In the annals of impromptu celebrity photographs, Alfred Eisenstaedt's snapshot during a high-society Berlin party in 1928 ranks among the most arresting. At the time, neither he nor anyone else present could know that the subjects of his casual photo — Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl — were destined for immortality.
All three women were at pivotal moments in their lives. Dietrich would soon find fame as a movie star of the highest magnitude, Wong was an Asian-American actress encountering uncommon success, and Riefenstahl was on the verge of becoming a trailblazing filmmaker. Yet history has little to say about the trio's fateful meeting that night, or their subsequent encounters in the following decades. Amanda Lee Koe imaginatively fills that void in her kaleidoscopic Delayed Rays of a Star.
Blurring the line between history and myth, Delayed Rays of a Star is encyclopedic in its detail and fit to bursting with invention. Mixing fact with fiction is nothing new for Koe; her previous short story collection, Ministry of Moral Panic, was a lively inquisition of Singapore's past and present. Delayed Rays of a Star marks an ambitious step forward, as she concocts an expansive, criss-crossing narrative that somersaults back and forth in time, from Weimar-era Germany and old-time Tinseltown to Paris and China in the 1990s. At the epicenter are Dietrich, Wong and Riefenstahl, navigating a twentieth century wracked with war, societal pressures, and the ever-shifting fortunes of show business.
Delayed Rays dramatizes incidents from its divas' lives with a sympathetic feminist viewpoint, while imagining fortuitous meetings, calamities and epiphanies. Each member of the trio is afflicted by the burdens set by their gender, ethnicity, and affiliations. Marlene is labeled a traitor when she abandons Germany for Hollywood during World War II. In her pursuit of artistic greatness, Leni allies herself professionally with Adolf Hitler (whom she refers to as "H"), a move that proves disastrous to her post-war career. Born and bred as an American, Anna May is typecast in stereotypical Asian roles, and yet is told that she is "too Chinese to play a Chinese" when a rare meaty lead part becomes available.
As the novel's title (drawn from a Rilke poem) suggests, Dietrich, Wong and Riefenstahl form the luminous core of the story, but their glow reflects off a large cast of supporting characters. Among the devoted, doomed and often flummoxed real-life men who float in and out of the women's lives are the mercurial Josef von Sternberg, Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. Running parallel with these momentous contretemps are more fictional flights of fancy, in which Koe conjures up a multi-national set of characters: Bebé, an illegal Chinese immigrant who becomes Dietrich's maid; Hans, a closeted gay Austrian soldier hired to work on one of Riefenstahl's films; and Ibrahim, a disenfranchised German radical of Turkish descent given to prank-calling Dietrich, just to recite poetry to her.
Immense in scope, peppered with conversational musings, and touched by melancholy, Delayed Rays is patterned like one of Dietrich's famous emeralds, as our views of its characters are refracted by the changing times. Much like the divas she writes about, Koe's novel struts flamboyantly all over the map, yet what lingers is the heartbreaking grandeur of her protagonists' existences. Like the stars in Rilke's poem, they have burned out, but their light persists, and Koe has fashioned a worthy tribute to their enduring impact.