by Nina Revoyr
And here again he looked directly at me, and I returned his gaze. I could feel my anger rising. I was about to reply to his obvious challenge when Mrs. Ishii interrupted again.
“Politics, always politics,” she said with the air of a wife subjected to one too many tiresome dinners. “You see what I must cope with? We’re invited to a social occasion on my first trip to America, and my husband can’t talk of anything but politics!” She leaned conspiratorially toward Mrs. Matsui, who was looking at her with gratitude. “I don’t know what all these men are complaining about. It’s us who have the truly difficult jobs, dealing every day with the likes of them.”
Mrs. Matsui gave a wide, relieved smile, and the tension began to lift once again. “Indeed!” she concurred, turning toward us men. “Why, if you want to hear about real hardship, you should be here when my husband practices his speeches. He stomps and shouts and rehearses in front of a mirror. Why, it’s enough to drive our cats out of the house!”
It was clear that all serious conversation was over, and after the guests had had one final cup of tea, we collected our coats and began to disperse. When the foreign minister passed me on the way to the door, he stopped and gave a curt farewell. His wife, however, bowed sincerely and smiled.
“I apologize for my husband’s behavior,” she said. “He has a very limited way of seeing the world. And I believe, although he would never admit it, that he envies artistic men.” I detected a glint in her eye. “Especially gentlemen as handsome as yourself.”
As my driver took me home, I thought of Mrs. Ishii and her graciousness, which tempered slightly the unpleasantness of the evening. But the event itself caused a discomfort I still felt, like bad fish that had soured my stomach. Despite Matsui’s defense and Mrs. Ishii’s intervention, I was disturbed by what the foreign minister had implied. And if he felt these things—so strongly that he was bold enough to bring them forth in public—who else might have felt the same way? I experienced a wave of irritation at all of these people for their arrogance and naïvete.
I did not know what they expected of me. Did they think that I, one man, could affect how Americans saw all Japanese? Did they truly believe that I, a mere actor, could influence events in California and the rest of the country? I was certainly aware of my own popularity—just that week my car had been mobbed by a group of American school-girls when my chauffeur stopped at a store for cigarettes— but to think that such fame could be used to shape public affairs seemed utterly fantastical. I was not surprised that the foreign minister disapproved of my roles—as I’ve said myself on many occasions, some of them were troubling. But at least I played characters who were strong and resolute; at least I never took the comical houseboy roles that were favored by lesser actors like Steve Hayashi. Moreover, to assume the kind of stance that Ishii was suggesting would not have helped matters at all. Certainly I wished to play a wider range of parts—but the fact that I was given these starring roles at all was a benefit to all Japanese. One only needed to peruse Variety or the picture magazines to see that Hollywood—America—loved me. And this was what the foreign minister did not appear to understand. Although it might have been true that some Americans did not embrace the Japanese, it wasn’t prudent to meet this negative feeling with negative acts of our own. I did not believe in taking actions that would draw unfavorable attention. I believed, and still believe, that the best way to win acceptance is to be as agreeable—and American—as possible.
Dr. Ishii’s behavior was especially maddening because I was engaged, even at the time of his visit, in an effort that would soon paint the Japanese of Los Angeles in a very positive light. The U.S. government had just released its second war bond, and Mr. Matsui had been working feverishly to encourage people to buy them. The Japanese Association had thrown the full weight of its support behind the effort—running ads in the Rafu Shimpo, passing out notices at churches and temples, posting signs in Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights. Even the motion picture industry had gotten involved—the short film that Hanako and I had shot in Santa Barbara was an appeal to audiences to purchase bonds. The response thus far was encouraging—as it had been with the first bond—but Matsui wanted to orchestrate a large public gesture to show the community’s support for the war. He decided to organize a war bond rally, and asked Hanako, Steve Hayashi, and myself to appear. Hanako declined, citing her continuing commitment in San Francisco. And while I too normally turned down requests to promote particular causes, the importance of this endeavor made me readily agree.
