Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  “That’s the way it goes, Wheatley,” Dewey replied and finished his martini in silence.

  Lady Mary was less complacent than Lachlan Wheatley. Though she had made her own peace with the Chinese people years earlier, her tough-minded realism was unimpaired. Like Dewey Miller, she had read the voluminous literature of the Cultural Revolution and had talked with Red Guards who had fled from China. Those early defectors from the Cultural Revolution were revolted by their own deeds and fearful of the future.

  “You’re probably understating events,” she told Miller. “I fear civil war.”

  The first pitched battle between the storm troopers of idealistic nihilism and the neo-Stalinist defenders of the established order was fought in Shanghai, the city of seven million on the mudflats where the Woosong and Hwangpoo Rivers join before disgorging into the Yangtze River and the East China Sea. The mortal confrontation was historically and dramatically inevitable. Both capitalism and Communism had come to China through Shanghai, and, after seventeen years of the Communists’ People’s Republic, those antagonistic forces still contended in the great port.

  By mid-January 1967 the excesses of the Red Guards had alienated Shanghai’s working class. The longshoremen and factory workers whose fathers had seized the city in 1927 under Chou En-lai’s leadership turned against the Maoist zealots of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee that had “seized power” from the former municipal government. Led by their old cadres, the workers staged mass strikes. Electricity and water flowed only intermittently, and trains halted on their tracks. Mills and foundries stood idle, while ocean-going ships were as effectively stranded when longshoremen refused to unload cargoes as if they had run aground. Angry farmers in the surrounding countryside choked the city’s food supplies to a trickle. The revolt of the masses precipitated the armed struggle that was called the “January Storm.”

  Tou-tou came to Shanghai in mid-January to lead the Red Guards from Peking who battled for the Chairman’s supernal ideals. The granddaughter Lady Mary had never seen was convinced that her father was a vicious counterrevolutionary. James, in turn, despaired of diverting his daughter from the path he feared would lead to her destruction, though her mother Lu Ping was wavering in her dedication to the Cultural Revolution.

  Having survived many intra-Party struggles, Lu Ping could no longer delude herself regarding the latest and most destructive struggle. She quailed at the barbarism of the rampaging adolescents, and she realized that her husband’s warnings against irrevocable commitment to the Cultural Revolution were but prudent. Three decades of Party life had taught her the cardinal virtue of self-preservation: She knew that her fate was directly linked to his, despite the Party’s cant about “perfect equality between male and female.”

  But Lu Ping could influence her daughter neither by political logic nor by maternal admonition. Tou-tou was as obstinate as her great-grandfather, Bandmaster John Philip Osgood, who had refused to attend his only daughter’s wedding to a “blasted chink.”

  Tou-tou’s chief target was the striking railway workers. They not only demanded higher wages, but refused to operate trains overloaded when visiting Red Guards pushed into carriages reserved for the workers of the Third Iron and Steel Works. The revolution therefore demanded that the politically conscious Red Guards, themselves the privileged children of senior officials and intellectuals, instruct the manual laborers in their “proletarian duties.”

  Chanting revolutionary songs, Tou-tou led the march of three hundred and fifty Peking Red Guards on the railway workers’ apartment complex. Her unit was challenged by a defensive phalanx of three hundred Shanghai Red Guards, who were the railway workers’ children. The leaders confronted each other while the massed ranks behind them waved little red books and shouted Chairman Mao’s slogans.

  “We stand with our fathers, with the working class!” The cheeks of the eighteen-year-old Shanghai leader were scarlet in anger. “We are the true proletariat, while you, you rotten eggs from Peking, are fake proletarians.”

  “We must distinguish clearly between our enemies and our friends.” Tou-tou countered with the appropriate quotation from Chairman Mao. “You Shanghai people are rotten with bourgeois thinking. The railways must run again to serve the people.”

  “What do you know about serving the people?” the Shanghai youth retorted. “You foreigners have created chaos—devoured our food and stolen our rights. You’ve made Shanghai a jungle. Serve the people, you say! Because of you, the people don’t even have enough food!”

