Open Secret
There is a 1974 Shaw Brothers film called The Drug Addicts. It was about a martial artist who is a drug addict whose drug supplier, also a martial artist, thinks he’s going too far with his addiction. This echoes what happened between Bruce Lee and his friend Bob Baker - the latter being his drugs contact in America. There is a scene in The Drug Addicts where the addict gets someone rehabilitated. In Robert Clouse’s 1988 biography about Bruce Lee, he claimed that Bruce tried to get one of his friends to go through a rehabilitation program. The Drug Addicts was directed by an actor named David Chiang. He wanted to use Bruce’s house for his directorial debut, and tried to find him on July 20 in 1973: the day when Bruce was declared dead.
In an interview for Hong Kong Cinemagic, the film’s star - Ti Lung - talked about the lengths that he went to for his daring role in The Drug Addicts. He lost 15 pounds, but what he doesn’t say is that he was actually mimicking the real-life weight loss of Bruce Lee. What makes the movie even more perverse is that Ti Lung made many movies where he was cast alongside David Chiang, both of whom were supposed to be Shaw Brother’s answer to Golden Harvest’s Bruce Lee. Like the legendary latter, Ti Lung is a Wing Chun practitioner. Shaw Brothers writer and director Wong Jing claimed that Ti Lung is one of the best Wing Chun experts. As such, he was the only person who could indirectly play Bruce Lee during his downward spiral i.e. the closest that we got to seeing Bruce go through a fat Elvis phase (although you could say that his fall from grace has more in common with Karen Carpenter of The Carpenters fame).
In an abstract manner, The Drug Addicts is as much of an alternative Bruceploitation film as Bloody Ring - a movie which conjures the image and essence of Bruce Lee even though the main actor’s stage-name isn’t Bruce. With Ti Lung, it goes beyond having the same hair and clothes…he even wears the same sunglasses, and adopts the same mannerisms. One step too far goes even further with the film’s soundtrack having resorted to borrowing snippets from Lalo Schifrin’s score for Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. The Shaw Brothers movie company would later produce a movie about Bruce’s relationship with Betty Ting Pei that also went out of its way to depict Bruce’s drug use. Ironically, Linda Lee wasn’t depicted in this movie despite telling the Hong Kong press: “Betty frequently came to our home for dinner, and the three of us would sit and enjoy Chinese food.”
Bruce’s relationship with Betty was supposed to be an open secret for quite some time but she claimed at an inquest that the last time she had seen him before July 20 was in June. This would have been after Bruce went to America to medically assess his well-being due to a near death experience. Perhaps Betty saw a way to bond with him seeing as how she had a similar experience except self-inflicted in a suicidal manner circa December 1972. The problem with his purported relationship with her was that he was Hong Kong’s most photographed movie star, and yet we don’t see photos of the pair in 1973 like in 1972. Actor/gangster Fan Mei-Sheng claimed that, some time before Bruce’s death, Betty had already moved on from dating him to dating Hong Kong’s leading jockey.
Bruce’s doctor, Donald Langford, claimed in a telephone interview that he never believed the official story of July 20 because it seemed like a way to increase Betty’s stock in the movie world. This makes sense since her association with Bruce’s death resulted in 1974 being her most prolific year as an actress. According to Bruce’s friend and colleague Charles Lowe, Bruce spent his final months flirting with women who worked at a Japanese restaurant that they visited. As far as actresses who were on their way to working with him, Susan Shaw had more chances of being in a casting couch situation than Betty Ting Pei since Susan actually did a screen test for The Game of Death in April 1973. After Bruce died, she was rejected by Golden Harvest since The Game of Death was a production intended for their subsidiary company co-owned by Bruce i.e. Concord.
It was to Golden Harvest’s detriment that Susan Shaw joined Shaw Brothers. By having Bruce die in Betty’s apartment, the focus of the media spotlight shifted from Susan to Betty. Personally, I think that Bruce was more interested in Sandra Lang than Betty. Sandra was a pop singer and actress who Bruce was first photographed with when he returned to Hong Kong in 1970 for a brief business trip. They were said to be childhood friends. Her father was a friend of Bruce’s father. Bruce had even dated her older sister, Doris. By 1973, Sandra had cooler hair than Betty Ting Pei. Sandra has not been interviewed enough about Bruce Lee despite being the last woman to be photographed with him when he appeared on Hong Kong TV for the final time in living colour on July 10. He was interviewed by Ivan Ho for a TVB show called Enjoy Yourself Tonight.
What doesn’t get mentioned nowhere nearly as much is that Bruce was invited as a guest on Sandra’s music show: Songs of Sandra. When he was photographed with her in 1970, she was accompanied by her pop partner in crime: Amina. In 1973, they split, and Sandra became a solo artist. Together, they were known as The Chopsticks. Coincidentally, Sandra once performed on TV with Susan Shaw. Perhaps not a coincidence is that their Hong Kong film careers began in 1974. What’s weird is that they didn’t get to act in the same movie until 1982 when they acted in Precious Adolescence (which came out in 1983). This is significant since it featured a martial arts actor who knew Bruce Lee: a notorious gangster named Michael Chan Wai-Man. Susan Shaw’s next shared film with Sandra Lang was Family Affairs (1994).
