The Age of Dreaming (9 page)
As I was standing at the foot of the stairs, I noticed a young girl across the courtyard. She was sitting on a low stone wall, picking fiowers out of the garden behind her and gathering them into a bouquet. One passerby, and then another, gave her a look of disapproval, but she seemed oblivious to everyone around her. She was dark-haired and lovely, yet there was something in her manner that struck me as melancholy. After she had picked as many fiowers as her small hands could hold, she turned back toward the courtyard and looked around with a detached and day-dreamy air. Presently her eyes settled on me. I tipped my hat and she smiled brightly, looking so delighted that I wondered if we’d met somewhere before. Then she stood and seemed to fioat across the courtyard, her long, thick hair trailing behind her, her white gossamer dress hanging nearly to the ground. When she reached me, she stopped and looked up into my face with the innocent curiosity of a child.
“Hello,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Nora. Who are you?”
I smiled indulgently and bowed. “I’m Jun. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She spread her arms wide and spun fully around, as if embracing the entire world. “It’s perfect today, isn’t it? I wish I didn’t have to be here.”
“Ah,” I said. “But where else would you find such beautiful flowers?”
“At home in Georgia,” she replied, turning back to me but looking somewhere else. “There were all different kinds of fiowers and trees. It was like the whole world was alive.”
That she called Georgia her home surprised me, for she lacked any trace of an accent. “And when were you last home?” I asked.
“Oh, too long, too long.” She sat down on the stone wall beside me. “You’re that famous Japanese actor, aren’t you? ‘The dark storm from the perfumed Orient.’ I read about you last month in
Photoplay
.”
I chuckled. “Well, Miss Nora, I don’t know how famous I am. But yes, I am an actor. I’m under contract here with Perennial.”
“My mother says your picture was immoral, but I rather liked it. I snuck out of the house to watch it with my friends.” She giggled, and I wondered what she was doing there at Perennial. I had no doubt which picture she was speaking of.
“Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“My mother thinks Japs shouldn’t be in pictures at all, but she says you’re a talented actor. She doesn’t like
anyone
very much, to tell you the truth. Especially the men who work
here
.” She gestured toward the offices. “She thinks they’re all crooks. She liked the people in New York much better.”
I peered at the girl more closely, thinking now that she looked familiar. She must have been sixteen or seventeen, although she acted more like twelve. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Nora,” she repeated, as if the whole matter of names was tiresome. “Nora Niles.” Then she looked into my face and said, “My, Mr. Nakayama, you’re lovely.”
Although she said this with genuine feeling, I knew at once that her words were innocent. She was simply expressing her appreciation for my objective appeal, as if I were one of the fiowers she had plucked from the garden. In fact, just as my mind had formulated that analogy, she extended the hand that held the bouquet. “Here. I think you should have these.”
“Oh, thank you, Miss Niles, but I’d rather you keep them. They’re delightful, more befitting a lady.”
“All right.” The girl sighed and cast her eyes to the ground, and I was afraid that I had injured her feelings. But when she spoke again, the fiowers had gone from her mind. “It’s so nice to talk to people. There are so few lovely people in the world.”
I considered her more closely—her blushed, rounded cheeks, her full lips, the irrepressible dark hair—and was certain now that I had seen her before.
How
I knew her— and who she was—struck me at precisely the moment that a high, shrill voice split the afternoon tranquility. “Nora!”
I turned around to look for the source of the voice, while the girl just kept her eyes on the ground.
“Nora, you come over here right now!”
Reluctantly, still not even glancing in the direction of the voice, the girl pulled herself up to her feet. But she didn’t move from her spot, and in another few seconds a woman rushed over to where we stood. My immediate impression of this woman was that she was boiling—not merely angry, but actually bubbling with anger. She had the same dark curly hair as the girl, and the same brown eyes, though hers were devoid of wonder. She grabbed the girl by the elbow and shot me a look. “You come on, Nora. It’s time to go home.”
By this point I had realized that I was talking to Nora Minton Niles, the young new actress who had signed with Perennial six months before to take the place of the departed Lola Moore. She was only sixteen when I met her that March day, and seemed much younger, though she had already appeared in six or seven films. She was there—or rather, her mother was there—to meet with studio executives; indeed, as I looked back toward where her mother had come from, I saw David Rosenberg, special assistant to the studio chief Leonard Stillman, standing at the top of the stairs.
