22 The Hollywood Connection

While May-ling spent most time with her husband in Nationalist Taiwan after the Communist takeover of China, Ei-ling visited the couple frequently, but made New York her permanent home. Big Sister had a large house in Locust Valley on Long Island, surrounded by woods. Her life was private and quiet, her main social activity was playing bridge and cards with a few select and very discreet friends. She shunned all public occasions. As always, God was central to her routine, and Ei-ling would pray before making all important decisions, including investing.

Her mind, which May-ling considered the sharpest of the three sisters, was still very much active, and she watched the situation in Taiwan with acute attention. One October day in 1956, while visiting Little Sister, she gave Chiang Kai-shek a piece of advice that would benefit the island in the years to come. In Chiang's rigidly controlled regime, few young people were permitted to study abroad. No one dared to suggest that the ban should be lifted, and May-ling did not have the kind of political brain to propose such initiatives. On this day, the sisters and the Generalissimo were strolling in the garden of the presidential mansion, when Chiang, with a big smile, took Ei-ling's arm. She turned to him, ‘Listen, Brother Chiang, we are lagging so far behind in science and technology … and you still don't open up and allow students to study abroad. You really should let the students go and study in America!' Chiang accepted her advice, and so began what would become a tidal wave of Taiwanese young men and women crossing the ocean.

In America, Ei-ling helped the Chiangs deal with personal problems. In 1964, a letter arrived from a Lawrence Hill, literary agent for the Generalissimo's ex-wife, Jennie. She was hard up, and planned to publish her memoirs. Hill said he wanted to check some facts with Ei-ling. Once published, the book would be tremendously embarrassing for the Chiangs, and Big Sister, working behind the scenes, prevented the publication. Jennie accepted $250,000 and promised never to publish it. The money undoubtedly came out of Ei-ling's pocket.*¹

In things big and small, Ei-ling played the provider of the family – always handsomely. When a son of her youngest brother T.A. first visited her, she handed him a $100 bill as a present – a colossal sum for the boy, whose weekly pocket money from his parents was twenty-five cents. Key staff members for the Chiangs received expensive gifts such as Rolex watches. When Chiang's doctor was invited to stay with her for a week, she fed him shark's fin soup, the most costly food, every meal. The doctor was put off the delicacy for ever, but he was charmed by Ei-ling's hospitality.

By all accounts, she was the brains in her marriage to H.H. Kung, who had been prime minister of China for years. H.H.'s own judgement, it was widely observed, could be erratic. In his reminiscences, which offered much candid insight, he boasted that ‘Roosevelt had one hundred per cent confidence in me. Whatever I told him, he accepted as the truth … Roosevelt was really a good friend of mine.' Similarly, Mussolini had the highest opinion of him: ‘Mussolini thought that China sent big, important men to all the European capitals [as ambassadors] … I think Mussolini confidentially suggested that he would like to have me.'

During his official trip to Europe in 1937, he had a private meeting with Hitler. He suggested that he had great rapport with the Führer, who ‘told me that the Communists tried to ruin Germany but the German people were alert enough to realize the danger. The Communists were driven out of Germany before they could go too far.' Hitler said to him ‘I understand that you, Herr Doktor, realize the danger of Communist doctrines.' H.H. also believed that ‘I was able to make Hitler think twice before getting too close with Japan.'

From Taiwan he received frequent messages begging him ‘to go back', he claimed. ‘They think that if I go back, I could help the Government recapture the mainland.'

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Ei-ling was well aware that she did much of the thinking for her husband – and that she exerted unparalleled influence over Little Sister and the Generalissimo. Once she told the mother of Debra Paget, the Hollywood star who married her youngest son Louis, ‘In many ways we are very much alike.' She meant that they each engineered the success of their kin (apart from the fact that they were both deeply religious).

