UNSETTLED MATTERS UNSETTLED MATTERS The Life and Death of Bruce Lee A Biography by TOM BLEECKER Gilderoy Publications / Lompoc, California UNSETTLED MATTERS The Life and Death of Bruce Lee A Biography by TOM BLEECKER Gilderoy Publications / Lompoc, California Gilderoy Publications titles are available at quantity discounts for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. For information write to special sales manager, Gilderoy Publications, Post Office Box 2004, Lompoc, CA 93438 UNSETTLED MATTERS Gilderoy Publications, Lompoc, California Copyright 1996 by Tom Bleecker First edition published 1996 Printed in the United States of America 01 00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 96-94563 ISBN (paperback): 0-9653132-0-4 Parts of Chapter 20 of the present work appeared in an issue of Karate Illustrated magazine (Vol.3 #6) January 1993 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Performance of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 CONTENTS Part One (The Life of Bruce Lee) Introduction – 1 – Hong Kong – 2 – The Seattle Years – 3 – Hollywood – 4 – THE BIG BOSS and FIST OF FURY – 5 – THE WAY OF THE DRAGON – 6 – ENTER THE DRAGON – 7 – The Final Curtain – Part Two (The Estate of Bruce Lee) 8 – The Aftermath – 9 – The Coroner’s Inquest – 10 – The Autopsy – 11 – War Declared – 12 – Lloyds of London and AIA – 13 – The Settlement – 14 – Quiet On the Set 15 – The Estate of Bruce Lee – 16 – GAME OF DEATH – 17 – July 20, 1973 Revisited – 18 – The Devil’s Due – 19 – Foul Play – 20 – Parting Thoughts – Bibliography – Index With all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite, We have had a jolly good lesson, and serves us jolly well right! --Kipling. Part One The Life of Bruce Lee Introduction It was a cold, rainy night thirty-two years ago in Los Angeles, and Ed Parker's black belt class had just ended. I sat in the dressing room gazing at my right shin. There was a swollen lump the size of a golf ball, and the pain was excruciating. I took off my sweat-drenched karate uniform and noted fresh blood on the sleeve of the recently torn rice cloth. I looked for cuts but couldn't find any. Someone else's blood. Ed Parker ran a tough class because Ed Parker was tough. Real tough. Street tough. Hawaiian-born, six-feet tall and a solid 220 pounds, and thought by many to be as fast and as powerful as Muhammad Ali. The student roster of the advanced class read like "The Wild Bunch.” We had a couple of ex-felons, several Hell's Angels, a recent Mr. Universe, and a college football hero, among others. On the tournament circuit there was a group of Parker's students who became known as "The Wrecking Crew.” And they fought anyone and everyone. Their most formidable foe was a nearby Tang Soo Do school, whose head instructor was a young man named Chuck Norris. Ed Parker's most notorious black belt hung out in Memphis. His name was Elvis Presley, and he didn't own a guitar upon which our school emblem wasn't prominently displayed. It was a select group of Ed Parker's black belts who later became known as the infamous Memphis Mafia. Men whose sole purpose was to protect "The King." Back in the sixties when the martial art was in its infancy in this country, it was amazing what power the lay public bestowed upon the elite few who wore the black belts. Mysterious, intimidating, at times even cryptic, many of these men were revered as superhumans, if not gods. If there was a spiritual aspect to this eastern philosophy of deadly fighting, it eluded us Westerners in the worst way. For the most part, we have always been a brawn society, evidenced in the early 1960s as we oiled our vast war machinery for transport to the jungles of Vietnam. I carried my shoes and walked across the mats barefoot, noting a new hole in the plaster wall where Bob Cook had kicked Larry Hartsell dangerously close to the plate glass mirrors. I was sitting in the small waiting room putting on my shoes when Ed Parker suddenly emerged from his office and headed for the back of the school. Two Chinese men entered through the rear door and were greeted by Parker. The shorter, more reserved, of the two men was James Lee. James had often driven from Oakland to visit Parker, and this time brought with him an unknown kung-fu practitioner from Hong Kong, who was meeting Parker for the first time. His name was Bruce Lee. He was a well dressed, good looking man in his mid-twenties. In sharp contrast to Parker, Bruce stood a mere five-feet-seven inches and weighed around 140 pounds. Soon Parker and Bruce began to exchange