Kissed Off
Review of Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe (USA: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2019)
By Diane Josefowicz
“Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl at Artists’ Ball, Berlin.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1928.
Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, The Delayed Rays of a Star, takes as its point of departure a photograph, snapped by Alfred Eisenstaedt, of three women at a party: Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong. All three smile more or less self-consciously for the camera, composing themselves as Eisenstaedt frames the image. Berlin, 1928: the Nazi Party occupied just twelve seats in the Reichstag and the economic stabilization of the late Weimar Republic had given rise to a brief cultural flowering. Looking at this photograph today, we know what’s coming, but the image already contains intimations of unease. Dietrich cannot resist mugging, and Riefenstahl, who hangs off Wong like an albatross in a chain-mail dress, seems eager to disappear.
Of the three women, Dietrich needs the least introduction, but on the night when Eisenstaedt clicked the shutter, she was just an up-and-comer paying her dues in undistinguished film and stage work, her greatest roles still ahead of her. If Riefenstahl is remembered at all, it is as Hitler’s propagandist, the director who memorialized his hate-rallies on film; yet in the photograph she, too, is a relative unknown, an actress with a handful of roles to her credit. They contrast sharply with Wong who, at twenty-three, is not only the youngest of the group but also the most distinguished. Six years earlier, she had starred in The Toll of the Sea, one of the first films to be shot in Technicolor; two years later, she featured alongside Douglas Fairbanks inThe Thief of Bagdad, an Arabian Nights-inspired swashbuckler. In the decades to come, Wong would fade from view while Riefenstahl and Dietrich went on to enjoy lasting fame—though in Riefenstahl’s case, notoriety is really the better word. Eisenstaedt’s photo is an odd document, evidence from a time when the future was open and unknown for everyone pictured in it. With this novel Koe imagines the as-yet unknown trajectories of these lives—Dietrich’s meteoric fame, Reifenstahl’s lasting infamy, and Wong’s near-complete disappearance.
This is a story that begs to be told, Rashomon-style, from multiple points of view. The triptych of women naturally lends itself to a multi-voiced narrative, and Koe, a talented ventriloquist, exploits this formal element to great effect, giving each character her own voice and allowing their accounts of their lives to overlap in ways that lend coherence to the whole. Dietrich’s is the voice of openness, at least in her youth. When a bigot objects to a man in a dress as “topsy-turvy,” she breezily dismisses his ugly rigidity while directing a puff of cigarette smoke to his face. “The world might as well be topsy-turvy,” she remarks. “What’s not to like about a topsy-turvy world? Women could be kings, and I’d wear pants all the time.”
Dietrich’s counterpoint is Reifenstahl, whose bigotry has envy as its gimlet-eyed taproot. Always rushing to see herself in terms of how she stacks up to others, Riefenstahl holds a yardstick to the world, seeking ways to assert her superiority. Her feeling about appearing in the photograph with Wong and Dietrich reveals this habit of comparison. “Of all the moments for [the photographer] to choose to notice her,” she thinks at the moment of the flash, “it had to be this: regrettably sandwiched between an Oriental visitor,” that is, Wong, “who would surely snatch the focus of the photograph by way of those foreign looks,” and Dietrich, “the chintzy wannabe.” There’s something patently absurd about describing a giant like Dietrich as a “chintzy wannabe”—but, of course, the absurdity is precisely Koe’s point. “What an odd picture it would make,” Riefenstahl reflects, “and how lucky for the blonde to be included in it at all, when she was not even a real actress, just another eager skirt trying to break into the industry!” Which is a bit rich, coming from the woman with just a handful of minor film roles to her credit.
Where Riefenstahl asserts herself in pursuit of power and Dietrich knowingly but equally relentlessly negates herself in the service of those who can advance her career, Wong remembers and reflects. Her childhood in Los Angeles is blighted by racism. Her parents do their best to protect her. Menaced downtown, where “it was common sport for white joes to set their dogs on Chinese passersby,” Anna’s father fends off a snarling dog and its bigoted owner with a joke. “The white man chortled, calling his dog to heel,” Koe writes, and “they were allowed to pass unscathed.” As they do, her father bows to the hostile stranger. Although the immediate danger is averted, Anna May can’t understand this behavior. More comfortable in their neighborhood, she doesn’t understand why he felt the need to behave so submissively.