“Mrs. Niles,” I said now, as the mother pulled her daughter along. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jun Nakayama, and I am also an actor under contract with Perennial. I suppose this makes colleagues of your daughter and me.”
The woman whipped her head around, and I was taken aback by the fury in her face. “I know exactly who you are, Mr. Nakayama. You and my daughter may work for the same studio, but you are
not
, in any way, colleagues. And my daughter’s name is Niles, but my own name is Cole. Mrs. Harriet Baker Cole. Now please excuse us.”
She led her daughter away, and I, along with everyone else in the courtyard, watched them go in silence. When I turned back toward the staircase, I saw Nora’s fiowers scattered all over the ground.
After the girl and her mother were out of sight, I walked over to David Rosenberg. He was a serious young man of about twenty-five, and whatever else his job description may have included, his main function appeared to be dealing with difficult people. Because his boss, Leonard Stillman, worked out of the studio’s New York headquarters, Rosenberg acted as his eyes and ears for West Coast operations. “Some piece of work, that Mrs. Cole,” he said as I approached. “You’re lucky, Jun, that you got out of there with your balls still attached.”
I stared at him, surprised. It had not occurred to me that anyone could make something of the fact that I had been talking to Miss Niles, perhaps because she seemed like such a child. “She’s very protective,” I offered.
“That’s one word for it,” said Rosenberg, drumming his fingers on his arm. “She can’t stand for men to talk to Nora—threatening her gravy train, I guess.” He tried to kick a stone in front of him and missed. David was tall, broad, slightly awkward in movement, as if he wasn’t sure his body really belonged to him. He often stood behind Stillman at public events, hovering over his much shorter boss. Now, he shook his head and chuckled. “Our first meeting, she told us she had a .38 in her handbag, just in case there was some kind of situation. Rumor is she carries a switch in her purse for when Nora gets out of line.” He tried for the rock again and connected this time; it went skittering off the top of the stairs. “She just screamed at us for an hour about how ‘limited’ the girl’s contract was, and it’s the biggest first-time contract we’ve ever offered. We shouldn’t be surprised at anything that woman does, though. She’d sue her own mother if it meant better terms.”
“I actually thought the girl was quite charming,” I countered.
“Sure she is,” said Rosenberg. “Nora’s a good kid. A little strange, but totally genuine.” He shook his head. “We were in a meeting last month and I said to her, I said, ‘Nora, you’re set to do ten pictures in the next eleven months. We’re glad you’re so ambitious.’ And she gave me that sad sweet smile of hers and said, ‘
I’m
not ambitious at all, Mr. Rosenberg. My mother is ambitious
for
me.’”
Over the next several months, as Nora Minton Niles appeared in one film after another, I learned more about her background. Nora’s family, as she had told me, was from a small town in Georgia, where her mother had appeared in local stage productions. No one seemed to know what had become of the father. What they did know was that several years before they came to Los Angeles, Harriet Cole and Nora had moved up to New York. There, Nora had starred in a series of small plays, and then bigger theater productions, before being discovered by a talent scout for Metro Pictures. In 1917, when I met her, Nora had been in California for less than a year. She lived with her mother and grandmother in a small house in Hancock Park; the famous mansion, which later attracted so many curiosity-seekers, would not be built until 1920. And from that house, her mother orchestrated every detail of her career.
Theories about Harriet Cole abounded. Some thought she was simply the kind of pushy stage parent who would soon become so common in Hollywood; some saw her as a frustrated former actress who was living out her dream through her daughter. It was rumored, too, that the name “Nora Minton Niles” actually belonged to the actress’s dead cousin, and that Harriet had stolen it—along with the accompanying birth certificate—to add five years to her daughter’s age so that the Gerry Society would not stop her from working in New York. Nobody knew what Nora’s real name was, nor her mother’s, and nobody dared to ask. Nobody bothered to ask Nora much of anything. It was Harriet who was Nora’s public face; it was Harriet who always spoke for her; it was even Harriet who collected all her daughter’s checks, since Nora was still legally under her mother’s care. Later, given all that eventually transpired, I would wonder if Nora had even wanted to be an actress, or if she was simply carrying out the desires of an unfulfilled woman who would sacrifice everything, including her daughter, to get what she wanted.
