A Cigarette that Bears a Lipstick’s Traces

Anna May Wong had many lovers. She was a movie star, after all, and a legendary beauty at that. Her slim-cut figure and graceful gait seduced more than a few in her day, sometimes without her even trying. British composer Constant Lambert, who first set eyes on the actress as the Mongol slave in <a href="https://halfcastewoman.substack.com/p/sadakichi-hartmann" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Thief of Bagdad</a> (1924), spent many a late night in his Bloomsbury flat toasting his Hollywood muse from across the Atlantic with cups of Chinese rice wine, and that was years before he’d ever met her in the flesh. While <a href="https://halfcastewoman.substack.com/p/miscegenation" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">anti-miscegenation laws</a> in America, statutes that criminalized romantic relationships and marriage between whites and people of color, certainly complicated Anna May’s love life, it never stopped her from following her heart. In London, where there were no such legal restrictions, Anna May was quite the regular on the high society social circuit. When she returned stateside, she slyly boasted to a reporter, “Well, for many months I did not buy myself a single meal.” <a href="https://katiegeesalisbury.medium.com/a-cigarette-that-bears-a-lipsticks-traces-fd5730a7ede">Website</a>