There's no question that Bruce Lee was an extraordinary athlete, teacher, actor, and
director. Even within the strictures of a 1960s TV series, The Green Hornet, his remarkable
agility and grace are truly mesmerizing. Dying far too young, at only 32 years old, only
adds to the icon's tragic mystique.
Along with the tragedy come stories, so many stories of a man whose reality was more than
remarkable all by itself. As detailed in Matthew Polly's 2018 biography, Bruce Lee: A Life,
there are still some myths about Lee that persist. Among them:
Lee didn't avoid alcohol because of discipline. The reality is that he didn't like to drink
alcohol because it caused an unpleasant physiological reaction, which he shared with an estimated
35 percent of Asian people. After even a few sips, Lee would become flushed and nauseous,
with sake as the only exception. He did, however, enjoy other substances, specifically cannabis.
After a long day of training at home, Lee would head out to the garage for a marijuana
cigarette, eventually moving on to hashish, which he would reportedly carry with him in
small bags and pouches to chew on throughout the day. When asked why he got high by a fellow
martial artist, Lee replied,
"It raises the consciousness level."
Occasionally, that level was too high for training partners. Polly cites a judo expert
who allegedly stopped training with Lee, quote, "because he was sick of all the pot smoke
swirling around." Lee's surprisingly cavalier attitude towards pot also translated to his
look, for a time, as he embraced a hippie aesthetic.
"What kind of hippie are you?"
"What kind of hippie am I? Man, I'm a business hippie."
Lee was known to the world as a "kinetic genius", totally in touch with his body, a champion
ballroom dancer able to quickly master any martial arts fighting style. There was only
one obstacle in his way: learning to ride a bicycle. He was also declared medically
unfit for the draft after failing his physical, perhaps for being too powerful? Jokes aside,
Lee was human after all, a fact easy to forget in the wake of his ascension to mythical status.
Though he was a sage, Lee was not always the picture of calm. In a 2014 Reddit AMA, Lee's
daughter Shannon wrote:
"He was definitely human. He also had a temper. He was also quick to anger. He wanted things
a certain way and he had high standards and sometimes he could lose it. But the good thing
about him was that he was self-aware. He knew when he had had a blow up and he would recover
and reset and apologize and work on doing better next time."
Another human element lost in his legend is the reality of his path to America. According
to Matthew Polly, he is often portrayed as a, quote, "impoverished immigrant who came
to America to make it big." But Lee actually came from a very reputable Hong Kong family,
with its own chauffeur and two live-in maids. His father was a Chinese opera star, which
helped Lee secure an early foothold as a child actor. By the time he had arrived in the US,
he'd appeared in around 20 films.
Another famous myth that Polly debunks is that the TV Western/Martial Arts hybrid series
Kung Fu was created by Bruce Lee, before being stolen away from him. Instead, as Polly told
Entertainment Weekly,
"It was written by two Jewish comedy writers from Brooklyn, Ed Spielman and Howard Friendlander."
Lee did audition for the lead role, but that ended up going to David Carradine instead.
As for that very premature death, there are some pretty wild ideas out there about what
really happened. Was Lee actually killed in some mysterious, arcane, possibly mystical
fashion? Had his popularity betrayed ancient secrets of the martial arts?
Part of the source of all these conspiracy theories is that Lee died in the apartment
of an actress to whom he was not married. However, he definitely wasn't assassinated.
The actual cause of death was a cerebral edema, but the source of the condition is unknown.
Some have suggested he was allergic to aspirin, which he'd taken for a headache, but Polly
believes the underlying cause was actually heat stroke. Lee had been intensively rehearsing
action sequences for the movie he was shooting, on the hottest day of the month in tropical
Hong Kong. According to Polly,
"I'm fairly certain it wasn't ninjas."
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