Quotes of the Day
 
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In the first minutes of Wong Kar-wai's 1990 Days of Being Wild, Leslie Cheung strikes up a chat with Maggie Cheung. She's lovely and lonely; he's smoldering and supercool. Out of the blue, he purrs a boast to Maggie: "You'll see me in your dreams tonight." Next day he comes by again, and she brags that she didn't dream of him. "Of course," he replies with practiced confidence, "you couldn't sleep at all."
Ah, Leslie: suave, cocksure, with a touch of the brute (they love him for it) and a hint of sad solitude. A Canto-pop idol and film idol since the '70s, Cheung was dubbed "the Elvis of Hong Kong" by Canadian critic John Charles. Except that Leslie lasted longer, did more, dared more. And did it his way. It's fair to call him the most widely adored and admired male diva of the late 20th century.
Cheung starred in many of the signal popular successes and artistic glories of Hong Kong's golden movie age: John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung's A Chinese Ghost Story, Stanley Kwan's Rouge, Ronny Yu's The Bride With White Hair, Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time and Happy Together. He won international acclaim for his role as a Peking Opera princess in the Cannes Palme d'Or winner Farewell My Concubine. As a singer he stood boldly, sometimes blatantly—in high heels, waist-length hair and a designer dress—atop the Cantopop charts, from his first song-contest crooning of American Pie in 1976 to his 2001 CD Forever Leslie. His concerts, alternately suburban-soulful and androgynous-sinful, packed the Chinese diaspora in around the world.
Back home, Leslie—whose homosexuality he hinted at, exploited and deflected until it was the worst-kept secret in Hong Kong showbiz—has been catnip for the voracious paparazzi. "They follow me everywhere," he told Stephen Short for a TIME Asia profile I wrote two years ago. "They know my car numbers, so they're there whether I'm at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Coffee Shop or at Propaganda [a hip gay club]. I don't even put my litter outside the house. People try to find things and sell them."
If he changed at all during his half-life in the public eye, it was to become more wily in the lavishing and husbanding of his allure. A cunning tease, he developed what might be called the Leslie Two-Step: seduce, then withdraw; approach and forbid. Such guile ensured that his appeal, which could have subsided like a schoolgirl's crush, remained a long-running provocation, a sustaining fever. He could have qualified as a monument to pop longevity if he had not been still in his glistening prime—and still so damned gorgeous. Any visitor to Hong Kong who mentioned his name to a local film maven would hear the same refrain: a conspiratorial "Guess how old he is." As if Leslie kept a rotting portrait of himself in the attic.
Leslie Cheung turned 46 last September 12, and will forever stay that age, no older. But he chose a drastic method of staving off wrinkles, a pot belly, the whims of a fickle public. On Tuesday he strode through the Mandarin Oriental lobby, took a room on the 24th floor, walked out onto the terrace that gives a view of Hong Kong Harbor, and jumped off. He landed in front of the hotel on the Connaught Road sidewalk and was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 7:05 p.m.
LESLIE LOST
In a region already unnerved by the outbreak of the SARS contagion, the reaction to Leslie's dreadful April Fool's shock was swift and volcanic. His Hong Kong fans, many of them in audible tears, clogged the radio shows with their grief and love. The www.lesliecheung.com website, which offered fans worldwide a memory book to sign, received so many hits it was virtually impossible to get through for 24 hours. Wong Kar-wai and Chen Kaige issued messages of grieving.
I too felt shocked. And pissed. Mourning gave way to rancor: he had no right to do this, to deprive us of his brilliance, his overbite, his presence on earth. A star's magnificence is a gift, not to himself, but to us. We, his fans and friends, are the ones to say it's over—and ain't over. No one is so possessive as the bereft. We buy into a star and want a lifetime guarantee. Ours.
Grady Hendrix, the Shakespeare of the Subway Cinema movie collective, expressed this poignantly in a message he sent me yesterday:
"Leslie was supposed to be bright, and beautiful, and brittle, and bitchy forever. ... [But] when Leslie Cheung killed himself he was just a guy... a guy who was looking in the mirror and seeing a receding hairline, an expanding waistline, a lack of options. He didn't see the hopes and dreams we had all projected onto him, he was seeing lines around his eyes that he had never seen before. ... And he was lonely, so lonely that he couldn't bear the thought of being alive for even one more minute. ... I look at Leslie Cheung in The Chinese Feast and I can't make the guy on-screen the guy in the hotel room who killed himself. ... Trying to reconcile these two men makes my heart ache and my eyes water."
