When the Chairman, Chiang Ch'ing, and some leading comrades and their troops descended upon Peking in March 1949 and took possession of its center point, the Imperial City, they appropriated for their own use the western section bounded by the central and southern lakes called Chung-nan-hai (literally, Central and Southern Sea). Each leader, and his wife and children —those who had survived the war—were assigned an apartment within this former imperial establishment. Although long stretches of the Imperial City walls had been removed to ease traffic along the great avenues, the leaders' residences were still beyond public view, as were their private lives. Chiang Ch'ing's and Mao's apartments, marked off by intricately carved and colorful pillars in the Ming style, were separate but connected.

They always lived simply, Chiang Ch'ing said of Mao and herself. Most of their time was given over to reading, study of current events, writing, and occasional involvement in the world outside. Rarely did she and the Chairman go out together. Almost never did they dine out for their own pleasure. Since they made their home in Peking, they went to restaurants (a pleasure of her younger days) only a few times. The Chairman was not very careful about what he ate, she admitted with a wry smile. He ate quickly, and was usually full by the time the last course arrived. What happened was that he forgot that there would be a last course, and by the time it arrived, he had no interest in it. That habit of his reminded her of Wang An-shih, the prime minister of the Sung dynasty, who was known always to consume the dishes which happened to be positioned closest to him without taking notice of other dishes arrayed on the table. When his wife told the cook that he always favored those dishes placed near him, the cook thought it was the dish he liked, not just its proximity. When she mentioned this to the Chairman, he chuckled and said to her, "That's all you know about history, and you tease me about it!"

KHRUSHCHEV IN PEKING

All during the late '50s, troubles were beginning to brew with the Soviet Union, then China's chief international ally. By 1960 the break between the two countries was complete. While Chiang Ch'ing did not play a direct role in foreign affairs, she did have some contact with Soviet leaders. Leonid Brezhnev she would later describe as "the biggest clown in the world"; Nikita Khrushchev was "a big fool." She was particularly bitter about him because he had talked to foreign statesmen about the "yellow peril."

Her only brush with him was in 1954. She remembered standing among the leaders on the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to review the parades, demonstrations, and fireworks that marked the state's fifth anniversary. Chou Enlai, always alert to proprieties, made a move to introduce Chiang Ch'ing to Khrushchev. Seeing what was about to happen, Chairman Mao stood up, walked over to Chiang Ch'ing (almost never did they appear publicly side by side), and brusquely escorted her away, leading her down one of the two alleys that ran along the sides of the rostrum. There the two of them enjoyed the fireworks together, out of the public view. The memory she cherished. [Chinese leaders rarely appear publicly with their spouses.]

Khrushchev's visit to China in the fall of 1959, ostensibly to celebrate National Day on the first of October, was tedious and painful. On that occasion Khrushchev announced he would withdraw all his experts from China and pressed the Chinese to pay all their debts. [The Soviets also] told the Chinese they wanted to set up a long-range broadcast station in China. Had they won that argument they would have been able to control China's entire communications system. They also offered to establish a joint fleet that would have enabled them to dominate all of China's waters, coastal and inland. As a matter of fact, the Chairman agreed to the last proposal, but only on the condition that the Chinese pay for such a system. Chairman Mao told Khrushchev, "This is a matter of principle: otherwise you'll take every thing away."

FIGHTING A COUP

During the 1950s, Chiang Ch'ing faded almost entirely from the political scene. Reason: cervical cancer and other ailments. In the 1960s, her health finally restored, she emerged from relative obscurity to dazzling prominence. At first she worked from behind the scenes, playing an increasing role in the arts, particularly as a chief critic of "bourgeois" plays and movies. Early opposition to her was swept aside by the Cultural Revolution. Conceived by Mao as a way of re-revolutionizing the Communist Party, the massive assault on the bureaucracy soon got completely out of control, degenerating into constant factional violence in which tens of thousands were killed. But it was Chiang Ch'ing's chance for power as China's cultural dictator, and she reached a kind of political apotheosis. Yet as violence mounted, Chiang Ch'ing's offices were attacked several times, and, as she reported, students occasionally threatened to "fry her in oil and strangle her."

A serious threat to the Peking leadership came in 1969, only months after the fighting among Cultural Revolutionary factions had been quelled by the army. Defense Minister Lin Piao, who had been formally named Mao's successor, allegedly attempted to assassinate Mao and take supreme power for himself. When his plot failed, the official but as yet unverified account continues, he died in a plane crash over Mongolia while he was trying to flee to the Soviet Union. Chiang Ch'ing recounted the entire case in great detail during her interview, disclosing several new elements in the Lin-Mao struggle:

"[Lin Piao's] men drew up a sketch map of our residences and were going to attack and bomb them and finish us off all at once." More pointedly, she said that during the time Lin Piao's men controlled their residence he arranged for toxic substances to be added gradually to the meals consumed by Chairman Mao and her. They became ill, and she remained ill, especially neurologically, during most of 1969. Only recently had she recovered, she added.

