Books

BOOK REVIEW | 'Shanghai Demimondaine, From Sex Worker to Society Matron'

In 'Shanghai Demimondaine' author Nick Hordern shares insights on the sunset of the imperial role in China in telling the story of Australian Lorraine Murray.

Published

1 month ago

August 5, 2024

Paul de Vries

Design from the book cover of Shanghai Demimondaine, From Sex Worker to Society Matron, by Nick Hordern.

"Demimondaine" is a nineteenth-century French term referring to women on the fringes of respectable society. Specifically, it refers to "kept women" supported by wealthy lovers. The featured demimondaine of Australian author Nick Hordern's new work, Shanghai Demimondaine, From Sex Worker to Society Matron, is Australian Lorraine Murray.

Murray was the inspiration for works of fiction by famed American writer Emily Hahn. However, her name had been lost to history. Hordern identified her by chance during unrelated research. His subsequent inquiries revealed treasure troves of letters in possession of Murray's family. More were found in the museums related to the historically significant individuals whose paths Murray crossed. It was an extraordinary piece of detective work on Hordern's part.

Murray resided within the international enclaves of Shanghai between 1932 and 1938. She witnessed some of the twentieth century's most significant events. And she was a customer, lover, or friend to a host of the principal actors. She was never more than two or three degrees of separation from the Queen of England, the Australian wartime prime minister, and the emperor of Japan.

Hordern's book weaves the story of Lorraine Murray around the last throes of empire upon China in the pre-Second World War years, the war years themselves, in the postwar decades. The list of characters is also veritable who's who. The broader history is handled by Hordern with uncommon balance.

Born in the Bush, Wanting to Get Away

Born in rural Australia in 1910, Murray was always of a mind that the "real world" lay outside of Australian shores. Her journey began, both literally and metaphorically, when she came across Japanese diplomat, Tokugawa Iemasa (1884-1963), at a Sydney club. She was eighteen, he was forty-three. Iemasa was Tokyo's most senior diplomat in Australasia and would later become the final president of the House of Peers. In being the direct heir of the Tokugawa line, he would have been ruler of Japan if born 100 years earlier.

Iemasa had come of age during a period of increased Westernization within Japan, a trend that he fully embraced. This included an eye for Western women. He had previously had a Western mistress in the person of Swede Ella Strom. Indeed, he had been sent to Australia by the Japanese foreign ministry to sever that relationship.

Strom, (later to marry Percy Grainger, Australia's most famous classical composer), pursued him there, necessitating a further transfer to Ottawa. Murray took her chance to leave Australian shores by becoming Iemasa's mistress in the Canadian capital.

*Tokugawa Iemasa (Public Domain via Wikimedia Images)*

The Tokugawa Era

Murray's relationship with Iemasa was "no sob story of betrayed maidenhood" writes Hahn. Murray had "spent the first years of her career, not as a European whore but as a Japanese mistress," and there "is a good deal of difference between the two." Murray knew what she was doing. Furthermore, she never expressed regrets.

Upon returning to Japan, Iemasa tried to install Murray into his Tokyo home, but his wife would have none of it. He then arranged for her to reside in his favorite geisha house.

The Tokugawa household, however, held more than just historical significance. Empress Kojun, the wife of the Showa Emperor, was Iemasa's wife's niece. As the presence of a foreign mistress could impinge upon the esteem of the Chrysanthemum Throne, Murray had to go. She was arrested and deported. Iemasa bid her farewell with a large gift of money. He "enjoined" her to return to her home in Australia and live a "virtuous life with her family"

*Lorraine Murray with her husband, Edmund Toeg. (undated, public domain)*

Southward Bound

Upon heading south from Japan in 1932, Murray made it no further than the port of Shanghai before deciding to delay her return. She remained there for six full years during which, although the circumstances are unknown, she drifted into prostitution.

In these years, Shanghai was dominated by the International Settlement and the neighboring French Concession, during which extraterritoriality was enjoyed. It was a supercharged version of postwar Hong Kong, located in a central position on the Chinese coast.

"The population of the foreign enclave was over a million," writes Hordern. "But it was lorded over by just twenty-five thousand 'Europeans' – a term which Emily [Hahn], with her disdain for cant, would dismiss as a 'clumsy circumlocution for white'." The worse things were for the Chinese, the better they were in the foreign enclaves. And conditions in the settlements for "Shanghailanders" were ordinarily quite good.

In the brothel within which Murray was employed, however, the ambiance was as valued as skill in the physical acts of sex. It was a high-class establishment for an exclusive clientele who would dine, drink, gamble, and conduct business. Murray's past experiences with diplomatic parties and geisha house refinement held her in good stead.

Her clients included TV Soong, the unofficial ambassador to the United States of America of the Nationalist Kuomintang regime. Moreover, he was also a brother of the wives of both Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. Sir Victor Sassoon, a ubiquitous presence within the pre-war Shanghai scene who later would become Emily Hahn's lover, stated that Lorraine had been a favorite of the brothel's Chinese clientele.

