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• 1 2015-02-08T15:47:48-08:00 Hollywood's Racial Mode of Production: Bodies, Disguise, and Resistance 31 Narrative Essay plain 2016-08-08T13:10:01-07:00

  Dolores del Río

  The future Hollywood goddess Dolores del Río (née María Dolores Asúnsolo López-Negrete) was born into Mexico’s ruling class in 1904. Her uncle Francisco I. Madero, was the first great leader and victim of the Revolution in 1910, but her father was a banker who was forced to flee the armies of Pancho Villa. After reestablishing the family in the capital, her parents educated Dolores in a French seminary, where she learned both French and English. During the first year of the triumphant Obregón administration (1922, the time of the Artes Populares exhibit in Los Angeles), Dolores met the Spanish aristocrat Jaime Martínez del Río y Viñet, who would become the first of her many husbands and lovers. The two became leading figures in the capital’s social scene. Hollywood’s elite also found the brilliant artists and intellectuals of the Revolution attractive, so it should not be surprising that director Edwin Carewe spotted Dolores at a party in the Mexico City house of the official revolutionary artist Adolfo Best Maugard. “Struck by her beauty, he offered her stardom in Hollywood.”[1]
  
  Backed by a wealthy family, Dolores was hardly in a position to be exploited, and made the most of her opportunity. Both her husband and her resourceful but protectful mother accompanied her to the notoriously sinful capital of American cinema. Predictably, Carewe saw del Rio as an ideal actress for Latin parts, casting her first in the romantic tale Ramona, a classic Southern California tale about the tragic fate of a California mixed-race Indian girl and her Native American lover. Del Rio rose rapidly in Hollywood stardom. Carewe next cast her as the title character in Evangeline (1929).  Another tragic tale of lovers torn apart by the British expulsion of the French Arcadians from Canada. Filmed with the Vitagraph sound technique (using synchronized 78 rpm records), Evangeline featured del Rio’s marvelous singing voice. By 1932, del Rio was considered one of the three most glamorous female stars, along with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
  
  It may seem curious that a mexicana would become a major star in a city ruled by an intensely anti-Mexican racial ideology. Indeed, much has been made of the “whitening” of Dolores del Rio, suggesting that her acceptance was achieved by somehow minimizing her mexicanidad, but such portrayals misunderstand race, class, and Mexico. For starters, elite Mexican families had the least indigenous ancestry: typically they are as light-skinned as any European. Second, del Rio was better educated than the vast majority of Americans, so the choice of how to adapt was fully hers to make. Wisely, she took voice lessons to refine her English pronunciation, which aided her extraordinary success in the sound era.[2]
  
  Much more important to Del Rio was the challenge of adjusting to North American culture. Del Rio found refuge among the Hollywood aristocracy, becoming close friends with William Randolph Hearst and his plural wife Marion Davies. But her first husband couldn’t stand the Hollywood scene and eventually left her. After their stormy divorce in 1929, del Rio spoke critically of Latin men’s patriarchal attitudes. Within a year she had remarried to the (Roman Catholic) Cedric Gibbons, M-G-M’s chief art director. After falling in love with the young Orson Welles, however, her illusions were shattered by Welles’ stunning indictment of Hearst in Citizen Kane.   A cosmopolitan who never needed to choose between mexicanidad and assimilation, del Rio returned to Mexico in the 1940s and spent many years as a star of Mexican cinema.
  
  Mexican stars of American movies provided a major fascination for Mexican Angelenos, of every class and occupation. The pages of the leading Spanish-language daily La Opinion were crowded with news of Hollywood’s and Mexico’s stars. Del Rio was far from the only Mexican in Hollywood. Lupe Velez, who played opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927), grabbed as many headlines, especially with the news of her romance with Gary Cooper, whom she dumped for Johnny Weismuller. The official Anglo ideology of white supremacy and segregation could hardly hold water when Mexicans could become superstars and intermarry with the Anglos. Given the highly ambiguous racial location of Mexicans, what mattered the most for many immigrants were, in order of importance: marketable skills, fluency in English and their own inclinations.
   
  [Del Rio 1] Author's translation: “Al quedar impactado por su belleza, le ofreció el estrellato en Hollywood.” Krauze (2004): 76.
  
  [Del Rio 2] A very good account is Hershfield (2000).
  
