“… isn’t that right, Jun?” said Moran, with an affectionate elbow to my arm.
“Excuse me, Mr. Moran?” I said, bringing myself back to my immediate company.
“I was telling Gerard that I’ve got to write you up another contract, before one of these sharks here tries to steal you away.”
This was a topic we had discussed frequently in recent weeks. My two-picture contract had been fulfilled, and I was under no obligation to work with Moran again. With the success of my films—and with the American public’s growing interest in Japanese subject matter—I was suddenly a desirable property. But at that moment, I had no interest in discussing contract matters. “Pardon me, Mr. Moran,” I said. “I was momentarily distracted.”
Normandy, another rising young filmmaker who had shown interest in my work, looked over to where I had been staring. “Ah, you’ve been distracted by Miss Banks,” he said, laughing. “As you can see, many gentlemen are distracted by Miss Banks.”
At that very moment, the four men standing around her burst into laughter again, and she happened to look over in my direction. Our eyes met and she smiled, tilting her head slightly as if asking me a question. Then she turned back to her admirers.
“Who is Miss Banks, sir, if I may ask?”
“She’s an actress,” Normandy answered. “A comic actress, not your speed. Very charming, but a real handful— temperamental as hell, and a bit too friendly with the bottle. I’ve worked with her once, and it was an experience I won’t soon forget. They don’t call her the Mistress of Mayhem for nothing.”
“We better keep Jun away from her,” Moran said, smiling. “If she has the same effect on him that she does on
those
poor fools, she’ll use him up and leave us with the shell of an actor. And besides, she’s too old for you, Jun. I believe she’s twenty-five.”
“Ah, it may be too late,” said Normandy. Miss Banks had broken away from her circle of men and was proceeding to walk straight toward us. She appeared to feel no trace of self-consciousness or modesty, despite the eyes that reached toward her like hands. It was clear from the way she carried herself—confidently, smiling—that she was accustomed to being watched.
“Mr. Normandy,” she said, offering her long, graceful hand, and the director, smiling wryly and suddenly fiushed, obligingly bent over and kissed it. “Mr. Moran,” she said, curtseying. “How good to see you.” She did not even acknowledge Mrs. Moran, who glared at her disapprovingly. Then she turned her attention to me. “I’m Elizabeth Banks. And who might you be?”
When her dark green eyes fixed on my face, all language momentarily escaped me. “Jun Nakayama,” I finally managed, bowing deeply. “I have made two films for Mr. Moran.”
“Ah, we should all be so lucky,” she said, giving my employer a bemused look. “Mr. Moran has never expressed an interest in
my
services. I
must
say I’m rather insulted.”
Moran smiled. “I don’t think I’m the proper director to bring out your genius, Miss Banks. You know my strong suit is serious drama.”
“Well, where did you find
this
one?” she asked, nodding at me. “His presence has made your pictures a hundred times better. They’re almost watchable now.”
Both men laughed, and I realized that she knew precisely who I was. I, to my dismay, was unaware of
her
work, although the two directors’ responses to her, and the whispered pointing from the other partygoers, confirmed that she was indeed a figure of importance. Just then, the director James Greene approached and engaged the attention of both Normandy and Moran. That left me alone to contend with Miss Banks.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Nakayama,” she said. “The screen does
not
do you justice.”
I had no idea how to respond. Despite her compliment, or because of it, I felt tongue-tied and hopelessly awkward. And I was stirred by her voice, which was textured and deep, making even the most innocent phrases sound like veiled promises.
“You know,” she said, leaning in so close I could feel her breath on my cheek, “Moran’s a good director, but he’s not a
top rate
director. You should talk to some other people before you sign another contract.”
“He has been very kind to me,” I protested.
“I know, I know,” she said. “But with the right men behind you, you could become a bigger star than Moran could ever imagine.” As she said the word “star,” she lay her hand on my arm—and even through the material of my jacket and shirt, I could feel the heat of her touch. I sucked in my breath and felt a current course through me, as powerful and direct as an electric shock. And it was at that moment that Miss Banks smiled up at me and said, “You certainly are a handsome devil, aren’t you?”
