by Nina Revoyr
“I loved your film,” she said. Then her voice changed again. “My mother thought it was indecent.”
“I am sorry to hear that. But I think she couldn’t always have disapproved of me. After all, we did eventually work together.”
Nora gazed at me intently, which was rather unsettling, for I did not know whether she was seeing me as I was, or as she had known me in the past. “You and I? My mother let us work together?”
“We appeared in six films together, don’t you remember? The Noble Servant was the first.”
At this point, Amanda must have felt that our visit was going well, for she stood up and smoothed down her apron. “I’ll go bring the tea. Would you like something to eat?”
I shook my head, and felt slightly panicked at the thought of her leaving the room. She must have sensed my apprehension, because she smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Nakayama. She’s perfectly harmless.”
When Amanda departed, I sat rather uncomfortably in the armchair directly across from Nora and held my jacket in my lap. Her mind seemed to have wandered off again, and she stared smiling at a spot beyond my shoulder. I took the opportunity to study her more closely. Beneath the mass of wrinkles, the face was familiar but distorted, as if I were looking at her through a slab of cracked glass. Her lipstick was dark red, and her mascara too thick; beneath her hair I could see the gray roots. She wore a cream-colored dress with wide, elaborate folds, which was buttoned up to her neck and ruffled at the sleeves. The bottom of the dress was dark with dirt, and her shoes—cream—colored as well, and rounded like a ballerina’s slippers—were worn and dirty. Suddenly I realized that the outfit looked familiar. Surely it could not have been her costume from Flying Princess, her comedy from 1917. But as I glanced around at the old furniture, the posters and pictures, I knew it was entirely possible.
“How have you been, Nora?” I asked, my voice too loud.
She didn’t respond for so long that I thought she hadn’t heard me. Just as I was about to repeat my question, she said, “I haven’t made a picture in a very long time. But I’m writing a book now. A novel. Would you like to hear it?”
I hesitated, but then said, “Certainly.”
She stood up and then, more nimbly than I would have expected, rushed over to her piano. There, she picked up an untidy stack of papers and sat down on the piano bench. “Wayward Winds,” she announced, and she began to read. While I understood that the story was about a river and some trees, I could not determine anything more about it. The sentences did not connect, the words were like the spewing of a broken water sprinkler, plentiful but erratic. What struck me more than anything was the sound of her voice, which was at once so familiar and so changed. If I closed my eyes, I could have imagined that this was the Nora of my youth—except I could not, and the person before me was a worn, unbalanced woman, a sad caricature of the lively girl she once had been.
After fifteen minutes or so, she stopped reading and looked up at me expectantly. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “Have you been writing long?”
“Oh yes!” she said smiling. “It helps to pass the time. It gives me something to do until my next role comes along.” At this moment, Amanda reentered the room, bearing a tray of tea cups, a pot, and some scones. She placed these in front of us and poured our tea, and then, after determining that all was in order, turned around and left us again. “Have you been working?” Nora asked, and I was sure now that she knew who I was.
I thought about Bellinger’s film and my upcoming screen test. But looking at her holding that yellowing manuscript, I said, “No. It has been some time since I appeared in a film.”
“We were good actors, weren’t we, Jun? Everyone used to love us.”
“Yes, we were.”
“Everybody loved us. You and me, and Mary, and Elizabeth Banks, and Charlie Chaplin, and Ashley Tyler.”
“Yes, Ashley Tyler,” I said, and my pulse quickened at speaking his name. “As a matter of fact, Nora, I wanted to talk to you about him.”
“I miss Ashley.” She gazed sadly at the floor. “He was always so good to me.”
“I believe that he cared for you deeply.”
“My mother said he only wanted one thing from me, but it wasn’t like that. He loved me for my mind.”
I paused for a moment, wondering how much she knew. “Your mother perhaps did not see Mr. Tyler for who he truly was.”
“He said I didn’t have to do what she told me to do. He treated me like a grown-up. He believed in me!”