It happens that my wife Mary and I knew Leslie a little, and had been in his thrall before we met him. At the 1993 Cannes Film Festival we saw The Bride With White Hair and Farewell My Concubine. The first was martial-arts fantasy, the second historical epic: The Sunshine Boys reconfigured as tragedy spanning a half-century of Chinese heartbreak. To see an actor play the world-weary swordsman in love with a wolf woman (Brigitte Lin) and homosexual masochist in love with his stolid partner (Zhang Fengyi) was a revelation. Returning to New York, I rented as many Leslie Cheung movies as I could find at Kim's Video, and that spurred me into the colony's burgeoning filmography. As much as anyone, Leslie hooked me on Hong Kong movies.
We later met the star a few times, as I will tabulate later. And we figured to see him next week, on our first trip to Hong Kong in three years; the director Yonfan said he hoped to arrange a meal for us with Leslie and Brigitte! Even I feared that was too much legend for one dinner table. But SARS was aligned against us. We postponed our trip to Hong Kong. And we will never see Leslie, except in dreams on the screen, and on the screen of our dreams.
"SENSE" MEMORY
Hong Kong is the tattle capital of the entertainment world; its score of dailies pounce voraciously on film and TV actors and Cantopop singers. Late last year the local dailies speculated on Cheung's demeanor. Reports said he was stressed, depressed. Had he broken up with Daffy Tong, the lawyer to whom Leslie had been "married" (his word) for 20 years? Was the perpetual youth facing a tumble into midlife? Some reports had the actor "haunted," to the brink of suicide, by his most recent movie, the Lo Chi-leung thriller Inner Senses.
Ridiculous! Leslie had played men in love with ghosts in some of his most famous films (A Chinese Ghost Story and its immediate sequel, Rouge, The Bride With White Hair). His fans gave him the nickname the Phantom Lover, after a film in which he incarnated a demon romancer. It could be said that Leslie's entire career was a risky game he shared with his audience: Let's pretend I'm straight; let's pretend I'm pretending. He was too smart a fellow, and too cynical, to fall for one of the corniest plots in melodrama: the actor who is ensorcelled by his role. I had watched Inner Senses last October, when it was part of Subway Cinema's In the Mood for Gore retrospective of Hong Kong horror movies, and had been impervious to its ethereal chills. So last night I screened it again.
Inner Senses is about Yan (Karena Lam), a young woman who sees dead people, and Jim (Leslie) the psychiatrist she goes to for help. The therapy proceeds smoothly—Yan seems cured of her illusions, and doctor and patient fall in love—until a madwoman attacks Jim, breaks a glass on his head and screams, "Why aren't you dead yet? You can never escape! Die, just die!" Jim now catches the seeing-things bug. A dead girl crowds his field of vision, or field of dreams. We learn the ghost is Jim's schoolgirl sweetheart, who went mad when he jilted her and killed herself by leaping to her death. The film has its denouement on the roof where the ghost had jumped decades before. Jim walks to the unguarded ledge, looks over, turns back and sees the dead girl. "I know what I have to do," he tells her. "You want me to jump? You want me to die." Stepping out on the ledge again, he nods and says, "I'll die with you."
In Inner Senses, the Cheung character doesn't jump to his death. The ghost forgives Jim his sins, and morphs into Yan. She and Jim fall into each other's arms, huddled for love and protection on the roof. But when Leslie stepped onto the terrace of that 24th floor room, no ghost called him back from the brink. No lover rocked him back to sanity. No friend was there to shout, "It's only a movie, Leslie." Life is not a movie—not that harsh, handsome, exalting, tragic.
Then again, Leslie's life was.
HOW KWOK-WING BECAME LESLIE
Cheung Kwok-wing was born September 12, 1956, in Hong Kong. "I'm one of ten children," he told TIME's Stephen Short in early 2001. "I'm the youngest and the loneliest. The one closest to me is eight years older. My brothers would be dating girls and I was left alone in the corner, playing G.I. Joe or with my Barbie Doll. I never lived with my father for one single day, never. My father used to beat my mother up. It was terrible. And I always used to think, 'This what they call marriage.'"
