The Age of Dreaming (36 page)

BOOK: The Age of Dreaming

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And even though my few years in the public eye were followed by decades of obscurity, I harbor no regrets about my career. I had a brief moment of unbelievable glory—but that is more than most people ever have. Certainly my time in movies could have lasted much longer. And of course I wish that—if only once—I could have portrayed a hero. Yet surely there was something of value in the roles I did play. Surely my very presence on the silver screen was itself some kind of victory. If I could never play adventurers like Fairbanks, or lovers like Valentino, at least I played characters of substance. For it is better—is it not?—to attempt to change things slowly than not to strive for progress at all.

It is true that my career and life might have played out very differently. But consider the fates of my closest contemporaries. Ashley Tyler was murdered, Elizabeth Banks killed herself with drink, William Moran died of a heart attack before he was forty, and Nora Minton Niles went mad. It is hard to claim, when one considers their lives, that what happened to me was so awful.

I remember Elizabeth telling me once that she could never go home to her little town in Missouri and resume the quiet life she had fied from. I remember her saying that such a fate seemed worse than death, for once her world had expanded to include so much, the thought of it shrinking again was unbearable. I do not recall what I thought of her feeling at the time, but I certainly don’t share her sentiments now. One thing this last year has taught me is the virtue of companionship, the quiet joy of ordinary pleasures. I grieve for the way my errors of judgment affected Nora and Elizabeth, and of course I regret the fate of Ashley Tyler. I also mourned for years, selfishly, the destruction of my career, all the pictures that I could have made, and didn’t. But it is too late for me to do anything about those past failures except to claim them, accept them as my own. And this I have done and must do in order to accept the recent blessings that life has unexpectedly provided me. For I have come onto something—not totally divorced from my past, but with a life and a value all its own. And I would not trade what I have today, the afternoons with my son, for any measure of fame or success.

It is now a full month into the baseball season, and next week we’re taking Charlie to a game. Dodger Stadium sits high on a hill just off the Pasadena Freeway, and on Saturday afternoon we will pick him up and take him there. I am told that the view of the mountains from inside the stadium is lovely, particularly when they’re lit orange and red at sunset. I am told that the Dodgers’ former star and one of Charlie’s heroes, Jackie Robinson, grew up in Pasadena, and perhaps after the game we will try to find his house. The weekend after that we will go to Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel and several other rides have opened on the pier. Soon after that we will go to the zoo, which has just received two new lions. There appear to be an infinite number of activities in Los Angeles, things I never thought to do until recently. But my son is interested in everything, and wants to go everywhere, and Mrs. Bradford is always happy to join us. She has her own suggestions for places we might visit, and she and Charlie talk excitedly about where they want to go next. My plan is simply to take them wherever they wish. I am sure that they will keep me quite busy.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: Jennifer Gilmore and Kyoko Uchida, my indispensable readers. Richard Parks, for his patience and belief. Johnny Temple, for being the most committed and conscientious publisher any writer could ever hope for. Johanna Ingalls, for her tireless work and unflagging sense of humor.

I am indebted to several written works and their authors, particularly Jeanine Basinger,
Silent Stars
; Kevin Brownlow,
The Parade’s Gone By
… and
Behind the Mask of Innocence—Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era
; Roger Daniels,
The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion
; Sessue Hayakawa,
Zen Showed Me the Way
; Sidney D. Kirkpatrick,
A Cast of Killers
; John Modell,
The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles 1900–1942
; and Tony Villecco,
Silent Stars Speak: Interviews with Twelve Cinema Pioneers
. I am also grateful to Daisuke Miyao for his brilliant work on Hayakawa, which helped me understand the kinds of roles my own fictional actors would have been able to play. In addition, I learned a great deal from movie magazines of the silent film era, particularly
Photoplay
and
Motion Picture Classic.

There are a few intentional adjustments in the dates, names, or histories of particular real places, variations from fact that I kept in service to my story. Scenes occur at the Pasadena Playhouse or Runyan Canyon Park, for example, when those places did not actually open until several years after the events of the novel. But by the time I learned the true dates, those settings were so integral to the story and so entrenched in my imagination that I could not bear to find alternative locations.

I am grateful to Jason Reed, who let me stay in his cabin and introduced me to my favorite place on earth. Thanks also to Stephanie Vaughn and everyone else at Cornell, who afforded me the quiet and space—again—I needed to complete this book; and to my friends and colleagues at Children’s Institute, who gave me fiexibility, understanding, and time.

Finally, my love and gratitude to Patsy Cox—for all the things I’ve already thanked her for, and the many more I haven’t.

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