Who
is the real Tak Wing?Who
is the real Tak Wing?
Where do characters come from? Sometimes they literally pop out of nowhere, full blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Other times they are based on real people. Perhaps mystery writers are such a nice group of people because if there is truly someone we'd like to kill, that person may very well end up, thinly camouflaged, in a book. With a hatchet in the back of his head.
In The Girl With The Phony Name there's a rather colorful entrepreneur of Chinese/Japanese origin named Tak Wing. His name came off a sign I saw from a bus in Chinatown. The inspiration for his character, however, came to America from Germany in 1863. His name was Oscar Hammerstein and he was fifteen years old. No, this was not the Oscar Hammerstein who wrote the lyrics to Show Boat and collaborated with Richard Rodgers on Oklahama! and other musicals, changing the face of American theatre. This was Oscar Hammerstein 2d's grandfather, the original Hammerstein.
Penniless
and speaking no English, the young Oscar found work in a cigar factory, and
made
a fortune in the tobacco business. He eventually became a real estate tycoon and then a
opera impresario, building the theatres that would become the backbone of Times
Square.
By 1880 Oscar Hammerstein's characteristic appearance was established. It was to become as familiar to the general public as Teddy Roosevelt's, such was his fame. The little pointed beard. The Prince Albert coat and striped trousers. The top hat that he is said to have designed himself, possibly to appear taller than his 5'4".
He was a difficult man of boundless energy, lunatic ideas and indomitable spirit. At one point, after building some of the most important theatres in America and founding an opera company that humbled New York's Metropolitan Opera, he had lost everything ("Opera's no business," he once said. "It's a disease.") Meeting a friend on Broadway he offered him a cigar saying, "I have lost my theatres, my home and everything else. My fortune consists of two cigars. I will share it with you." The next year he was able to talk himself into a twenty year lease for the property at the corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street -- with no money down!
What,
I wondered, would happen if such a lunatic appeared today? He would be
Asian, I decided, because when I wrote the book Asians were the new
entrepreneurs, ready to take over New York it seemed. THE GIRL WITH THE
PHONY was going to be his book, but I needed some innocent to tell the
story. Thus was born Lucy McAlpin Trelaine, who during the search for her
own past, runs smack into this crazy fellow.
The problem was that I started the book from Lucy's point of view. Tak Wing doesn't appear until a hundred pages into the book, and by then it was too late. The book had become about Lucy, whose story we had begun with. I should have known better. One of the first things I learned as a playwright is that the audience follows the character who appears on stage first.
I have no regrets, but I still wonder what would have happened if Tak Wing had taken over a major television network as I had originally planned?
Oscar Hammerstein Illustration by Arlene Graston
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