The Bitter Tea of General Yen Read online

  She said nothing to Capra but thought the movie was “grotesquely miscast,” that Stanwyck was all wrong for the New England young woman, that her accent was “crude,” her voice “uneducated.”*3 Stone was not at all happy that a Swede was playing the role of a Chinese general.

  Capra took great pains with The Bitter Tea of General Yen, carefully planning each detail of the production. The extraordinary sets were designed by Stephen Goosson, Columbia’s art director who’d worked with Capra on Platinum Blonde and American Madness. Interesting to note that the signature wall-high octagonal window of Yen’s palace—and Megan Davis’s bedroom—so identified with the film, and assumed to be an art director’s extravagant, inspired notion, is first described in Grace Stone’s novel.

  The stylized look of The Bitter Tea of General Yen—dreamy, exotic, otherworldly—was achieved through Joe Walker’s camera work and innovation and Capra’s direction.

  The film opened in Los Angeles in January, 1933, at the RKO Hillstreet Theatre. In New York, Bitter Tea inaugurated the newly redesigned $8,000,000 Radio City Music Hall, which went from being the world’s largest two-a-day theater with a seating capacity of 6,250 (the stage was deemed too cavernous), to a motion picture house with a newly installed screen, seventy by forty feet.

  The reviews were admiring of Capra’s work—“a triumph of repression; the more spectacular sequences [are] irreproachably conceived”—as well as Nils Asther’s and Walter Connolly’s “unusually clever performances” (New York Times). The picture really belongs to Asther. Of Barbara Stanwyck’s Megan Davis, made somewhat muted by Capra’s complicated, recently replaced feelings for his star (he’d married Lucille Rayburn six months before the film’s production), the critics described Stanwyck’s work as “a brittle impersonation of the missionary girl, a portrait which lacks warmth and depth.”*4 One critic said of Capra’s Bitter Tea itself, “No picture half so strange, so bizarre, has ever before passed outward through the astonished doors of the Columbia Studio.”*5

  In 1934, Grace Zaring Stone published a much-admired novel The Cold Journey, set in eighteenth-century New England and Quebec, based on a French and Indian raid of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a kidnapping of some of the town’s inhabitants, a kind of allegory of Europe in its then present times. Carl Van Doren called the book “a novel of shuddering force, of concentrated power and sensitive beauty.”

  Five years later, Stone, then living in Paris where her husband was naval attaché, wrote an altogether different kind of novel—an anti-Nazi suspense—using the pseudonym Ethel Vance. Escape became the first of many admired Ethel Vance novels, spellbinding thrillers written with a sense of excitement; a facility of construction; and a smooth, sleek, quicksilver narrative written in another voice altogether.

  The New York Times called Escape a novel of “compelling and almost breathless immediacy” (November 22, 1943). Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune described it as “a novel with the agonizing suspense of Rebecca and the deep compassion of Reaching for the Stars,” and Rose C. Feld wrote, “If it were possible to imagine a perfect collaboration between Willa Cather, Nora Waln, and Dorothy Sayers, it could be no better.”

  Escape takes place in an unnamed but recognizable totalitarian country (“We meet in an evil land that is near to the gates of Hell …”) about people caught up in the war in Europe trying to get to freedom, about a rescue from a concentration camp of one of Germany’s greatest stage actresses by her American son and their desperate efforts to flee the country.

  The novel sold more than two hundred thousand copies in its first three months and was a selection of the Book of the Month Club. MGM bought the film rights knowing that Ethel Vance was a pseudonym. For two years many speculated on the author’s identity and rightfully assumed that the novel was written by a woman—Erika Mann? Dorothy Thompson? Rebecca West?—who’d taken another name to protect some relative or friend living in Germany. And indeed, at the time, Stone’s daughter, Eleanor (then Baroness Zsigmond Perényi; later author of More Was Lost, 1946; The Bright Sword, 1955; Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero, 1974; and Green Thoughts, 1981) was living in the midst of dangerous circumstances, in Nazi-occupied Hungary. When Eleanor, pregnant, had no choice but to flee her adopted home, she and her mother, then visiting, both trapped in Hungary with the Germans invading Belgium, made their way out to Genoa as the RAF bombed the city.*6 A small American boat took them away from a Europe at war and brought them to safety and New York City. MGM’s Escape, produced in the fall of 1940, starred Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer, Alla Nazimova, and Conrad Veidt and was directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