[She] could parse the telling of the joke in their moment of danger, but she was unable to accept that scraping bow, after the pit bull had been called back.
Why did you bow? she asked her father, trying to keep the scorn from her voice.
Did you want to have rabies? he said.
Later Wong is pained to discover that she has been typecast, slotted into predictable minor roles (exotic vixen, dragon lady) even as she hones her talent and organizes her advancement. “It was true” none of her jobs “were lead roles, but she’d assumed she’d not been invited to try out for those because she wasn’t yet ready, not because she was Chinese.” Following her early successes, she seeks an interlude of freedom in Berlin, where Eisenstaedt catches her image as a woman whose solid record of success entitles her to dream of bigger things. But those dreams do not materialize. Years pass; indignities accumulate. She continues to work, investing unsatisfying roles with real grandeur. “I’m going to come right out and say it,” a colleague tells her later on. “You got the best parts. [...] You had the sexiest costumes, the best lines. No kissing anyone up, you kissed them off.”
The juxtaposition of the lives of these three women raises questions one might prefer to avoid about women’s ambitions, the ways in which those ambitions are thwarted, and the ugly outlets that such thwarted development sometimes seeks. Wong, and to some extent Dietrich, just want to be good actresses. But Riefenstahl is after immortal fame, and where this novel really shines is as a critique of this system of values. Although all three women are diminished by their contexts, only one—Riefenstahl—yokes her ambition to a death machine masquerading as a government. She knows what she’s doing, but she’s willful enough to deny it for long stretches, and when her will fails, she has her consciousness-erasing drugs. So buttressed, she decides to make an extravagant state-sponsored film. Seeking extras, she recruits “gypsies” (Roma and Sinti) imprisoned in a concentration camp, winning them a reprieve for long enough to get the footage she needs. At the end of filming, when they beg her to secure their release, she rejects their appeal. “You could not fix everything for everyone, much less a gypsy,” Riefenstahl says, justifying her cruelty to herself. “Give them a concession out of the goodness of your own heart and all of a sudden they expect you to bend backward and cartwheel for them like you owe them a living.” This scene may be fiction, but Riefenstahl did indeed recruit Roma and Sinti from a concentration camp to be extras in a film. She also refused to acknowledge the Nazi genocide against the Roma and Sinti until shortly before her death in 2002.
I can’t say I mourned her passing, and I resisted even the limited sympathy required to tolerate Koe’s imagined Riefenstahl. By saying this I am not critiquing Koe’s artistry so much as I am pointing to the difficulty of her subject. That said, the difficulty is somewhat mitigated by Koe’s sympathetic portrayal of the minor characters who flit in and out of the stories told by and about the principal figures. Like them, their lives are filled with incident; unlike them, events unfold off-camera, in private moments of humiliation, struggle, loss, and occasionally contentment. A soldier falls helplessly in love with a superior whose self-hatred undoes them both; a musician of mixed Turkish and German descent gets a word of encouragement from none other than David Bowie and comes to grief on the border of East and West Germany; his lover, the young woman who looks after the aging Dietrich, returns to China wrapped in one of the movie star’s glamorous old coats, listening to the Smiths on her Walkman.
In her acknowledgements, Koe alludes to Roland Barthes’ view that “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent”—that is, its subject—with the power to touch the distant viewer “like the delayed rays of a star.” Anna May Wong was indeed a star for whom recognition is overdue, and this accomplished novel will ensure that Wong’s life and work are more widely known. But more than merely celebrating an overlooked celebrity, with this novel Koe invites readers to reckon with the fundamental emptiness of the image and the mixed blessings of fame.
Diane Josefowicz's writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Dame Magazine, and Necessary Fiction. She presently serves as director of communications for Swing Left Rhode Island, a progressive political organization.