Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who determined that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".
When she was 9 years
old, a neighborhood predator sexually abused Louise. This event had a
major influence on Brooks' life and career, causing her to say in
later years that she was incapable of real love, and that this man
"must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude
toward sexual pleasure....For me, nice, soft, easy men were never
enough – there had to be an element of domination". When
Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her
mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading
him on".
Brooks began her
entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn modern dance
company in Los Angeles (whose members included founders Ruth St.
Denis, and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham) in 1922. In
her second season with the company, Brooks had advanced to a starring
role in one work opposite Shawn. A long-simmering personal conflict
between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, however, and St.
Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in 1924, telling her in
front of the other members that "I am dismissing you from the
company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver".
The words left a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an
outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The
Silver Salver" was the title she gave to the tenth and final
chapter.
Thanks to her friend
Barbara Bennett (sister of Constance and Joan), Brooks almost
immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's
Scandals, followed by an appearance as a featured dancer in the 1925
edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. As a result of her work
in the Follies, she came to the attention of Paramount Pictures
producer Walter Wanger, who signed her to a five-year contract with
the studio in 1925. (She was also noticed by visiting movie star
Charlie Chaplin, who was in town for the premiere of his film The
Gold Rush. The two had an affair that summer).
Brooks made her
screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an
uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female
lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the
next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among
others.
She was noticed in
Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent
"buddy film", A Girl in Every Port in 1928.
In an early sound
film drama, Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country
girl who kills her foster father in a moment of desperation. A hobo,
Richard Arlen, happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to
disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding
the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle,"
they meet another hobo, Wallace Beery. Brooks's disguise is soon
uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal,
sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location, and the boom
microphone was invented for this film by the director William
Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking
scenes in the movies.
By this time in her
life, she was mixing with the rich and famous, and was a regular
guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at
San Simeon, being close friends with Davies' niece, Pepi Lederer. Her
distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend; many women styled their
hair in imitation of her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. Soon
after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks, who loathed the
Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after
being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for
G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.
Paramount attempted
to use the coming of sound films to pressure the actress, but she
called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this
rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of
her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and
independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of
Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether,
her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount
for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed
her on an unofficial blacklist. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired
to dub Brooks's voice for the film, as the studio claimed that
Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.
Once in Germany, she
starred in the 1929 film Pandora's Box, directed by Georg Wilhelm
Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays
by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) and Brooks
plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notable for its frank
treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first screen
portrayals of a lesbian. Brooks then starred in the controversial
social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by
Margarete Böhme and also directed by Pabst, and Miss Europe (1930)
by Italian director Augusto Genina, the latter being filmed in
France, and having a famous surprise ending. All these films were
heavily censored[where?], as they were very "adult" and
considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality,
as well as their social satire.
When she returned to
Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift
to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931). Her performances in
these films, however, were largely ignored, and few other job offers
were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".
Despite this,
William Wellman, her director on Beggars of Life, offered her the
female lead in his new picture, The Public Enemy starring James
Cagney. However, Brooks turned down the role in order to visit her
then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City, and the part
instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom
largely as a result. Brooks later explained herself to Wellman by
saying that she hated making pictures because she simply "hated
Hollywood", and according to film historian James Card, who came
to know Brooks intimately later in her life, "she just wasn't
interested .... She was more interested in Marshall". In the
opinion of Brooks's biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public
Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career". She
made one more film at that time, a comedy short, Windy Riley Goes
Hollywood (1931), directed by Hollywood outcast Roscoe "Fatty"
Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".
Brooks declared
bankruptcy in 1932 and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living.
She attempted a comeback in 1936, and did a bit part in the Western
Empty Saddles, which led Columbia to offer her a screen test,
contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love,
uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. She made two more
films after that, including the lead opposite John Wayne in Overland
Stage Raiders (1938), a "B" Western in which she played the
romantic lead with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but
unrecognizable from her Lulu days.
Brooks then briefly
returned to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out
to be another kind of hell," she said. "The citizens of
Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for
being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must
confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature." After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she
returned East and, after brief stints as a radio actor and a gossip
columnist, worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store
in New York City for a few years, then lived as a courtesan with a
few select wealthy men as clients.
I found that the
only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of
thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with
the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping
pills.
Brooks had been a
heavy drinker since the age of 14, but she remained relatively sober
to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During
this period she began her first major writing project, an
autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from
Goethe's Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she
destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.
She was a notorious
spendthrift for most of her life, and was kind and generous to her
friends, almost to a fault.