But as I sit here this evening with Bellinger’s script, I know that this train of thought is ultimately useless. It may be true, on purely theoretical terms, that Nora had the appropriate blend of dreaminess and sadness to play the role of Diane Marbury. Yet Nora has been out of pictures for as long as I have, and she is by now an old woman. Bellinger and Perennial will surely seek a contemporary actress, someone versed in the modern ways of filmmaking. And such a choice would of course be appropriate. No doubt I am thinking of Nora because my mind has been wandering back of late to my own career in pictures. No doubt it is natural for my thoughts to settle on a familiar actress, despite the awkwardness that colors all my memories of her.
But perhaps, upon further reflection, Nora Niles would have been too young to play the role of Diane, even at the height of her fame. Nora was only twenty-one, after all, when the events occurred that drove her from the screen altogether. She never got a chance to play anything but spirited children and sad young teens. She wasn’t in pictures long enough to play a true adult.
October 13, 1964
L
ast Saturday, as usual, I met Mrs. Bradford for breakfast. Outside of monthly meetings with my property management firm, these breakfasts are my only consistent appointments. I don’t mean to give the impression that I am lacking for things to do; in fact, I often attend the symphony or the theater. I also hold memberships to several museums, which I visit when there are notable exhibits. Moreover, I dine out several evenings a week, and I even—before I began to tire so easily on long drives—took frequent trips to Santa Barbara or the mountains.
Almost always, I undertake these excursions alone. There is something to be said for experiencing great art, or nature, by oneself; the absence of other people makes the enjoyment more pure, and one’s perceptions grow acute and discerning. And certainly it is easier to make arrangements for one, as nobody else’s requirements or whims can ever affect my plans. Nonetheless, I cannot deny that it is pleasant to occasionally partake in the company of others. This is why my regular meals and conversations with Mrs. Bradford have come to be so agreeable.
We have tried many different establishments in the Hollywood area, both classic diners like the Silver Spoon on Hollywood Boulevard and newer restaurants on Vermont and Santa Monica, but the place we have settled on as our mutual favorite is a quiet, older restaurant on La Brea. The proprietor, a Mr. Earhardt, makes superb spinach omelets, and I look forward to his cooking all week. That particular morning, Mrs. Bradford wanted to meet later than usual, which gave me time to visit my barber. My hair had started to look somewhat untidy; indeed, the previous Saturday Mrs. Bradford had joked that I would soon fit in with the scruffy youths out on the Boulevard.
I entered the restaurant a few minutes early and found Mrs. Bradford already seated at the window table. She was wearing a yellow and white striped blouse and new white tennis shoes, and she seemed, as always, more youthful than her age. It is not that Mrs. Bradford
looks
younger than her sixty-some years; her hair is silver and there are wrinkles on her face and hands. But there is an alertness in her posture, a quickness, a perpetual brightness in her eyes, that makes it seem as if she is always poised for an adventure.
She greeted me warmly as I sat down, and as soon as I ordered my food, she launched into an involved story about the raccoon fight she’d broken up in her garden the previous evening. I tried to give the impression that I was following her story, but she must have sensed that my mind was elsewhere, for she stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Nakayama? You don’t seem to be with me this morning.”
I apologized and explained that I had been busy all week, and was still rather preoccupied.
“Is it because of the reporter? You met him this week, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “As it so happens, I did meet the young man. Twice, in fact. And I read several of his pieces. They’re very good.”
“Did you like him? Did you grant him an interview?”
“I did like him. He knew a great deal about the silent film era, and it appears he will be writing about me.” I considered telling her about Perennial and the possible movie role, but it felt too premature. It would inspire a rash of questions from her, I suspected, and more interest than I could cope with at the moment. My feeling was only confirmed when Mrs. Bradford smiled and said, “So now you have someone paying attention to you. No wonder you got a haircut.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “My hair was getting long.”
“Yes, but people often take better care of themselves when they want to impress somebody.”
“Perhaps,” I said, attempting to quell my irritation. “But that’s not the case where Mr. Bellinger’s concerned. Besides, for all you know, I could be trying to impress
you
.”
This caught her off guard, and she laughed a bit, but it had the intended effect. When she spoke again, she addressed a different topic. “It must be strange to revisit that part of your life after all of these years.”
