Prophetical
Not to toot my own horn but my 2017 WordPress article about Bruce Lee’s The Game of Death foreshadowed the release of the infamous missing log footage. I predicted that a 50th anniversary special would mark such an occasion. Instead of November 2022 (half a century after Bruce’s final birthday month), it turned out to be July 2023 (fifty years after Bruce’s final living month). Instead of the release date being July 20 (the date when he was declared dead), it’s July 17 - the 50th anniversary of when Bruce supposedly cajoled Raymond Chow to sign George Lazenby to the Golden Harvest film company. I say “supposedly” because Golden Harvest’s magazine editor, Wong Nguk-Chung, claimed that July 17 was when Bruce told him that he intended to leave Hong Kong because some people weren’t friendly with him.
Two years ago, July 17 was when it was announced that someone purchased letters sent to Bob Baker from Bruce and his wife Linda. The existence of the letters was first announced on Twitter in late June of that year, but it was only on July 5 when most of the Bruce Lee community were made aware of them after someone posted the link to the Heritage Auctions site on a Bruce Lee forum. Way before then, some of my posts on that forum were harbingers of what was to come without myself realizing it at the time. On December 6 in 2019, I posted a remark that Ron Van Clief had made about Bruce in his 2006 collaborative audio commentary with George Tan for a movie called Death of Bruce Lee (1975): “I knew that he was combining too many illegal drugs. You can’t do hash, coke, smoke, booze and cigarettes, and work out like a fiend. Your body can’t take it.”
Later that month on the 29th, I posted my review of Tom Bleecker’s 2011 novel (Tea Money) where I observed: “Chapter 9 is when we are introduced to a character named Johnny Chen. Contrary to first impressions, it’s not based on Joey Chen. In fact, Johnny is meant to be a composite of Wu Ngan and Bob Baker. The Baker connection is only obvious in Chapter 24, where it’s revealed that “Johnny” is at a rehab facility called Baker House.”
On November 18 in 2020, I made the following comment: “I sometimes wonder if Baker enabled Bruce to be a drug dealer. In Jackie Chan’s first autobiography, he mentioned that Shaw Brothers were so stringent with wages that some of the actors had to resort to profiting from crime. In the below interview, Shek Kin said something that made me think about this also being the case with Bruce. He claimed that Bruce told him: I consider movies just as a side business.”
Back to the year when the drug letters were publicized, I had posted an interview that Van Williams did for the April 1978 issue of an American magazine called Fighting Stars. On March 15 in 2021, I singled out Van’s most memorable quote about Bruce Lee: “The Chinese mafia approached him about certain things. I don’t know what the whole story was.”
Four months later, the Bruce Lee community was fractured by the letters which could all be read in their heavenly glory. Some fans had denounced their hero, others had more respect for him due to what he was able to accomplish in spite of his drug addiction. There were over forty letters but even more images scanned of them because not only was there usually more than one page but even the envelopes were scanned so that you could see when they stamped, who from and even Bob Baker’s address. This required a lot of patience, and I can’t help but think that the person who did this was inspired by the effort that I put in when taking dozens upon dozens of scans for the Bruce Lee Lives forum. It’s been debated as to why the letters came out when they did. Some suspected that someone was eager to make money because of personal financial hardships caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s also been debated as to who was responsible for giving away the letters to be put up for auction. Some say that it was Bob Baker’s daughter, Laurie, but others say that it was Bob’s son - Dale. The official story is that the letters were found at a flea market, but I suspect that this was a cover that would allow the Baker family to be absolved of infringing the privacy of the Lee family. If the Bakers were to be taken to court, they could always have used the excuse that the letters were stolen. However, the Lee family have remained silent because they didn’t want to give any more publicity to it. Any action that they would take would bring to mind the 2003-coined term, the Streisand effect. Coincidentally, Barbra Streisand has a connection to Bruce Lee in that her boyfriend in the seventies (i.e. Jon Peters) wanted to produce a biopic that was to be written and directed by Robert Clouse - the director of Bruce’s Enter the Dragon.
