Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (13 page)

Meanwhile, for three days, Johnson and Phelps hid in a Los Angeles apartment, and then hitchhiked to San Francisco with a hapless Army sergeant, whom they robbed. 
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In Oakland, several days later, they robbed and killed fifty-four-year-old dentist Glen Ivar Olsen. Phelps later testified that Johnson’s only comment after he shot Olsen was, “Damn, I got blood on my pants.” 
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Stealing Olsen’s car, the pair drove to Muskegon, Michigan where they held up a liquor store. When Phelps drove the wrong way down a one-way street making their getaway, she was pulled over by police and the spree ended. Johnson was tried first in Michigan for the robbery and handed thirty-five years, then sent to Oakland for the Olsen murder. Silliphant paid the costs to have him extradited to Los Angeles to face charges for killing Loren, where he was put on trial in late 1969. Phelps testified against him. On December 17, a six-woman, six-man jury in Judge Raymond H. Roberts’s courtroom took seven and a half hours to convict him 
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and, on January 7, 1970, Johnson was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. He was next tried in Alameda County for Olsen’s murder. 
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His death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and, in 1995, he began the long process of seeking clemency. 
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As of this writing he remains incarcerated in the Solano facility in Vacaville, California. He is sixty-six. 
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“Loren’s sister [Dayle] called him ‘the little prince,’” Allen remembered fondly, “like in the Saint
-Exupéry
book. He had a band, and he liked to talk like John Lennon. He wanted to be a creative guy. Probably a writer, a songwriter. He was a droll, imaginative kid who was very lovable. A lot of freckles, reddish hair, kind of pale, and a little moustache that a fifteen-year-old boy would have. He had a very funny imagination and he would create characters in his mind that would be, say, the creations of Shel Silverstein. He’d [invent] ‘“Mary Comworth,” what do you know about her?’ Well, he would make her up, and he would attribute all these amazing things. Or some guy who was the longest man in the world. How do you determine who was the longest man in the world? It was almost Lewis Carroll-funny stuff that he would say in his John Lennon accent.”

Years later, Silliphant would say of this time, “I suppose, [it was] a period of redefining myself, but I would urge you not to put too much stock in that possibility, because, truthfully, I am redefining myself virtually every day of my life and am continually striving to change events as well as myself. If anything, all these reverses may have impelled me more toward Buddhism and the certainty that everything — I mean everything — is transient and that to arrive at any state of even comparative happiness you have to open your hands and let go of whatever it is you’ve been clutching — because whether you let it go willingly or are forced to — whatever you’re holding is already moving away from you. If you let this certainty trouble you, you have a problem. If you accept it as the basis of all existence you can actually be calmed by the loss of people and things.”

Silliphant’s embracing of Buddhist precepts was not spontaneous. It came out of his relationship with — and, indeed, his discovery of — one of the most charismatic, influential, and yet misunderstood people whose spirit ever touched the hearts of others: Bruce Lee.

“I owe my spirituality to Bruce Lee,” Stirling Silliphant often said — only he said it before everyone else did. It could also be argued that it was Silliphant who made Lee widely known to the western world outside of the martial arts community.

Lee’s life and, especially, his 1973 death, have long since entered the realm of exaltation, speculation, adulation, and downright fabrication. The truth alone is the stuff of legend, which, in fact, is what it has become.

Lee Jun-Fan (Lee Xiao Loong) was born in San Francisco on November 27, 1940, to well-connected parents who had come to the States from Hong Kong. His father, Hoi-Chuen Lee, was a stage performer who made occasional films, and his German-Chinese mother, Grace Ho, enjoyed deep family roots. When he was three months old, Bruce (an Americanized name supposedly given to him by a hospital maternity nurse), his parents, and their three other children at the time (a fifth was born after Bruce) returned to Hong Kong. This was not a wise move, as it coincided with the Japanese invasion and World War II.

Family connections led Bruce to appear as a child actor in more than twenty films in Asia. Growing up as a teenager in post-war British-occupied Hong Kong, he was involved in enough gang fights that his father arranged for him to start training in the close-range martial art of Wing Chun. At eighteen, after one too many street brawls (as well as to secure his birthright American citizenship), he was sent back to San Francisco, and then to Seattle where he finished high school, enrolled in college, and began teaching martial arts. Soon he drifted to Oakland, California. Throughout his journeys he networked with such martial arts figures as Jesse Glover, James Yimm Lee, Taky Kimura, and Ed Parker, Sr., the latter a promoter of the Long Beach International Karate Championships, one of the biggest and most prestigious karate tournaments in the U.S. at the time. It was at Parker’s 1964 event that Hollywood hair-stylist Jay Sebring (who was later murdered with Sharon Tate by followers of Charles Manson) witnessed Lee’s dazzling demonstration. Sebring mentioned Lee to his client, Hollywood producer William Dozier, who was casting for his new TV series,
The Green Hornet.
Dozier hired Lee for the role of Kato, The Green Hornet’s manservant/bodyguard.