“Yes, in fact, it is rather odd.”
“You know, I’m dying to see one of your movies. Do you still have them around somewhere?”
I gave a short laugh. “No, I believe they have all been lost, and if any do remain, I do not possess them.”
“What a shame. There
must
be some, somewhere.” She brightened. “What about old photographs or movie magazines?”
“What about them?”
“Well, I’d love to read about you, silly. And maybe see some old photos.”
“I do have some of those things, but they have all been put away.”
“What do you mean, ‘put away’? Can’t you find them?”
“It would be a great deal of trouble.”
“Well, I don’t see why.”
I sighed. “I’m afraid they’re all in storage, Mrs. Bradford.”
She did not respond for a moment, and then an unusually serious expression came over her face. “Mr. Nakayama, you never told me why you stopped.”
“Stopped what?”
“You know what I mean. Stopped making films. You were a huge star with a fiourishing career, and then suddenly nothing.”
I thought carefully before I replied. “I was one of the casualties of sound. Once voices came into film, I, along with many of my peers, was finished.”
“But Mr. Nakayama,” she said gently, “talkies didn’t become the standard until 1929. Your last movie was in 1922.”
I kept my eyes on the table. “Things were changing very rapidly then. There came a time when it was clear I could not continue.”
“Was it racism? I know there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment at that time. It’s really kind of amazing that you got to be as famous as you did. It couldn’t have been easy to be an Oriental man in Hollywood.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “For a large part of my career, Japanese art and culture were held in high esteem in America. They were seen as the epitome of refinement and class, and movies dealing with Japan were very popular.”
“Yes, but still, there was all that agitation about property and citizenship. California didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for Japanese people.”
I took a sip of my tea and measured my words carefully. “One can always find prejudice if one specifically looks for it. But that was not the reason for my retirement.”
“You didn’t kill anybody, did you?”
I was so startled by this question that I looked up at her face and was relieved to see that she had been joking. “Of course not. Mrs. Bradford, what made you think of such a thing?”
She took her napkin out from under the silverware, shook it, and placed it on her lap. “Well, from reading all those histories when I was trying to find out about you, I learned that there were a couple of big scandals. There was the Fatty Arbuckle situation, which I knew about already, but there was also the murder of the British director, Ashley Bennett Tyler. If I remember correctly, he directed you in some of your films. And isn’t it true they never caught the killer?”
I was taken aback by her questions—I hadn’t known she had done so much research. And I did not then, or at any time, wish to talk about Ashley Tyler. “Yes, he did direct me. And yes, it is true that they never caught the killer.”
“There were suspicions, right? But never a formal charge?”
I forced a smile. “You’ve been doing your homework, Mrs. Bradford.”
“Well, it was strange to me that the Arbuckle case is still remembered today, but this one, it’s just disappeared.” She leaned over the table, and I saw the same excitement in her eyes that I’d seen in Bellinger’s when he talked about his film. “Mr. Nakayama, you were around when all of this happened. Do
you
know who killed Ashley Tyler?”
I gave a light laugh, which belied the sudden churning in my stomach. “Of course not, Mrs. Bradford. My dealings with Mr. Tyler were purely professional. I could not imagine why anyone would do such a thing, and I certainly don’t know who was involved.”
Mercifully, our omelets arrived and Mrs. Bradford dropped the subject. I had lost my appetite, however, and only took a bite or two of my eggs. Mrs. Bradford did not seem to notice. She chattered on about the novel she was reading, and about the status of her garden. And although I kept expecting her to bring up the Tyler case again, she did not return to that uncomfortable topic.
But as I walked back to my town house after our meal, it occurred to me that there could very well be people who were still curious about those events from the distant past. It wasn’t likely that anyone was pursuing the matter; as Mrs. Bradford said, one did not hear much anymore about the Tyler murder. But with the new theater opening, and especially with Bellinger’s article, interest in that era might be stirred up again and produce this piece of unresolved history. I wondered if there were people I should try to find in order to clear up any potential misunderstandings—people like David Rosenberg, my old acquaintance at Perennial, who was present for the scandal and aftermath. As I thought more about the attention that would accompany Bellinger’s article—and then, especially, when I thought about the possibility of being considered for a part in his film—I concluded that it would indeed be prudent to find these people and ensure that the record was clear.