  “We must reason together,” Tou-tou replied. “We must reconcile our views by struggle, criticism, and reform. We must …”

  “If it’s struggle you want …” The Shanghai leader hefted a crowbar.

  A barrage of bricks soared over the rival leaders’ heads into the defensive phalanx. The Shanghailanders growled in their throats and surged forward, trapping Tou-tou and their own leader between the converging front ranks. The youth’s iron bar caught Tou-tou in the solar plexus, and she doubled over. The Shanghai Red Guards’ pounding feet pummeled her defenseless body while girls’ shrill screams rose above youths’ enraged rumbling.

  Two of her followers dragged Tou-tou from under the writhing knots of combatants. She motioned them to return to the battle and shouted: “Struggle! Struggle harder! A revolution is not a tea party!”

  Shaken by the Shanghailanders’ fierce defense of their parents and their homes, the Peking Red Guards retreated from the concrete battlefield. But they rallied and returned to the attack. The rival groups skirmished for five days, mauling each other in fierce melees. The Peking detachment counted seven dead and twenty-eight hospitalized; the defenders’ casualties were even higher. Yet the trains still stood unmanned in their marshaling yards.

  Tou-tou was in the thick of battle for almost a month. Her hair hung lank; her face was deeply scratched; her body was bruised and battered purple. Still she led her followers into the fray, hurling her most vehement taunts at the soldiers who cordoned off the struggling Red Guards.

  “Son of a bitch-turtle,” she screamed at a portly major whose superior calm recalled her father. “You’re worse than the counterrevolutionaries. The People’s Army must support the people’s cause.”

  The astonished major regarded her blankly. Tou-tou rushed at him, whirling a heavy iron chain. When his men fended her off with rifle butts, she sobbed in frustration.

  She knew the rot went deep, as Chairman Mao had warned, since the People’s Liberation Army itself was infected with the deadly virus of bourgeois thought. Socialism was obviously in mortal peril when peasants from suburban truck farms marched into the city. Armed with rifles and shotguns by their reactionary cadres, the peasants joined the workers on February 6 to besiege the Kiangsi Street offices of the Shanghai People’s Commune, the “ultra-left” successor to the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Tou-tou and sixteen lesser Red Guard leaders from Peking stood behind the bespectacled First Secretary of the Commune when he fearlessly faced the mob.

  “You’ve taken over the factories and production has stopped.” A bearded peasant leader brandished an old Japanese rifle. “We won’t send a grain of rice or a leaf of cabbage to Shanghai until the factories start up again—until you grant our just demands. The peasants and workers demand more food, higher pay, and an end to oppression.”

  Tou-tou glowed with admiration for the First Secretary’s courage. He patiently explained that even peasants and workers must sacrifice immediate benefits for the ultimate good of all the people. He did not blanch when the old peasant shouted, “We are the people—and you are sucking our blood!” He firmly told the dupes of the capitalist-roaders that the evil days of landlord-capitalist exploitation would return if they did not support the Shanghai People’s Commune. The misguided peasants stubbornly repeated their demands for more food, lower taxes, higher wages, and shorter working hours.

  “I can’t do anything about your problems at this time,” the First Secretary said reason
ably. “It’s a matter of national policy, a question for the Party Center.”

  The First Secretary retired with dignity into the dilapidated stone-faced building, but the infuriated peasants and workers would not disperse. Six hundred reactionaries advanced on the Commune’s offices, every tenth man armed with a fowling piece, an old rifle, or a shotgun. But guards carrying submachine guns stood before the wrought-iron gates. As the door closed behind the First Secretary, they fired at the ground in front of the peasants’ feet.

  Watching through a window, Tou-tou marveled at the guards’ restraint. Their commander shouted to the peasants to halt, but the tide of angry men flowed toward the building. The guards fired a second volley, careful not to hit the peasants.

  “Cease firing,” the wiry old peasant cried, “or we shoot back.”

  “Halt!” the guard commander shouted. “One more step and we’ll shoot you down!”

  The peasants and workers surged forward, and the commander ordered his men to fire.

  They shot directly into the mob. Though twelve peasants fell, their fellows still moved forward. Their ancient weapons blasted the guards, felling five. The guards retreated into the building.