   

  Ahn Chang-ho, Philip Ahn, Susan Ahn Cuddy

  Ahn Chang-ho was born in Pyongyang in 1878 and educated by Presbyterians. A Christian with deep interests in education, Ahn also became a follower of the independence teachings of Philip Jaison, whose activities increased as Japanese in Korean affairs grew in the late 1890s. Seeking to study American educational methods, Ahn honored an arranged marriage to Yi Hye­ryon (aka Helen) and left with her to Inchon for Japan, and then to the United States in 1902--reportedly the first Korean married couple to migrate to the United States.  In San Francisco and then Los Angeles, Ahn quickly became a leader, forming “the first politically-oriented organization of Koreans in California” on 5 April 1904. Following economic opportunity, the Ahns moved to Riverside and then Los Angeles on 29 March1905 and had their first son, Philip in the Highland Park neighborhood north of Downtown. [1]

   

  Philip Ahn is claimed by the family to be “the first American citizen of Korean parents born in the United States.” His sister Susan Ahn Cuddy, born 1915, was the first female gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy, serving from 1942-1946. As their father became a key leader linking the Korean diaspora in the long struggle for independence, Philip, Susan, and a third sibglin Ralph, absorbed two cultures: an intense Korean nationalism and American popular culture.  Philip was fascinated with Hollywood, yearning to become an actor from an early age.  He claimed to have met Douglas Fairbanks while observing the set of The Thief of Bagdad (1924).  Fairbanks reportedly offered him a job as an extra, but Philip's mother, reportedly, refused to give her permission, and he eventually enrolled in the University of Southern California to study business.  But before his father embarked for Korea in 1926 he encouraged Philip to get serious about acting. Chang-ho would never return; he died in a Japanese prison in 1938.  Following his father's advice, Philip took cinematography classes and threw himself into stage acting. Hungry for talented Asians who could play exotic and menacing roles, the studios began casting Philip Ahn in 1935, in A Scream in the Night (Ray Kirkwood Productions). Euro-American audiences weren’t very clear on the differences between Asians, so Ahn played minor roles as Chinese characters in such films as The Good Earth (M-G-M, 1937) and Charlie Chan in Honolulu (20th-Century Fox, 1938).  By the 1940s, with his kid sister Gunnery Lieutenant Susan Ahn Cuddy blasting the Japanese with Navy artillery, Philip fought alongside her on screen,  portraying evil Japanese officers.  His family’s political struggles and his acting career merged in the mass-mediated racial politics Los Angeles had perfected.  He had become a trans-Asian generalist: Playing Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans as needed.  [2]

   

  In Back to Bataan (RKO Radio Pictures, 1945) Ahn provided the hateful enemy for John Wayne’s heroic role. In the postwar years, Ahn continued a successful acting career, appearing in Michael Todd’s 1956 landmark, transnational production, Around the World In Eighty Days (United Artists) and with Elvis Presley in the musical comedy Paradise, Hawaiian Style (Paramount, 1966).[3] Ahn also became a major figure in the Korean American community, and served for two decades as the honorary mayor of unincorporated Panorama City. Philip Ahn’s last major role was the venerable Master Kan in the television series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine (ABC, 1972-5). He died in 1978.

   

  [Ahn 1] Gardner (1979); 10-36, quotation at 35. On the Korean nationalist movement in the United States after the bloody 1919 March 1st Movement, see Choi (2004).

   

  [Ahn 2] Philip Ahn’s younger brothers Philson (b. 1912) and Ralph (b. 1926) also became movie actors, playing the same types of roles as Philip.

   

  [Ahn 3] On the transnational structure of Michael Todd’s production of Around the World, see Schwartz (2007).
   

  Sessue Hayakwa

  Sessue Hayakawa (1893-1973) burst onto the Hollywood screen in 1914 -5 while en route from his economic studies at the University of Chicago, to see his parents.  He never made it that far.  Apparently unhurried, he stayed over the winter in the thriving Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles, fell in love with the actress Tsuru Aoki, who apparently introduced him to acting.  While on the downtown stage, he was scouted by Thomas Ince, who cast him in six known films, each embodying a noble exemplar of a "middle race" between the barbarous colonized peoples, and "white" Europeans. A real sensation, Jesse Lasky at Famous Players Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille brought him over to (what would become ) Paramount.   His breakout performance was his 1915 leading role as Hishituru Tori in The Cheat, also one of Cecil B. DeMille's breakthrough box-office hits as director.  In precisely the same Hollywood moment that D.W. Griffith produced his racist epic, Birth of a Nation, DeMille and Hayakawa teamed-up to produce a remarkably subversive film--one that ran counter to a massive anti-Japanese movement in California.  (note)

   

  To appreciate the audacity of Hayakawa's rise to stardom, we need to take a step back to review the context.   Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover.  An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California.  Japanese immigrants had originally concentrated in San Francisco, but the Anti-Japanese movement was so focused on that community, that many moved to Los Angeles, making Little Tokyo, centered at First and Central the primary settlement of California Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation) immigrants.

