There was plenty of steel to her, of course. In the middle of one of her Washington charm offensives, Roosevelt asked her what she would do with troublesome striking laborers: “the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.” There was also a good deal of humbug about her patriotic sermons around the US. While famine stalked wartime China, she was dazzling the Americans with her gold-trimmed dresses and jade earrings, dancing from one champagne reception to another, and spending half a million US dollars on fur coats. She would, Pakula suggests, have dropped her humorless, puritanical husband (who refused to touch alcohol, coffee or even tea) like a hot potato had the right opportunity come along. On one visit to America, she allegedly propositioned — in a highly businesslike manner — a potential presidential candidate: if he were elected, she told the lucky man’s representative, “he and I would rule the world.”
Soong was never a woman short on a sense of self-worth. While Churchill was in Washington in 1943 — not a particularly slow year for World War II — she summoned him to an audience in New York. He explained that the pressures of work made a trip north impossible, and persuaded Roosevelt to invite her for lunch at the White House. “The invitation was refused with some hauteur. Madame was of the opinion that I should make the pilgrimage.” When Churchill offered to meet her halfway, his suggestion was dismissed as “facetious.”
Pakula’s story of Soong’s conquest of the US is extraordinary, but elsewhere the book drags more than it ought to. For a biographer supposedly dedicated to giving Soong top billing over her less photogenic husband (that “crabbed little bastard,” in the words of one of his American detractors), Pakula sidelines her prima donna with curious frequency. For chapters on end, we lose sight of the bejeweled Soong amid floods of slow, male-dominated detail about revolutions and wars. Somewhere among it all is a glittering cameo of an ambitious, over-indulged woman who — had she been born 50 years later — truly might have ruled the world.
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