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Louise Brooks
(c.1926)
Born	Mary Louise Brooks (1906-11-14)November 14, 1906 Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S.
Died	August 8, 1985(1985-08-08) (aged 78) Rochester, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Holy Sepulchre Cemetery
Nationality	American
Other names	Lulu, Brooksie, The Girl In The Black Helmet
Occupation	Actress, dancer
Years active	1925–1938
Spouse(s)	A. Edward Sutherland (m. 1926; div. 1928) Deering Davis (m. 1933; div. 1938)

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), known professionally as Louise Brooks, was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is noted as a flapper icon and sex symbol, and is famous for her bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.

Brooks is best known as the lead in three feature films made in Europe: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were made by G. W. Pabst. She starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films before retiring in 1938. Brooks published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982; three years later she died of a heart attack at the age of 78.

Early life

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually busy with his practice, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who said that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".^[1]

Brooks as a sophomore in high school, 1922^[2]

Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music.

When she was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused Louise. This event had a major influence on her 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".^[3] 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".^[4]

Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. In her second season with the company, Brooks advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. A long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in Spring 1924, telling her in front of the other members, "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver".^[5] 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 the tenth and final chapter.^[6] Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal.^[7]

Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, the sister of Constance and Joan Bennett, 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.^[8] 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 a two-month affair that summer.^[9]

Career

Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show-Off (1926)

American films

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.

Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures, and after her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. Wanger tried to encourage her to take the MGM contract, so as to avoid rumors that she only got the Paramount contract because of her association with him, but she decided to go with its offer anyhow.^[10]

She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port.^[11]

In the 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.^[12] Soon after 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 savviest of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. 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. Margaret Livingston was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film,^[13] as the studio claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.

In Europe

Once in Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by 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.^[14] 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 filmed in France, and having a famous surprise ending. All these films were heavily censored^[where?], as they were very "adult" and considered shocking for their portrayals of sexuality as well as their social satire.

The general public and professional critics alike were shocked by Brooks's acting style in the German films. In the late 1920's moviegoers were used to seeing movies featuring theatre-style stage acting, which has exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Brooks's acting style was extremely subtle because she knew the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made exaggeration unnecessary. This style worked and continues to be the style film actors use today, but at the time it was so shocking to viewers that they thought she wasn't acting at all, with patrons leaving the theater verbally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!"^[15]

Life after film

Publicity photo, c. 1930

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), but her performances in these films were largely ignored, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".^{[citation needed]}

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. Brooks turned down the role in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City,^[16] and the part instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Brooks later explained to Wellman that 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".^[17]

In the opinion of Brooks's biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".^[17] She made one more film at that time, a comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".

Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932^[18] 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 Overland Stage Raiders (1938), a "B" Western^[19] in which she played the romantic lead, opposite John Wayne, 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."^[3] After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned east and, after brief stints as a radio actor and a gossip columnist,^[20][21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23]

Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14,^[24] but 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.^[25]

Rediscovery

French film historians rediscovered Brooks's films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon, much to her amusement. This led 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. 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 an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood.^[27][28]

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 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's 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", the lead piece in his book Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers.

Personal life

Marriages and relationships

Brooks circa 1926

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"^[29] 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".^[30] She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928.^[31]

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.^[32] According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more.^[32] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Brooks described her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall throughout the 1920s and 1930s as abusive.^[33] He was the biggest reason she was able to secure a contract with Pabst.^[33] 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.

Sometime before 1955, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism.^[34]

Sexuality

In a 1979 New Yorker profile of Brooks, theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan described her as "the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid. She's the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known."^[35][36]

By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, even posing nude for art photography,^[37] 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.^[38][39] She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".^[40][41] 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.^[42]

Death

On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead of a heart attack^[43] after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

Legacy

As is the case with many of her contemporaries, a number of Brooks's films are considered to be lost.^{[citation needed]} Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, which have been released on DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively.