   

  DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class Euro-American women of Long Island.  In the original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes.  Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood).  Because Hayakawa's character is crafty and sinister, seeking a forced sexual liason with the socialite wife who falls into his trap, the plot and role are certainly racist.  But in this context, DeMille and Hayakawa were mostly manipulating stereotypes of racial difference to achieve dramatic tension.  In the process, DeMille, inadvertently or not, created a major Japanese heart-throb and lion of California society.  Having already appeared in at least 18 films in 1914, Hayakawa starred or was featured in twenty-six (26) films for Famous Playsers Lasksy / Paramount  in 1915  from 1916 through 1918, with such titles as After Five (1915); The Chinatown Mystery (1915), Alien Souls (1916); The Victoria Cross (1916), Forbidden Paths (1917); The Call of the East (1917); Banzai (1918); and The White Man's Law (1918).

   

  Hayakawa first developed the role of handsome, sexually alluring exotic Other.   He played the sexy but cunning asiatic with a great passion, putting acting before politics.  This was no sideshow. For Lasky he starred with American-Californio Marin Sais in The City of Dim Faces and His Birthright (both 1918), and as his own producer Hayakawa by the early 1920s was among the three top-earning Hollywood stars, along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.  Starring in hits like The Beggar Prince (1920), he was the forbidden cross-racial fantasy for millions of Euro-American women.    For Japanese and other Asian women and men, however, Hayakawa's Hollywood roles were mostly un-attractive.  His films from the Lasky period were disliked in his native land, for obvious reasons. 

   

  At the end of the Great War in 1918, with the rise of anti-immigration movements and restrictive laws, Hayakawa left Lasky and DeMille behind, rejecting their racialist typecasting, and formed his own independent production company, Haworth, which was very successful, earning him more than $2,000,000 a year as one of the greatest leading men of Hollywood.   He drove a notorious gold-plated Pierce-Arrow and threw lavish parties in his mansion, called "The Castle." His work at Haworth his actress wife Tsuru Aoki in such films as  The Dragon Painter (1919) was enormously successful.

   

  After the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration by race and nationality and banned all Asian immigration entirely, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily soured, and anti-Japanese politics in California grew stronger.  By the late 1920s, Hayakawa moved with his wife Tsuru Aoki, began a peripatetic life, performing on stage and in films in New York, England, France, and Japan.  Her made some return visits to Hollywood, starring opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931).  He was trapped in Paris with the Nazi Occupation and served in the Resistance.  Humphrey Bogart sought him out to play opposite him in his 1949 Tokyo Joe, and her received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957).

   

   

  
  
  
   
• 1 2018-07-18T02:29:13-07:00 Sessue Hayakwa, 1914-1957 1 plain 2018-07-18T02:29:13-07:00

  Sessue Hayakawa (1893-1973) burst onto the Hollywood screen in 1914 -5 while en route from his economic studies at the University of Chicago, to see his parents.  He never made it that far.  Apparently unhurried, he stayed over the winter in the thriving Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles, fell in love with the actress Tsuru Aoki, who apparently introduced him to acting.  While on the downtown stage, he was scouted by Thomas Ince, who cast him in six known films, each embodying a noble exemplar of a "middle race" between the barbarous colonized peoples, and "white" Europeans. A real sensation, Jesse Lasky at Famous Players Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille brought him over to (what would become ) Paramount.   His breakout performance was his 1915 leading role as Hishituru Tori in The Cheat, also one of Cecil B. DeMille's breakthrough box-office hits as director.  In precisely the same Hollywood moment that D.W. Griffith produced his racist epic, Birth of a Nation, DeMille and Hayakawa teamed-up to produce a remarkably subversive film--one that ran counter to a massive anti-Japanese movement in California.  (note) To appreciate the audacity of Hayakawa's rise to stardom, we need to take a step back to review the context.   Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover.  An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California.  Japanese immigrants had originally concentrated in San Francisco, but the Anti-Japanese movement was so focused on that community, that many moved to Los Angeles, making Little Tokyo, centered at First and Central the primary settlement of California Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation) immigrants. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class Euro-American women of Long Island.  In the original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes.  Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood).  Because Hayakawa's character is crafty and sinister, seeking a forced sexual liason with the socialite wife who falls into his trap, the plot and role are certainly racist.  But in this context, DeMille and Hayakawa were mostly manipulating stereotypes of racial difference to achieve dramatic tension.  In the process, DeMille, inadvertently or not, created a major Japanese heart-throb and lion of California society.  Having already appeared in at least 18 films in 1914, Hayakawa starred or was featured in twenty-six (26) films for Famous Playsers Lasksy / Paramount  in 1915  from 1916 through 1918, with such titles as After Five (1915); The Chinatown Mystery (1915), Alien Souls (1916); The Victoria Cross (1916), Forbidden Paths (1917); The Call of the East (1917); Banzai (1918); and The White Man's Law (1918). Hayakawa first developed the role of handsome, sexually alluring exotic Other.   He played the sexy but cunning asiatic with a great passion, putting acting before politics.  This was no sideshow. For Lasky he starred with American-Californio Marin Sais in The City of Dim Faces and His Birthright (both 1918), and as his own producer Hayakawa by the early 1920s was among the three top-earning Hollywood stars, along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.  Starring in hits like The Beggar Prince (1920), he was the forbidden cross-racial fantasy for millions of Euro-American women.    For Japanese and other Asian women and men, however, Hayakawa's Hollywood roles were mostly un-attractive.  His films from the Lasky period were disliked in his native land, for obvious reasons.  At the end of the Great War in 1918, with the rise of anti-immigration movements and restrictive laws, Hayakawa left Lasky and DeMille behind, rejecting their racialist typecasting, and formed his own independent production company, Haworth, which was very successful, earning him more than $2,000,000 a year as one of the greatest leading men of Hollywood.   He drove a notorious gold-plated Pierce-Arrow and threw lavish parties in his mansion, called "The Castle." His work at Haworth his actress wife Tsuru Aoki in such films as  The Dragon Painter (1919) was enormously successful. After the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration by race and nationality and banned all Asian immigration entirely, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily soured, and anti-Japanese politics in California grew stronger.  By the late 1920s, Hayakawa moved with his wife Tsuru Aoki, began a peripatetic life, performing on stage and in films in New York, England, France, and Japan.  Her made some return visits to Hollywood, starring opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931).  He was trapped in Paris with the Nazi Occupation and served in the Resistance.  Humphrey Bogart sought him out to play opposite him in his 1949 Tokyo Joe, and her received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957).