Cheung père was tailor to the stars: William Holden, Alfred Hitchcock. "My Dad had a fortune. We're from Canton province and at one point we were the largest landowners in the province. My grandfather got killed during the Cultural Revolution because he owned too much land." Leslie said that he helped support most of his six surviving siblings. "I'm a blessing. Aside from my elder sister, who is very well-educated and doing OK, my brothers and sisters aren't doing very well, so I do help them out sometimes. But I've no regrets. Blood is thicker than water." He enunciates the first principle of control through charity: "It's better to help somebody than have somebody help you."
At 11, Kwok-wing took math and verbal exams to get into secondary school. "I failed the regulations. I won awards for prose readings and music festivals but not the maths. My father called me up and asked if I wanted to study abroad. I thought it would liberate me. My situation had been miserable to that point. So I got on the plane and went to the Norwich School [in Norfolk, England]." At Norwich, Kwok-hing had to make a lot of readjustments. "There were racial problems, discrimination. But it still enabled me to see more things. I could take a train to London. So I didn't feel lonely. During weekends I used to go to Southend-on-Sea to see my relatives; they ran a restaurant there, so I was a bartender. I'd start doing performances. I was only 13 years old, but I'd do amateur singing every weekend." By this time he had chosen his English name. "I love the film Gone with the Wind. And I like Leslie Howard. The name can be a man's or woman's, it's very unisex, so I like it. It's rare in Hong Kong, too." There are 300 Cheungs listed in the Hong Kong Movie Database, but only one Leslie. As it should be.
After a year studying textile management at the University of Leeds, he returned to Hong Kong and placed second (singing American Pie) in ATV's Asian Music Contest. He was an immediate pop star, and stayed at the top for a quarter century. In the late 70s, as now, pop singers were encouraged to do movies, and at 21 Leslie made his film debut in a cheapo production, Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber, which was notable only for the first unveiling of his silky derriere (later almost a trademark). He appeared in a few TV dramas, including The Wu Lin Family, with a teenage Maggie Cheung. But the small screen couldn't contain his smoldering appeal. Leslie had a thing or two to teach Hong Kong about movie masculinity.
MOVIE LESLIE
Here was a new kind of star: beautiful, tender, toxic. James Dean with a mean streak, or a deeper Johnny Depp. At first he exploited his luscious youthfulness. In A Better Tomorrow he was tough Ti Lung's soft younger sibling—essentially a kid sister—so infuriated by righteousness that he seems in a perpetual girlish snit. (No matter that Cheung turned 30 the month after the movie came out.) In his next hit, A Chinese Ghost Story, he was again the naif, getting tossed around by a 1,000-year-old tree demon with a giant yucky tongue and happily bossed around by the spectral Joey Wong.
He showed terrific versatility, at ease in art films (Farewell My Concubine, his fullest, bravest performance), action thrillers (A Better Tomorrow), fantasies (The Bride With White Hair), dark romances (The Phantom Lover) and fluffy comedies (as the music mogul who falls in love with a girl he thinks is a guy in He's a Woman, She's a Man). He could play souflée-light (the chef in The Chinese Feast) or psycho-dark (the killer in Double Tap).
Inside these varied characters was the irreducible, enigmatic "Leslie": a beautiful man whose sexuality is a gift or a plague to those who fall under his spell. They loved him and he left them; he must have said, "I don't love you" more times than anyone else in movies. He often played slick Ah Fei (shiftless youth) types; he could be daringly uningratiating, playing rotters and not caring what people thought. Seeming not to care, he got audiences to care. Women loved the on-screen Leslie because he came on sexy, forbidding, dominant, dangerous, easily bored or annoyed. Then, when he embraced you, you felt the simmering sky had cracked open, and Thor smiled.
Beyond attitude, this star was an actor. Leslie didn't simply mesmerize or bully the camera; he worked subtle wonders before it. He glamorized a scene in Days of Being Wild just by appraising himself in a full-length mirror while doing an expert cha-cha. Or, in unforgiving closeup, without moving a muscle, he could somehow change emotional temperature. You could see feelings rise in him like a blush or a bruise.