  “This is counterrevolution,” Tou-tou cried. “The reactionaries are trying to seize power!”

  A volley from the mob shattered the windows, and dank air poured into the building. The guards’ submachine guns fired prolonged bursts, and the peasants fell back. Her voice thick with indignation, Tou-tou shouted encouragement to the brave defenders of the new-born Shanghai Commune. Skulking in doorways across the road, the peasants raked the building with shots. Shouting louder, Tou-tou leaned out the window to brandish her little red book at the counterrevolutionaries. An impact hurled her to the floor of the cold room. She was crawling back to the window, determined to rejoin the struggle, when delayed shock overcame her.

  Tou-tou did not see the belated arrival of the police of the Public Security Corps or their clash with the peasants. She did not see cordons of Liberation Army soldiers isolate both the rioters and the police. Insolently neutral, the soldiers actually opened their ranks to allow the peasants and workers to withdraw when their ammunition was exhausted. Throughout the protracted fight, Tou-tou lay unconscious on the floor amid broken glass.

  She opened her eyes to see an intent young man bending over her. He wore the red-starred cap of the Liberation Army. When his fingers probed her wound a lance of pain impaled her, and she sank back into unconsciousness.

  “It’s a pity,” the young Army doctor said. “I’ll need X-rays, but I’m pretty sure her spine’s broken. Those hammered slugs are fearful. With luck she’ll live. But she’ll never walk again.”

  On the other side of the world, a declining former imperial capital embarked on another evening of gaiety. The London night was unseasonably warm for mid-April, and the police horses pawed restively at the unyielding pavement. A mounted constable swabbed his red forehead with his handkerchief.

  “No way to spend the English summer, is it, Fred?” His partner offered the obligatory jest. “But it’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “Rather be me and you, Bert, than those poor sods on foot.” Fred nodded toward the arm-linked ranks of foot constables holding back the massed crowds that filled the Haymarket from Piccadilly Circus to Pall Mall.

  “You think we’ve got aggro now,” Bert warned. “Wait’ll the nobs start coming out.”

  “Yanks quit Vietnam! Yanks quit Vietnam! Yanks go home!”

  The throng chanted without passion, mesmerized by the monotonous beat of its own voices. Flags fluttering on long poles obscured the blue-tiled façade of Finland House. The American stars-and-stripes was scrawled with the taunt: SHAME. The red star of the Vietnam National Liberation Front fluttered vigorously beside the golden star of the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam. The three red stripes on the yellow flag of the Republic of (South) Vietnam were defaced by the black words: AMERICAN PUPPETS.

  Placards held high demanded: FREEDOM FOR SOUTH VIETNAM. UP THE LIBERATION FRONT. YANK MURDERERS QUIT VIETNAM. University students waved the little red book of Chairman Mao’s Quotations and shouted: “Without a people’s army, the people have nothing.”

  The floodlit marquee of the Theatre Royal proclaimed in red letters four feet high: Life and Death in Saigon. Three-foot-high yellow letters blazoned the magic name: Alaine d’Alivère.

  Before retiring seven hours earlier in Hong Kong, Albert Sekloong had smiled over the Telexed guest list for the premiere and the receipts for forward bookings. Dragon Films, he estimated, would clear $3 million on Life and Death, and his own outlay was no more than $200,000. Forced to withhold further financing in order to salvage Ah Sek, Albert retained his original financial interest in the project he had thought defunct.

  Two days after The Guardian carried a sympathetic interview with Alaine lamenting the demise in midproduction of her chef d’oeuvre, the Friends of the Vietnamese People had offered to guarantee costs up to $2 million. Their loan was to bear a reasonable interest of 4 percent. If the finished film lived up to their confident expectations, they said, they would remit the interest “as a contribution to culture.”