  
  Endnotes for Part 1 (see Bibliography For White Shadows) for complete references:
  
  B-1  Gregory Black, "Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940," Film History 3 (1989): 167-89.)
  
  B-2  Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, Chapter, "When Hollywood Became Hollywood."
  
  [B-3] (DeMille 1959, p. 21)
  
  B-4 (Higham 1973, pp. 5-8)
  
  [B-5] (Quoted in Higashi, 1994: p. 7).
  
  [B-6] (Higham 1973, 19-49)
  
  [B-7] (Miyao 2007, p. 5; 21-49).
  
  [B-8]  Quotes and translations are from: Miyao, 2007 pp. 27-28.
  
  [B-9] Quoted in Ross, 2002, p. 82.
  
  [B-10] Starr, 300, 322.
  
  
  [1] In 1913 Biograph moved to a new studio in the Bronx, at 807 East 175 Street. Biograph also operated studios in Los Angeles: in 1910 at Grand Avenue and Washington Street; and from 1911 to 1915 at Georgia and Girard Streets. Slide (1986): 39-40.
  
  [2] Although Ben obviously anglicized his surname upon immigration, he and his family successfully kept the original name a secret. It may have been Varna or Varnerski, according to his great-granddaugher Cass Warner Sperling. Sperling and Millner (1998): 20.
  
  [3] Sperling and Millner (1998): 27-8.
  
  [4] Sperling and Millner (1998): 41.
  
  [5] Altman (1992): 2-15.
  
  [6] May (1983): 148.
  
  [7] Sperling and Millner (1998): 53-4.
  
  [8] Sperling and Millner (1998): 59-65.
  
  [9] Sperling and Millner (1998): 150.
  
  [10] Ross (2001): 258.
  
  [11] Slide (1986): 192-3; Quotation is from Culver City Historic Site #7 marker on the property, signed by Culver City Historical Society, February 21, 1986.
  
  [12] Slide (1986): 291.
  
  [13] Marx, (1975): 42-49.
  
  [14] Lahue (1973); Slide (1986): 306-307; Pintar (2001): 322-323; Edmonds (1977).
  
  [15] Mahar (2001): 90.
  
  [16] Ross (1998); Mahar (2001): 91.
  
  [17] E. Leslie Gilliams, “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?” Illustrated World (Feb 1923); Henry McMahon, “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures,” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920), both cited in Mahar (2001).
  
  [18] Slide (1986): 256-7.
  
  [19] This phrase is given to the period 1909-1916 by Karen Ward Mahar, in Mahar (2001): 81.
  
  [20] The campaign against the film in Los Angeles, led by Charlotta Bass and Frederick Roberts, is detailed in Flamming (2005): 86-9.
  
  [21] According to Lillian Gish, William Clune had become an investor during the filming of Birth, striking a deal with Griffith to hold the premiere. Gish (1971): 52-53.
  
  [22] Rogin (1987): 190-235.
  
  [23] Ross (2001): 260.
  
  [24] Drew (2001).
  
  [25] Ross (2001): 262.
  
  [26] Ross (2001): 262.
  
  [27] Altman (1992): xii.
  
  [28] Marx (1975): 25.
  
  [29] Gary (1981); Marx (1975): 67-76.
  
  [30] Slide (1986): 210; Marx (1975) 51; Quotation from Carey (1981): 144.
  
  [31] Pintar, (2001): 333.