Frances Fong

I could forget that Frances Fong used to play Rosie. Just as I always forget that her first of two episodes also featured the most frequent of the three actresses to play the role, Eileen Saki, as the leader of a group of what I believe Colonel Potter calls floozies. Saki played the role eight times to Fong’s twice, after all. It all goes back to the fact that M*A*S*H clearly had no continuity editor and didn’t worry about it at all. They could’ve changed the character’s name, but maybe Rosie is just the Korean James Bond and the name goes from person to person as a title. Or else she’s a Time Lord.

Actual Frances Fong was born in Honolulu of parents themselves born in Hawaii, though her birth name was Chung and her grandparents were Chinese immigrants. In fact, Fong would have to learn Chinese as an adult for roles, because, like many immigrants’ grandchildren, she grew up speaking English not just as a first language but as an only language. She was an all-American girl in the Hawaiian sense, attending the same high school Bruno Mars eventually would where she was extremely active in extracurriculars and performed shows for the USO.

She graduated from high school, moved to the mainland, and started community college to study dramatics. After a few weeks, she was doing a show for war workers when she was spotted by actor Francis Lederer and given a screen test. She was put under contract at MGM. She worked there from 1945-1948. After her contract ended, she started working as a singer in San Francisco with a band called The Cathayans. A promotion called Miss Chinese New Year Festival (that apparently didn’t care that she was by this point married to her second husband) brought her back to the attention of Hollywood, this time for roles on television.

It is a remarkably all-American performer story if you ignore the bits that we don’t think of as all-American. But why wouldn’t it be? Just because her last name was Chung, or Fong, doesn’t mean that her story isn’t just as typical of what the fan magazines would sell about quite a lot of white performers. That bit about her being discovered while at a factory is just literally Marilyn Monroe, except that Monroe was herself one of the factory workers. No, she never made a huge splash, but that’s also true of an awful lot of people who worked in the industry.

To me, in fact, the weirdest part of the story is her name. She really was named Frances. Eventually, she was also named Fong. But while under contract at MGM, she married Leslie Fong, another minor actor about whom I cannot find much. She kept performing under the name Frances Fong. They had two sons—including Brian Fong, who among other things appeared in The Love Bug—and then divorced. Then, she married George Fong, no relation that I know of, of Oakland not San Francisco, and only then did she switch her stage name. And that is why she’s credited under two different names.