A Cigarette that Bears a Lipstick’s Traces
the woman who inspired one of the most famous love songs ever written
Anna May Wong had many lovers. She was a movie star, after all, and a legendary beauty at that. Her slim-cut figure and graceful gait seduced more than a few in her day, sometimes without her even trying. British composer Constant Lambert, who first set eyes on the actress as the Mongol slave in The Thief of Bagdad (1924), spent many a late night in his Bloomsbury flat toasting his Hollywood muse from across the Atlantic with cups of Chinese rice wine, and that was years before he’d ever met her in the flesh.
While anti-miscegenation laws in America, statutes that criminalized romantic relationships and marriage between whites and people of color, certainly complicated Anna May’s love life, it never stopped her from following her heart. In London, where there were no such legal restrictions, Anna May was quite the regular on the high society social circuit. When she returned stateside, she slyly boasted to a reporter, “Well, for many months I did not buy myself a single meal.”
The men Anna May Wong fell in love with were often brilliant artists in their own right — composers, writers, filmmakers — visionaries who had something to say to the world.*