  Stone said she chose the name Ethel Vance “because it sounds like a name you were born with and can’t get rid of.”*7

  The Bitter Tea of General Yen, more than eight decades later, is an extraordinary film for what it reveals of Hollywood’s—and America’s—attitudes about race in the 1930s; for the look of the picture and Capra’s ambitious vision and commentary about the West’s insular, unknowing view of the world; and for what it brings to life of Grace Zaring Stone’s subtle and illuminating portrait of a colonial China set against its two-thousand-year history, caught in time between its fierce struggle to establish democracy and its equally passionate pull toward communism.

  “I don’t try to imitate genius—naturally. Why should I?” said Stone. “I work terribly hard to tell a story effectively, and do a good, tight construction job, because I can do that much. I can be a craftsman.”*8

  The Bitter Tea of General Yen is not a great novel; it is a well-crafted novel, written with a delicate hand, a book that has dignity and elegance and an intensity of vision.

  Grace Zaring Stone lived in Stonington, Connecticut, until her death in 1991. She wrote six other novels under her own name; four under the name of Ethel Vance, including Winter Meeting (1946), which was made into a Warner Brothers picture in 1948 that starred Bette Davis and James Davis (no relation to his costar). At the time of Stone’s death, she was a hundred years old.

  Victoria Wilson is a vice president and senior editor at Alfred Knopf. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and has served on the boards of PEN American Center, the National Board Review of Motion Pictures, the Writing Program of the New School of Social Research, and Poets & Writers. She is the author of A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940. She lives in New York City and upstate New York.

  * * *

  *1Robert Van Gelder, “An Interview with Grace Zaring Stone,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1942.

  *2Frank Capra, in George Stevens Jr., ed., Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 98.

  *3Eleanor Perényi to author, January 5, 1998.

  *4Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 347.

  *5Philip K. Scheuer, New York World-Telegram, January 14, 1933.

  *6Eleanor Perényi, More Was Lost (New York: Helen Marx Books, 2001; New York: Little, Brown, 1946).

  *7New York Times, May 5, 1942.

  *8Robin Van Gelder, “An Interview with Grace Zaring Stone,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1942.

  I

  Megan, drawing her chair over to the window, saw that the rain had given an air of transcience to the solid Chinese earth. For the moment it had stopped raining and all the pools reflected cloudy sky, making the roadway an unsubstantial track over emptiness; willow trees hanging over a wall at the far side of the road were silvered and delicate with moisture, and even the brutal fact of barbed-wire entanglements stretching along the foot of the wall was tempered by the fragility of tremulous drops. She had been told that the barbed-wire entanglements bounded the French Concession and that farther to the left the opening in the barricade marked the entrance to the Avenue Joffre, one of the chief thoroughfares of the Concession.

  A French non-commissione
d officer and several Senegalese soldiers stood at the entrance and examined, bored but relentless, all the traffic going in and out. All afternoon, in spite of bad weather, there had been a straggling passage of motors, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and Chinese men in long black skirts, holding large umbrellas, fastidiously picking their way among the puddles. Megan since her arrival in the house, while talking to the Jacksons and when they had gone, unpacking, directing the amah’s pressing, was always conscious of the windows. In the dimness of the European house those gray windows opened strangely on to the Chinese road. She was more and more conscious of them as she did various small things that had to be done, longing to possess them undisturbed, and when finally she drew up a chair in the little drawing-room and rested her elbows on the sill, she looked out at that moment when China, washed in a luminous impermanency, presented itself to her not with the dull impact of a solid fact but with the peculiar intensity of a vision seen partly from within.