Chiang Ch'ing then went on to say, "Comrades like the Premier and myself were on the side of Chairman Mao. They [Lin Piao's Ultra-Left] set fires everywhere, and we acted like a fire brigade. [In 1971] Chairman Mao continually advised the Premier on how to deal with such clashes, but Mao's ideas were not easily carried out. During the peak of the crisis she flew to the side of the Premier several times to help "cool things down." Constant threats, divisiveness among the people, and conspiratorial actions made it almost impossible for them to work—even at their home at Chung-nan-hai, which had also become infiltrated by the enemy. Nor could they sleep or eat there safely. Just to survive the Chairman and their defenders quietly evacuated Chung-nan-hai and established themselves at the Chinhai Hotel. That was inconvenient, so they moved on to the Great Hall of the People. The leaders' search for a haven against Lin Piao's conspiracy to overthrow Chairman Mao had not been revealed to outsiders before this moment, she added.

"[In the end,] just as Chairman Mao said to [French Foreign Minister Maurice] Schumann [on a visit to China in 1972], Mao applied a drop of alcohol and Lin Piao was finished." [Mao probably meant, figuratively, that he rubbed Lin Piao out.]

STAGING A BALLET

Apparently under Chiang Ch'ing's influence, Mao had proclaimed that all plays portraying "ghosts" or "emperors and princes, generals and ministers, gifted scholars and beauties" should be banned. Instead, there should be idealization of the proletariat. Thus Chiang Ch'ing had started during the Cultural Revolution to build a new "proletarian " art from scratch. One of her successes was the showy Red Detachment of Women—performed for President Nixon in Peking in 1972. She recounts the difficulties she had in staging this theatrical extravaganza:

Chiang Ch'ing explained to me how, when she undertook this ballet in the early 1960s, there was absolutely no precedent for using ballet to show military history, and almost no one would support her intent to establish it. In search of approval from among the leaders, she invited Premier Chou to attend a rehearsal of an early version, which he did. The weak spots that he pointed out they changed. To educate her dancers in the ways of the military, she decided to send them down to live with a PLA unit for some months.

As soon as she had released her order, Chou Yang announced from his high office in the Ministry of Culture that he was sending the very company she was working with to Hong Kong to perform Swan Lake! She was outraged but helpless. [Chou Yang reportedly maligned] The Red Detachment as an "infant in swaddling bands sucking its thumb" and an "ugly daughter-in-law."

[Nevertheless] she continued the revisions and finally accompanied the ballet on tour in the major cities. Back in Peking, she went with Premier Chou to another performance, which had been much revised. His calling it "real revolution" gratified her. After the final curtain she and the Premier went backstage to congratulate the dancers and musicians who had remained loyal to her throughout the battles of creation.

REGARDS TO GARBO

Chiang Ch'ing kept an eye on her favorite ballet and theater troupes, issuing the most detailed instructions. One performer recalled that when a play called for her to burst into tears, she would sit down and cover her face with her hands. Chiang Ch'ing protested: "Working class people don't sit down or bury their heads when they cry. They cry standing."

She also tried to apply her principles to the movies, inveighing against "the bourgeois system of centering on the director" and decreeing that films should be made according to "democratic centralism. " The result: the Chinese film industry was and remains shattered.

But as for herself, Chiang Ch'ing made no secret of her love for more bourgeois drama. She asked Witke:

"I greatly admire Greta Garbo's acting. Is she still around?"

Cultivating a private life in New York, I guessed.

"I must put in a good word for her. You Americans have been unfair to Garbo by failing to give her an Academy Award.* I believe this is the fault of those in power in the United States and not of the American people. When I was in Yenan a correspondent by the name of Brooks Atkinson used to discuss Garbo with me."

Brooks Atkinson had become well known in America as drama critic of the New York Times, I commented.

"No wonder he talked with me at such length about literature and art! Is he still in New York?"

"Yes, though retired."

"If you see him, please tell him that I still remember him. If you see Garbo, tell her I send her my regards. Greta Garbo is 'Great Garbo'! Her interpretation of 19th century bourgeois democratic works is outstanding. There is a rebellious side to her character. She has an air of dignity; she is not affected; and she does not theatricalize."

One evening after a late dinner in Canton and a gracious promenade around a hall in her villa, Chiang Ch'ing revealed that she had a treat in store: Garbo's Queen Christina. Her face was glowing with anticipation. That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film of 1933 was an old favorite of hers. She had ordered it flown down from Peking for the evening's entertainment.