All the qualities I witnessed in Elizabeth Banks that night—her bemusement and beauty, her directness, her effect on men—were qualities that remained consistent throughout the years of our acquaintance. In the shamefully small amount that has been written about Elizabeth, there is—perhaps inevitably—far too much emphasis on her personal entanglements and her role in some of the period’s more unfortunate episodes. She was, indeed, a compelling figure, and the story of her rise from a humble past inspired many young women in that time of possibility. But what survives of her in history is a sadder portrayal, and it is unfair that she is remembered now only in relation to events over which she had little control. The few written accounts that do address her career pay scant attention to her actual films, and almost universally ignore what a singular talent she was. Those historians did not know her as I did. And although I made it home alone on the evening of that party in Whitley Heights, I was ignited by the memory of Elizabeth’s smile and touch, and stayed awake half the night planning what I would say on the occasion I should see her again.
I met Elizabeth just after I’d finished working for two months in succession with Hanako Minatoya. Through April and May, during the making of our films, we saw one another every day. Since we were both still living in Little Tokyo at that time, and since Mr. Moran’s fifty-acre filming complex was in Pacific Palisades, Moran would send a car to pick us up and bring us to the ocean. The driver took Sunset Boulevard, which was then just a dirt road that wound through canyons and hills, passing citrus groves so lush that one could reach out the window and pluck oranges right off the trees. Los Angeles was beautiful on those early spring mornings. The sun rose slowly from behind the mountains and cast an ethereal light across the city; the air was filled with the scent of fiowers and the morning songs of birds. There was a stillness then, a perfection, that existed at no other time of the day, and I felt fortunate to be able to share it with such agreeable company. The trip to the Palisades took an hour and a half, and during the drive, Hanako and I would talk of anything that came to our minds—the theater, the growing numbers of Japanese in California, the people, sights, and foods we missed from home. We would speak in both English and Japanese, the two languages woven together, between them making possible a world of topics and descriptions that neither could encompass alone.
It was on one of these drives that Miss Minatoya described to me the unusual circumstances of her upbringing. She had come to the U.S. with her parents at the age of fourteen to take a driving tour of California. But while Hanako was at the home of family friends in San Francisco, her parents, the Kuriyamas, were killed in an automobile accident. Since she had little remaining family left in Japan—both sets of her grandparents were dead, and her older sister had a family of her own—she decided to accept her hosts’ invitations to stay with them in San Francisco. She assumed their name and entered an American high school, but when Japanese students were barred from attending public schools, she decided to follow her dream and join a theater troupe. With that company—and much against the Minatoyas’ wishes—she traveled around the country, which is how I came to see her perform in Madison. Within a year, she was the head of the company, and two years after that, she and several other members were signed by William Moran.
“And what about you, Nakayama-san?” she asked when she had finished. “Is your family still back in Japan?”
“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t seen them in several years. In some ways it seems like I just left Nagano; in others it feels like I’ve been away forever.”
Hanako nodded. “They must have been sorry to see their eldest son go.”
“I am not the eldest, despite my name. In fact, I am the second son. But on the day of my birth, I struggled to escape my mother’s arms, and my father said he knew I would always choose my own path. He gave me the
-ichiro
designation to prepare me.”
She smiled. “He sounds like a wise man, your father.”
“Yes, I suppose he was.”
Once we arrived at Moran’s filming complex, it was as if we had entered not one but several different worlds. Because the landscape was so varied, any number of films could be shot at once. In the valleys, you might see dozens of horses and men recreating a Western shootout. In the hills, the small figures of a group of fictional prospectors, panning the rivers for gold. Down below, a shipwrecked crew on the beach, building a fire in the sand. And in the fiats, a replica of a Japanese village, with a red Shinto shrine, rickshaws, pagoda-roofed building façades, even fichus trees with glued-on bits of white paper that were meant to be cherry blossoms. There was constant activity at the complex, constant noise, and Moran, when he wasn’t busy directing, traveled from set to set on horse-back, surveying his various projects.
