Louise Brooks — Life of a Lost Girl
“If I ever bore you, it will be with a knife”
Lulu
“There is no Garbo. There is no Dietrich. There is only Louise Brooks”, said French film historian Henri Langlois at the time Louise Brooks was in Paris receiving a homage in honor of her film legacy, during the 1950s. Brooks, who had been forgotten for years, was finally returning to the spotlight, not only as a movie star of a bygone era —at long last she was being recognized as a true artist.
Her Hollywood years were long gone; ironically, she was not immortalized by her work in California or New York, but on the other side of the ocean: in Europe, more precisely in Germany, making Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl for Austrian director G.W. Pabst. She was definitely not nostalgic, and when she got tired of something or someone, she would just walk away without looking back — men, career, fame, friends, family. There she was again in Europe, then in France, after years of seclusion and oblivion, being an object of adoration for passionate cinephiles of the most varied profiles, but all of them united by the same fascination. Louise was older, frail and far from her younger years. Some were a little disappointed: there she was, an old lady with long gray hair, tied back — no sign of the famous bob haircut that she had immortalized in silent films and that had earned her the nickname “The Girl in the Black Helmet”. But her unforgettable profile was intact, as was her sharp wit. Brooksie was finally rising from the ashes.
Louise, Lulu or “Brooksie” never wanted to be an actress or movie star in the first place, just like so many who happened to parachute over Hollywood and then became film icons by chance. Since childhood, inspired by her mother, she wanted to be a dancer and became a very talented one, before her fame in cinema. In any case, Louise was indeed a dancer, not just professionally, but she knew how to dance on the face of society, how to dance into oblivion, and ultimately to dance into immortality. Through the lights and shadows of the silver screen and beyond.
Mary Louise Brooks was born on November 14, 1906, under the sign of Scorpio. Each person has their own personality and life path, but it is impossible not to see in Brooks’ life path a visceral and self-destructive lifestyle, typical of Scorpios, as we will see throughout her biography. For more details of her chart, for those interested in astrology, here’s the Astrotheme.com link, with her astrological chart:
https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Louise_Brooks
Ironically, the eccentric actress was born in the flat, ordinary town of Cherryvale, Kansas. The city remains small to this day, with the 2019 Census accounting for just over 2,000 inhabitants. Of her hometown, she described it as a typical American Midwest community where the inhabitants “prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn.” (in the words of the ever-sharp Lulu).
Unlike Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, also a resident of the Kansas plains, Louise was not a naive daydreamer — nowness was her only reality and always would be (though Alice in Wonderland was one of her favorite books). But from an early age there was a lot of energy and vitality in her, making her a mischievous girl who loved to play and do pirouettes. Through her mother’s artistic influence, those pirouettes would soon turn into dance steps.
She was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks (1868–1960) and Myra May Rude (1884–1944). Her father Leonard was a kind and hardworking lawyer born in Tennessee, shortly afterwards moving with his family to Kansas. Myra was from Burden, Kansas, and married Leonard in 1904 at age 19, while he was already 36 years old — 17 years her senior. After the wedding, the couple moved to Cherryvale, and Leonard went on to work for the Prairie Oil Company until that company’s demise. Years later in Wichita, when the whole family moved there, Leonard Brooks continued to practice law, but dreamed of being a judge, something that ended up never happening. According to Louise, he was considered a good man, honest and too puritanical, which did not make him compatible within the circle of cunning politicians at the time. The joke of the town was that Leonard was so honest that his secretary made more money than he did. However, at almost 80 years of age, a late reward came: Leonard became Deputy Attorney General of the state of Kansas. He would still live until 1960, dying at the age of 92.
Despite being considered a good man by his friends and acquaintances, Leonard Brooks was a simple, ordinary man, and Louise never felt particularly close to him. Her mother was not the most approachable of women either, but she had a lot to teach her children: art, books, music and dance, subjects that fascinated Brooks from a very early age.
“What do I care if she was no mother and cared less about her children than an alligator? She taught us the love of beauty and laughter.”
Lulu on her mother Myra
Myra Brooks had a difficult youth, as her parents could not take care of their six children (including herself) and it was up to her, the eldest, to take care of her five siblings. Married to Leonard Brooks, she gave him an ultimatum: after wasting so much time looking after her siblings, she certainly was not going to waste her energies having children (“squalling brats”), and if she did, she would let them fend for themselves. She had four children in the end, but in fact she was never a conventional mother, let alone a conventional woman, and she made no bones about hiding it from whoever it was.