It was Wong Kar-wai who illuminated the inner Leslie on the big screen. Days of Being Wild made him a pouty brute whose mistreating of women is his payback to the mother who deserted him; it won Cheung a Hong Kong Film Award for best actor. In Ashes of Time, cast as a martial-arts scoundrel, he ably anchored a film of top Chinese stars and rapturous visual splendor. In the not-so-gay drama Happy Together he taught Tony Leung Chiu-wai how an actor prepares.
The film opens with a stark scene of the two main characters having sex. "When we tried to shoot the love scene it really shocked Tony," Cheung recalls. "He refused to do it. For two days he was miserable, lying on his bed. So I went up to him and said, 'Look at me, Tony, I've gone through so many scenes kissing, touching girls, grabbing breasts, do you think I really enjoyed it? Just treat it as a job, a normal love scene. I'm not going to fall in love with you, and I don't want you to really have sex with me. You're not my type.' So he agreed to do the scene."
FIVE TIMES LESLIE
My wife Mary and I spent serious time with Leslie—I should say, he granted us an audience—five times over five years in five far-flung cities: Suzhou, Atlantic City, New York, Hong Kong and Las Vegas. Each encounter gave us a tantalizing glimpse of uncut celebrity magnetism. He flirted (with Mary) and flared (at the mention of other Chinese stars). He was at ease with his often dogmatic petulance, unburdened by the world's acknowledgment of his luster. Leslie didn't manufacture star quality, or trouble much about radiating it. He was star quality. He embodied more charisma, more purring sexuality, more danger and need, than any Hong Kong or Hollywood actor I've met.
We first met Leslie on a four-day visit to the Suzhou, China, set of Temptress Moon, his reunion with the director, producer and female lead of Farewell My Concubine: Chen Kaige, Hsu Feng and Gong Li. Leslie was no prima donna, at least with us. Gracious, witty, instantly intimate with two strangers from halfway across the world, he gabbed and gossiped in high spirits and style. Then, just before a scene was about to be shot, he would retreat a bit, curl himself into his character and take his place on the set. I remember a scene that required him to burst through a door, cast an eye on some domestic mischief and escalate into high dudgeon. He did it perfectly, and at the end bowed to the crew's applause. "One Take Leslie!" he announced proudly—the honorific of a gifted professional.
A year or two later, we joined Norman Wang, our guide in all matters cinematically Chinese, for a Leslie Cheung concert at an Atlantic City casino. He expertly wooed the staid audience until they danced en masse in front of the stage, votaries to the pop god. You must understand that Hong Kong pop stars tour all over the world, entertaining thousands of fans at every site, and perform all their material—the songs, the patter, the works—in Cantonese. But that Easter Eve, Leslie stepped into English and said he was dedicating the next song to Mary and Richard. Ting-le! It was the theme from Temptress Moon. We floated home.
In 1997 or so, we lunched with Leslie and Ang Lee in New York. Ang said he was hoping to get to his long-delayed martial arts project, and Leslie practically auditioned for the part. Which part? I didn't know at the time. But in 2001, Leslie told Stephen Short: "If Ang Lee had asked me to play the part Cheng Chan plays, the film would have been a different story again." He meant: better.
In April 2000 we saw him at the ultra-swank China Club, where one woman came to our table and asked Leslie to autograph a CD of his. (How did she know he would be there? Or did she always tote the disc, hoping she would spot her favorite Canto-popinjay?) That afternoon, Leslie was so glamorous he was glowing. He said he talked with Zhang Yimou, and hoped to star in a film about China's first emperor. The Hero role most suitable for Leslie went to Tony Leung, his co-star in three Wong Kar-wai films. A wary soul could start to see these occasional blips of rejections as a trend.
Christmas 2000: Vegas! Two Caucasians and a South China sea of Asians had the casinos to themselves. At the MGM Grand, Jackie Chan headed an all-star revue that filled a 13,500-seat arena with tickets at $75 and $150. Over at Caesars Palace, Leslie had stopped with his Passion tour. Through an idiocy of scheduling, the two concerts went on at the same time. So, two nights earlier, I'd flown to Toronto to see Leslie's show. For his evening of Passion he donned eight Jean-Paul Gaultier outfits, in ascending order of outrageousness, from a white tux with angel wings to a naughty skirt (and long black wig). At his Toronto concert a voice cried out, "I love you, Leslie!"; he said, "I love you too, whether you're a boy or a girl." The line happens to be one he delivered in the hit 1994 comedy He's a Woman, She's a Man, but it winks at the man's pansexual appeal.
