come to France after reading Madame Bovary. When, with tears in their eyes, they ask her what she thought of it, she says, "I do not want to go the way of Emma Bovary."

Though each of the actresses receives a check-in in their twilight years, the book jumps around chronologically. The party with the photograph is used as the jumping-off point for Marlene, and for Anna May Wong, who was in 1928 a successful actress, though having trouble breaking into leading roles due to the racism of the film industry (and the presumed racism of the audience) at the time. She grew up in Los Angeles and was obsessed with film since she was a young girl, eventually getting her start as an extra. Hollywood put out a lot of movies in an "oriental" setting, and though Anna May eventually found plenty of work as a second female lead, often a temptress or villain that the hero must overcome, she was never cast as the female lead. According to the Hays Motion Picture Production Code, a white man could not kiss a woman of a different race on screen. She crossed the Atlantic a couple of times, searching for the promise of better roles (and getting photographed in Berlin, obviously). Her second return to Hollywood was to try to star in The Good Earth, an adaptation of the Pearl S. Buck novel, in 1935. She hoped to play the female lead, O-Lan. She received extensive screen tests, but was not hired, as the filmmakers instead went for an all-white cast in yellowface, including the reigning yellowface actor, Warner Oland.

Hitting the bottle hard after this disappointment, Anna May Wong went to China, where she found that she was not well-received. In fact, the book shows her finding that she doesn't have much of a Chinese peasant girl in her at all, she is too cosmopolitan. Pearl S. Buck at least actually lived in China, she thinks. While she views Hollywood appropriating and making shallow Chinese culture, critics schold her that she herself has done this with other Asian cultures, having used a Siamese dance she read about in a magazine when asked to come up with her own dance for a China-set film. The novel could have played this as a classic "torn between two worlds" narrative, but instead Anna May Wong just feels rejected by both the world of American Hollywood and her roots in Asia. The narrative picks back up with her later, in the early '60s, when she is a has-been who drinks too much. She had carried on a romance with Marlene, starting with the party in the photograph (according to the novel) and rekindled through their famous film together, 1932's Shanghi Express. In the '60s, she goes to see Marlene's nightclub act in Vegas, and meets her backstage later. The two have some laughs acquiring and eating a massive shrimp meal in the back of a taxi, but Anna May rejects her former lover in the hotel, because Marlene can never turn it off, even as she is approaching her sixth decade and ailing.

Leni Riefenstahl, famous Nazi, receives less page-time. Her commentary on the party and the photograph comes much later than it does from Anna May's or Marlene's point of view, being related to an interviewer around the late-middle of the book when Leni was 101 years old. Her appearances prior set her out as a hard-hearted career girl, happy to have Hitler's funding and confidence (she only refers to him as "H" in her narrative) and trying to get what she needed out of Goebbels without spending much time on their power struggle. Most of her story takes place on the shoot of Tiefland, another mountain film shot during the war. Everyone in the crew is hoping to stay in the mountains as long as possible, out of the carnage. Riefenstahl is constantly wracked with bladder colic, and must deal with a troublesome production as well as tedious bureaucracy. In this story is the third main fictional character, Hans Haas, late of the North African front, who has returned to his job as a lighting technician despite the death of his lover/mentor, Schmitz, in battle. Hans, in mourning, is a good person at heart, but does not step up and do the right thing when it counts. When a wolf needed for the film escapes, he does not capture it when he has a chance, and then when another grievously injures it he does not put it out of its misery. This pattern is repeated on a larger scale when he is interacting with the extras that Riefenstahl procures to play Iberian peasants, Roma and Sinti people from a nearby concentration camp. Riefenstahl's internal monologue is convinced that these people are simply there for holding or work, and doesn't understand when they make such a big deal about being sent back, despite her appreciation for their help. Hans begins to let them escape the truck on the return trip, but stops them when he realizes that he'll be held responsible if they are all gone when the truck arrives. He goes on to hang himself upon returning to the set.

Riefenstahl is dismissive in her later scenes, wishing in her remarks and in her internal monologue to be judged only for her art, and not the political context that produced it. In her age-101 interview (which led me to realize that she was alive until I was in the 5th grade, wow) she lays down practical, no-nonsense line. In the earlier scenes she is shown doting on one of the Roma extras, a little girl, with candy. Later in life the same woman (unrecognized by her) is suing her for her commentary on the film; Riefenstahl wonders in the novel, "why don't these people move on and make something of themselves?" She complains about her protests and threats, and tells the interviewer a story about meeting Joseph von Sternberg (Marlene’s old director) at a film festival in the ‘50s, where they hate her but think her film is alright. Riefenstahl is portrayed unsympathetically, with constant unkind thoughts about Marlene and patronizingly forgetting Anna May's name in her old age. This portrayal is for the best, and I’m glad Riefenstahl’s internal narrative of persecution can easily be swept away.

Back on the Marlene side of things, her caller late in life is Ibrahim, a German-Turkish boy looking for his identity between a German father who walked out on him and a Turkish mother who committed suicide young. In college, he tried to cut down an old "Work Will Set You Free" concentration camp sign, wondering "what could WORK SETS FREE mean in a time of genocidal totalitarianism then, and a split capitalism-communism Cold War dichotomy now?" After living the punk lifestyle for a while in a bar that David Bowie happens through, he first calls Marlene on a bet, seeing how long her can keep her on the phone by being mysterious and reciting German poetry. Though she affects impatience and indignation, Marlene enjoys the calls, and for reasons unknown to him, he keeps making them. Once, invited to the lobby of her apartment building, he follows Bébé and meets her, and the two strike up a romance.

Eventually, Ibrahim returns to his mother's grave on the Baltic, only to find that his father didn't pay for a plot renewal, and her remains have been cremated. Ibrahim is distraught by this, and after a swim in the sea with Bébé (his mother had drowned herself), he commits suicide by trying to jump the East German border. Bébé is deported by Germany back to China, which she is mostly sanguine about. She goes to Tiananmen Square and eats at the KFC there. She continues (what I interpret to be) a search for identity, a theme across all the novel's characters and the failure of which is what drove Ibrahim to suicide. Anna May’s and Hans’ searches have been covered, Riefenstahl is not seen by others as she sees herself. Marlene Dietrich, of course, was all affectation. She was a larger-than-life character, playing the part of Marlene Dietrich in every scene she appears in, no matter her age or career status. She is shown as a young, confident actress in Berlin, a diva in Hollywood and during the war, and still cashing in in the ‘60s, reveling in her adoration. As the Berlin Wall falls at the end of the novel, she rises from her bed, trying to shut down the TV in a fit of paranoia, and comes instead to stand in the sun for the first time in years, just as she had stood in the spotlight for her career. The title comes from this, and from a Barthes quote from Camera Ludica.

My notes here just scratch the surface of the novel’s storytelling and themes. These include cameras and the nature of film, of course. It is a Hollywood novel, after all. This book was great at making recurring connections, whether between the Madame Bovary references or Marlene's association of the anonymous Ibrahim with Casablanca (which he references to Bébé before his suicide) to the characters appearing at different points to the different actresses, whether Joseph von Sternberg or Walter Benjamin, who corresponds with Anna May Wong for a while before committing suicide while fleeing the Nazis, a scene we follow the character for. I was reading or re-reading the Wiki pages on each; the only thing that didn't come up that may have been interesting was that Anna May and Riefenstahl apparently were friends, though in the book the two don't interact other than at the imagining of the party. This might be a missed opportunity, but otherwise the novel delivers in every way.