Still a young woman, Myra Brooks saw in writing and playing the piano possible escapes from that chaotic and rustic home in the Midwestern countryside. She had great artistic aspirations, and although she was already married with children, she dreamed of abandoning everything and pursuing a career as an artist. At that time, back in the 1910s and 1920s, she was already giving lectures at a women’s club on women’s suffrage, reviewing books and playing several classical pieces on the piano: her children grew up listening to Myra play Debussy, Ravel and Wagner. She was not the typical loving or affectionate mother, but that was certainly not a hostile home environment, despite its chaos. Thus, Louise and her siblings grew up inspired by books and music.
In retrospect, reflecting on her sassy personality, Louise said she was never punished for telling the truth at home. She was raised in a completely nonstandard family. Her parents never scolded their children for sincerity, as hurtful as that was. If the children were naughty or out of line in their games, their parents joked more than they scolded, or were just too busy with their own affairs to care for anything. Once Louise went to her mother to confess that she had broken Myra’s favorite piece of china, and Myra, without showing any reaction, only said, “Now, dear, don’t interrupt me when I’m memorizing Bach.”
For better or worse, Brooks’ parents inspired her a lot. She was fascinated by their dedication to their own interests above anything else. What’s more, her parents took intense pleasure in their creative endeavors: her mother at the piano and books; her father in law and the violin. In essence, being brought up in a home where she did not have to lie or dissimulate; a place where she could do whatever she wanted and however she wanted. Years later she would feel suffocated within the castrating system of Hollywood and rejected by the social conventions of the time. But she would never put her head down for anything or anyone, even if it cost too much.
It was not all dream and joy, unfortunately. At the age of nine, Brooks was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood. He lured the girl with sweets, and inside his house he molested her. Many believe this trauma followed Brooks throughout her life, damaging her personal life, relationships and career. Lulu would later say that she was incapable of true love, and that particular man must have had a lot of influence on her sexual attitude.
“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.”
To make matters worse, when Louise finally told her mother what had happened, years later, Myra suggested that it was Louise’s fault, not the man’s, for “leading him on”.
Brooks did not want to be a movie star — she wanted to be a dancer. Even in her dreams she saw herself dancing. Everything would actually start at the age of 10, when she took up dance lessons. At that time, already showing talent and holding promise, she started to make paid presentations in small social events as a dancer. Her father thought that a dance career was “nonsense,” while Myra not only encouraged it but followed Louise along in every detail, handling her feisty daughter’s tantrums with absolute professional calm.
In Wichita, the teenager Lulu was beginning to show the first signs of a strong personality, without mincing words. Though young, she already showed a lot of talent in dancing, to the point of finding her teacher at the Wichita College of Music “mediocre and with an air of superiority”. Her dance teacher, Alice Campbell, had a real disdain for Kansas (and Louise would say that with the exception of Nebraska, almost every state in the nation shared that disdain). Myra Brooks insisted that her daughter Louise should try to be nicer to people, but Louise had a short temper and could only say what was on her mind, no matter how bad the consequences were later. She would always be like that, even if her temper eventually turned her into a social fiasco. Miss Campbell ended up expelling Brooks from her dance class, saying that the girl was “spoiled, bad-tempered and insulting”.
It was not just a difficult teenage character though. In fact, in the early 1920s, dancing was still taking small steps as an art and craft to be studied. Dancing icons such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were just beginning to make the art of dance “teachable.”
Louise Brooks’ mother took her to various dance shows. One company that electrified young Louise was the Denishawn Dance Company when they performed in Wichita. Encouraged by the artists and her mother, Louise went to study dance in New York in the summer of 1922, accompanied by a family acquaintance named Alice Mills, with whom she lived together in NY, since Louise was still very young. That same year at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, Lulu became a professional dancer at the age of 15, soon touring the country until 1924. Louise joined the company for two seasons of performances.
Brooksie was fascinated by dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, with whom she became friends. Martha was part of the Denishawn Company along with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and Graham’s influence on modern dance is seen today as so emblematic as Picasso was in painting, Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture and Stravinsky in music.
“I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.”
Lulu
Louise Brooks and Ted Shawn starred in some of the dance company’s shows. Over time, Brooks and Shawn began to dislike each other and have constant confrontations in the dance studio, to the point that Shawn fired Brooks for finding her too insolent and with a supposed air of superiority. Again, Louise did not accept being bossed around or be told what to do, and she did not let it go. She smoked, drank, ignored reprimands and dated men regardless of what others thought. Her “outrageous” conduct got to the point of her getting kicked out of the Algonquin Hotel in New York for “inappropriate behavior”.
Lulu was not Ruth St. Denis’ favorite person either in the Denishawn troupe. After a long personal conflict between them, St. Denis dismissed Lulu from the dance company in 1924 for good, 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.”
