He paused, looked down, and then back up at me again.
“So no, Mr. Nakayama, I’m not anxious to talk. I mean, some good happened out of that mess for me, but a lot of bad came of it too. It changed my career, my whole life, can’t you see?”
He gave me a pained expression, and I followed his hands, which took in the entire room. I did not understand his meaning at first. Then I noticed the fineness of everything—the crystal chandeliers, the handcrafted furniture, the Oriental rugs.
I avoided his pleading eyes and said, “I see.”
His breathing had grown more labored, his voice husky and raw. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Nakayama. I’m so sorry about what happened to you.”
I continued to look away from him and tried to digest what he’d told me. “It was the others who suffered, Mr. Hopkins. I was fine.”
“I always thought you could have come through it, though. You could have pushed back. I never understood why you didn’t.”
I smiled wryly. “There were other things that kept me from resuming my work.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “I suppose there were.”
He lowered his head and we each sat alone with our thoughts. As I reflected on what he had said and implied, I suddenly realized that he was referring to my friendship with Elizabeth, as if that alone had been the reason for my visit. In his mind, that entanglement was problem enough— as indeed it would have been in our time. I decided it was best to let him continue to believe that Elizabeth was all I wished to keep private.
Finally, Hopkins raised his head again, and spoke more evenly. “You don’t have to worry, Mr. Nakayama. If anyone does come around, I’m not telling them a thing. That case died and was buried with Ashley Tyler, and I’m not about to dig it up.”
Two days after my drive out to Santa Monica, my conversation with Owen Hopkins stays with me. It is not simply that his face, aged and yet so familiar, took me back to the hours I spent answering questions in a dim room at the old police headquarters. It is also his regret about what happened to the rest of us. I was not surprised that Hopkins had been dissuaded from pursuing his leads, but I didn’t know that the police had treated Elizabeth so cavalierly, and that news was deeply troubling. For more than anyone else, Elizabeth’s life was altered needlessly by the events of 1922. And it is not a stretch to think that everything that befell her in subsequent years was the direct result of Tyler’s death and its aftermath. Who is to say that, had the truth come out, Elizabeth could not have continued acting? Who is to say that she might not even be alive somewhere—years past her days of stardom, yes, but still full of the contradictions and passion and life that so compelled me in the time that I knew her?
CHAPTER TEN
In truth, things had already begun to change for Elizabeth before Ashley Tyler was murdered. The late teens and early ’20s were not kind to her, and it is possible that even without the Tyler affair, her time in film would have drawn to a close. Indeed, several historians have asserted that the Tyler situation only hastened the inevitable. For if one considers that period more closely, it becomes sadly apparent that Elizabeth Banks was on the decline.
Although none of us could possibly have known it at the time, the war bond tour was the pinnacle of Elizabeth’s fame. Not long after the Great War ended, her stature began to change. It wasn’t obvious at first—she still had star billing in two or three films, and was still, for a while, a fan favorite. But gradually the roles got smaller and became distinctly fewer, with more and more time lapsed between them. The fan magazines began to feature her less often, and then buried her in their back pages. The most status-conscious Los Angeles hostesses—who had never been comfortable with Elizabeth’s inelegant background— stopped inviting her to parties. I do not fully understand why these things occurred, or why the studio executives lost confidence. In hindsight, it is easy to say that times were changing—that the sultry women and girlish pixies of the 1910s were being replaced by the urban flappers of the ’20s. Or that the studio had finally tired of her drinking and inconsistency, when there were hundreds of other young hardworking girls lined up to take her place. But I believe that the answer was more mundane; that pictures were simply leaving her behind. Elizabeth was, at thirty-five, a mature woman; she already had been when I met her years earlier. In picture terms, she was already old. What the screen loved was fresh-faced children.
In the months after we returned from the war bond tour, we saw each other several times a week. Sometimes at my house but more often at hers, we would spend the evening together. Elizabeth would dismiss her maid for the night and cook dinner for me herself; she made what she said were the “foods of her youth”—Polish sausage and sauerkraut, beef and vegetable goulash, stuffed cabbage, and crusted tuna casserole. I would sit at the kitchen table drinking martinis while she cooked, and at those times, as she stood in front of the stove,
