Bookshelf: Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China

When we first meet Bernardine Szold, it’s 1929, and she’s on a train heading for Dairen (Dalian) to marry her fourth husband, suffering dreadful pre-wedding jitters (or perhaps it’s simply a premonition?). Chester Fritz, that fourth husband, did turn out be a mistake, but he had one thing going for him: Shanghai.

In dynamic, worlds-meeting Shanghai, Bernardine—bored and lonely–starts a salon, bringing together for the first time Chinese and foreigners, addressing cutting-edge topics. When she can’t accommodate all the people who want to come, she starts a theater, producing plays, ballets, and organizing lectures. Nearly every famous name who lived in, or visited, Old Shanghai attended Bernardine’s salons or productions. She was a fascinating character, the center of a vast social whirl, yet history has recorded her as a minor character—when it recorded her at all—and often misrepresented her.

She’s a busybody and golddigger in Ken Cuthbertson’s biography of Emily Hahn; battling with Emily in ‘The Great Bernardine Wars’ in Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe; and although one of her most celebrated productions, Lady Precious Stream, is featured in James Carter’s Champions Day, Bernardine herself doesn’t rate a mention.

Susan Blumberg Kason’s delightful new biography changes all that. Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old Shanghai, is a wonderfully researched, compellingly told story of an extraordinary, complex woman against the backdrop of an extraordinary, complex time and place—1930s Shanghai.

“I had something—something that appealed to distinguished people—and I took it for granted that I would never know any except creative, exciting people—but I had an enthusiasm, a vitality…” -Bernardine Szold-Fritz

It was that charisma that drew a who’s who of cultural figures to her, from Paris (Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau), to Hollywood (Charlie Chaplin, Claudette Colbert, Anna May Wong), to Shanghai (Lin Yutang, Hu Shih, Zau Sinmay, Emily Hahn, Victor Sassoon, Daisy Kwok), many of whom would meet at her Route Boissezon salon or participate in her theatrical performances. And it wasn’t just that Bernardine knew these headliners: she had warm friendships with them that would last for decades, as they shared their works-in-progress, and asked her advice.

Like many of her era, Bernardine, who was a journalist in Chicago and Shanghai, was a great letter-writer, and Blumberg-Kason’s use of this rich resource gives the book a being-there immediacy, as Bernardine often returned from dinners and outings to scribble down vignettes of what had been discussed and detailed descriptions of the places, guests, and food. It gives rare insight into these famous names: we learn of Lin Yutang’s great sense of humor; of how grumpy George Bernard Shaw was on his Shanghai visit; of how difficult Victor Sassoon could be.

Bernardine had acted in Chicago’s Little Theater, and her greatest triumph was the International Arts Theater (IAT), where she mounted, to great acclaim, stunning cross-cultural productions that resonated in a city where East intersected with West. The IAT produced S.I. Hsiung’s Lady Precious Stream, a Chinese opera turned into an English-language play by a Chinese playwright, performed by Chinese actors. She collaborated with Russian-born Jewish composer Aaron Avshalomov on a groundbreaking Chinese ballet, The Soul of the Ch’in, at the time, the largest-scale ballet performed in Shanghai. Avshalomov is still celebrated in Shanghai as the first to orchestrate March of the Volunteers for the film Children of Troubled Times, the song would become China’s national anthem.

Yet while Bernardine’s salon and theater went from strength to strength, her personal life was moving in an opposite trajectory. Chester is mostly absent, there’s a major health scare; money is often a concern; she has a distant relationship with her daughter Rosemary, who she sent off to boarding school at a young age, where she remained through Bernardine’s many moves.

Blumberg-Kason’s gift as a biographer is that she paints Bernardine’s flaws and foibles with as much detail and context as she depicts her successes, often stepping back to provide context or even wonder herself, because there isn’t always an answer—Bernardine was complicated!

Of course, historical accuracy is of paramount importance for the Historic Shanghai Book Club, and here, Blumberg-Kason triumphs. She knows Shanghai, with the street cred of having first visited in 1988 and has been writing (Good Chinese Wife; Hong Kong Noir) and reading (as a book reviewer) about China and Shanghai for decades. The prodigious research that went into Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon brings Bernardine and her Shanghai to life, but it never feels heavy–she gives just enough context to understand, but not so much that it ever slows the pace.

In the much-written about world of Old Shanghai, Blumberg-Kason has given us the gift of an untold story. It’s all the more remarkable because Bernardine’s supporting players are household names in the Old Shanghai world, but it’s only here that we learn of their nexus: the remarkable Bernardine Szold-Fritz.

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