Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

by Huang, Yunte

  ACCORDING TO HISTORIAN Robert C. Schmitt, the first motion picture actually arrived in pre-territory Hawaii on February 4, 1897. It was a seven-reel Edison Veriscope, consisting of A Family Scene, A Watermelon Contest, Arrival of the Empire State Express, The Ferryboat Chicago Arriving at the Slip in New York, The Great McKinley Parade, The Spanish Bullfight, and New York Fire Department on Active Duty. At prices ranging from 25 cents to a dollar, the show, a most curious form of newfangled entertainment in an island culture steeped in its own mythological traditions, drew a small crowd at the Hawaiian Opera House but received rave reviews in local newspapers. In the next few years, especially after Hawaii became a territory, movies were presented sporadically on the islands. As the film industry matured, Hawaiians, like people on the mainland, caught the movie-going fever. By 1909, only twelve years after the crude Edison show, there were as many as eleven movie houses in Honolulu, including Apana’s favorite, the 930-seat Empire Theater near the Honolulu Police Headquarters.4

  Audiences in the days of silent pictures were often noisy and sometimes unruly. On the night of February 10, 1905, a riot by nearly five hundred Chinese broke out in the Chinese Theater on Liliha Street during a kinetoscope malfunction. “There was first a rush to smash the machine,” reads a front-page article published the next day, “wild disorder…the familiar Chinese cry to rush the police…. Then the mob attempted to wreck the box office.” Police eventually restored order.5

  Given the natural beauty of the islands, it should be no surprise that movies on Hawaiian themes appeared as early as 1898. In June that year, Burton Holmes, a famous traveler, photographer, and film-maker who coined the word travelogue, took the first movies known to have been filmed in Hawaii. Notable later movies included Triangle’s Aloha Oe (1915), Fox’s The Island of Desire (1917), and Lasky’s The Bottle Imp (1917). The latter starred Sessue Hayakawa as a Hawaiian sporting a Japanese grass-coat and Lehua Waipahu, a descendant of Queen Liliuokalani, as a local maid. All these movies were presented in the islands.6 After Charlie Chan’s film debut in 1926, the series immediately became a local favorite.

  Among the forty-seven Chan film titles, The Black Camel has the distinction of being the only one actually filmed in the islands. Published as a novel in 1929, just a few months before the Great Crash, The Black Camel was Biggers’s fourth Charlie Chan book but only the second set in Hawaii. The plot involves the murder of Shelah Fane, a Hollywood star with a dark secret in her past. After arriving on the island with a film crew, she is soon found stabbed to death at her beach house; hence the book title. “Black camel” is a Chinese metaphor for death. Several suspects mill around in the background: an ex-husband who still carries a torch for Fane, a jilted millionaire lover, a sleek and manipulative fortune-teller, and a disgruntled costar. In the course of the investigation, as Chan puts it, “Deceit sprouted everywhere and thrived like a weed.” But Chan knows that “a gem is not polished without rubbing nor a man perfected without trials.” Eventually he discovers a link between the Fane murder and another unsolved mystery in Hollywood, and he catches the killer by recovering the broken tip of a brooch pin in her shoe.

  Despite making this movie during the depths of the Depression, Fox did not cut back on expenses. Besides paying Warner Oland $12,500 for the lead role, the company hired Bela Lugosi, who had just finished his role in the sensational Dracula, to play the slippery psychic Tarneverro. The decision to allow location shooting rather than to palm off Santa Monica as a makeshift Honolulu—especially at a time when most movie studios were strapped for cash—reflected Fox’s determination to make the film into a blockbuster.