ideas, with Bruce often using James Lee (no relation to Bruce) to demonstrate his point. Above all else, what instantly impressed me about Bruce was his unmistakable self-confidence. In the two years since I had begun training with Ed Parker, Bruce Lee was the first man who did not appear intimidated by this massive Hawaiian. Although this meeting took place over thirty years ago, three distinct characteristics still stand out in my mind: the intense level of enthusiasm with which Bruce expressed his art; his awesome physical and emotional energy; and most notably the incredible speed of his hands. Over the next six years Bruce and I spent a great deal of time in each other's company. In addition to training together in the martial arts, we had both become involved in the Hollywood film industry and, as a result, shared a common life-style and numerous mutual friends. The day Bruce died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973 I was having lunch with Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews. Like so many others, I had either known firsthand or heard secondhand about Bruce's troubles, his extreme weight loss, his life-threatening hospitalization nine weeks earlier, his violent and unpredictable mood swings, his deep depression and growing paranoia, his drinking and drug use, his alleged womanizing, his ongoing battle with the press and his seemingly endless list of enemies. And now he was dead. Dead at the age of thirty-two, curiously from brain edema. In lay terms his brain simply swelled up inside his head. The problem was the doctors had no idea why. Fifteen years later I produced a tribute to martial arts Grandmaster Edmund Parker, which was held at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles on February 27, 1988. Over a thousand friends, students and martial arts dignitaries sat down to a five-course dinner and were entertained throughout the evening. In addition, scores of television and film celebrities came from all over the world to pay tribute to Ed Parker, along with his entire immediate family, many of whom were flown in from Hawaii and Utah. It was truly a grand evening held on a grand scale. Although Ed, at age fifty-seven, was thirty pounds overweight and was occasionally bothered with gout, the martial arts community was stunned when he two years later died in a Honolulu airport of a massive heart attack. In the early planning stage of the tribute, I wrote a letter to Bruce Lee's widow, Linda, inviting her to attend on behalf of Bruce. I had not seen Linda since Bruce's death, and I was pleased when I learned that she had accepted my invitation. On the evening of the tribute, Linda was accompanied by a man named Adrian Marshall. Back in the mid-sixties, Marshall had trained for a brief period at Parker's WLA school. Later he became Bruce Lee's attorney. Although he had been married for over thirty-five years, Marshall often escorted Linda to various functions having to do with Bruce. The following week, Linda and I talked on the telephone, specifically in regard to a book she had been commissioned to write for Ohara Publications. Essentially it was to be an authorized biography of Bruce Lee. She had a problem, however. Although she'd been advanced a considerable sum of money to write the book, she couldn't get beyond the first page. In addition to having been for years a close personal friend and student of Bruce's, over the past twenty years I had worked as a professional screenwriter, and so I was a prime candidate to help Linda out of her dilemma. Shortly after our conversation, I traveled to Linda's home in Los Angeles, where she and I discussed the prospect and finally agreed to work together. The book that Linda had proposed was actually a rewrite of a Dell paperback first published in 1975. The book was called Bruce Lee: the Man Only I Knew, which had been ghostwritten by an English writer named Alan Shadrake, with Linda being listed as author. At the time Linda and I co-authored The Bruce Lee Story (Ohara Publications), Linda was employed as a kindergarten teacher in Torrance and, as a result, I often worked alone. On the day that I began my research, Linda had left a copy of Shadrake's book in a large room adjacent to the garage. Essentially, everything having to do with Bruce was located in that room, primarily in six large filing cabinets and two closets which, collectively, I was to use as my research material. As to an office, we agreed that we would work in either that room or in Linda's office, which was located at the opposite end of the house.