Debra Paget, the lead lady in Elvis Presley's first film Love Me Tender, was pushed into Hollywood by her dominant mother, Maggie Griffin, described as ‘a shrewd, talkative, charming ex-burlesque queen who is a well-loved local figure in her own right'. Maggie was determined that Debra and her siblings would make their careers in show business. Shortly after Debra was born in 1933 in Denver, Colorado, the family moved to Los Angeles to be close to the film industry. Debra had her first professional job at the age of eight. By the time she co-starred with Elvis in his movie debut in 1956, she had made nineteen films, and assumed the role of promoting Elvis. She told her fans: ‘I will gladly take a chance on predicting that Elvis Presley will continue to retain his popularity … Elvis Presley is here to stay.'

During the shooting of the movie, her mother sat on the set bantering with Elvis. Maggie had made it a rule to be wherever Debra was filming. She stood at the centre of the actress's relationship with the future rock ‘King'. To the audience of the then influential Milton Berle Show, Debra said:

I looked forward to my first meeting with Elvis Presley with mixed emotions. I had heard and read a lot about this new young singing sensation from Tennessee – and most of it was not complimentary … The first thing I recall was the way he greeted us. When Mr Berle introduced us, Elvis grabbed my hand firmly and said, ‘I'm glad to meet you, Miss Paget.' Then he shook my mother's hand with equal vigor, excused himself, and a couple of minutes later came back with a chair for her … From then on my family and I saw a lot of Elvis … my folks considered Elvis a member of the Paget clan – a feeling which, I believe, he reciprocated.

Apparently, Elvis proposed to Debra. But Maggie vetoed the marriage. ‘If it had not been for my parents,' Debra said in a television interview, ‘I would have married him.'

As it happened Debra divorced her first husband (actor David Street) after ten weeks, and left her second (director Budd Boetticher) nineteen days after their wedding. In 1962, at the age of twenty-eight, she met and married Ei-ling's youngest son, Louis. The Sandhurst-trained former captain of the British Army had turned forty, remained a bachelor, and was now an extremely wealthy oilman in Houston, Texas. He owned a private plane and was protected by a team of security guards.

Ei-ling was instrumental in the union. She liked Debra, not least because the red-haired ‘glamour girl' was as devout as she was. Describing Elvis, Debra would say, ‘And he loves God – that's the best part.'

Ei-ling had a house in Beverly Hills, and Debra was invited to dinner to meet Louis. The invitation was delivered by a mutual friend. Maggie told the press: ‘It was all so proper. He invited me, too. And introduced his mother to us. She is a lovely person. It was all so proper, so old-fashioned that Debra just had to fall in love with him. I know I did.'

When Louis and Debra were engaged, Maggie purred, ‘He wooed my daughter in such a wonderful, old-fashioned way – I just could not ask for a nicer son-in-law … I just love him and I know his mother loves my daughter, too.' Debra had been contracted to make films in Rome. But Louis flew her instead to Las Vegas, where the wedding took place in the First Methodist Church, in the presence of both mothers. When the couple went on honeymoon, Maggie again gushed to reporters: ‘I was as excited as Debra … I think my baby has found real happiness this time.' Ei-ling was pleased, but as always, refrained from talking to the press.

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The home to which Louis brought Debra was ‘a fortress' outside Houston, in the middle of hundreds of acres of wooded pastureland. Here the headquarters of his oil company and family mansion were fitted with bulletproof windows. In the grounds there was a man-made pond, with Chinese pavilions of blue-tiled roofs, looking dainty and decorative on the Texas plain. On closer inspection, these ornaments turned out to have been made from reinforced concrete and equipped with gun ports for machine guns.