I did not know what to say to her, so I looked down at my tea.
“I saw him again,” she said. “I saw him before they buried him. I paid a funeral attendant to let me in, and I kissed him and gave him a rose. I wanted to lie down there in the casket with him, but the attendant took me away.” She stared at a spot beyond my head, and I wondered what she was seeing. Then she said, “It wasn’t his baby, was it?”
I held fast to the chair to steady myself and worked to calm my breathing. “No, Nora,” I managed to answer. “No, it wasn’t.”
“My mother thought it was his, you know. My mother thought it was Ashley’s. But he never loved me that way. Never. Not even when I wanted him to.”
I drew myself up straight and spoke softly, as if trying to keep a frightened animal from scurrying away. “Excuse me, Nora, but there are some matters I’d like to discuss with you about that time. Or rather, some things I hope you’ll choose not to discuss. There’s a young man from Perennial named Josh Dreyfus, who happens to be Benjamin Dreyfus’ grandson, and he may come here asking questions about me.”
She looked at me as if just noticing my presence. “Benjamin Dreyfus’ grandson?”
“Yes, do you remember Benjamin Dreyfus, from the studio? His grandson may want to know a few things about me, and perhaps about you as well. About some of the things that we experienced together.”
“Benjamin Dreyfus’ grandson,” she said. “Yes, he was already here.”
I had just leaned over to pick up my tea, and at this, my hand stopped in midair. “Josh Dreyfus was already here?”
“He came last week. He wanted to know about you. I didn’t like him and asked Amanda to send him away.”
I sat back, my mind racing in several different directions. “So you didn’t tell him anything about the past?”
“He tricked me! He said he was Benjamin. But I saw his hair and his sunglasses and I didn’t want him in my house.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her. In her condition, she might remember an encounter with Ben Dreyfus as if it had occurred last week. “If he comes back, are you going to talk to him?”
“He wasn’t a nice man! I don’t want him in my house!”
Her voice was loud and she sounded upset, and I knew her state of mind would not be improved by the question I had to ask next. “Nora,” I said gently, “what happened to the baby?”
“Gone, baby,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Gone, baby. Baby gone.”
“What do you mean by gone, Nora? Did you go to the doctor?”
“My mother took it,” she said. “I didn’t want her to. My mother took everything I loved. Just ask Ashley.”
At this, she began to cry, a soft sound that gradually built into a wail. She rocked back and forth and hugged herself, and the sound of her crying brought Amanda rushing back into the room. “I think you should go now,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Miss Amanda. I don’t know what happened.” And I was sorry—not only for that day, but for all of the days, forty-two years ago and all the time between.
“There, there,” she said, putting an arm around Nora, who calmed down almost immediately. Her cries quieted to whimpers, and she looked at the floor; she no longer seemed aware that I was present. In another moment, Amanda stood and led me to the foyer. I glanced back toward the living room one last time, more sad than I could find the words to say.
“She has good days and bad days,” Amanda said by the door.
“These last few days have been difficult.”
“She mentioned that Josh Dreyfus was here. Is that true?”
“Yes. He came two days ago. He didn’t stay long.”
“Nora said he came last week.”
“She’s just confused. He came and immediately began to pressure her. A most distasteful young man.”
“I’m sorry I upset her.”
She peered at me suspiciously again. “As I said, she’s not used to visitors. But thank you for the fiowers. I’m sure she’ll enjoy them.”
With that, I left the house and drove shakily down to the pier at Santa Monica. I needed to be outside and to breathe some fresh air, so I walked along the boardwalk for several hours until the sun began to set over the ocean. Then, exhausted, I drove back home.