The rally was held in Little Tokyo in the first week of October. The streets were so crowded in every direction that it looked like the entire population of Little Tokyo, waving small American fiags, had gathered at First and San Pedro. After a series of rallying speeches from Matsui, Hayashi, myself, and a few other dignitaries, the crowd divided into lines to purchase bonds. My own line—I was set up at an individual booth—was, of course, the longest, and after hours of smiling and signing autographs and posing for pictures, I was as tired as I had ever been in my life.
The rally’s success—described in the next day’s Los Angeles Times article, “Japs Set Record Buying Liberty Bonds”—directly led to an increase in box office receipts for my just-released new film. The majority of my viewers were—as always—Americans, and this boost in sales gave the studio an idea. Why not organize several stars with current or upcoming films to participate in the war bond effort? And why not, to attract as much attention as possible, send those stars on a trip across the country?
That is how I found myself, in the fall of 1917, a passenger on the “Victory Train.” Perennial had recruited its then-biggest stars—myself, Elizabeth Banks, the comedian Tuggy Figgins, and the cowboy actor Buck Snyder—to travel together on a four-week war bond tour, culminating with a rally in New York City.
The trip was widely publicized for several weeks, and it created such interest on the part of the media that Perennial decided to rent the entire train. Two cars were reserved for the actors—one for Elizabeth and one for the three of us men—another for studio executives, another for members of the press, and several others for the theater owners, exhibitors, and distributors who were critical to a picture’s success. A final car was reserved for the government employees who would coordinate the sale of the bonds.
The tour began with a kick-off rally at the train station in Los Angeles, complete with a live band and several speakers. Benjamin Dreyfus was there—he’d engineered the whole event—as well as Gerard Normandy, David Rosenberg, and a number of stars from Perennial. Even the mayor himself appeared, and after his brief remarks exhorting everyone to support the war effort, he bought his bonds right there on stage. The crowd was tremendous—even larger than the crowd in Little Tokyo—with frenzied people screaming out our names and trying to push through the police lines. But although this event was only blocks from Little Tokyo, none of the faces from that earlier rally were visible here.
When the train finally started pulling out of the station, the four of us actors leaned out the windows and threw fiowers at the crowd while a thousand brilliant fiashbulbs exploded. And as we left downtown Los Angeles, we were met with a surprise—people were lined up for miles on either side of the tracks, shouting our names and waving American flags.
Once we got past San Bernardino, the crowds thinned out and we were able to relax. There was a double set of facing seats in our men’s car, so Elizabeth joined us, sitting next to me and across from Snyder and Figgins. I did not know either of the men very well, although I’d met them at parties and studio functions. The studio’s selection of its male stars was sensible, for both of these men—who were in their late thirties—were too old to enlist, and I, of course, was ineligible.
I’d heard that Snyder was a rather private man, a genuine former cowboy whose success in Hollywood had not altered his basic plainness. He’d been discovered years before at Gower Gulch, and it was said that he still roped cattle and raised horses and sheep on his
ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Figgins was more of an enigma. He had that lovable, self-deprecating big-man persona, and yet out of the public eye he was unpredictable. His given name was Eugene, but he’d earned the nickname Tuggy at a party on the pier in Santa Monica. The story was that there’d been a footrace, several drunken men barreling blindfolded down the pier, and when Figgins broke the ribbon at the finish line, he kept going and fiipped over the rail. He took the ribbon, several balloons, and the wooden barriers they’d been tied to down into the water with him. And as he swam back to shore with this load trailing behind him, someone leaned over the rail and said, “Hey, he looks like a tugboat!” This eventually got shortened to Tuggy, and the nickname stuck. So did his talent for attracting misad-venture. There was talk about drunken fights at questionable night spots and arguments with the studio—talk that might explain his presence on the Victory Train, which could have been an attempt to repair his image. He did not appear to be getting off on the right foot, however. Less than an hour into the trip, he sighed heavily and said, “Well, howsabout a little drink?”