It is amusing, in retrospect, to think how primitive our efforts were in those early years. For my first two films, all of the interiors were shot on outdoor sets, with canvases draped over them to soften the sun. All copies of
Jamestown Junction
have long been lost, but if the film had survived, and if you could see it, you would notice that during the office scene the papers on my desk are disturbed by a mysterious breeze. And in the very next scene, you would see a shadow moving in the corner, caused by the canvas fiapping in the wind. These were the conditions in which we shot at that time, and because we worked without the benefit of artificial light, there was always a rush to complete the day’s filming before the shadows grew too deep in the afternoon. In late May, when we endured an unexpected heat wave, Moran had giant ice blocks delivered to the sets, and powerful fans placed behind them to blow the cool air in the direction of the players. If it rained, filming would halt altogether, and we would scramble to move all the furniture and props under the complex’s few permanent roofs. But despite these challenges, everyone remained in good spirits. We were working, yes, but it felt like play, and it was hard to comprehend the tremendous good fortune that had suddenly befallen me.
Through the making of both films, Hanako gave me constant guidance, which I eagerly accepted. And I immediately discerned the difference between myself, an untrained amateur, and a seasoned professional who knew everything about the art of acting. Indeed, she was perhaps the largest influence on my development as an actor—with the possible exception, a few years later, of Ashley Bennett Tyler.
“There is no audience to see you,” she said one day in Japanese, as I gestured expansively to convey my anguish at the death of one of my fellow soldiers. “You don’t need to project like you would in the theater, as if you’re trying to be seen by the person in the last row. Pretend the camera is the one man you’re playing to.”
On another occasion when I was perhaps
too
under-stated, Hanako approached me after Moran called “cut.” “You’re painting a picture with your body,” she said. “Think of pantomime. You must express physically what you can’t with your voice. And use your face, your eyes. You have such eyes. They alone speak volumes.”
Moran nodded in agreement, although he couldn’t have understood, and I adjusted my actions accordingly. I was surprised by the extent to which he let Hanako direct things—not only my own performance, but also the placement of props, even the movements of the other actors. Yet all of her suggestions improved the films. And between her advice and Moran’s direction, I was slowly learning what to do. The transition from theater, which depends on dialogue, was more difficult than I had imagined—indeed, many stage actors, even those who didn’t disdain the new medium of moving pictures, did not make the change successfully. Hanako Minatoya was one of the few who was equally accomplished in both realms. I was learning under her tutelage every day.
On certain days, when we weren’t in scenes, Hanako and I would leave the sets and walk into the hills. They were vibrant with color, with fiowers wherever one looked— blue brodiaea and lupin, Mariposa lilacs, the wispy orange California poppies. Even the cacti, which she loved, put forth dense and vibrant fiowers, unexpected bursts of yellow and pink against their sturdy, sharp, untouchable bodies. The beauty of that landscape, when the air was cool, the sun glinting off the ocean, and the breeze carrying the scent of the fiowers, was so dramatic I could hardly believe it real. And I was seeing it, feeling it, in the company of an artist whose work I had admired for years.
One day on our walk we were discussing a well-known actor, and Hanako surprised me by her reaction to his name. “He is nothing but a face for the fan magazines,” she said dismissively. “He is not a genuine actor.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, although I didn’t disagree.
“It is impossible to distinguish one of his roles from another. He is always the same, and it is obvious why. In order to project a believable fiction, the actor himself must have substance. You must possess something
internally
to perform it externally. He has only a fraction of the talent of an artist such as you.”
I was, of course, deeply fiattered by her compliment, and I did not know how to respond. Hanako continued talking of this actor and that, without noting my reaction. That night, however, and for many nights after, I recalled what she had said with much pleasure.