  On the last day of shooting, Warner Oland and Chang Apana appeared in a photograph together. In it, the two detectives—one real-life and the other on-screen—stand against a backdrop of tropical flora, with Oland’s strong arm wrapping around Apana’s lean shoulder. At the bottom of a copy of the photo that once was kept in the Apana family, Oland inscribed, “To my dear friend, Charlie Chang, ‘The bravest of all,’ with best of luck from the new ‘Charlie Chan,’ Warner Oland.”7

  Two months after the departure of the Fox crew, Biggers arrived yet again on the island on July 2, 1931, for a monthlong summer vacation, and he renewed his friendship with Apana. Since their previous meeting, much had taken place. Biggers had suffered two heart attacks and had lost a great deal of money in the 1929 Great Crash. In June 1929, caught up in the frenzy of the first half of the year, Biggers bought, on the recommendation of Laurance Chambers, 100 shares of common stock of Meyer-Kiser Bank, an Indianapolis-based company that had close financial ties with Bobbs-Merrill. In May 1931, just two months prior to his departure for Hawaii, Biggers received the distressing news that Meyer-Kiser had closed its doors, one of the 3,600 bank failures across the country within two years after Black Tuesday. Fortunately, the new Chan books paid off and soon made up for Biggers’s financial losses: Charlie Chan Carries On, published in the fall of 1930, sold 35,400 copies in four months, and the royalty statement shows that Bobbs-Merrill paid Biggers $17,140 in 1930 alone.

  By contrast, Apana, now over sixty, was still making $250 a month as a detective. As Charlie Chan puts it in The House Without a Key, “I am policeman on small remuneration.”8 Apana never received any royalty for his Charlie Chan inspiration, and, according to Walter Chang, he never asked for any. “You know how much Apana get?” Walter said angrily in the interview. “Not even nickel! How you like that, not even five cents.” At one point, Biggers tried to get Fox to hire Apana for a movie role for $500, but Apana turned it down. As Chang explained, “They offer him a job to go up the states and to play the picture. He say I cannot speak English, why I go. You know what I mean, I’m not an actor. I don’t know how to speak English.”9

  During this meeting in 1931, Apana took Biggers for a long car ride during which they visited the scenes of Apana’s greatest triumphs as a detective. In Chinatown, Apana pointed out the places where he used to leap from roof to roof like a human fly, busting opium dens and gambling parlors and chasing down criminals. “He went into them in great detail,” Biggers recollected a year later. “He had more than bravery, this detective. He had brains. There was a robbery that he solved by finding a silk thread on a certain bedroom floor. A murder that was run down within twenty-four hours, because the Filipino who did it got mud from a certain section of the town on his shoes, hid them, and bought a new pair. I didn’t get all this, but ‘I say to him, why you wear new shoes this morning?’ was the big dramatic climax.”

  Apana also showed Biggers his favorite restaurants, Wing Sing Wo and Wo Fat, both on Hotel Street. The former was run by folks from Apana’s hometown. The latter, a chop-suey dive, would become famous one day, thanks to the popularity of the TV series Hawaii Five-O.*

  On August 1, 1931, the day of Biggers’s departure, Apana arrived at the dock to see his friend off. In the midst of aloha music and hula dancing, Apana hung a crimson lei around Biggers’s neck and waved good-bye in his broken English: “Old man now. Maybe I no be here when you come back. Aloha!”10

  WO FAT RESTAURANT, CHINATOWN, HONOLULU (Photo by author)

  Sounding like a Chanism, the last words uttered by the humble detective to the celebrated mystery writer proved to be prophetic.

  23

  Rape in Paradise

  CHANG APANA, CIRCA 1932 (Courtesy of Honolulu Police Department)

  The case that had everything.

  —Time magazine

  WHEN CHANG APANA stepped out of his home in Kaimuki on the morning of January 8, 1932, little did he know that he would be a direct eyewitness to one of the most sensational and disturbing cases in American courtroom history. Closing the door behind him, he spent a moment standing on the front lanai, taking in a fresh ocean breeze mixed with the fragrance of mai-say-lan in the garden. Just as he was about to walk down the steps and head out toward the police station, he spotted two cars racing past his home on Waialae Avenue. A white woman was erratically driving the first c
ar, a blue Buick sedan, with two male passengers. The speeding vehicle was followed closely by a police car, inside which Apana saw two of his colleagues, Detective George Harbottle and Officer Thomas Kekua. From the high speed of the chase, Apana immediately recognized trouble. Soon the two cars, trailing a plume of dust, shot out of view. A few moments later, he heard three sharp cracks of a pistol, followed by the roar of engines.