David Rosenberg was on the train too—he’d been sent by Leonard Stillman to keep an eye on us—and at this, he sat up straight in the seat behind me. “Little early, Tuggy, don’t you think?”
It was early—only 10:30 a.m.—but this didn’t seem to deter the comedian. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his coat—which barely closed over his soft, bulky frame—and said, “I’m boiling, sport. Need a spot of something cool. Now be a good boy and rustle up some beer.”
At this, Elizabeth, who’d kicked her shoes off and crossed her legs on the seat, said, “One for me too, David, if it’s not too much of a bother.”
I tried to give her a look, but she avoided my eyes. Then I turned to Snyder, who shrugged. Unconcerned, he lit a cigarette and gazed out the window. When I glanced at David, though, he was pressing his lips together and furrowing his brow. He must have decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of fighting, because he left and came back with the beers.
Despite this beginning, there was a general sense of excitement about the trip. The distributors and theater owners kept knocking on our door, wanting to meet us, and Rosenberg would shoo them away. The train’s service staff would come in with our food, trembling with excitement, and then we’d all read their descriptions in the next day’s papers of our clothes and eating habits.
At our first stop, in Phoenix, we held a rally at a football field, led by a contingent that included the mayor and the U.S. senator from Arizona. One by one, we climbed up on the stage to yell through megaphones on behalf of Liberty Bonds.
“Every bond you buy will help save a soldier’s life!” shouted Snyder.
“Every bond you buy is a hammer in the Kaiser’s coffin!” called out Elizabeth.
Figgins and I expanded on these general themes, as did everyone else who took to the stage.
After we’d finished exhorting the crowd, we each retreated to our booth to sell bonds. All proceeded smoothly until a young redhead reached into my booth and threw her arms around me. I returned her embrace briefly, but when I attempted to pull away, she tightened her grip around the back of my neck. Three policemen appeared, and after their repeated commands to let go of me went unheeded, they had to pry her loose. “Jun, Jun, I love you!” she sobbed, as the police began to pull her away. Before they succeeded, she took something out of her pocket and threw it at me. It was a pair of lacy underwear, and all the men grinned as I plucked it off my shoulder. Figgins, from the next booth, shook his head in amazement. “Normandy told me you were popular with women. But jeez, I had no idea.”
Each official stop was a variation of the first—large crowds that grew as we progressed across the country, smiling politicians, fans crushing through police lines to get to us. We each had our own particular brand of followers. Elizabeth, of course, was loved by all the men—some of them shyly passed her fiowers or love letters; more than one asked her to marry him, and a man in Cleveland paid $10,000 in cash for a clump of her chestnut hair. Young women loved her too—not society girls, but girls in waitress outfits and mothers old before their years, women who knew where Elizabeth had come from and who believed her success gave them hope for their own lives. Figgins’ fans were portly or scrawny boys and their adult equivalents, people who yearned not for heroic figures but for reflections of themselves. The working men were drawn to Buck Snyder, who was the archetypal Western hero. The men who liked me were the sophisticates, the urban men who liked elegant clothing and good cigars; who cared about culture and literature. Both Snyder and I were loved by the women. And there were thousands of women.
One day, somewhere on the great Western plains, the train came to an unexpected halt. Rosenberg, who’d been napping on one of the bench seats in our car, was awakened by the screech of the brakes. He yawned and said, “It must be a whistle stop. No need to get up.”
But then someone else from Perennial—a teenager who was probably somebody’s son—stuck his head in the door. “Gentlemen, would you mind coming back to the rear platform? There’s a crowd out there waiting to see you.”
We had not been expecting to make a stop that day, and Figgins was still in his nightshirt. Snyder was asleep in his upper bunk, with one boot hanging over the side, snores audible even with the noise of the train. I was dressed, as always, in a jacket and tie, but even I had been looking forward to a day with no public appearances. Elizabeth, David told me after he had spoken to her maid, was getting a massage.
“Can’t we skip it?” asked Figgins. “I’m in the middle of something.” What he was in the middle of was a fiask of whiskey; it seemed to be his most treasured possession.
