By the time he finished, I had gathered myself again, and I said as sternly as I could manage to without appearing rude, “Young man, this is a private residence, and my number is not for public use. Please don’t call again. I no longer give interviews.”
I realized my mistake when the caller exclaimed, “So you really are Jun Nakayama!”
But rather than answering I simply hung up, and then retreated into the kitchen to make some tea.
You might think my reaction to the phone call strange, but I didn’t welcome this reminder of my past. It is not that I am ashamed of my career in film; no, quite the opposite. I remain proud of the films I appeared in, of which there were more than sixty; the works my peers and I created in the first two decades of this century laid the foundation for the subsequent growth of the movie industry. But it all happened so long ago, in such a different world, that these things seem like the accomplishments of an entirely different man. And the stranger’s phone call yesterday morning was akin to a chance meeting with a friend from one’s youth, who reminds one of how much has changed in the intervening years, and how far one’s strayed from the course one first embarked upon. One must be friendly, both out of courtesy and to honor the past, but as soon as there’s a chance to cut the conversation short, one does, and then quickly moves on.
I didn’t always shy away from such attention. For more than a decade, and particularly in the years between 1915 and 1922, I gave countless interviews and posed for photographs and was often featured in the fan magazines. The lavish parties I held at my home in the Hollywood Hills sometimes drew up to five hundred people, and the opening nights for each one of my new films sold out at the country’s most prestigious theaters. I was as famous and recognizable as a man could be at that time—an era quite different from the star-worship and tabloid sensationalism that started later, in the ’30s and ’40s, and that by now has grown entirely out of control. I am grateful that the arc of my career was complete before the advent of television, which both cheapened films and destroyed the privacy of those actors who appeared in them. Still, I can’t deny that it was jarring to go from being frequently recognized—and more importantly, from being identified in the autobiography of someone of the stature of Cecil B. DeMille as “easily the greatest dramatic actor of the silent era”—to entering my present state of invisibility. Although I am only seventy-three, few others from my era survive. Gerard Normandy and Ashley Bennett Tyler, my two most famous directors, are both long dead, as are most of my other directors and fellow actors. Nora Minton Niles is still alive somewhere, but I have not heard any word of her for years. Even the reporters who covered our movies all seem to be gone, and the few modern viewers who show an interest in silent films weren’t even born when I retired. There is no one else who remembers what we did or who we were. No friends remain from that era. And I have no family.
Perhaps because of the completeness of my erasure from public memory, I have learned to take comfort in my obscurity. For the last forty-two years, I have lived in the same small town house at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, part of a complex that was opened in 1922, the year of my final film. I live a quiet life of morning walks up to the top of Runyan Canyon and afternoons of reading and tea, my routine altered only by phone calls or errands regarding my various properties. Occasionally I go down to the Boulevard to attend a film or a play, and on those evenings, as I pass by the Walk of Fame, I see the tourists taking pictures of the concrete-preserved signatures and hand-prints of my contemporaries—Chaplin, Pickford, Swanson, Fairbanks—as well as those of the stars who followed us to even greater fame—Bogart, Stewart, Monroe. None of my neighbors in the complex know that the older Japanese gentleman in unit 2B was once not only an actor, but an international star. None of them, I think, would believe it. Just last week, in fact, when I went down to my corner pharmacy to purchase medication for my allergies—an affliction that fifty-three years in Los Angeles has done nothing to change—the pharmacist, Mr. Buchanan, a harried man in his middle forties, gave me a funny look and asked, “Mr. Nakayama, you weren’t ever an actor, were you?”
I took the bag of pills from his hand and let out a small laugh. “What gave you that idea, Mr. Buchanan?”
“Mrs. Bradford,” he answered. “You know how she always talks. She mentioned that you were once in a movie or something, but I should have known not to believe her.”
“Our dear Mrs. Bradford has quite an active imagination.”
The pharmacist nodded soberly. “Especially since she lost her husband.” Then he brightened again. “Just imagine. Old Nakayama a movie star. What a funny idea!”
“Indeed!” I answered, forcing a smile.
This Mrs. Bradford has been a friend of sorts these last few years, ever since she and her husband moved into a town house just a half-block down the hill. Not long after they arrived, I happened upon her, in her gardener’s gloves and hat, tending to the bougainvilleas that spilled over her gate. We struck up a conversation about the plants