This was not necessarily a compliment. Like Blacks and Indians, Asian actors had a painful history of being stereotyped by Hollywood. Whether playing obsequious houseboys, subservient Geishas, inscrutable detectives, or the “Yellow Peril” in wartime propaganda films, Asians were not American movie heroes. Bruce Lee would challenge that.

But it would take a while. After playing Kato from 1966 to 1967 and making crossover appearances on its companion series,
Batman
(1966-1967), Lee was unemployed. It was during this period that he opened the Jun Fan Institute of Gung Fu and developed his freer style of martial arts called
jeet kune do,
reportedly in reaction to the more formal
Jun Fan Gung Fu. Jeet kune do
’s fluidity suited Lee’s physique and flashy personality, and, before long, he was known to the Hollywood cognoscenti, among them Stirling Silliphant.

“I was at one of those instantly-forget-the-name-of-the-host Hollywood parties,” Silliphant told writer and martial arts historian John Corcoran, “and I heard someone talking about the fabulous Chinese martial artist named Bruce Lee. The story I heard was that Bruce had been invited to Las Vegas by Vic Damone, the singer.” Doubting that anyone could defeat his bodyguards, Damone challenged Lee to do just that. In a dazzling display of speed and agility, Lee knocked Damone’s hotel room door off its hinges, put one bodyguard on the floor, and kicked a cigarette from the other’s mouth before either had a chance to move. “Whether that story is true or not, I will never know,” Silliphant allowed. ”But that was the story I heard… [and] it was good enough for me. I decided Bruce was going to be my Main Man — the one I wanted to train with.”
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It took him several months to track Lee down and, when he did, Lee set a high price of $275/hour for private lessons
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“as a way of showing that the lesson offered has worth — the fee is merely the token of this, not the point of it,” explained Silliphant, who became a student first and later a disciple.
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At times the process was painful:

I often went to his house in Culver City. At this point, we were working out three of four times a week. And no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I exercised, or how much I sparred or how much I ran, I never stopped aching. I mean, there were times when I would wake up in the morning and wish I was dead, so overwhelming and total was the pain from every aching muscle. I remember arriving at Bruce’s house and being unable to get out of my car. When I started to move my left leg to get out, pain exploded throughout my whole body. That’s how wracked-up I was from these workouts. Bruce finally came out and asked, “What are you sitting there for?” I said, “I can’t move, I ache too much.” He pulled the car door open and said, “Get out!” Well, when you’re dealing with a master, you get out — fast. Because you know that if you don’t, he’s going to pull you out and that’s going to hurt even more. So, painfully, I pulled myself out of the car. Bruce then said, “You know, in ten minutes, you’re going to feel great. What you’re going to do is like diving into a cold ocean with a wet suit on. There’s that first shock of extreme cold and then it all warms up. The first minute you test all of your muscles they’re going to hurt. After that you’ll feel better.” He was right, of course.
 
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“The way I teach it, all type of knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge,” Lee explained to interviewer Pierre Berton. “So therefore they are coming in and asking me to teach them not so much how to defend themselves, rather they want to learn to express themselves through some movement, be it anger, be it determination, or whatsoever. He is paying me to show him, in combative form, the art of expressing the human body.”
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In addition to technique and discipline, Lee taught Silliphant a kind of spiritualism that helped him address concerns he was beginning to have about his life, career, and the world in general. “I never met another man who was even remotely at his level of consciousness,” the writer marveled. “I’ll give you just one example. Early on in my workouts with Bruce
in jeet kune do
(‘the way of the intercepting fist’ in Cantonese), he observed that, while my defensive moves were blindingly fast, my offensive moves were perfunctory. I tried to explain to him that, as a member of the three-man foils fencing team at USC for three years and as a West Coast fencing champion in foil, I scored 90 percent of my
touchés
via counter-attacks. An opponent would make a move and I’d counter it while he was still engrossed in having delivered it, and I’d skewer him where he stood. ‘Bullshit,’ Bruce replied, ‘that’s a technical rationalization. There’s something in
you
, something deep in your psyche, that stops you from attacking. You have to rationalize that the other guy is attacking you, so then it’s okay to knock him off. But you don’t have the killer instinct; you’re not pursuing him. Why?’ Well, Bruce and I worked on this for weeks. Finally, I volunteered that my father (pure Anglo) had never once in his life held me in his arms or kissed me. In fact, I had never in my life touched a man or had any body contact with another male. No, I was not homophobic. I just — hadn’t — ever — done it.

“I remember that afternoon so vividly. Bruce and I were sweating — we were naked from the waist up, wearing those black Chinese bloomer pajama pants only. Bruce moved in closer.

“‘Put your arms around me,’ he ordered.

“‘Hey, Bruce,’ I said, ‘you’re all sweaty, man.’

“‘Do it!’ he demanded.

