The Age of Dreaming

that flourished in our area—she and Mr. Bradford had just moved inland from Malibu—and that topic opened up into many others over the next several weeks, as we discovered a mutual love of classical music, literature, and theater. Less than a year after my new neighbors arrived, Mr. Bradford was struck with Alzheimer’s disease. Mrs. Bradford had to care for him, which grew more difficult as the disease progressed, and her weekly breakfasts with me eventually became her one regular time of respite. Just before he died, at a moment when she seemed particularly burdened by her imminent loss, I mentioned, on the spur of the moment, that I had once been an actor of some renown. I thought this admission might cheer her somehow, or at least distract her from her own sad circumstance. But her alarmingly blue eyes opened wide and she said, “Mr. Nakayama, are you pulling my leg?”

“No, Mrs. Bradford,” I said. “I appeared in more than sixty films. If you refer to Davis Croshere’s definitive History of the Silent Film Era, you will find a short account of my career, as well as several photographs.”

She apparently did so, for the very next day she called with the news that a former colleague at the Los Angeles Public Library, where she’d been the director of program development for more than twenty years, had found references to me in several books.

“And to think,” she said, “that all this time, without even knowing it, I’ve been spending Saturday mornings with the man who used to make young women faint in the theaters, the man the magazines called the ‘Dashing Oriental.’ Why didn’t you ever tell me you were famous, Mr. Nakayama? And why does no one speak of you now?”

She then informed me that she intended to see all of my films, and to learn everything she could about my career. I didn’t think much about the first possibility—most of my films, like most silents in general, were simply not preserved, and the few copies that have survived are parts of private collections. And when she did go searching through the histories of film, I trust that she found very little. There are just a few short paragraphs to document my ten years in Hollywood, scant words to describe the sum of a decade’s work. I could have pointed her to them and saved her the trouble of looking. There is Mr. Croshere’s classic, which she had already seen, Mr. DeMille’s autobiography, J.B. Stark’s Encyclopedia of Film, Terry Canterbury’s Hollywood: A Historical Perspective, and William Anderson’s Black and White and Silent: The Birth of American Film. In each of these works, there is at least a full-page account of my career, and in the books by Mr. Croshere and Mr. Canterbury, I warrant a full subsection of a chapter.

While both men are able critics and clear lovers of film, I believe their analyses of my career to be incomplete, with facile and inaccurate conclusions. For example, they both greatly exaggerate the disapproval in Japan and Little Tokyo of the role I played as the casino owner in Sleight of Hand, and they mistakenly assert that my career was later affected by rising sentiment against the Japanese. In the first instance, it is true that some officials in Japan, and a few of the more conservative members of the Japanese community in Los Angeles, objected to my role as Sasaki. They thought his characterization as a deceptive seducer reflected poorly on the Oriental male. But I have always thought it was misguided to attach too much significance to something so fanciful and ephemeral as film. Moreover, the fact that I even appeared in such prominent roles was itself an indication of racial progress.

It is also a mistake to assume that the waning of my career was attributable to prejudice. While it may be true that some Americans did not embrace the Japanese, this had little to do with the reception of my films, and the accounts by both historians overlook the extent to which I engineered my own departure. The fact is, my retirement from film in 1922 was completely voluntary. My star was simply too bright to be extinguished by a handful of narrow-minded studio executives, and while I certainly appreciate these writers’ indignation, their accounts are simply inaccurate. Nobody forced me to stop making pictures. It was I who made that decision.

My career ended, however, just as the Hollywood publicity machine was fully maturing, and perhaps that is why I am now almost totally absent from the national collective memory of early film. My contemporaries, like Chaplin and Fairbanks, were once no more recognizable than I—but from almost precisely the moment I stopped making films, their fame grew, while my own began to fade.

Yet what has surprised me more than my excision from official documentation of early Hollywood is my absence from more personal accounts. Mr. DeMille is the only director who discussed me extensively in his memoirs, and Faith Valiant, the accomplished dramatic actress, was once quoted as saying that everything she knew about the craft of acting she learned from watching me. But in Fairbanks’ memoirs, in Pickford’s, my name appears a total of three times, and William Moran only lists me as one of his “discoveries” without going on to discuss my future success. All accounts of the Normandy Players make me sound like a bit player, and the flurry of articles on the unsolved murder of Ashley Bennett Tyler barely mentioned me at all. This, despite the fact that I starred in twelve of his pictures, and that I, along with the teenage actress Nora Minton Niles, was set to start shooting a new film with him the very week he died. This, despite the fact that I was held by the police for several hours for questioning and released with the threat of further interrogation. I was his player, I was one of the people who helped secure his fame, and yet