Her eyes danced as the lights were flicked off one by one, and as we sat in the dark she remarked that no matter how often she saw this film she was entranced by it. Projected onto a portable screen, the film creaked and jerked with age, the actors' movements speeding unnaturally or grinding slowly. The sound track—it was the original one—was practically inaudible. Nor were there Chinese subtitles, a lack that did not daunt Chiang Ch'ing, who knew the screenplay perfectly from beginning to end. In fact, her running Chinese narration murmured into my ear was far clearer than the English dialogue.

Why was it permissible for her to enjoy such bourgeois stars as Garbo while strictly prohibiting the Chinese masses doing the same thing? Chiang Ch'ing's response to that question:

"Those bourgeois democratic films are to be reserved for private showing," she declared flatly. If the people could view them they would criticize them bitterly on political grounds. Such public exposure and attack would be most unfair to Garbo because she is not Chinese. The same was true for Chaplin, almost all of whose films she saw in the 1930s. Modern Times she recognized as a diatribe against dictatorship. Others of his films seemed to be pitched against Stalin and, most powerfully, against Hitler, which makes them "progressive." It is all right to screen these films "among ourselves" (the leaders), who decide on their strong and weak points. But those private showings cannot be publicized.

SKIRTS AND ORCHIDS

Western movies were not Chiang Ch'ing's only nonproletarian indulgence. Indeed one night she seemed far more bourgeois than revolutionary.

Once she signaled over her shoulder to her bodyguard, who promptly delivered a large oblong box of undecorated cardboard. Laughing like a girl, she lifted the cover and pulled out, as if by magic, one long, pleated black skirt after another.

"I like skirts," she announced as she handed out one each to her female

attendants (myself excluded). "And they're comfortable in summer."

I asked her where they came from.

"From the Friendship Store!"

No matter to her that the official line on the Friendship Stores was that they were reserved exclusively for foreign consumers.

For her Canton retreat, Chiang Ch'ing had reserved an orchid park stretching between her villa and the Pearl River. On the fourth day of the interviews, Witke and her guides went to see Chiang Ch'ing in the park.

At a gentle pace we passed through moongates, traversed gardens skillfully landscaped "naturalistically," bypassed rustic tea pavilions, and crossed arched bridges over artificial streams and ponds. In the hazy distance arose a moon-viewing pavilion. Chiang Ch'ing, dressed in luminous silk, was seated on its veranda overlooking a lotus pond.

As we approached her, she greeted us gaily from her wide wicker chair and continued her "work," as she explained. From a basket she lifted rare specimens of orchid plants and laid them upon blotting paper stretched on light wooden frames built by her bodyguard. "You may photograph me at work," she allowed as she kept up her brisk pace, laughing and chatting in accompaniment. So I did. Despite the strong sun of the late afternoon, her bodyguard cast powerful artificial lighting upon her figure. Suddenly, she admonished herself for appearing so frivolous, walked to the balustrade, and affected a neutral expression of officiality against the lotus pond's lush background.

She changed the subject to the evening.

"Change before dinner, and why not wear something brighter? Why did you choose to wear black when you knew I would photograph in color naturally?"

I explained to her that my companions had recommended this somber costume.

"You should never listen to others," she declared. "You should always make your own decisions. Wear what you like and feel happiest in."

THE LAST MESSAGE

In the end, it was her all-too-glib ability to make distinctions between herself and the masses—whether in regard to movies, clothes or weightier matters—that would count against Chiang Ch'ing. Her fall, four years after her interviews with Witke, ended one of the century's most dramatic and important political careers. Mao himself had warned his wife of the extreme perils she would eventually have to face. In a 1966 letter to her, he speculated that after his death, anti-Communist rightists would make a bid to seize power. Then ...

Ten years later Mao sent Chiang Ch'ing another message in the form of a poem. She circulated it among her supporters while he was still alive, as if it were his last testament.

"You have been wronged," he told her. "Today we are separating into two worlds. I am old and will soon die. May each keep his peace. These few words may be my last message to you. Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds. In the struggle of the past ten years I have tried to reach the peak of revolution, but I was not successful. But you could reach the top. If you fail, you will plunge into a fathomless abyss. Your body will shatter. Your bones will break."

* [Mao's first marriage, to an illiterate peasant girl, was arranged in the traditional way by his parents and was never consummated. His second wife was Yang K'ai-hui, daughter of one of his teachers and mother of their three sons. She was beheaded in 1930 by the Nationalists.)

* [That daughter. Li Na. a historian by training, lives in obscurity and is probably in disgrace.]

* [In 1954, Greta Garbo was given a Special Award for "unforgettable" performances.]