And so it happened that I went to visit David Rosenberg this morning at the St. Mary’s Retirement Home in Culver City. I had found my old colleague by calling the seven “David Rosenbergs” that were listed in the phone book, until I reached his son, Nathan, who was living in his old house. Nathan knew who I was, and seemed delighted to hear from me; he directed me to the retirement home where his father had been living for the last three years, battling Parkinson’s disease. So I warmed up my car and made the short drive to Culver City. I took the surface streets past the old MGM studio, driving directly over the spot at La Cienega and Venice where the great chariot race scene was filmed for
Ben-Hur
, and then headed up the winding hills of the Culver Crest until I reached St. Mary’s. It was, for a nursing home, a beautiful place, an old Spanish-style estate with a half-dozen buildings arranged along the top of a hill.
I parked my car and went into the front of what looked like the main building, and announced myself to the nuns behind the desk. But when a nurse led me to the patio, where a cluster of elderly residents sat in oversized wheelchairs and gazed out toward the ocean, I could not believe that the folded-in man she pointed out was my old friend David Rosenberg. He was about the same age as I, but looked twenty years older. Rosenberg had been formidable as a younger man, large and carelessly handsome, and it was startling to see him so reduced. When he turned to face me, though, I saw the same liveliness in his dark eyes that I had seen on a daily basis during the years we worked together at Perennial.
“Jun!” he said, patting my arm with his hand. “What a wonderful surprise! When Nathan told me that you’d called, I was sure he was kidding. You look the same, I see. Wish that were true for me.”
I put my own hand on top of his, which was trembling a little. “It’s good to see you, David. How have you been?”
“Well, if you had two or three weeks to spare, I’d tell you.” He gestured for me to pull up a chair, which I did. We sat looking out at the view in silence, not knowing where to start. I stole glances at him now and again, examining the deep lines in his face, the unmistakable shaking of his arms and legs. “This place isn’t bad, as far as retirement homes go,” he said. “There are a few other old geezers who are still up to playing poker or watching a ball game, and the nurses here are generally nice. Never thought I’d find this old Jew in a Catholic-run joint, but my daughter-in-law’s father is the head of the board, and this is supposed to be the best place on the Westside. Besides, I thought it would be too depressing to live with all those washed-up picture people at the Motion Picture Relief Fund Home. Too many egos and neuroses, not to mention shoddy facelifts. I’d rather be with the regular people. So here I am.”
I smiled and leaned back in my chair. “It seems quite comfortable here.”
“Well, I’d rather not be here at all, you know. But when the Parkinson’s hit, I couldn’t really be by myself anymore, and I was too much for Nathan to handle. He’s a good boy—I shouldn’t call him a boy, he’s forty-six now, with two teenagers himself—but life seems to move too fast these days for people to care for aging parents.” He chuckled. “Listen to me. As if life wasn’t moving fast when
we
were young.”
“We certainly weren’t lacking for excitement. We worked hard, but we enjoyed ourselves too.”
“We
did
work hard,” said Rosenberg, struggling to pull himself up in his chair. “Look at the industry now—how Perennial and UA and MGM seem bigger and older than God. But we were there at the beginning, we watched them take their first steps. Without men like us, Jun, those great studios wouldn’t be what they are today. Hollywood wouldn’t even be Hollywood.”
“It’s true,” I agreed. “The Valentinos, the Chaplins, everyone remembers them. But the men like us have largely been forgotten.”
We were quiet for a moment, both lost in our own thoughts. David tried to pat my arm again, but his hand shook so badly that it hit my leg instead. “I’m sorry, Jun. I don’t mean to sound so depressing. I’ve been sitting here feeling sorry for myself and haven’t asked a thing about you. How’s life treated you since we saw each other last? Do you have a gorgeous wife? Are there children?”
I shook my head. “No, David. I never married.”
He considered me with genuine surprise. “But you had women scratching each other’s eyes out over you. What happened? You weren’t willing to give up the bachelor’s life?”
“No, I just never found the right woman.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and we dropped off into silence. Around us, several other residents were talking in loud voices to the pigeons that had gathered for bread. Beneath their voices was the sound of someone moaning, so soft I wasn’t sure I really heard it.