50 years without Bruce Lee: drug use, infidelities and doubts about the causes of his death
50 years ago the mythical actor and martial arts master died. He had a short but intense life. His overwhelming success in the movies and the particularity of all his action films. His fame as a good lover. His struggle with addictions. And why he died just six days before the release of Operation Dragon, his great legacy.
Bruce Lee’s epic fight with Chuck Norris Credit: Imbd
“Be water: don’t settle into a form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be amorphous, moldable, like water. If you put water in a cup it becomes the cup. If you put water in a bottle it becomes the bottle. If you put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend,” is how Bruce Lee expressed his philosophy of life. He was, undoubtedly, one of the icons of that world where cinema and martial arts are combined. And one of the most hung posters on the walls of teenagers: Lee, in a kung fu pose, his body locked and perspiring, his gaze serene and concentrated. However, behind the brightness of his success, there were also shadows that, with time, have been unearthed and revealed.
Although 50 years have passed since his tragic death, Lee’s legend does not rest. Recently, letters written by him shortly before July 20, 1973, when his body was found in the apartment of one of his mistresses in Hong Kong, came to light. They revealed his struggle with addictions, an enemy worse than any oriental karate fighter. It was confirmation that he was a heavy drug user.
The star maintained an epistolary exchange with Robert Baker, an actor who became his dealer. The letters showed how Lee asked him for cocaine, LSD and marijuana in exorbitant quantities. At first they referred to the drugs by code names. Time and the impunity of not being discovered made them lose their discretion.
Bruce Lee was, without a doubt, an influential figure in popular culture. Son of Cantonese opera singer Lee Hoi Chuen and Grace Ho, he was born on November 27, 1940 in San Francisco, but grew up in Hong Kong, where he began his meteoric career in film. At the age of three months, he made his big screen debut in the film “Golden Gate Girl” (1941), directed by his father.
He also began practicing martial arts at a very young age, practicing Tai Chi. And then, under the orders of master Yip Man, he delved into the Wing Chun style. His childhood and youth in Hong Kong were marked by a total dedication to this sport.
In the 1950s, Lee began to stand out in Hong Kong cinema, with a series of low-budget films. However, his roles were romantic, and although he had a modest fame in the region, the boom of his films came a decade later, when his career turned to the action and martial arts genre.
During those years he returned to the United States, where he studied philosophy at Washington State University. It was then that he opened his first martial arts school, “Jun Fan Gung-Fu Institute”, in the city of Seattle. There he developed his own style, which he called Jeet Kune Do. The school quickly gained popularity, and Bruce Lee began to teach his fighting techniques, based on the “no action” philosophy of Taoism.
In college he fell in love with a student in his martial arts classes, Linda Lee Caldwell. They married on August 17, 1964 and had two children: the ill-fated Brandon Lee, who followed in his father’s footsteps until his tragic death, and Shannon.
Despite his success in the world of martial arts, Bruce Lee needed to express other facets of his talent. He linked his philosophical thinking with his passion for poetry and writing. His poems, full of contemplation and melancholy, reveal a deep and sensitive mind that sought a connection with the world.
The year 1966 marked a milestone in Bruce Lee’s career. That year he was discovered by producer William Dozier – the same of Batman – who chose him to play Kato in the TV series “The Green Hornet”. The character of Kato, a martial arts expert and faithful companion of the masked superhero, became a success, eclipsing the main protagonist played by Van Williams. Internal problems soon followed, and the series lasted only one season.
The experience in American television led him to try his luck in Hollywood cinema. He started with small roles in films that were not related to martial arts. It was back to square one as in his beginnings on the big screen in Hong Kong, but he was not discouraged.
Moving to Los Angeles, he managed to teach kung fu to the likes of James Coburn and Steve McQueen. In the exchange of ideas, he learned from McQueen how to move within the artistic environment. And something else, according to his biographer Matthew Polly: he began to have a court of groupies. His fame as a lover went hand in hand with his fame as an athlete and actor. Linda endured many infidelities, but perhaps none like with actress Sharon Farrell, his co-star in Marlowe (1969), who had an affair with McQueen himself and left him for him. She was also complimentary in the sexual realm: “He had such a beautiful body. Those abs, his muscles were so defined, it was like they were chiseled. Bruce was the most incredible lover I’ve ever been with. He was knowledgeable about a woman’s body.”
The moment his career catapulted was when he began working with the Chinese production company Golden Harvest, with whom he had his first starring role in “Karate to the Death in Bangkok,” directed by Lo Wei in 1971. The film, besides being a worldwide success, had a particularity. Bruce Lee had such fast movements that the usual 24 frames per second used in cinema could not capture them. So they had to reshoot his scenes, but at a rate of 32 frames per second.
That same year, a stumbling block. Lee wanted to replicate his success with a series of his own creation called “The Warrior”. It was about a martial arts expert who is sent to the Wild West. He made a mistake: in an interview for “The Pierre Berton Show” he spoke at length about his project. He never materialized it, and for a simple reason: in 1972 he had to watch David Carradine star in “Kung Fu” with a story quite similar to his own, that of the Shaolin monk who travels to the Far West in search of his brother.
Despite the setback, Bruce Lee continued with a promising film career. In 1972, his second collaboration with Golden Harvest, “Oriental Fury,” also by Lo Wei, became another box-office hit. But it wasn’t enough for him. After directing, producing and starring in “The Dragon’s Rage”, where he has an epic fight with Chuck Norris, it was his turn for his biggest hit: “Operation Dragon”, 1973, directed by Roberto Clouse.
However, Bruce Lee was never able to see his masterpiece finished: he died six days before its premiere, on July 20, 1973, in Hong Kong. He was only 32 years old. According to the autopsy, the cause of his death was cerebral edema caused by his hypersensitivity to meprobamate, a component of a headache analgesic called Equagesic. At the time he was at the apartment of one of his mistresses, actress Betty Ting Pei. She was the one who, supposedly, gave him the drug.
The massive funeral of Bruce Lee Credit: Imdb
However, his biographer Polly slipped another theory: he said he died of heat stroke due to the high temperatures in Hong Kong. The reason would have been that the actor did not like to sweat so much in his films and that he had surgery on his sweat glands. Polly says his biographer that he had already gone through that trance while they were putting the finishing touches to Operation Dragon: “On May 10, 1973 he entered a small dubbing room on one of the hottest days of the month and they turned off the air conditioning so as not to damage the audio. He immediately began to get dizzy. Although he left the room, he collapsed to the floor. He got up and when he re-entered the hot room he fell again and began to convulse violently. He was taken to the hospital and the doctors suspected that he had swelling in his brain….”.
The news of Bruce Lee’s death shocked the whole world. He was not forgotten. And there is a good reason: he died young and beautiful, and that, it is known, is synonymous with eternity in popular culture.