Mr Chow: interview(2)
As a man more sensitive to beauty than most, women have always enchanted Chow. Ask him which female stars left an impression above all others and he cites “the model Celia Hammond, Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie”. In his personal life, aside from his wife of 20 years, Eva – who is busy relaunching the film department of the LA County Museum of Art with Leonardo DiCaprio – and with whom he has a 16-year-old daughter, Asia, beautiful women haven’t always brought him lasting joy. His union with Coddington ended after a year, and a second marriage in 1973 to Bettina Lutz – a model who became a muse to photographers like Helmut Newton – came to such a tragic end that it remains the one subject Chow has always refused to talk about. After the marriage fell apart and Lutz embarked on an affair with French aristocrat Kim d’Estainville, she became the first prominent heterosexual woman to contract HIV and died of Aids in 1992.
Asked what his late wife’s legacy was, Chow pauses, smiles tightly and says: “There are two: my daughter, China [37] and my son, Maximillian [34].” It’s when the dark periods of Chow’s life come up that you realise what an anomaly he is in LA. From the way he bats away any hint of emotion with a staccato sentence or a jarring laugh, it’s clear that this is a man who has never had therapy. And yet the autobiographical screenplay he’s finally finished writing gave him the catharsis he needed.
“There are things I’m pretty cool with now, things I’ve gone through and come out the other end,” he says. “When you write about things, you come out thinking it’s a movie – that it has nothing to do with you.”
Chow’s childhood, however, tells you much about the man he’s become.
Born into a well-known theatrical family – Chow’s father, Zhou Xinfang, was China’s most famous actor and a leading figure at the Peking Opera in Shanghai – he was sent away to Wenlock Edge boarding school in Shropshire at 13. Mao’s power was consolidating and it was deemed safer to send the young boy away. “Plus they wanted me to get a good education, but that was the last time I ever saw my father.”
Can he remember saying goodbye to him? “Oh yeah,” he mutters, “all that stuff – all that drama. Why, are you trying to make me cry?”
It took a few weeks at that “Harry Potter-like” school, where a single leg of lamb was shared among a hundred boys, potatoes served with every meal and there was no rice to be found, for the culture shock to set in. “Only then did I realise that I’d lost everything: my culture, my country and my parents.” Was he bullied? “Of course,” he nods. “I was Chinese: I was there to be bullied. But life’s a funny thing because sometimes, no matter how hard the memories, you still manage to feel nostalgic about them.” Bitter sweet? “Mostly bitter,” he laughs, “with a drop of sweet.”
It wasn’t until the Eighties, when Chow returned to Shanghai, that he found out what had really happened to his family during the Cultural Revolution. “News had come in dribs and drabs over the years. There had been a piece in Time magazine saying that my father had committed suicide but I only found out that was a lie years later.” In fact, his father and brother had been imprisoned and tortured and his mother – sick and exhausted – had died. All the family’s books, art and music had been burned.“All heavy stuff,” he says quietly.
And yet these atrocities didn’t turn Chow against his homeland. “No, the saddest thing for me was never to have had a proper mourning period for my parents. Other people have a week, a month or three, but I have mourned consistently throughout the years.” Most self-made men who lose their families at a young age wish above all else that their parents had been able to witness their success; not Chow. “It was never so much that for me, as wishing I could have seen them again. I worshipped my father, so when I started up the restaurants, they were never just restaurants, they were my whole life. They were about rebuilding a life and a desire to communicate how great my father was and how great China was. China was and is my passion.”
For that reason, Chow feels any racist slight keenly. “Actually I collect them,” he says wryly. “Alongside portraits and ice buckets and the opening scenes of movies.”
Mr Chow, he believes, has never got the culinary recognition it deserves for one reason. “It’s like the cliché about all blondes being dumb. Because we’re so glamorous and so many famous people come to us, the critics would rather point to some little greasy spoon and say, ‘Oh isn’t the food marvellous.’ But the restaurants wouldn’t have survived for 43 years if the food were no good. And what you find is that most critics don’t study Chinese food in the way that they study French wine, so their only reference is casual food like takeaway.” He reprimands me on my use of the word “Chinatown”, telling me that the term is abusive and yet rarely pointed out as such by the Chinese. “Particularly in England, people still use it, and yet you’d never say ‘Chinaman’, would you? That’s like using the ‘N’ word.”
Ask Chow how the various Chinese communities feel about his restaurants and his success and he shrugs: “You’d really have to ask them.” If Chow occasionally comes across as stern, it’s an impression that’s dissipated by his mannerisms. He doesn’t laugh a great deal, but when he does it’s with his whole face. With his dry humour, touching reliance on Eva – whose approbation he seeks out with his eyes throughout the interview – and that impatient mind, it’s hard to tell whether Chow really has settled on the one ambition.
He’s already looking at opening more restaurants and working on releasing another screenplay – with Eva’s help – next year. Then, of course, there are the unfinished paintings I glimpsed, stacked against a wall in the pool house at the end of the garden. Whether he’ll ever feel he’s mastered that particular talent is anyone’s guess, but from a story he tells me about a stay at the famous Colombe d’Or hotel in Provence, he’s already got the recognition he craved. “This one night, we must have been making a lot of noise in our room,” he says, “because someone next door complained. ‘They’re allowed to make noise,’ came the owner’s response, ‘they’re artists.’”