While I was enjoying Jackie's Vegas extravaganza, Mary was being serenaded by Leslie. Directly. Again he performed most of the concert in Cantonese. This time he offered "a special song for Mary." It was White Christmas, in English.
The next day Leslie met us on the Caesars ground floor to take us up to his suite. As usual he poured on the charm: doting, droll, sweet as a cinnamon roll. But when he realized he was being pursued down a remote corridor of the hotel by one of his myriad Japanese groupies (Leslie was elected Best Actor 10 years in a row by Japan's 17,000-member Cinecity fan club), he spun around and shouted, in English, "Go away! Get the hell out of here!" The young woman receded; I like to think it was exactly what she wanted. Anyone can get a star's autograph. But to receive a flash of his rage—private Leslie ad-libbing the movie Leslie—is a compliment masquerading as an insult.
There you have it: our five brushes with the master of painted faces. I pause in sadness to know there won't be a sixth.
DIVA
Even in 2001, Leslie was guarded about his future. "I was asked to do a Japanese TV series with Norita Fujiwara, but at my age I don't want to go back and do TV dramas. I don't care how big the Japanese market is. I might get more money through endorsements, but what's the point? It would downgrade me. I want to play things by my heart." He paused and smiled: "I like that line. 'I have to play things by my heart.'"
And what did this survivor of the 70s, 80s and 90s think about his standing in third-millennium Hong Kong? "I've worked bloody hard for 20 years," he said passionately. "I was penniless, dying hard for my groceries. I can now live in a reasonably sized detached house. I'm still very strong in Japan and Korea. But I may be a little passé in Hong Kong. The place is so extravagant, vulgar, expensive. People have forgotten what integrity is. Money comes first. I may be too soft for Hong Kong. I don't always count myself as one of them."
Spoken like a true diva: above, aloof, alone, yet avid for attention. He was at home on stage, because he knew he was so good at commandeering audiences, and because their innocent ecstasy turned him on. But while watching Leslie perform, I thought I saw him watching himself, as much the critic as the creator—a luscious showbiz courtesan, bringing the crowd to climax as he calculates both what he gives and what the box office takes.
Not that Leslie performed by rote. His instincts to entertain, goad and seduce were as genuine as he trusted the audience's response would be. He had an almost naked love for being loved. What I should have realized is that that love could be a gnawing need, and with that need might come the hint, the suspicion, the certitude that the fire of the fans' adoration would one day cool. His CDs wouldn't go to No. 1. His movies would earn less money; the directors he wanted to work with would get someone else. (And why did it so often have to be Tony Leung?) The accountant inside him could see diminishing returns around the corner—perhaps, as Grady Hendrix suggests, in the mirror. The last thing Leslie wanted was to become an oldies act.
A glittering raiment of ego had cloaked and cushioned Leslie for nearly 30 years in the limelight. Still beautiful, still looking a decade younger than his years, at the end he had all the perfections but one: a belief he was not as perfect a Leslie as he had been. Or that he was not seen to be as beautiful, as necessary, which for a magician is the same sad thing. What to do? Leslie's choices of films, songs, plumage, concert strategies had been brazen and true. Could his choice of a solution to his despair be just as daring?
I have no informed idea what circumstances led Leslie to take his life. But I imagine he felt an artist's grim pleasure as he determined the form of his suicide. It would be audacious, yet in a grand tradition. Chinese actresses—from the first superstar, Ruan Lingyu, in 1935, through the 60s luminaries Lin Dai, Betty Loh Tih, Kitty Ting Hao and Margaret Du Juan, to the troubled Pauline Chan last July—had chosen early death (usually by sleeping pills) as a final starring role. These women—all women—ended their careers with a crimson exclamation point. Leslie Cheung, the cinema's greatest man-woman, would trump their startling exits. Instead of riding out the inevitable decline, he made the most sumptuous gesture possible: a swan dive from a swan diva, from the balcony of his enduring eminence to the sidewalk of his misery.
I wish him a better tomorrow. I'm no scholar of Buddhism, but couldn't a body, just this once, come back as himself? Leslie could see, then, how much he was loved, respected, treasured and missed.
- Richard Corliss
- Richard Corliss on the beautiful career and shocking death of Hong Kong idol Leslie Cheung