Sessue Hayakawa - Tales of Awesomeness

When you think of “Hollywood heartthrob”, who comes to mind? Brad Pitt? George Clooney? Ryan Gosling? OK, let’s rewind a little more to the golden age of Hollywood. Cary Grant? Rock Hudson? Marlon Brando? If we rewind a little further, all the way to the dawn of cinema, who can you think of now? We’re talking before the “talkies” – back to the silent film era? Charlie Chaplin? Buster Keaton? Rudolph Valentino? Who was the very first dot from whence all these heartthrobs can trace their lineage? Would you believe it’s Sessue Hayakawa?

Who?

Yes, the very first heartthrob in Hollywood, before they even had a word for such a thing, was a Japanese-American movie star named Sessue Hayakawa. He’s all but forgotten now, but in his heyday, he was the most sought after movie star in the nascent Hollywood, the man to be seen with and around. He was the “sexiest man alive” before people spoke about sexiness in polite society, back when polite society was actually a thing. And you haven’t heard much about him because, well, because Hollywood is Hollywood.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Sessue Hayakawa was born Kintaro Hayakawa (or Hayakawa Kintaro in the Japanese way) in 1889 in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. A couple of decades after the Meiji Restoration, he was the son of a provincial governor who was expected to enter the Imperial Japanese Navy, but due to a ruptured eardrum he went to study political economics at the University of Chicago instead. But like millions of future Hollywood hopefuls who will come after him, he quit school after a couple of years to do something else with his life. That something else turned out to be acting when he discovered theater during a layover in LA on his way back home to Japan. He was discovered by a film producer, Thomas Ince, at a play that Hayakawa was in called The Typhoon. Ince wanted to turn the play into a silent film with the original cast and Hayakawa tried to dissuade Ince from doing this by asking for a then-unheard of sum of $500 per week. Ince said that that was fine, and the rest is history. Well, sort of.

His performance in The Wrath of the Gods (1914) and The Typhoon (1914) made him an overnight success, making him the very first Asian-American movie star. A contract with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which later became the famed Paramount Pictures, followed and a star was born. What made him an international star was his starring role in Cecil D. Demille’s The Cheat (1915), opposite Fannie Ward. It cast him as a romantic/sexual opposite to Fannie Ward, where he played a seemingly gentlemanly Asian neighbor to a white housewife who is seduced and then later raped by said neighbor. Granted, he played a bad guy and a sexual predator at that, but his portrayal of that bad guy made him very popular by the women who saw the movie, who saw a brooding, emotional, and vigorous character that stoked a lot of, shall we say, appetites that were usually hidden and controlled in Edwardian society. He became a superstar of the silent era and became comparable to the likes of John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks.

Not only was he popular to the audiences, he also knew how to party like a movie star. He drove a gold plated Pierce-Arrow, had a veritable castle built in Hollywood for his home, and before Prohibition hit, bought a huge supply of liquor to the extent that he was able to supply his own liquor for all his parties for years. He was paid $5000/week in 1915, and later started his own production company where he took creative control of his own movies and wrote, directed, produced, starred, and edited his own movies – 23 in all over the span of three years (actors wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing until many decades later). There’s a story that during this time, he lost one million dollars at the gambling table in one night at Monte Carlo – an amount that he just shrugged off, but an amount that lead to the ritual suicide of another fellow Japanese visitor at the same casino. To put that in perspective, depending on exactly when this story took place, it was blowing off an equivalent of 12-20 million dollars of gambling loss in one night. Because he could, because he was that big of a star.

American women adored Hayakawa, but there were also some who protested his popularity and railed against the movies where he portrayed a romantic hero, starring opposite some of the biggest stars of the era, such as Jack Holt and Marin Sais.

This was a presage for things to come.

As the decades wore on, two things happened that changed Hayakawa’s fortune. The first was the introduction of the talkies. He had a Japanese accent which made his transition to English speaking roles difficult. The second was a rising tide of anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood and in America in general. This was the age of increasing Japanese imperialism, an age of rising racist, Fascist and nationalist thought, of America First and the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan that clashed with the flair of an international Asian movie star. So Hayakawa left America and went to Europe that was paradoxically more receptive of his Asianess.

After WW2, he came back to the US to try a go at Hollywood again, but attitudes had ossified and Asian actors (and Japanese actors especially) were not as welcome as they were in the first decades of the 20th century. Hollywood had entered the age of the “yellowface”, (think The Good Earth with Luise Rainer and infamous Mickey Rooney fiasco in Breakfast with Tiffany’s). He did receive acclaim as the Japanese army colonel in The Bridge Over The River Kwai and his post-war roles followed a similar trend – that of an honorable villain. In 1961, he moved back to Japan and became a Zen master after the death of his wife.

So what to make of the legacy of Sessue Hayakawa? He became a popular sex symbol when the world didn’t even have a word or phrase to describe such a thing. He was the first Asian movie star and helped, for a while, to define Asian maleness in a more positive light in the American consciousness. Unfortunately the world turned away from the more cosmopolitan conception of male awesomeness that he represented and to a more parochial, more ethnocentric one – and we haven’t completely recovered. And for all that, he made a significant dent in the universe in his time. And being a role model, an example of a time that once was, he is making a dent in the universe still.

PS: One side note. Here’s a story from Wikipedia that is kinda awesome:

“Hayakawa was known for his discipline and martial arts skills. While a student at the University of Chicago, he played quarterback for the football team and was once penalized for using jujitsu to bring down an opponent…..While filming The Jaguar’s Claws, in the Mojave Desert, Hayakawa played a Mexican bandit, with 500 cowboys as extras. On the first night of filming, the extras drank all night and well into the next day. No work was being done, so Hayakawa challenged the group to a fight. Two men stepped forward. Hayakawa said of the incident, “The first one struck out at me. I seized his arm and sent him flying on his face along the rough ground. The second attempted to grapple and I was forced to flip him over my head and let him fall on his neck. The fall knocked him unconscious.” Hayakawa then disarmed yet another cowboy. The extras returned to work, amused by the way the small man manhandled the big bruising cowboys.”