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"[In the end,] just as Chairman Mao said to [French Foreign Minister Maurice] Schumann [on a visit to China in 1972], Mao applied a drop of alcohol and Lin Piao was finished." [Mao probably meant, figuratively, that he rubbed Lin Piao out.]
STAGING A BALLET
Apparently under Chiang Ch'ing's influence, Mao had proclaimed that all plays portraying "ghosts" or "emperors and princes, generals and ministers, gifted scholars and beauties" should be banned. Instead, there should be idealization of the proletariat. Thus Chiang Ch'ing had started during the Cultural Revolution to build a new "proletarian " art from scratch. One of her successes was the showy Red Detachment of Women—performed for President Nixon in Peking in 1972. She recounts the difficulties she had in staging this theatrical extravaganza:
Chiang Ch'ing explained to me how, when she undertook this ballet in the early 1960s, there was absolutely no precedent for using ballet to show military history, and almost no one would support her intent to establish it. In search of approval from among the leaders, she invited Premier Chou to attend a rehearsal of an early version, which he did. The weak spots that he pointed out they changed. To educate her dancers in the ways of the military, she decided to send them down to live with a PLA unit for some months.
As soon as she had released her order, Chou Yang announced from his high office in the Ministry of Culture that he was sending the very company she was working with to Hong Kong to perform Swan Lake! She was outraged but helpless. [Chou Yang reportedly maligned] The Red Detachment as an "infant in swaddling bands sucking its thumb" and an "ugly daughter-in-law."
[Nevertheless] she continued the revisions and finally accompanied the ballet on tour in the major cities. Back in Peking, she went with Premier Chou to another performance, which had been much revised. His calling it "real revolution" gratified her. After the final curtain she and the Premier went backstage to congratulate the dancers and musicians who had remained loyal to her throughout the battles of creation.
REGARDS TO GARBO
Chiang Ch'ing kept an eye on her favorite ballet and theater troupes, issuing the most detailed instructions. One performer recalled that when a play called for her to burst into tears, she would sit down and cover her face with her hands. Chiang Ch'ing protested: "Working class people don't sit down or bury their heads when they cry. They cry standing."
She also tried to apply her principles to the movies, inveighing against "the bourgeois system of centering on the director" and decreeing that films should be made according to "democratic centralism. " The result: the Chinese film industry was and remains shattered.
But as for herself, Chiang Ch'ing made no secret of her love for more bourgeois drama. She asked Witke:
"I greatly admire Greta Garbo's acting. Is she still around?"
Cultivating a private life in New