I paused for a moment, recalling my Independence Day party—John Vail’s tousled hair, and Ashley Tyler’s. “But what about his family in New York?”
“I don’t know, but my guess is he probably had to marry. Hell, even I was married for a couple of years, until she found me in the sack with her brother. But Ashley wasn’t cut out for the family scene one bit. Why do you think he fled to California?”
I sat there stupidly, trying to take all of this in. Vail’s predilections did not surprise me; I’d known he didn’t have a taste for women. But Tyler? “He was homosexual? I had no idea. I knew his servant was homosexual, because of that morals charge. But Ashley himself? I can’t believe it!”
John threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Jun, you’re such an innocent. Willy Parris wasn’t queer. He was picking up boys in Westlake Park to take back to Ashley.”
I shook my head; I was totally speechless. But as I thought about it, I realized the signs had been there all along. Tyler was so proper, and he never joined the other studio men on their trips to the after-hours clubs and brothels. And although he was surrounded by adoring women, he’d always claimed that his friendships with them were chaste. Now I knew why. I wondered if they knew. I considered the irony of the fact that all of these women, who were so desirable to others, desired the one man who wouldn’t have them. And I thought of Ashley Tyler, or Aaron Towland, and the elaborate fictions he had weaved, which were as much of an accomplishment as anything he ever committed to film.
“Who knew about him?” I asked now.
“Oh, everyone. The studio knew. Why do you think there were so many people at his place the morning he was found? We were trying to get rid of the evidence that he was anything but a red-blooded lady-killer. Of course, we had no idea about his life before pictures. He had us believing he was practically royalty, the clever bastard.”
“You were there that morning?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes, I left before you and Elizabeth arrived. I removed some of his letters, some compromising photos. There wasn’t much, but they wanted me to get rid of it all.”
“What about the revealing pictures of him with the actresses? The lingerie? The perfume-scented letters?”
“There were no pictures—that was pure fiction, and the papers ate it up. Or rather, there were pictures, but like I said, they weren’t of women. The letters were real; women wrote him all the time. Most of the intimate garments were planted—except, interestingly, Nora’s nightgown. She had given him one, the poor desperate thing. Maybe she thought it would somehow make a difference.”
“But he didn’t touch her.”
“No, he didn’t touch her. I never understood why all those women tortured themselves over him—he wasn’t going to change. But Nora really loved him, I think, as much as a young, unbalanced girl can love anybody. She was there that morning too, you know. Showed up right when I did, just desperate to see him. I shuttled her out of there before anyone could see her.”
“Nora was there too?”
“Shit, Jun, the whole studio was there. I’m telling you, they didn’t want anything to be out of their control. Everything the press got hold of was because the studio wanted them to. When we found out who Tyler really was, hell, that threw everyone for a loop. I guess the old bastard was a better actor than we thought.” He shook his head. “But you know, that still leaves the question of who got Nora pregnant. From what I hear, there were more than a couple of candidates.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the rumor was that Nora was stepping out all the time. I don’t know whether she was doing it to prove a point to her mother, or maybe she just needed affection, but there were several men who claimed to have slept with her. You never know if it was just talk, but there was definitely interest. Why do you think Tyler started escorting her around? He wanted to make sure that all those wolves stopped sniffing up to her.”
My mind was working to incorporate this new information. Vail continued to talk.
“The word was that she stopped seeing those men once Tyler put the clamps on her. But obviously someone got through his iron defenses.” He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag. “So who knows who the lucky daddy was? My guess was always Clarence Hand, he had such a crush on her. Or Jacob Steele, since he fucked everything in sight.” He exhaled a stream of smoke and glanced at me sideways. “Then there’s you, I suppose. You always did well with the ladies. And you did find her up there in the mountains.”
I laughed loudly. “That’s funny, John. Amusing indeed. You’ve always had a strange sense of humor.”
All of Vail’s revelations disturbed me, for they made Tyler’s death, and the ruining of the actresses’ careers, seem even more unnecessary. I did wonder, though, if they were accurate. If he could be so incorrect about the end of my own career, then he could have been wrong as well about Tyler’s circumstance. I knew that he was probably right about Tyler—the evidence, including his own experience, was insurmountable. Harriet Cole, on the other hand, clearly hadn’t known. And Nora and Elizabeth either weren’t aware themselves, or had embarked on the futile effort of trying to change him. That the studio had made such an effort to cover up his secret was not a surprise; the news would have been explosive. A homosexual director would have been just as damaging to Hollywood as a scandalous and unsolved murder.
Regarding my own career, however, it was wrong-headed of Vail to assert there was a backlash against me simply because of my race. As I’ve said, my career was