As I sit here this evening in the Oak Grove Pub, I’m both troubled and relieved by the day’s events. On the one hand—and I know this is entirely selfish—I’m glad that Nora wasn’t willing to answer Dreyfus’ questions. But on the other, given her state of mind, there is no telling what she remembers or thinks of the past, and it is always possible she might speak to him later. Besides that, I was truly disturbed by her condition. It distressed me greatly to see her so alone in her mind, and to think that I might have had something to do with her condition. I suffered as well because of what happened to Ashley Tyler—admittedly not as much as either she or Elizabeth, but my own troubles were not insignificant. And yet I have my health and comfort and certainly my mind, all things that have eluded poor Nora.
To be sure, seeing her again—and having even our limited conversation about the past—has also stirred up certain difficult recollections. For truth be told, in the atmosphere of hysteria that followed the Tyler murder, I was not as sensitive to Nora’s circumstances as I would have liked. In my urgency to protect my own name and career, I did not offer her solace or comfort. I did not, as any decent man would have done, try to speak to her about matters that concerned us both. And if I now have questions about things that transpired; if I now feel excluded from decisions in which I might have had some say, the fault is completely my own. Still, I cannot help but wonder what might have been had I tried to talk to her after Tyler was killed. Nora—or her mother—might have made different choices, and the long decades that followed the end of my career might not have been so full of regret.
Had Tyler not been killed, Nora’s relationship with her mother might have evolved into something different. It was already apparent that Nora was growing tired of Harriet’s constant supervision, and during the filming of The Latest Game, our penultimate film together, I began to notice a change in the way she behaved around her mother. Instead of listening to—or at least tolerating—her mother’s comments and advice, she would simply turn from her, and sometimes go so far as to get up and leave the room. During a review of the rushes, when Harriet criticized the angle at which her daughter held her head, Nora stood up, stomped her foot, and exclaimed, “Mother!” A few days later, I saw Nora and her mother on the Perennial lot, gesturing and shouting at each other. Even Nora’s appearance had changed—she’d cut the long, fiowing hair into a less girlish style, and had abandoned the fiowery gossamer dresses for the sleek, fitted dresses of the ’20s. It was noted by several people that she was starting to look more grown-up. I wasn’t truly surprised when, a few weeks later, I began to hear word of Nora going out at night, attending various parties; apparently Harriet hadn’t found a way to keep her daughter from escaping their huge new mansion. One evening, I even saw Nora at the Cocoanut Grove, dancing with Charlie Chaplin. There was a new, more worldly aspect in her carriage and expression, and I found my eyes returning to her again and again. She appeared happy and intoxicated, looser than I’d ever seen her, almost desperate in her need to be free.
I do not know what caused this sudden marked rebellion. Perhaps she’d finally realized that it was she and not her mother who held the real power in the family. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of a young woman coming of age. Or perhaps it was simply that she was in love, since her most common companion during her nights on the town was Ashley Bennett Tyler. The young Mr. Riner Jones was gone, and for a while he was replaced by several other, older men. But whoever Nora might be entangled with in a given week or month, it was Tyler who accompanied her most often. Nora’s mother was aware that she was going out in the evenings; one of the arguments I overheard was about a party she’d attended without her mother’s consent. I almost felt sorry for the woman, since the one thing she had control of, her creation, as I’m sure she saw it, appeared to be slipping away. On the other hand, I was glad, in an almost paternal manner, to see Nora enjoying herself and achieving some separation from Mrs. Cole.
That evening I saw her dancing at the Cocoanut Grove may have been the last carefree night she ever had. For it was only a few weeks later that the incident occurred that changed everything forever. It happened during the making of Into the Wild, the otherwise undistinguished work that achieved a certain notoriety because it was the last picture that Tyler directed, as well as the last film in which both Nora and I appeared. Indeed, it almost didn’t proceed to shooting at all—the studio had not been for it, but Tyler convinced them, partly by promising to scale back my role. In subsequent years, I’ve often wished that he had not succeeded; the course of all our lives might have been very different.