*Shanghai international settlement (via Wikimedia Commons)*

Respectability Restored

Her release from prostitution was made possible by the patronage of Edmund Toeg, a Sephardic jew from Iraq. He was a cousin of Sir Victor Sasson. While unable to offer himself as a husband to a former prostitute, he, as with Tokugawa Iemasa, wished to see her living within the security of a stable marriage. Toeg also paid her an allowance. He was ultimately persuaded to marry her and settle in postwar England after the International enclaves had been handed back to China, and the Shanghailanders scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Toeg and Murray lived lives of respectability in postwar England. On January 10, 1953, they attended the Dalkeith/McNeill wedding which, comments Hordern, marked the "apogee of Lorraine Murray's social rehabilitation." Toeg had been a friend of the bride's father in Shanghai. It was the society wedding of the year, attended by the Queen and much of the British establishment.

Toeg died in 1978. Murray, suffering from dementia, was brought back to Australia by her brother in 1986. She died in 2000.

The 'Willingness' of Prostitutes

Shanghai Demimondaine is essentially a book about the opportunities available to women, and how lack of opportunity can induce them to pander to the egos of men or engage in outright prostitution. Sexual activity during the 1930s and 40s is a subject upon which the world tends to fixate upon Japan and its comfort women program. Hordern appears to take a broader view.

In the prewar years, there was no more dominant bastion of sexual exploitation than the International enclaves of Shanghai. "According to one estimate", he states, "the ratio of brothels to ordinary dwellings in Shanghai as a whole, was as high as one in twelve."

The comfort woman statue that South Korean activists have been attempting to install worldwide, depicts a twelve-year-old girl, despite the women typically being in their 20s. The destination of choice for child prostitution, however, by all accounts, was the French Concession. What "Paris was to romance, Hordern writes, "Shanghai was to prostitution."

"Not for nothing was the city nicknamed 'The Whore of the Orient'," he reminds.

Were the women willing? Was Murray herself? She certainly had more options than most. As for many of her Chinese counterparts, Horden quotes the "writer Wu Zhouliu." Wu "railed against the foreign presence in Shanghai, considered the prevalence of brothels as the result of extreme social inequality ー and he blamed that inequality on European imperialism." Prostitution, Wu concludes, was a "manifestation of a wretched desire to survive."

War Aphrodisia

Hordern further introduces the concept of "war aphrodisia." This is a term for the "oft-observed phenomenon of a sharp rise in sexual activity in wartime." The impact of "conflict–lengthy separations, tedious wartime jobs, a thriving black market, sudden economic opportunity, a dearth of familiar partners contrasted with an influx of exotic strangers," Hordern lists, "not to mention a fear of sudden death — all these conspire to loosen restraint."

During the height of the Asia-Pacific War, in 1943, Murray was working at the US command in Brisbane. At the time, the "habit of senior American officers keeping concubines was one of the scandals of the day." Hordern names the names that Murray has provided. They are headed by General Douglas MacArthur's Chief of Staff General Richard Sutherland, whose mistress was the socialite Elaine Clark.

Murray's war-era correspondence also lists Generals George Kenney, Walter Krueger, John Donaldson, and Admiral William Halsey, naval commander of the South Pacific Area. These men were frequently seen on the streets of Brisbane accompanied by "fluffy blondes".

Asian Appeal

The cover of Shanghai Demimondaine depicts an illustration of Murray as painted by her husband Edmund Toeg. There are no actual photographs.

In the absence of photographic images, it is hard not to imagine Murray in the mode of Marlene Dietrich. She was the star of Shanghai Express, the most famous of the 1930s-era movies incorporating the "fall" of Western women in prewar Shanghai.

However, the common preference of Japanese men for Western women is more in the style of Audrey Hepburn, not Marlene Dietrich or Marilyn Monroe. Was Iemasa Tokugawa that far out of the mold?

Hordern references a studio portrait of Murray that was taken in Shanghai. It appears on his Facebook page but regrettably, not within the book. He compares her look to Jean Harlow, a legendary Hollywood bad girl. But that takes foreknowledge of Murray's past into account. On first impression, she is Hepburn all over, and a whole lot more. In my observation, the dream Western woman in the eyes of Japanese males.

It is fitting, therefore, that in the final paragraphs of Shanghai Demimondaine, Tokugawa Iemasa reappears. In the concluding years of her life, Murray's dementia worsened. Her brother, on occasion, would take her on excursions to the local airport. She enjoyed watching airplanes take off and land. "One day a group of Japanese were in the airport and one of them opened a door for Lorraine" Hordern retells. "She thanked him in his own language, he replied, and to the astonishment of her brother, the largely mute Lorraine burst into Japanese conversation."

"Perhaps for one moment" Hordern concludes, "Tokugawa Iemasa was ushering her through the door to a golden future."

A Twentieth Century History Lesson

Lorraine Murray's life stretched for all but the initial decade of the twentieth century. Hordern has done a masterful job of both acknowledging her place in Shanghailander history and telling her story in a way that brings the characters and realities of that tumultuous century to a twenty-first-century readership. Shanghai Demimondaine is a valuable history lesson and a very good read.