  On the road a car came at tremendous speed from Siccawei toward the Avenue Joffre. The fans of muddy water curving back from its wheels looked like the fins of a porpoise, and like a porpoise it lunged over the uneven road. As Megan watched, only dreamily noting, a small Ford released from examination at the entrance to the Avenue Joffre unexpectedly darted forward, and to avoid it the large car swerved sharply to the left, skidded and crashed into a telephone pole. Megan heard the crash and the tinkle of breaking glass. She jumped up and ran out the front door. Two of the Senegalese were there ahead of her and several passing Chinese had gathered. The hood was smashed in, the engine wrecked, and the chauffeur had been thrown through the windshield and flattened against the telephone pole. But Megan, only now conscious of a real intrusion, stood reluctant before the necessity of doing something about it.

  The door of the car opened and a Chinese man stepped out. He was muffled in a coat too heavy for the weather, but his hat had fallen off and a thin, dark trickle of blood ran down his smooth temple. He stood for a moment beside the ruined car feeling himself apprehensively about the ribs, shoulders and arms and, satisfied that he was unhurt, feeling more tenderly still each finger of his exceedingly beautiful hands as if he could not too completely reassure himself that their slight bones were intact. He was so absorbed that Megan said to him sharply:

  “Your chauffeur is hurt.”

  He looked at her vaguely and smiled with a curious lift of his eyebrows, then obviously as reluctant as she was, took a few steps toward his chauffeur and glanced down at him. He turned toward her again and clicked his tongue.

  “Annoying!” he exclaimed in English.

  Another Chinese man stepped from the car and walked around to observe the extent of the disaster with the foolishly hesitant movements of a fowl picking its way about a littered garden. He also was smothered in a heavy coat, but a cap pulled over his eyes hid his face, and as everything he wore was apparently several sizes too large for him, he seemed a boy of sixteen or even younger. He and the Chinese man were about to enter into a consultation when the French sergeant walked up and, brushing curtly between them, began to question the Chinese man. The boy moved away and the man answered the sergeant, smiling as though their meeting furnished an unexpected but agreeable opportunity for conversation. Finally he took a paper from his pocket and showed it to the sergeant. The sergeant examined it, then looked up at him, looked him over, and with deliberate mockery saluted him. The Chinese man continued to smile, though his smile now was not directed at the sergeant; it became diffused, meditative, touching rather some particularly uncertain aspect of humanity just revealed to him. He turned away. In touching his forehead to return the salute he had discovered his fingers to be smeared with blood and this further reminder of the hazards of life seemed to deepen his meditation into melancholy. His smile vanished.

  “Annoying,” he murmured once more.

  From the Ford which had stopped a few yards up the road jumped a vigorous, black-bearded priest in a black soutane. He ran toward them and, paying no attention to any one else, bent at once over the chauffeur whom he laid out flat on the ground, uttering loud exclamations. Megan knew that the chauffeur was undeniably the real, if the less interesting sufferer, but she felt that the Chinese man had met with an unmerited slight from the French sergeant. And he too had been actually hurt. She exclaimed impulsively:

  “Please take my handkerchief,” and drew a clean folded one from the pocket of her cardigan.

  The Chinese man answered, “Thank you, but I have one.”

  He took a large handkerchief out of his own pocket, unfolding it to its full size and displaying a character embroidered in the corner. Something in his gesture made Megan realize her offer had implied that he could not possess a handkerchief. She was resentful, not only because he had checked her impulse but he had also made it seem a bit absurd. She turned away from him abruptly and joined the priest.

  The Senegalese and the French sergeant strolled over but they only stood looking down while the priest felt the chauffeur’s body for broken bones. Megan knelt beside him in the attitude of one ready to help and even with some reluctance ran her fingers over the chauffeur’s skull through bristling, oily black hair. The priest lifted an eyelid. Then he said to her in French:

  “And the skull, is it broken?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Megan; “perhaps you had better examine it.”

