Oprah would frown

Here are some notes, most of them cribbed from William Warren's "Bangkok," on the ghastly Anna Leonowens, of "The King and I" fame.

No well-born Victorian lady, and possibly part Indian, the decidedly un-Deborah Kerr-like Leonowens was a widowed, struggling teacher in Singapore when Thailand's King Mongkut (Rama IV) hired her through an agent to educate his dozens of wives and children. He got more than he bargained for---not including "Hello, Young Lovers" and all those other haunting tunes, and no choreography by Jerome Robbins.

Famously broadminded, and well-educated to boot, Mongkut had already embarked on an ambitious program of Bangkok modernization when Leonowens sailed into town in 1862. It was Mongkut who shrewdly played the colonial powers off one another and kept Thailand independent. He was a busy man, and there is no evidence that during her five years in Bangkok Leonowens influenced the king in any way at all or that he took much notice of her.

This did not keep Leonowens (the odd name came from Thomas Leon Owens, her late husband) from journeying onward to yet another land of opportunity, the United States, where in 1870 she published "The English Governess at the Siamese Court." Most of it was made up, possibly with the help of a ghost writer. The book was followed in 1873 by "Romance of a Harem." It also was rife with lurid fabrications, and some sections were revealed at the time to have been plagiarized.

Here, from the first book, is an example of Leonowens' prose style. She is describing her arrival in Bangkok with no housing arrangements having been made for her and her young son. "The situation was as Oriental as the scene, heartless, arbitrary insolence on the part of my employers, homelessness, forlornness, mortification, indignation on mine... My tears fell thick and fast and, weary and despairing, I closed my eyes and tried to shut out heaven and earth; but the reflection would return to mock and goad me that, by my own act, I had placed myself in this position."

Lucky for her, missionaries had built a Presbyterian church, which Leonowens noted as her boat pulled in. "The gentle swaying of the tall trees over the chapel imparted a promise of safety and peace, as the glamour of the approaching night and the gloom and mystery of the pagan land into which we were penetrating filled me with an indefinable dread." Want tuk-tuk, lady?

Leonowens' partner in literary crime was Margaret Landon, author of "Anna and the King of Siam," an American bestseller in 1944. The wife of a Christian missionary in Thailand, Landon added yet more fantasy, including an early romantic life for Leonowens and palace influence that was pure hooey.

Landon's book was the basis for a movie, in which short, brown, copiously blackhaired King Mongkut was portrayed by Rex Harrison. Yul Brynner played him in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that followed. More recently, Jodie Foster, who should know better, starred in "Anna and the King," an unsuccessful re-make with a weird anti-globalization slant (according to the negative New York Times review) that was filmed, judiciously, in Malaysia.

Thais find the entire phenomenon incomprehensible. It's a shame---all those good songs in the service of a bizarre lie.