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 flowers 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
