“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 flourishing 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
