Bruce Lee’s Final Week
From Monday, July 16 to Friday, July 20 in 1973, George Lazenby was said to have been in Hong Kong where he met Bruce Lee to discuss a potential collaboration. Lazenby claimed that he met Bruce when Typhoon Dot was hitting Hong Kong. The duration of this typhoon lasted from July 11 to July 21. The H.K. press, who Bruce despised, published on July 20 that Lazenby had signed a contract to the Golden Harvest film company on July 19. In interviews, Lazenby claimed that he was going to have dinner with Bruce on July 20 if it wasn’t for Bruce dying on the evening of that day. He usually recalls Bruce claiming that he had a headache but wasn’t going to cancel their scheduled meeting, which was to include Golden Harvest founder Raymond Chow and actress Betty Ting Pei.
Bruce Lee having suffered from headaches during his final week is a curious claim for curious George to make because there are televised interviews that Raymond Chow and actor Unicorn Chan gave after Bruce died where they counteract this. Unicorn said that Bruce never told him about having headaches, which contradicts what Unicorn was quoted as saying years later in print about a phone call that he got from Bruce on July 16 while Unicorn was in the Philippines. To help you picture it, there is no time difference between H.K. and the Philippines. As for Raymond Chow, he claimed that Bruce seemed to be fine on the days leading up to July 20. People like to say that Bruce’s headache on July 20 was an extension of his cerebral edema on May 10, but Chow claimed that Bruce had no more problems in the interim.
In the October 1980 issue of Kick Illustrated, Stirling Silliphant talked about Bruce Lee’s final week. A producer named Sy Weintraub discussed doing business with Bruce after Monday, July 16. In the interview, Stirling said: “So Sy called Bruce on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and made a date for us to fly out Friday of that week to spend the weekend with Bruce in Hong Kong to discuss what we needed to do to put him and The Silent Flute back together again. Bruce had agreed to that meeting. The day before we would have flown out - he died.”
Stirling indirectly said that Bruce Lee died on a Thursday. There was one English language newspaper in H.K. which quoted the H.K. police as claiming that Bruce died on Thursday night in H.K. time. In U.S. time, this would be Thursday morning. Someone, possibly Bruce’s wife Linda, would have needed to call Stirling before he got on the plane on Friday in U.S. time. In a 1993 documentary titled The Curse of the Dragon, James Coburn recalled a phone call that he had with Stirling Silliphant where the latter told him that Bruce’s death was reported in the local U.S. papers. This would have been Saturday, July 21. James remembered telling Stirling that he couldn’t believe Bruce was dead because he had a phone call with him a couple of days prior. The implication being that Bruce didn’t sound like he was in bad health. James would have said something about Bruce feeling a little under the weather if it was true. Although most Americans found out on July 21, Warner Brothers president Ted Ashley sent his condolences to Bruce’s widow in a telegram that was dated July 20.
In a 2004 book called Against All Odds, Chuck Norris claimed to have met Bruce Lee circa mid-July in Los Angeles where Bruce was apparently there for one day. Chuck wrote that he heard the news of Bruce’s death four days after they met. H.K. is sixteen hours ahead of Los Angeles, so if Chuck was informed on July 20 in U.S. time then this would mean that they met on Monday, July 16. Anyway, Chuck didn’t say anything about headaches. In the September 1973 issue of Black Belt (which came out in July), there was a news item about Bruce which corroborated what Chuck said about Bruce being in L.A. circa July: “Bruce Lee flew into town recently and will be back in July to look for a place to rest his weary legs whenever he’s in L.A. on assignment.”
In the July 16 issue of Box Office, it was revealed that the August issue of Black Belt (which came out in June) placed emphasis on John Saxon in terms of interview coverage and being the only star from Enter the Dragon on the cover. When the September issue came out in July, Bruce was probably relieved to know that John didn’t get top billing. The downside is that the title was still going to be Han’s Island. Picture this: Bruce gets a midnight plane to H.K. on Tuesday, July 17. Symbolically, he’s in H.K. 16 hours later at 16:00. Although he obviously died on a Thursday, it’s common knowledge that he died on a Friday. However, the official notification of his death was revealed so late on that day that it only got printed on Saturday morning; hence why you have stories of H.K. people who woke up to the news of Bruce Lee’s death. Wing Chun classmate William Cheung claimed that Bruce died two days before it was printed in H.K. newspapers.
As such, there is a H.K. film director who talked about meeting Bruce Lee at the Shaw Brothers film studio four days before he died. Monday was off limits because Bruce was hanging out with Chuck Norris, so director Ulysses Au-Yeung Jun had met Bruce on Tuesday. If Bruce decided on Wednesday, July 18 to have Sy Weintraub and Stirling Silliphant fly to Hong Kong on Friday then George Lazenby would have said something about it. You then have to wonder where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fits into all of this because he claimed that he was twelve hours too late to meet Bruce in Hong Kong. Kareem heard about the news of his death while he was at the Singapore airport. There is no time difference between H.K. and Singapore, so he would have heard about Bruce’s passing on Saturday, July 21. Kareem didn’t mention Lazenby, either.
This brings us back to Thursday, July 19. Raymond Chow and Bruce Lee had a lunch meeting with Nancy Kwan where the intention was to sign her up to be the female lead in The Game of Death. According to Matthew Polly’s 2018 biography, George Lazenby was nowhere in sight. Anyway, Bruce loudly criticized Chow for refusing to pay him the money which Bruce believed that he had earned. According to Nancy, Bruce was constantly berating him. Hours later, Bruce had dinner with a Chinese cameraman named Charles Lowe. Later that day, Bruce had a phone call with Jhoon Rhee. The latter lived in Washington, which is thirteen hours behind Hong Kong. He remembered that Bruce told him about having just been in an argument with director Huang Feng about who should get top billing for When Taekwondo Strikes. Bruce wanted Jhoon whereas Huang wanted Angela Mao, his goddaughter. Jhoon found out about Bruce’s death on the radio during the following day. This would have been towards the end of July 20 in U.S. time.
To help you visualize the following anecdote, I would like to establish that H.K. is three hours behind Australia but one hour ahead of Indonesia. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith said: “On July 20, 1973, I boarded a Cathay Pacific flight from Sydney to Hong Kong to shoot a documentary about Bruce Lee, a new Asian superstar I’d become aware of on a previous visit to the colony, who at the time was still virtually unknown to Western audiences. The forthcoming release of his first American-made action picture, Enter the Dragon, would change all that. I had negotiated with his producer Raymond Chow to interview him for a wide-ranging documentary on Asian martial arts movies to be entitled World of Kung Fu. In my briefcase was a six-page outline I had written about a Chinese Dirty Harry-type cop sent to Sydney on a routine extradition, who then goes after the local crime lord, causing major mayhem. Arrival at Kai Tak Airport confirmed the newspaper headlines I had seen at the Jakarta refueling stop: Bruce Lee Dies.”