  The chauffeur’s face was a mass of cuts, with glass driven into the flesh. She began to feel a little sick.

  “It is horrible, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes, they can’t stand much,” said the priest, “they are desperately undernourished.”

  “No one seems to concern himself,” said Megan, glancing still resentfully at the Chinese man who was cleaning his forehead with little dabs of the handkerchief.

  “Oh,” said the priest, shrugging his broad shoulders, “what do you want! They are five hundred million souls!”

  And Megan saw that it was difficult for him to bear in mind the surpassing value of such a super-abundant commodity.

  The sound of another car stopping made her look up. A crowd had gathered by this time and the magnificence of the new arrival diverted most of the attention. Like the first it was a shining and obviously new car but spattered high with the mud of rough and rainy roads. The windows were draped in chenille fringes, and through them Megan saw a woman’s head, her black hair melting smoothly into the dusk of the background, her face vivid as a painted egg-shell, supported apparently on a shining collar of lime-green satin. She lowered a window and leaning forward made little chirping ejaculations at the sight of the wreck. The Chinese man walked over and spoke to her. He leaned on the window, and as he talked to her with considerable animation, Megan looked at him more attentively. Nothing about him suggested any particular age; his face was smooth and of a uniform pallor, the nose long and aquiline, the eyes bulging a little, there was a curl of humor at each side of his small, full mouth and a certain vigor to the modeling of his forehead, but the hands with which he gesticulated as he talked betrayed him, not so much by their feminine delicacy and beauty as by a way he had of handling things that was both fastidious and ineffectual.

  The priest got up from his knees and went over to speak to the Chinese man. The small Chinese in the great coat and the sergeant joined them. The priest evidently made suggestions in Chinese. They talked a great deal, and the sergeant watched them cynically, to indicate that he had the proper contempt for a conversation of which he could not understand a word. Finally a decision was arrived at. The priest and the chauffeur of the second car picked up the injured chauffeur and put him into the second car. They laid him on the floor at the feet of the lady, bending his legs into an uncomfortable position, and the two Chinese men got in after him. Then they drove off. The priest, having watched them go, took off his hat to Megan and went to his Ford, which awaited him a little farther up the road. The small crowd of coolies and passers-by continued, for want of anything better, to
stand listlessly about the damaged car. It began to rain again. As Megan slowly crossed the road to the house the French sergeant, looking at her ankles, hummed a French song called Valentine.

  II

  Inside the house Megan sat down by the fireplace, in which a fire was being built and lighted by the coolie. In leaving the street she had turned her back on China; the house she was in was on the wrong side of the barbed-wire barricade and in Chinese territory, but it might have been a house in Brighton, as English as it was possible to make it. There was a cottage piano in one corner, loaded with photographs in standing frames; a plum-colored carpet covered the floor and on the walls hung pictures, evidently belonging to a series and representing dogs of different breeds sitting on cushions, taking tea, and wearing lace caps and top-hats. The tea table was being set near the fire by the number one boy for the Jacksons, who had said they would be back about five o’clock.

  It was the Jacksons who met Megan on her arrival at Shanghai that morning. The ship anchored down the Whangpoo, and before she could step aboard the launch that was to take the passengers up to the jetty she was accosted on deck by a small, shabby man with a soft apologetic voice and a very drooping mustache who told her he was Mr. Jackson, of the China Inland Mission, sent to meet her. Megan turned so pale that the little man caught at her arm to steady her.

  “But Bob,” she stammered, “has anything happened to him?”

  “No, no,” cried Mr. Jackson hastily, “he is well, he is quite well.” And all the time the launch was chugging up the river he continued to reassure her as to Bob’s safety, for he was terribly afraid of emotional women, that is, when they were of the European race; the outcries of a recently widowed Chinese he was capable of taking with calm. He explained to her that Bob had been unable to leave Changsha, and that while he was not exactly in actual danger, still there was a great deal of fighting around Changsha and at various points along the river, so that he might even be delayed for weeks.