  That car chase, which had begun at the busy intersection of Waialae Avenue and Isenberg Road, had barreled through the sleepy neighborhood of Kaimuki before ending up ten miles later on a serpentine trail by the ocean near Hanauma Bay. When the police finally forced the blue Buick off the road and approached the vehicle with guns drawn, they discovered in the back of the car a body wrapped in bedsheets and soaked with water and blood. “I then noticed,” as Detective Harbottle later wrote in his report, “a human leg sticking out of the white bundle, and I placed the occupants of the car under arrest.”1

  Yet the story does not begin, as few do, with a terrifying police chase and an arrest. Rather, we need to backtrack a few months to a late summer day—September 12, 1931, to be precise. On this muggy Saturday evening, just six weeks after Apana and Biggers waved farewell at the Honolulu docks (and exactly one week before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria), a young haole couple was entertaining some friends at their Manoa home. Nipping at the jar of bootleg okolehao (a potent Hawaiian moonshine), they listened to the Boys from Dixie and the Melody Sisters on the radio. The husband, Thomas Massie, a native of a small town in Kentucky, was a U.S. Navy officer stationed in Pearl Harbor. His wife, Thalia, age twenty, came from a family of wealth and influence, at least in name. Her father, Granville Roland “Roly” Fortescue, was a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt. During the Spanish-American War, in the same year that Hawaii was annexed, young Teddy and Roly had actually fought side by side at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba. Thalia’s mother, Grace Hubbard Fortescue, née Bell, was a niece of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and a granddaughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, first president of the Bell Telephone Company. She seemed, as they said, properly bred, but despite this illustrious background, Thalia’s parents lacked in money what they had in pedigree. Grace tried hard to maintain the appearance of good breeding, though she would have to resort on occasion to giving bridge lessons to make ends meet.

  The marriage of Thomas and Thalia was not a happy one. She was bored and was rumored to be going out with other officers. Thomas had threatened her with divorce. On this September night, the couple fought again. The domestic discord continued even after they and their friends left the house and arrived at the Ala Wai Inn, a Japanese teahouse and dance hall in Waikiki. At about midnight, Thalia left the dance floor and walked out of the inn alone. The next time Thomas spoke to her, almost two hours later by phone, Thalia cried out: “Something awful has happened. Come home.”

  The dutiful husband hurried home, where he was shocked by the sight of his wife: clad only in her nightgown, her jaw broken, and blood dripping from her upper lip. Wrought with emotion, Thalia described, tearfully, how she had been kidnapped by a gang of “Hawaiians.” After leaving the inn, she said, she had been walking along Kalakaua Avenue toward the ocean for some air when a car pulled up beside her. Five Hawaiian boys forced her into their vehicle and drove her to an isolated area off Ala Moana Road. They then dragged her into the bushes, punched her, and raped her six or seven times. As Thomas would later confide to a jury in graphic detail, his wife, as she had relayed the horrific ordeal to him, was “in a total state of collapse and broken down from sodomy.”2

  Based on clues from another incident reported to the police that night—a shoving match between a Hawaiian woman and a local boy following a near car accident—the police soon rounded up five suspects, all youngsters of either Hawaiian or Asian descent: Ben Ahakuelo, Henry Chang, Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, and David Takai. It was as if Fu Manchu had materialized, now in the guise of these five young men who came off to the public as the worst kind of sexual predators. Reality had fully collided with fantasy, as if all the sexual nightmares of a Caucasian minority had now come home to roost. When the news, like a thunderclap, reached the street the next morning, it sent shock waves through the whole territory. In the words of historian David Stannard, who has written the best book on the Massie Case, “this promised to be Hawaii’s most explosive criminal case ever—the first one in history involving the rape, by Hawaiians, of a white woman, and a navy officer’s wife at that.”3 The tabloids were eager to expand readership, and newspaper headlines screamed: “Gang Assaults Young Wife.” The articles contained inflammatory details about how “a young woman of the highest character…a white woman of refinement and culture” had been attacked by a gang of “fiends.” Rumors ran rampant throughout the ranks at Pearl Harbor, with claims that the “thugs” had violated a fellow officer’s “kid bride” in every sordid way. Rumor, like fire, can spread quickly and lethally, and this particular conflagration showed no sign of being brought under control. One sailor later described what he had heard at the base: “There are only three orifices on the human body, and they kicked her and broke her pelvis and they bit the nipple practically off one of her breasts. They broke her jaw in such a manner that one of her teeth had to be taken out. They broke her nose. Blackened both of her eyes, of course. On her face was a perfect imprint of a rubber heel, where they stomped on her.”4

