Mao: The Unknown Story

Mme Mao talked to Witke for sixty hours. But her performance annoyed Mao, who had originally endorsed the project. True to form, she shot her mouth off. To the horror of her entourage, she confessed to a deep “love” and nostalgia for Shanghai in pre-Communist days, and even hummed to Witke a flirtatious song popular there in the 1930s. “My life was extremely romantic then … I had so many boyfriends, suitors who chased after me …” This was bad enough, but she nearly caused heart failure in the Chinese present by describing how an American marine had once tried to pick her up. “Perhaps he was drunk. He was staggering towards me along the Bund in Shanghai, and stood in front of me. He barred my way, clicked his heels and gave me a military salute … He put out his arms … I raised my hand and slapped him. He went on smiling, and gave me another salute, clicking his heels. He even said ‘Sorry.’ You Americans are so polite …”

Mme Mao gushed that she “worshipped” Greta Garbo, and adored Gone with the Wind, which she said she had watched some ten times: “Each time I was very moved.” “Can China produce a film like this?” she asked, as though she and her husband had nothing to do with the suppression of Chinese cinema. Her adulation of Gone with the Wind seems to have made Mao’s press controller Yao Wen-yuan uneasy, as he started spouting Party clichés: “… the film has shortcomings. She [the writer] sympathized with slave-owners.” Mme Mao shut him up with a baffling observation: “But I didn’t see any praise in the film for the Ku Klux Klan.”

In the end, on Mao’s orders, only some transcripts were shipped to Witke, who published a full-length biography. Jiang Qing continued to play the First Lady with foreigners, though her chances to do so were far fewer than she would have liked. As a result, she constantly tried to shoehorn her way in. When Danish prime minister Poul Hartling came in 1974, she accompanied him and his wife to a show, but was not included in the state banquet, so she barged in just beforehand and detained the Danes for half an hour, keeping 400 people waiting. She talked in what seemed to the Hartlings a “haughty” and “show-off” manner, and was embarrassing. When an American swimming team came, she lurked around the corner of a glass wall to eye them practising. “Oh, they were so beautiful!.. such beautiful movements,” she enthused afterwards. (She herself had earlier declined to take to the water with Witke on the grounds that “the masses would become too excited” if they saw their “First Lady” swimming.)

MME MAO’S THIRST for contact with foreigners was matched only by her yearning for feminine clothes. In her husband’s China, women were only allowed shapeless jackets and trousers. Only on extremely rare occasions could she wear a dress or a skirt. In 1972, she longed to wear a dress to accompany the US president (who described her as “unpleasantly abrasive and aggressive”) and Mrs. Nixon to the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, one of her eight “model shows.” But after much agonizing, she abandoned the idea, since it would look too incongruous in front of large numbers of Chinese in the audience who, though specially invited, would all be wearing drab Mao-issue clothes. When Imelda Marcos of the Philippines visited China in September 1974 in her glorious national costume, Mme Mao had to appear in her shapeless uniform and cap, which showed her up most unfavorably next to the former beauty queen. Both the Chinese photographer and Mrs. Marcos noticed that she kept staring at Mrs. Marcos enviously out of the corner of her eye.

Mme Mao set her heart on designing a “national costume” for Chinese women. Her design was a collarless top with a three-quarter-length pleated skirt. The ensemble was so unflattering that when pictures of China’s female athletes wearing it abroad were published in the newspapers, Chinese women, even though fashion starved, greeted it with universal derision. Still, although her design was a failure as fashion, Mme Mao’s love of clothes helped to lift the taboo on women wearing skirts and dresses, which cautiously returned after nearly a decade in 1975.

Mme Mao tried to have her design made official “national costume.” This required a decision from the Politburo, which decided against, on budgetary grounds. A long pleated skirt would use a lot of material, and if it went into production as “national” garb, huge quantities would be needed. She tried to persuade Mao to reverse the decision by getting his favorite girlfriends to wear the dress for him. But when he heard it had come from her, he rejected it with annoyance, even disgust.