"There is no
Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"
Henri Langlois, 1953
French film
historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her
as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as
a film icon, much to her amusement. It would lead to the still
ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation
in her home country.
James Card, the film
curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks living as a
recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move
to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film
collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own
right. A collection of her writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published
in 1982. She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his
essay, "The Girl in The Black Helmet", the title of which
was an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood, a hairstyle
she helped popularize.
She rarely gave
interviews, but had special relationships with film historians John
Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s she was interviewed
extensively, on film, for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The
Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary
Conklin, and for the documentary series Hollywood (1980) by Brownlow
and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed
interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a
year before her death, but filmed a decade earlier. Author Tom Graves
was allowed into Brooks' apartment for an interview in 1982, and
later wrote about the at times awkward and tense conversation in his
article "My Afternoon With Louise Brooks" that is the lead
piece in his book Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers &
Dreamers.
In the summer of
1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she
made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had fallen "terribly in
love" with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of
laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team,
following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as
"the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced
Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in
June 1928.
In 1933, she married
Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis, Jr.,
but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of
marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her
intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just
"another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938.
Despite her two
marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren
Brooks". Her many lovers from years before had included a young
William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. According to Louise Brooks:
Looking For Lulu, Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks
for the rest of her life, and according to the documentary this
stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. She also had
an on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall
throughout the 1920s and 1930s (which she described as
"abusive"). He was the biggest reason she
was able to secure a contract with Pabst. Marshall
repeatedly asked her to marry him, but after finding that she had had
many affairs while they were together, married film actress Corinne
Griffith instead.
By her own
admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to
experiment, even posing fully nude for art photography, and her
liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is
speculation.
Brooks enjoyed
fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships
with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy
Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian
dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later
described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".
Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor
bisexual:
I had a lot of fun
writing 'Marion Davies' Niece' [an article about Pepi Lederer],
leaving the lesbian theme in question marks. All my life it has been
fun for me. ... When I am dead, I believe that film writers will
fasten on the story that I am a lesbian... I have done lots to make
it believable [...] All my women friends have been lesbians. But that
is one point upon which I agree positively with [Christopher]
Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people,
although they may accommodate themselves, for reasons of whoring or
marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with
girls – they did nothing for me.
On August 8, 1985,
Brooks was found dead of a heart attack after suffering from
arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy
Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
Blunt Memories of
Celluloid Life
‘Lulu
in Hollywood,’ Tales From Louise Brooks
By JANET MASLINJUNE
21, 2012
The energy source
for Laura Moriarty’s new novel, “The Chaperone,” is its
secondary character: Louise Brooks, at the age of 15. This book is
really about the older woman enlisted to accompany Louise to New York
from Wichita, Kan., during the summer of 1922. Louise was going to
study dance. The woman’s job was to keep Louise on the path of
virtue. As if.
By 1925 the real
Louise Brooks would be in movies. By the later ’20s she would be
the toast of Hollywood. By 1938 her career would be over. In 1940 she
went back to Wichita for a brief spell. “The Chaperone” treats
this visit pretty gently, considering what Brooks would later have to
say about it: “The citizens could not decide whether they despised
me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a
failure in their midst.” When she went back to New York, she found
that “the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful
actress of 36, was that of a call girl.”
Long story short:
“The Chaperone” leads straight to “Lulu in Hollywood,” the
collection of Brooks’s reminiscences about her movie career. It was
published in 1982, after she had had a lifetime to reflect on how
Hollywood works and how it treats actors. Much of what she says is
startlingly true today.
These eight essays
are selective, nostalgic, poison-tipped and fearlessly smart. They’re
sharp about Hollywood’s definitions of success and failure, about
how actors are manipulated by their employers and pigeonholed by the
press. Brooks saw stardom as a “pestiferous disease.” Late in her
life she could cherish her solitude.
“To a film star,
on the other hand,” she wrote, “to be let alone for an instant is
terrifying. It is the first signpost on the road to oblivion.”
Brooks still shimmers as a rare loner who traveled down that road,
her life in ruins — and then came back.
This book is as
idiosyncratic and magnetic as its author. It certainly isn’t a
memoir. She had so little intention of telling all that she actually
called one chapter “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs.” The main
reason: She could not and would not describe the sexual experiences
that would explain who she was and what she had done. “I cannot
unbuckle the Bible Belt,” she said.
The real Louise
Brooks forgot more than many film stars ever know. And she was much
more trouble than the budding bad girl of “The Chaperone.” Reread
“Lulu in Hollywood” to remember why.
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