Love triangles, rampant drug use, and health issues abound: Bruce Lee's death was strange enough — but it was nothing compared to what came out after.
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00:00Love triangles, rampant drug use, and health issues abound.
00:03Bruce Lee's death was strange enough, but it was nothing compared to what came out after.
00:07In the early 1970s, many people were championed at the bit for a showdown between Bruce Lee
00:11and Muhammad Ali.
00:12The fact that the two athletes were trained in totally different disciplines wasn't an
00:15issue for most fans, who seemed sure that it would be a bout for the ages.
00:19For his part, Lee admired Ali.
00:20He even studied tapes of the Boxers' 1966 match against Cleveland Williams to get inspiration
00:25for the climactic fight scene in The Way of the Dragon.
00:31Robert Klaus, director of Way of the Dragon's sequel Enter the Dragon, later revealed that
00:37Lee had taken fans' hopes of a fight more seriously than anyone could have imagined.
00:41He quotes Lee as saying,
00:42"'Everybody says I must fight Ali someday.
00:44I'm studying every move he makes.
00:45I'm getting to know how he thinks and moves.'"
00:47But while Lee was proud of his athleticism, he was not delusional.
00:50He understood the reality of what would happen if he, a 5-foot-7-inch, 145-pound man, fought
00:55the 6-foot-3-inch, 210-pound boxer.
00:58Again, Klaus quotes Lee,
00:59"'Look at my hand.
01:00That's a little Chinese hand.
01:02He'd kill me.'"
01:04Bruce Lee married his wife, Linda, on August 17, 1964.
01:07Having a wife and daughter at home didn't stop Lee from his Lothario ways, however.
01:10He didn't even wear a wedding ring while he was married.
01:12Lee had a steady stream of girlfriends up until he died.
01:15Fellow actor Thordis Brandt only found out Lee had a family after months of dating.
01:19Another actor, Nora Miao, later admitted that the two had an affair when they were working
01:22together.
01:23While the wider world might not have known that Lee was a womanizer until long after
01:26he died, many of those around him were already well aware.
01:29Betty Ting Pei, for example, says that she was always with him in Hong Kong, and that
01:33everyone on set there knew that they were dating.
01:35Although Pei was single while she was seeing Lee, many of his other mistresses were not.
01:38Thordis Brandt had been in a relationship with her future husband, actor James Arnest,
01:42for years.
01:43Yet another girlfriend, Sharon Farrell, later moved on with Lee's good friend Steve McQueen,
01:47prompting Lee to show up on set one day and try to win her back.
01:50That son of a gun got the toughness in him."
01:55Even though she refused, he tried again a couple years later, giving her his number
01:58when they ran into each other shortly before his death.
02:01Bruce Lee's friends remember him as a man who loved to party.
02:04He also had a reputation for using recreational drugs.
02:06His drug of choice was weed, although he later moved on to hash.
02:09On one occasion, Lee showed up at a friend's house with joints the size of cigars and passed
02:13them out to everyone there.
02:14Another friend remembers Lee eating hash brownies at the end of a workout.
02:18He also used harder narcotics, including cocaine and LSD, and often drank to excess.
02:22One friend claimed that he would drink up to 20 bottles of sake a night.
02:26Publicly, however, he claimed martial arts was a better and more natural high than anything
02:30drugs could provide.
02:31Aside from the tales told by friends and associates, proof of Lee's drug use turned up in an unexpected
02:36place.
02:37Around 2020, someone discovered a cache of letters written by Lee at a flea market.
02:40Many of the letters were written to the actor Robert Baker, who, based on their correspondence,
02:44seemed to be Lee's dealer.
02:46Remarkably, Lee appears to have wanted to quit using drugs at one point.
02:49In one letter, he wrote,
02:50"...I told Linda to call you to forget about the stuff because I really don't need them
02:53in my training.
02:54I feel that I have gained in trying them, but the excessive indulgence of them just
02:58isn't in my road in Jeet Kune Do."
03:00"...Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."
03:06There seems to be a general agreement among experts that some of Lee's most powerful quotes,
03:10sayings, and philosophies were lifted or heavily inspired by other sources.
03:14One academic, Dr. James Bishop, studied Lee's writings and concluded,
03:18"...Make no mistake, Bruce Lee was a plagiarist.
03:20I take no satisfaction from saying that, but it is nonetheless true."
03:23Matthew Polly, the author of the definitive biography on Lee, told Kung Fu Tea,
03:27"...I believe that, while Bruce borrowed language and imagery, he was genuinely trying to describe
03:32a similar spiritual epiphany.
03:33But the issue still bothers me."
03:35Lee himself wasn't necessarily to blame for all this, though.
03:38During his life, he had kept a notebook in which he wrote down random things that came
03:41to mind, including famous quotes by others, but he didn't always attribute them.
03:45This was understandable, of course, since it was just a personal journal, but when that
03:48journal was published posthumously, many of those quotes became mistakenly attributed
03:52to Lee himself.
03:53On another occasion, Lee gave an interview in which he quoted one of his character's
03:57lines, and the clip would often be cut down in documentaries to leave out the interviewer's
04:00question, making it look like Lee was claiming a writer's dialogue as his own philosophy.
04:05Perhaps the strangest thing to come out about Bruce Lee after he died was an admission by
04:09Roman Polanski.
04:10For a sense, disgraced director had been introduced to Lee through his wife, Sharon Tate, after
04:14which Polanski became one of Lee's students in the ways of Jeet Kune Do.
04:18Then, in August 1969, Tate and four others were murdered in her home by members of the
04:22Manson family.
04:23"...If anything is possible, we have no solid information which will limit us to a single
04:32suspect."
04:33For three months, the investigation dragged on, and Polanski became desperate for leads.
