The Lucky Girl

HONG KONG The Lucky Girl As a top box-office draw for at least 20 of his 35 years, handsome, open-faced Chinese Movie Star Huang Ho might well be called the John Wayne of the Far East. Already a big name in Shanghai before World War II, Huang turned his back on his homeland when the Communists took over, and, as the idol of Free Chinese movie fans from Java to Malaya, went on making up to ten pictures a year in Hong Kong and Formosa, often for the princely Asian salary of $2,000 (U.S.) a picture.

A sober, serious-minded young hero on the screen, Huang was equally sober and serious in his private life. As a rising star in Shanghai, he spent his evenings studying medicine instead of going to nightclubs, and throughout his career preferred a good book to an evening on the town. He had not married. "Who," the Chinese fan magazines asked over and over again, "would be the lucky girl?"

Dark Heroine. Last week, in the tortured and tormented confessions of a would-be suicide, reprinted on the front pages of Hong Kong's leading newspapers, the question was answered. The girl who captured the handsome hero was a dark and devious adventuress, as full of schemes and subterfuge as a Communist cell. Pert, pretty and dynamic, Hung Hsien-nu was the reigning queen of the Hong Kong opera, with a score of movie credits to her name as well. The protegee and wife of a former Hong Kong movie star whose Red sympathies had carried him back to the mainland, she had been helped to fame and fortune by a series of profitable associations with some of Hong Kong's wealthiest, businessmen. One of them wanted her to divorce her husband after he went back to Canton. It was simple enough: all she did was advertise in a local paper that she and her husband were no longer living together. For this the new admirer made her a thoughtful gift of $33,000. Soon afterward, pert little Hung startled both the lover and Hong Kong operagoers by departing for Canton, money and all, to make Communist movies with the husband she had officially renounced.

And that was not all. Before leaving, sprightly and fickle little Hung had captured still another heart--that of the matinee idol Huang Ho himself. He had met her two years before in a movie studio. "She was fragile," he wrote later, "and looked as though she must have tasted the bitterness of life. I held her in high esteem, and never for a single moment cherished an impure thought toward her." But soon after their meeting, much to the shy young actor's surprise, Hung called him on the telephone. "She poured out her heart to me," he wrote. "She told me how much she cared, that her longing could no longer be concealed." In his diffident way. Huang tried to suppress the singer's ardor, but "she said she knew exactly what she was-doing."

Unconditional Surrender. What Hung was doing turned out to be exactly what her husband's Communist bosses wanted her to do, and as Huang spent more and more time in the company of his new love, he saw less and less of his old friends. Hung gradually persuaded the hypnotized actor to desert his family, his career and his principles. "I decided to throw in my whole lot for her sake alone," he wrote. "I wanted to share everything, good or bad, with her. I sold myself unconditionally and promised to do whatever she wanted."

When at last Hung left for the mainland, Huang was left virtually alone in Hong Kong--his family, friends and money gone, his career reduced to the making of low-paid Red propaganda films at a local Communist studio. Finally, broken in heart and health, he decided to join his love in Canton. The meeting was brief and terse. Less than a week later, Huang Ho, the idol of millions, was back in Hong Kong, where, a few days before Christmas, he was found in a hotel room all but dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. Last week, as doctors nursed Huang Ho back to life, his millions of fans could read the story of the girl he loved, in the suicide note which he had titled: Hung Hsien-nu Killed Me!

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