As of 2007, Miss Europe and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release. Her short film (and one of her only talkies) Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released on VHS and in 2012 on DVD.

In popular culture

Louise Brooks as an unattainable film image served as an inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image.

In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies". (Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fiction elements, served as a basis for Alain Resnais's 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.)^{[citation needed]}

Brooks also had an influence in the graphics world – she had the distinction of inspiring two separate comics: the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel that started in the late 1920s and ran until 1966, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, Show Girl, that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway; and the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

• 
  1972 – In Bob Fosse's Cabaret nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) wears "Lulu makeup and helmet-like coiffure" based upon Brooks' 1920s appearance.^[45]


• 
  1986 – In the Jonathan Demme film Something Wild, a thriller with comedic and dramatic moods, Melanie Griffith plays a wild, reckless femme fatale who calls herself "Lulu" and adopts a bobbed hairdo like Brooks's.


• 
  1988 – For the Siouxsie and the Banshees album Peepshow and subsequent tour, singer Siouxsie Sioux sported a hairdo and costumes in Brooks' style.


• 
  1991 – In the British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released the single "Pandora's Box" as a tribute to Brooks. The video for the single used extensive footage of Brooks from the movie and included a text intro that explained who Brooks was.


• 
  1992 – In the 1992 film Death Becomes Her Isabella Rosselini plays Lisle von Rhoman, an ancient yet beautifully preserved woman, clearly inspired by the films of old Hollywood and actresses such as Louise Brooks.


• 
  1998 – Soul Coughing's 1998 song "St. Louise Is Listening" contains several references to Brooks.


• 
  1999 – The song "Interior Lulu", by Marillion is a reference to Louise Brooks, and mentions her in its first lines.


• 
  2001 – In Neil Gaiman's American Gods the character Czernobog refers to Brooks as the greatest movie star of all time.^[46]


• 
  2006 – Lackadaisy a comic by Tracy Butler. Ivy Pepper, a character from this comic, is inspired by Louise Brooks because of her hairdo.^[47][48]


• 
  2007 – An exhibit titled "Louise Brooks and the 'New Woman' in Weimar Cinema" ran at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2007, focusing on Brooks's iconic screen persona and celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth.^[49]


• 
  2011 – American metal group Metallica and rock singer-songwriter Lou Reed release the double album Lulu with a Louise Brooks-like mannequin on the cover.


• 
  2011 – In her novel of supernatural horror, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as an actual character in the leading character's visions.


• 
  2012 – Brooks appears as a central character in the novel The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
  


• 
  2013 – In the novels Just One Day and Just One Year by Gayle Forman, the female protagonist, Allyson, is called "Lulu" because of her bobbed hair, which resembles that of Louise Brooks. Brooks's film Pandora's Box is mentioned and described in both books.


• 
  2014 – On Natalie Merchant's self-titled album, the song "Lulu" is a biographical portrait of Brooks.


• 
  2015 – Rick Geary's graphic novel, Louise Brooks: Detective, is published.

Filmography

References

Bibliography

Further reading

• Gladysz, Thomas. Beggars of Life: A Companion to the 1928 Film, PandorasBox Press, 2017.


• Gladysz, Thomas. Now We're in the Air, PandorasBox Press, 2017.


• Hutchinson, Pamela. Pandora's Box, BFI Film Classics, 2018.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Louise Brooks.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Louise Brooks

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  Louise Brooks on IMDb


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  Louise Brooks at the TCM Movie Database
  


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  Louise Brooks at the AFI Catalog
  


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  Louise Brooks at AllMovie
  


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  Louise Brooks at the Internet Broadway Database
  


• 
  Works by or about Louise Brooks in libraries (WorldCat catalog)


• Louise Brooks Society


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  Every Little Breeze fansite at the Wayback Machine
  


• A Louise Brooks interview clip from Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture
  


• The Louise Brooks portrait doll by Lenci, 1930