04:37Along the way, he had seemingly convinced himself that Tate must have been killed by
04:40someone they knew.
04:41Not only was Lee a friend, but he also lived only a few miles away from Polanski and Tate.
04:46Then, during a Jeet Kune Do lesson that took place after the murders, a passing comment
04:50made Polanski think Lee could be the killer.
04:52The actor mentioned he had lost his glasses, and Polanski knew that one of the pieces of
04:55evidence left at the scene was a pair of glasses.
04:58Plus, as Lee biographer Matthew Polley explained to Esquire, Bruce was the only person Polanski
05:02knew personally who had the physical skills to hurt a bunch of people at once.
05:06Bruce was the toughest guy he knew, and Bruce knew weapons.
05:09Polanski offered to buy Lee new glasses, and they went together to order a pair.
05:12It was only when Polanski realized that Lee used a different prescription to the glasses
05:16found at the scene that he crossed him off the list of suspects.
05:18He never told Lee that he had thought he might be a killer.
05:21Lee knew how good his physique looked on film, and he took extreme steps to keep that look.
05:26According to his wife, before he died, Lee was living on what was essentially a liquid
05:30diet, with his food intake almost completely limited to carrots and apple juice.
05:33This obviously wasn't healthy and could have done some serious damage in the long term,
05:37but there is a theory that it had a far worse and more immediate effect.
05:41Lee died due to swelling in his brain, but the big mystery around his death has always
05:45been what caused such a severe reaction in someone so young and healthy.
05:48Officially, Lee died of an allergic reaction to medicine he'd taken for a headache.
05:52One contrasting theory, however, suggests that his excessive intake of water and other
05:56liquids ended up killing him.
05:57Not only was he living on a liquid diet, but Lee was living in a very hot and humid environment
06:01in Hong Kong.
06:03Excessive consumption of liquids could have damaged his kidneys, which meant too much
06:06water stayed in his body, leading to brain swelling.
06:09Game of Death producer Raymond Chow was with Lee when he died.
06:12He remembers the actor becoming overheated before drinking some water.
06:15Chow says Lee got dizzy after this, went to lie down, and died.
06:19Bruce Lee felt an obsessive desire to succeed in Hollywood.
06:22As a result, he pushed himself too hard in his final years.
06:25His wife, Linda, told biographer Matthew Polley about the punishing pace Bruce was keeping
06:29in the period before he died.
06:31She said,
06:32"'I tried to talk him into easing up, but he would cut me short by saying, the biggest
06:34detriment to relaxation is to say, I must relax.'
06:37By this stage, he had convinced himself that he was relaxing when he was working."
06:40"'Water is the softest substance in the world, but yet it can penetrate the hardest rock.'"
06:47Over the course of two years, Bruce's weight dropped from about 140 pounds to around 120.
06:52The problem was, he wasn't losing fat.
06:54As you can see in his earlier films, there was no fat on him, even at 140 pounds.
06:58Instead, his body was losing muscle mass, which is much less healthy and could be a
07:02sign of something more serious.
07:04Friends who saw him during this time remember him being constantly tired, with dilated eyes
07:08and a gray color to his skin.
07:09Lee himself admitted that he was working too much and that it was affecting his health,
07:13but he didn't appear to do anything about it.
07:15While many people are aware of the mysteries surrounding Lee's death, not everyone knows
07:19that he had almost died just two months earlier, and possibly in the exact same way.
07:24Since he survived that first brush with death, we know what went wrong the first time.
07:27Lee had suffered heat stroke.
07:29This led biographer Matthew Polley to conclude that Lee's eventual death was caused by heat
07:33stroke, too.
07:34The first incident took place on May 10, 1973.
07:37It was a particularly warm day in the hot and humid city of Hong Kong.
07:40Lee was in a sound booth dubbing lines for one of his films, and while the room had air
07:44conditioning, it had to be turned off so as to not ruin the noise on the takes.
07:48This meant that Lee was being kept in a small, hot, stuffy, humid room while working for
07:52an extended period of time.
07:54Complicating matters was the fact that just weeks before, Lee had undergone an operation
07:57to have his armpit sweat glands removed.
08:00While this might have meant he looked better on film, it wasn't exactly helpful when his
08:03body was overheating.
08:04Lee soon began to feel unwell and escaped to a bathroom, where he fainted.
08:08He was discovered by a stagehand, fainted again, went into convulsions, and started
08:12to have difficulty breathing.
08:13Fortunately, on this occasion, he was rushed to the hospital immediately and treated in
08:17time, albeit barely, having been unconscious for over two hours.
08:21Lee later told his wife that he had been able to feel how close to death he'd come.
08:25Bruce Lee was dealing with business in Hong Kong on the day he died.
08:28In the middle of the day, Lee went to the house of his girlfriend, Betty Ting Pei.
08:32After that, we only have the accounts of Pei and producer Raymond Chow as to what happened.
08:36But it seems Lee felt unwell, took one of Pei's headache pills, laid down to rest, and
08:40died.
08:41When Lee's death was announced to the public, however, the story was changed to make it
08:44less scandalous.
08:45Instead of being with his mistress, Lee's friend, Zou Wenhui, claimed that the actor
08:49had been with his wife, Linda, at their own home.
08:51Pei claims not to know why Zou lied, and says she was not told about the decision to try
08:55and cover up their relationship.
08:57Of course, the truth was quickly revealed, and while the denials over their affair continued
09:01for decades, Pei eventually admitted that she and Lee were in a relationship.
09:04Pei says that her life was later ruined by accusations that she'd had something to do
09:08with Lee's death.
09:09This led her to give up her acting career at just 38 years old.
09:12As she told the Sunday Morning Post,
09:14If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available.
09:25Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact
09:29SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.