Underneath the pond, Louis had built one of the world's biggest private nuclear bunkers: the Westlin Bunker. He took the possibility of nuclear attacks by Red Russia or China very seriously. The bunker was reached through hidden stairwell entrances, including ones inside the pavilions. It was a massive subterranean compound, designed to withstand any known cataclysm, even a forty-megaton blast. This underground city in miniature had its own generators and a capacity to stockpile water, food and fuel for 1,500 people for ninety days. Bunk beds were stacked up neatly; one room housed 115 triple-decker bunks, each with its own reading light. There were canteens with tables and chairs, toilets and decontamination showers ready for use, a clinic – and even a jail, with four steel-encased cells. Louis had thought of everything, not least trouble.

In the event of a nuclear attack, a wall-mounted panel in the control room would send out flashing lights and other signals and the lock-down facility of the bunker would be activated. Geiger counters for measuring radioactivity would go into action, checking the water and ventilation systems.

On the website of Houston Architecture.com, which described the bunker, a reader, Todd Brandt, left a message: ‘I supervised the construction of the elevator house and interior remodel of the Westlin Bunker. It was fascinating, you'd have to see it to believe it. This thing had a lake on top of it but no leaks. Coolest job I ever built.'

This fantasy cavern cost Louis $400–500 million (in today's terms). During Houston's oil bust in the 1980s, he lost title to the property (though he was far from bankrupt personally). This extraordinary Cold War folly remained unfinished and sat frozen in time until fairly recently, when it opened for leasing in 2005. After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, large companies came knocking on its door in their dozens. Some, like Continental Airlines, wanted to use it as a crisis-operations centre. Others found it an ideal internet data centre. Today, it is advertised as being able to provide ‘some of the most secure hosting and data warehousing possible. Weatherproof. Watertight. And survivable in case of nuclear attack.' Louis' refuge in case of a deathly assault has taken on a new lease of life.

Louis loved Cold War gadgets fit for a James Bond film. Once he gave a young nephew a comb that was a knife in disguise. May-ling came for a visit, and was driven in a custom-made limousine whose boot would open to reveal two giant spotlights powerful enough to blind pursuers, while the exhaust pipes shot out flames. The down-to-earth Mme Chiang Kai-shek commented to her brother T.V. that ‘Louis is not very stable.' T.V. replied that he ‘has the capacity of dreaming'. Louis had many hobbies. He owned a handsome estate in Louisiana, where he went duck shooting. May-ling's entourage liked him as he gave them a good time.

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Louis and Debra were divorced after eighteen years, but the couple stayed close. ‘We're the best of friends,' Debra said. She maintained her friendship with the Kungs and Soongs after Louis' death in 1996. This ‘wonderful relationship' was partly thanks to their son, Gregory, for whom Debra had given up her film career.

Gregory was born in 1964 in a house on Beverly Hills next door to Frank Sinatra. When H.H. Kung came to see his grandchild, he brought a jade ru-yi, a curved sceptre that was normally a ceremonial well-wishing gift and had to be carried in both hands. Ei-ling looked after the infant like a well-practised grandmother. When Gregory was a young boy and was brought to see May-ling in New York, his august great-aunt told him off: he had not learned the etiquette of rising from a seat when an adult entered the room, or of sitting properly, not lounging. She later could not praise him enough as he grew into a courteous young man. She was also relieved that he was not on drugs.

Gregory was Ei-ling's only grandchild. Of her four offspring, David and Jeanette never married, and Rosamonde's two marriages produced no children. Gregory, single child of Louis and Debra, is the sole descendant of the Kungs. He was devoted to looking after Debra who, in her eighties at the time of writing, is still very good-looking – and keenly religious. Mother and son are extremely close.

Neither Ching-ling nor May-ling had children of their own, thanks to the life – and husbands – they had chosen. So Gregory, who does not have children either, is the solitary ‘heir' of the three Soong sisters. He is not interested in spending his life being the keeper of their legacy and remains a fiercely private man.

*¹ Hill, the agent, was beaten up during this period – probably by Chiang's thugs. But it was the payout that ultimately did the trick. Jennie's memoir was not published until the 1990s, long after she and Chiang had both died (she in 1971).