  Whether or not he truly believed these sensational accusations, Admiral Yates Stirling, the commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District, reacted to the news with rage and disgust. His first inclination, he said, was to “seize the brutes and string them up on trees.” Stirling’s reference to lynching was, as Stannard puts it, “no surprise to those who knew him.” Though born in California, he had grown up in the South and had seen how whites had dealt vigilante justice to black suspects without a trial. In the early part of his military career, Stirling had “[fought] revolutionaries in the Philippines and Chinese warlords on the Yangtze River.” To say that he did not like Asians is hardly an understatement. In his memoir, Stirling bragged about the indiscriminate killings and scorched-earth campaigns he had carried out in the Far East: “We burned the villages; in fact, every house for two miles from either bank was destroyed by us. We killed their livestock: cattle, pigs, chickens, and their valuable work animals, the carabaos [water buffalo], It seemed ruthless; yet it was after all war, and war is brutal.” As the top U.S. Navy commander in the Pacific, he believed that Hawaii’s polyglot population was a threat to America’s security in the region. As Gavan Daws puts it, Stirling had nothing but scorn for what he called “enthusiastic priests of the melting-pot cult.” Now that a carload of dark-skinned criminals had brutally attacked a white woman, much less the daughter of a prominent Eastern family, Stirling was determined to see justice served, one way or another.5

  Thinking along the same lines was the most influential businessman in the islands, Walter Dillingham, then dubbed the J. P. Morgan of Hawaii. Born in Honolulu and educated, like Biggers, at Harvard, he was the head of the Dillingham Corporation, which had a virtual monopoly over construction, shipping, and land development in Oahu. Dillingham was also outspoken in his contempt for nonwhites. For many years, he had served as the vice chairman of the American Defense Society, a nativist organization founded in 1915 with members such as the eugenicist Madison Grant. In addition, the U.S. Navy was the biggest client of Dillingham’s company, and Admiral Stirling was his personal friend. Therefore, Dillingham had also made up his mind that those “beasts,” as he called them, would get what they deserved.6

  At first, it appeared as if Stirling and Dillingham would have nothing to worry about. Lawrence Judd, the governor of Hawaii, was more than willing to take orders from the top military man and the top businessman. Throughout the territory years, a handful of sugar factors, known as the Big Five, would take turns and select their own representatives for the governor’s position. In 1929, they chose L
awrence Judd, the grandson of Dr. Gerrit Judd, to be the governor and, make no mistake about it, to protect the interests of big business.

  The other key figure involved in the Massie Case, who would also be eager to please people like Stirling and Dillingham, was Captain John McIntosh, chief of the Detective Division of the Honolulu Police Department. In fact, McIntosh was always frank to admit how he had attained his current position. “I was put there,” as he had once told an interviewer, “by the business interests and the politicians.” As the captain, McIntosh was known not only for his harsh treatment of nonwhite subordinates but also for his blatantly racist treatment of officers. In high-profile cases, according to Stannard, he often “removed nonwhite detectives from an investigation they had begun and replaced them with handpicked haoles.” The Massie Case would prove no exception. By Sunday morning, none of the nonwhite detectives who had worked the case, except for John Jardine (Portuguese were not considered haole at the time), were allowed to handle the investigation.7 Seeking to affirm his position and bring a speedy end to a grisly case, McIntosh had from the very beginning convinced himself that the five suspects in custody were guilty. He was so eager to convict them that he even tried to plant evidence: He drove the suspects’ impounded car to the alleged crime scene after a rain and left behind tire marks in the west ground. The police photographer, sensing a frame-up, refused to take pictures.