Into the Wild was filmed up in what is now the Angeles National Forest, in a small open space enclosed by cedars and Douglas firs. This clearing was the size of a house and lit with a nearly preternatural light, which filtered in through a break in the branches far above the forest floor and hit the ground as bright and focused as a spotlight. Every morning for more than a week, a caravan of cars would make its way up through the winding mountain roads, followed by a truck which carried the film equipment. The trip was only twenty miles, but it took well over two hours, as most of the road was not paved. We drove up in street clothes and got into costume in unheated temporary sheds. Our hands would shake in the sharp morning cold.
The plot involved an explorer, played by Tyler, his bride, played by Nora, and his Indian wilderness guide, which was me. Tyler was both acting and directing, and I saw immediately the effect that this dual role had on Nora. Playing Tyler’s wife seemed to stir her to a new level of agitation, so that when she talked to him, or touched his shoulders, or enfolded herself in his arms, there was a fiush in her cheeks that had nothing to do with performance. During the few scenes when their characters quarreled, her anger and disappointment seemed utterly real, and she would continue to rage or cry after the camera stopped rolling. Even these shows of emotion, though, seemed different somehow—not girlish pouting, but rather more womanly suffering. As usual, her mother wasn’t present, since Tyler had barred her from the set. But on the last day of filming, Mrs. Cole made the trip to the forest uninvited, and following a brief argument with Tyler—and after she informed him that her driver had left—he reluctantly allowed her to stay.
We were filming a scene where the explorer finds that the party’s belongings have been ransacked in the night. He is angry at first, and then consoling to his wife, who fears correctly that there are hostile Indians—one of them played by John Vail—lying in wait in the woods. The scene requires a subtle shift from surprise to anger to fear, and Tyler kept reshooting it to get Nora’s expression right. Harriet, standing a few feet to the left of the camera, was growing increasingly angry. She clenched her fists and paced in a tight back-and-forth pattern. To this day, I do not know what caused her to be so upset—whether it was the sight of Ashley Tyler laying hands on her daughter (his character embraced hers when she saw what had become of their belongings), or the realization that Tyler disapproved of her, or if something else had happened between her and Nora. But as Tyler and Nora continued to reshoot the scene, Harriet became more vocal.
“Hold your head up straight,” she instructed her daughter. “The cameraman can’t see your face.” Then: “Why
are you wearing that ridiculous dress? Couldn’t the studio have found something better?” Then: “You look like a stupid starstruck child, gazing into his face like that.”
As Harriet spoke, Nora grew more upset, which resulted in her missing her cues and stumbling over her marks and forcing Tyler to do more takes. Watching this, I felt embarrassed and powerless. The men in the film crew were bothered too. The cameraman, with his hand still cranking the camera, gave Harriet dirty looks; the prop man stepped right in front of her holding a reflector in order to cut off her view. John Vail, his face covered with paint and head crowned with feathers, lit a cigarette and mumbled under his breath, “Wicked old dried-up bitch.” Tyler himself, typically, attempted to ignore Harriet, until finally one of her jabs made Nora burst into tears.
“Mrs. Cole,” he said gently. “Please, you’re upsetting your daughter, and it’s making it difficult for her to concentrate on the scene.”
“My daughter’s moods are none of your concern!” insisted Mrs. Cole. “You are simply her director, and don’t ever forget it. Stop acting like she’s your wife!”
“Mother!” pleaded Nora.
“You shut up, you little slut. Let me finish.”
But Nora didn’t let her. Before Harriet had the chance to say anything else, Nora turned and ran into the woods. We were all so shocked that none of us reacted at first; then, finally, Tyler called out after her. He and Vail hurried off in the direction she’d gone, with Harriet close behind. They returned a few minutes later, without Nora.
“I’m sure she’ll be back in a moment,” said Harriet. “She’s very prone to dramatic scenes lately.”
“Well, if you’d just ease off of her—” began Tyler.
“I can say what I want! She’s my daughter!”
“She’s not a child! No matter what you choose to believe. She’s a woman, and she’s tired of you treating her like property!”
“And since when do you have such intimate knowledge of my daughter’s feelings?”