Forbidden City (nightclub)


The Forbidden City was a Chinese nightclub and cabaret in San Francisco, which was in business from 1938 to 1970, and operated on the second floor of 363 Sutter Street, between Chinatown and Union Square.
The Forbidden City was one of the first nightlife venues to feature Asian American singers, dancers, chorus lines, magicians, strippers, and musicians, and was entirely managed and staffed by Asian Americans. It was popular with military personnel who were transiting through San Francisco during World War II, as well as Hollywood celebrities, and became the most well-known venue in a golden age of Chinatown nightlife. Some of the featured entertainers would go on to greater fame after launching their careers at the Forbidden City.
The club inspired the novel The Flower Drum Song, which became a musical and film of the same title. In 1989, the club was profiled in the documentary, Forbidden City U.S.A., by Arthur Dong.

History

Inception

Charlie Low, the son of small store owners from Nevada, opened the Forbidden City on December 22, 1938, after the success of Chinese Village, which he opened two years earlier. Named after the Forbidden City in Beijing, the new club would eventually become the most famous of approximately 12 Chinese-themed cabaret clubs in the Chinatown area. It was located on the outskirts of San Francisco's Chinatown, and intended to cater to the curiosity of a largely white audience. Low's Forbidden City was preceded by and competed with Andy Wong's Chinese Sky Room, which opened almost a year earlier on December 31, 1937; the Chinese Sky Room featured a big band led by trumpeter Wong in what was previously the rooftop Chinese Tea Garden of the Grand View Hotel at Grant and Pine.
Initially, Low found it difficult to recruit performers from the local Chinese community, which looked down on entertainers, particularly women in sexually provocative performances. For this reason, Low recruited Asian American performers from primarily other cities, rather than directly from San Francisco's Chinatown. The opening night lineup included Li Tei Ming, Jadin Wong, Ellen Chinn, George Lee, and Gee Ming.

Rise to popularity

Business was slow until 1940, when Low hired Noel Toy, a journalism student at University of California, Berkeley who had worked as a nude model at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939. At Forbidden City, Toy was marketed as a "Bubble Dancer." She performed nude with a large, opaque bubble covering her body. She also performed a nude fan dance with ostrich feathers. Within three months, business revenues had tripled. Life Magazine published a 3-page profile of the club in 1940, praising the dancing abilities of Chinese women as a "fragile charm distinctive to their race".
Many of the performers were second and third-generation Asian Americans, who had grown up in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrant households. The women, in particular, were expected to follow traditional female roles, and their grandmothers may have had bound feet. However, they strongly identified with American youth culture, including the film, music, and dance styles of the era. Some ran away from home to pursue a new life, such as Jadin Wong and Ellen Chinn. The Hollywood star Anna May Wong served as an inspiration to some of them, and they often bucked conventions of their period. As Candice Pociano, daughter of Ellen Chin explained, "It was taboo to dance in Mom’s day onstage exposing your legs, and even in my teen days, the Chinese girls were shy and demure." Furthermore, as explained by Jimmy Borges, a former performer at the club:
the Asian was always looked upon as being a menial. And when Charlie Low's nightclub opened, he showed that, you know, the Asians don't only do dishes or work on the railroads or do laundry. They dance, they sing, they're magicians, they're tap dancers. And not only that, they're very good at it... And whenever I ran into stuff where people I would run into, racism or stuff like that, all it did was make me stronger. I says, 'You know what? You're going to be sorry one day, you're going to wish you were my friend.' Because that was my impetus to succeed.

The club thrived during World War II, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The war brought many servicemen to San Francisco, which served as a primary port of departure for the Pacific Theater; the club was popular with both servicemen and tourists. The audience was primarily Caucasian, but Asian American locals and tourists also visited the club. Some of the Japanese American performers changed their names to avoid the prevalent anti-Japanese sentiment while others were forced to move out of the region to avoid internment. A fire in 1946 temporarily closed the club.
While Forbidden City was the most famous Chinatown nightclub, it competed with other venues that featured Asian American performers, such as Club Shanghai, Lion's Den, Kublai Khan, Dragon's Lair, and Chinese Sky Room. In fact, Charlie Low had a rivalry with Fong Wan, a famed herbalist and the owner of Club Shanghai. In 1949, Fong Won sued Low for $50,000 for "stealing" an acrobat from his club. The lawsuit was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The club inspired the Flower Drum Song novel, musical, and film. In 1957 author C. Y. Yee wrote the best-selling novel, which was set at the Forbidden City. Rodgers and Hammerstein created a popular musical from the book in 1958; since then, it has had several revivals, the most recent by David Henry Hwang in 2001–02. Jack Soo had been hired to headline the Forbidden City for a six-week engagement starting in September 1957; by October, it was rumored he would be moving on to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, but it was announced in November that he would star in the Broadway production of Flower Drum Song as Wang Ta, the Americanized son promised to Mei Li; he would go on to reprise the role in the Hollywood film version of the musical, released in 1961.