“Better not,” said Rosenberg. “It looks like you’ve got several hundred people out there. The town’s mayor declared a holiday today.”
Figgins groaned and began to arrange his body to stand, which would take him several minutes. David went and shook Snyder’s dangling leg; in a moment the actor, looking sleepy, had jumped down from his bunk and pressed his cowboy hat to his head. Then Elizabeth burst into the car wearing a simple cotton dress, her hair tied up in a bun. “David, I’m just about through with this shit,” she said. But by the time we all marched to the back of the train, she had composed her features into a smile.
The teenager had not been exaggerating. Surrounding the rear car was a large, excited crowd, against the back-drop of land so golden and fiat it seemed to go on forever. As soon as we appeared, a high school band in full uniform struck up a cheerful song. The four of us stood against the railing and smiled for the cameras, while hundreds of children waved miniature flags.
“Elizabeth, Elizabeth!” the young girls squealed. “Let us see your new hairstyle!”
“Buck, did you bring your horse on the train? Show us your gun! Dontcha got your gun?”
“Tuggy, do the shell game!” a large man yelled, referring to one of Figgins’ gags.
And then, directed at me, mostly by the children: “Mr. Jap! Talk Japanese to us! Swing your samurai sword, Mr. Jap!”
None of us fulfilled these specific requests, but we waved and smiled and talked to the crowd. We stayed out on the platform and posed for pictures—Snyder placing his hat on Elizabeth’s head; Figgins imitating a film diva applying her makeup; I pretending to engage Snyder in a duel, our pointed fingers serving as guns—until David Rosenberg gave us a nod and we made our way back inside. As we disappeared we heard the crowd yelling, “Bye!” and, “We love you!” And although none of us had wanted to go outside, we all felt considerably cheered.
During the long nights, when the train made most of its progress, we entertained ourselves as best we could. Elizabeth, Snyder, and I would make our way to the rear cars and play poker with the theater owners and distributors—something that the studio executives enjoyed, because the better these men liked us, the more willing they’d be to buy the new slate of pictures that included our latest titles. Figgins would not join in on these games—he sa
id he didn’t know how to play poker, although the truth was that he was more interested in the company of his fiask and that, despite his jocular image, he was rather solitary. But the rest of us had no such problems. Buck Snyder, not surprisingly, had a marvelous poker face, his laconic visage foiling us time after time as he gradually accumulated wins. I did fairly well, although not as well as Snyder, and the distributors seemed amazed that a Japanese man could speak English and hold his own at a game of cards. And Elizabeth. I still see Elizabeth clearly, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, taking swigs of whiskey straight from the bottle as she squinted at her hand, and cursing like a sailor—to the delight of all the men—whenever she had to fold.
Sometimes the four of us would avoid the rear cars altogether and engage in what Figgins called a “bunk crawl.” We would enlist some of the studio men like Rosenberg as well—after they’d sworn not to tell their bosses. In each man’s bunk, and in Elizabeth’s car, there would be a different drink—beer in Buck Snyder’s bunk, martinis in mine, gin and tonics in Elizabeth’s, and so on. All of us—and at its height, the group grew to fourteen—had to fit into the bunk together before we could take a drink, a tangle of arms and legs, heads resting on shoulders, giggles that caught like sneezes in the overstuffed compartments as we all struggled to swig our drinks without spilling. In David’s bunk, which was dominated by his own bulky presence, I was folded into a corner with Elizabeth pressed against me, and the feel of her skin against my arms, the smell of her hair, affected me more strongly than the liquor.
On more than one occasion, the evening ended with Snyder having company in his bunk. There were three young maids on board—Elizabeth’s, and two who were traveling with the studio men—and each of them, at some point, found her way into the cowboy’s bed. Twice, women came on board at one of the whistle stops, traveling with the train and keeping Snyder company until the next stop, when she disembarked and made her way back home. Figgins, whose bunk was directly across from Snyder’s, slept through these assignations. But I was kept awake by the giggling and clinking glasses—and then later in the night, the loud and steady moans.