  The Friends of the Vietnamese People had alarmed Alaine by “tentatively suggesting minor changes to make the film more realistic by graphically portraying American brutality and the valor of the People’s Forces.” But Alaine in all artistic conscience found no reason to object. The Friends had even provided actual footage of the Vietcong operating in the Mekong Delta. The stark black-and-white scenes contrasted dramatically with the gaudy color depicting the degenerate Americans and their Vietnamese puppets. The film told the story of a half-Vietnamese prostitute: first, her sexual exploitation by a sadistic American colonel, and, later, her arduous but honorable life after she stabbed him and joined the People’s Liberation Forces, carrying the master plan for the infamous Operation Phoenix that assassinated Vietcong cadres.

  The London premiere sponsored by the Friends of the Vietnamese People was proving a commercial and artistic coup. The intellectual community had contended for invitations, and the Friends had, quite remarkably, secured the 146-year-old Theatre Royal, which normally presented only stage plays. The first-night audience included authors and journalists, actors and actresses, television celebrities and university dons, compassionate clergymen and Labour life-peers, as well as militant American scriptwriters and motion-picture stars living in civilized exile in London. The American Ambassador had declined, but the French Ambassador, wearing all his decorations with his tailcoat, was seated beside three delegates of the National Liberation Front in funereal black.

  London was only the beginning. Premieres followed by long runs were already booked for Paris, Munich, Tokyo, and Stockholm. The United States, still gripped by war hysteria, the Friends advised, was more difficult to book. But avant garde theaters, anti-war activists, and student groups were keenly interested.

  “Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh! Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh!” The crowd chanted as the Theatre Royal’s doors opened and the critics scurried to make their deadlines. “Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh! Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh!”

  The portly critic of The Times paused on the pavement for a word with the bright young man The Washington Post had flown to London for the premiere.

  “You know, Jake,” the Englishman mused, “if I simply had to sum up this film in one word … thank God I don’t.… But, if I had to, that word would be integrity.”

  “It took guts to make this one, Lionel,” the man from The Washington Post replied. “Real guts to blast the Establishment just by telling the truth. It really tells it like it is.”

  “You chaps who’ve been in Vietnam, you do know,” The Times observed. “It must have been Hell. How long were you there?”

  “Actually I never … too busy at home. But I’ve talked with our guys who were there. Real guts, that’s what it took to make this movie. And that Alaine—what a dame!”

  “Quite dishy
, isn’t she?”

  A slender, dark-haired girl wearing red-velvet trousers and a black-velvet jacket over a frilled white blouse smiled dreamily at the overheard conversation. Her violet eyes were unfocused, and their pupils were pinpoints. Mary Henriette Philippa Sekloong was floating in euphoria induced by her cousin’s triumph and by the four pipes of opium she had smoked before the performance. Wholly self-assured at sixteen, Little Lady Mary disdained the marijuana and amphetamines her seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan III favored. She contemptuously spurned the LSD her eighteen-year-old cousin George Chapman Parker III urged upon her.

  “Opium was good enough for great-great-grandpapa,” she said firmly. “It must be good enough for me.”

  The cousins could not believe that Sir Jonathan had never smoked a single pipe of opium. Jonathan III, who was drawing on a joint, had insouciantly dismissed his father Sir Henry’s heated denial that the Old Gentleman was an opium addict. The equally skeptical George Chapman Parker III, who wore a stained jeans jacket over a tee-shirt emblazoned DEATH TO ALL PIGS, squinted into the floodlights, which his disoriented brain perceived as an oscillating, unearthly rainbow.

  “Don’t hand me that crap, man!” Chappie had sneered at his father when that strait-laced Air Force Brigadier General pleaded with him to give up drugs. “Don’t I know it? Grandpa Jonnie peddled opium on Shanghai streets. And great-great-grandpa … the Old Man, Sir Jonathan, for Chris’ sake. He shoveled the stuff into China. Why donchya stop preaching to me? Go back to Vietnam and drop napalm on babies!”

  “Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh! Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh!” The crowd chanted, surging forward. “Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh!”

  The constables struggled to clear a lane for the Daimlers, Jaguars, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces of the audience. The bejeweled women waiting between the marble pillars designed by Thomas Nash for King George IV had already repaired make-up ravaged by their tears for the oppressed South Vietnamese peasantry. The three cousins paused indecisively amid the chattering filmgoers.