Decline and legacy

Despite the popularity of Flower Drum Song, business at the club declined, hurt by the increase in the cabaret tax in 1944. By the late 1950s it was facing increasing competition from more explicit shows, such as the Condor Club in North Beach. Owner Charlie Low retired in 1962, selling the club to exotic dancer Coby Yee. Yee managed the club until it closed in 1970.
The space was destroyed by a fire in the 1980s, but the building has survived and was used as a computer instruction center as of 2000.
An hour-long documentary, Forbidden City, U.S.A., was filmed in the mid-1980s by Chinatown native Arthur Dong and released in 1989, featuring most of the original cast. A DVD was released in 2003. The documentary led indirectly to a second singing career for Larry Ching, the club's "Chinese Frank Sinatra." Excerpts from two 78 RPM acetate disks were played in the documentary, and included in Ching's debut album Till the End of Time.

Description

The Forbidden City has been compared to an Asian-American version of the Cotton Club, in that it featured an all-ethnic cast of performers for a mostly white audience, performing to the popular tastes of the time rather than in stereotyped or authentic ethnic roles. However, some acts played up the supposed exoticism of ethnic Chinese, as well as sensuality of Chinese women. The owner, Charlie Low, generated publicity by nicknaming the performers after famous mainstream celebrities. Part of the club's appeal to both audiences and performers was the "racial cross-dressing" of placing Asian Americans into traditionally white entertainer roles, and the racial dialog that came out of the varying level of success of the various performers had in fitting into these roles.
For many visitors from middle-America, Forbidden City was their first encounter with people of Asian ethnicity. San Francisco's Asian population was approximately 4.2% of the population in 1940, versus 0.2% for all of the United States. Although the cast included Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans and other Asian Americans, they were presented to audiences as Chinese.
The club itself seated 300, and also contained elaborate stage area and dressing rooms. Typical of the clubs of the time, in front, it displayed pictures of famous guests. The club was patronized by Hollywood celebrities, such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Jane Wyman, and Ronald Reagan.
An evening's entertainment at Forbidden City typically started with a dinner that was ostensibly "Chinese" cuisine, but it was a fusion of Chinese and American cuisine. Dinner would be followed by dancing, then a floor show. The floor show typically opened with performers dressed in traditional Chinese clothing. The performers would then shed the traditional clothing and perform modern song and dance. Acts were a combination of vaudeville and burlesque-style performances, including singing, tap dancing, ballroom dancing, skits, slapstick, tumbling, and parodies of American cowboy scenes. The show included burlesque performers like Coby Yee, dancers such as Toy & Wing and Mai Tai Sing, and singers such as Larry Ching, who performed six nights per week with a band. Each show typically lasted 45 minutes.
The club also formed a touring company that played across the United States and Canada, as well as USO shows worldwide.

Notable performers

A number of Asian American musicians, actors, and other celebrities either started their professions at the Forbidden City, or are famous for performing there. During the early years of the club the performers' salaries, modest as they were, provided rare employment opportunities for Asian-Americans suffering under the discriminatory laws of the time.
Charles P. Low was youngest of seven children, born on June 9, 1901 in McDermott, Nevada. He arrived in the Bay Area in 1922, when he was 21, and made a fortune in real estate and by trading on the stock market. Low completed the Low Apartments in 1927, 1060 Powell, after Caucasian landlords refused to rent to him. Low went on to open the first cocktail bar in Chinatown, the Chinese Village, on November 12, 1936 at 702 Grant Ave; Dr. Margaret Chung was one of the early investors in the Chinese Village. Despite warnings that Chinese American residents would not patronize the Chinese Village, Low drew enough business from tourists to pack the small space regularly, prompting him to consider moving to a larger space where entertainment, not cocktails, would be the emphasis.
Low was married four times: first to Minnie Louie, then to Li Tei Ming, Betty Wong, and Ivy Tam.