“So I put my arms around him.

“‘Pull me closer,’ he said.

“‘Jesus, Bruce!’

“‘Closer!’

“I pulled him closer. I could feel the
chi
in his body — a vibrant force which literally throbbed from his muscles. His vitality passed between us — and it was as though a steel wall had just been blown away. He felt
good
. He felt alive. When I opened my arms and he stepped back, he was studying me. ’You have to love
every
one,’ he said, ‘not only women, but men as well. You don’t have to have sex with a man, but you have to be able to relate to his separate physicality. If you don’t, you will never be able to fight him, to drive your fist through his chest, to snap his neck, to gouge out his eyes.’

“Well, this stuff ain’t for kids, I’m here to tell you. But over the years I shared as much of my life with Bruce as time permitted us. I had many such lessons. They came from the guy — but they came from higher planes as well — and because of Bruce I opened all my windows.”
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Lee and Silliphant became each other’s protégés as well as mentors. Their exchanged letters are not only complimentary, they are extraordinarily emotional for two men in a world that had not yet evolved the male bonding ethos. Lee was supportive of Silliphant’s training, both spiritual and physical, and told him (in graceful, almost feminine handwriting) that he had renewed his interest in working together. Silliphant was even more effusive, telling Lee, in a Christmas exchange in 1967, “I think you know how much of an influence you’ve been in changing a great number of things in my life for the better. I look forward to a long and meaningful friendship so that some day I can call you ‘old friend’ in the sense that the years will continue to be wonderful to both of us and our families.”
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And Silliphant opened something for Lee too: doors. He hired him to play the role of Winslow Wong in
Marlowe
(1969), his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s
The Little Sister
, starring James Garner as the eponymous private detective. In updating the novel twenty years from its 1949 origins, Silliphant simplified the plot — no mean feat — switching events and eliminating characters to focus the action on a fewer number of faces.
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Despite a fine performance by James Garner, the film achieved its chief notoriety because of Lee’s cameo as a mob henchman sent to scare Marlowe off the case.

“By the time of
Marlowe,
I had seen so many parodies of a thin guy with a weasel face and a fat guy with a black suit come into the offices to threaten people that merely seeing such types enter a room would send me into gales of laughter. So I thought, let’s send in one of the world’s greatest martial artists and have him demolish Marlowe’s office. If you see this scene, you will see that I wrote it as a master [long shot] and persuaded director Paul Bogart to shoot it that way, rather than in convenient cuts that would allow the martial artist to catch his breath between kicking out a door or knocking the ceiling fixture from the socket. Since Bruce had the physical capability of doing the whole enchilada in one continuous ballet of directed violence, I didn’t want to cut into it. Paul went with this and, of course, I rank this scene as one of the foremost martial arts scenes ever to appear in an American film.”
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Lee’s scene in
Marlowe
, released in October of 1969, created a sensation, but — taken along with his guest appearances in routine TV episodics in the same era — was nowhere near a true career launch. Its importance lay not in the scene’s excitement but in the fact that Lee was not playing a stereotypical “Oriental.” Silliphant also hired Lee as fight coordinator for
A Walk in the Spring Rain
while angling to give him a more substantial role in a series he was developing for Paramount Television about a blind insurance investigator named Longstreet.

“It’s absolutely impossible,” Silliphant laughingly told columnist Joyce Haber when Paramount and ABC asked him to write the two-hour Movie of the Week pilot for
Longstreet
. “I’ll do it.”
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He was soon regretting his quick consent. “I agreed as part of the contract to write six episodes for the first season,” he later confessed, “turning the rest of the scripts over to my producer Joel Rogosin, who is a writer, and letting him run with assignments to freelancers. As it turned out, I had trouble writing even four episodes because, with the concept of a blind detective, how many shows can you write in which, to equalize the odds against sighted opponents, you have to have the lights go out in Act III? I do recall having fun with one such episode, however: the series opener guest-starring Bruce Lee, (‘The Way of the Intercepting Fist’
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) which dramatizes Jimmy Franciscus (Longstreet) learning how, as a blind man, to fight a dock bully he can no longer see.”
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Lee had a second champion at Paramount: Tom Tannenbaum, another private student, who was the executive in charge of taking
Longstreet
from concept to primetime. Lee’s character may have been called Li Tsung, but there was no mistaking where his thoughts originated.

“I think the successful ingredient in it was that I was being Bruce Lee and I could express myself honestly as I expressed myself at that time,” Lee said, and gave, as an example, “I said [to Franciscus], ‘empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now: water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.’”
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Lee’s work drew praise from the
New York Times
and, for an instant, both Paramount and Warner Bros. were after him for a series — only it had to be on their terms, not his. They wanted a modern story, Lee wanted a western, reasoning, “How else can you justify all of the punching and kicking and violence except in the period of the west? Nowadays you can’t go around punching and kicking people, I don’t care how good you are.”
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