Louise Brooks never forgot those words. In her aborted autobiography years later, she thought of “The Silver Salver” as the name for the final chapter of the book, which in the end was never published and not even finished. It is possible that the episode did not inhibit her, but rather stimulated even more her pleasure in defying convention and challenging others.
Anyhow, she was only 17 and alone in New York. But not for long.
She thoroughly enjoyed her sabbatical in Paris with her wealthy friend Barbara Bennett (sister of actresses Joan and Constance Bennett). Impulsively and without great prospects for work, Brooks tried her luck dancing Charleston in London, in clubs and seedy cabarets, without much return. She ended up moving back to New York and making do with borrowed money. Until, finally, new opportunities arose for her.
Louise was lucky enough to always have friends to support her in the most difficult times. Her friend Barbara Bennett and sisters Constance and Joan were part of a wealthy and influential family in high circles and in the artistic world (their father was famous actor Richard Bennett). Barbara Bennett was one of the few people from the high society who did not judge or belittle Louise, and it was Barbara who introduced Louise to several wealthy and important men, who courted her with pleasure. Lulu also took the opportunity to start dressing better, behaving more classy, and getting rid of her Kansas accent, until she could speak English with perfect elocution, Mid-Atlantic like.
Barbara was one of Louise’s few friends and who saw potential in her free and sassy friend who many called a “detestable girl”. Barbara was perhaps the most impulsive and emotional of the Bennett sisters, as Constance was the most snobbish and glamorous, and Joan the most resilient and practical. Without great artistic success and after some failed marriages, Barbara Bennett ended up committing suicide in 1958.
It was through Bennett’s help that Louise Brooks got a job as a chorus girl in the Broadway show George White’s Scandals. During this time she flirted with legendary Broadway composer George Gershwin, and caught the public’s attention with her remarkable beauty and “black helmet” hairstyle (which later gave her the nickname “the girl with the black helmet”). Louise could not get along with her fellow dancers and directors and left the production, eventually ending up in the Ziegfeld Follies, one of the most famous revues of all time, dancing semi-nude.
Even with small appearances, Brooksie drew a lot of attention from the public and was getting better and better jobs and greater projection, culminating in contract offers from film studios.
Lulu received two big offers: one from Metro Goldwyn Mayer and another one from Paramount Pictures. Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount, became very interested in the young dancer, they even became lovers. Because of their intimate relationship, Wanger told Brooks to opt for MGM, as he thought that by going to his studio, Paramount, everyone would think that she had only climbed the ladder to success by going to bed with him.
Louise could not care less to what other people thought of her. Either that or she just loved to be obnoxious to other people. Even though she was advised to accept MGM’s offer, perhaps because she only wanted to be contrary, she decided to sign a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures in 1925. She was not embarking on films because she had dreams of stardom or anything like that, she was just throwing herself in a new adventure to see what would happen (and of course she was accepting it, more than anything, for the money).
Brooks filmed some of her first films in New York, at Famous Player Lasky’s Astoria studio, which would later be incorporated into Paramount Pictures. In 1927 she would leave for Los Angeles, California.
It was not just the attention from producers that Louise received during her time on Ziegfeld Follies. Charlie Chaplin, one of her greatest idols, fell for her, and then the two began an affair during the summer of that same year, 1925. They had met at a cocktail party hosted by Walter Wanger, when Chaplin was promoting his new film, The Gold Rush. He was married at the time to Lita Grey, but it is common knowledge that Chaplin was a real womanizer. When the affair ended and both went their separate ways, Chaplin gave her a very generous check. Louise did not even bother to write a note thanking him, years later saying: “damn me”.
“My mind goes back 50 years and I’m still trying to define that lovely being from another world”.
Brooks on Chaplin
Louise Brooks in real life was the very incarnation of the flapper: the libertine, dancing, free-spirited type of girl of that time. Hence, it was no challenge for her to play flappers in the movies. She played this character in several films throughout her career in Hollywood, as did Clara Bow and Colleen Moore (who, by the way, also had black bob hair). Due to the enormous success of both Louise and Colleen, the “bob” hair look became a fashion fever until the mid-1930s. The haircut remains in demand to this day, due to its timeless charm.
Just like before, when she was never the most popular in her dancing days, Lulu would again be an outsider, this time in Hollywood. Louise never wanted to be a movie star in the first place. And when she began her career at Paramount, she was just considered a pretty, stupid girl who did not know how to act and, on top of that, had a lifestyle that was considered promiscuous and depraved. Brooksie never had any formal preparation for acting, and was never encouraged by anyone to be a real actress, as they only expected her to be beautiful and sexy. As in the end she did not even take it all seriously, she kept doing the beautiful and sensual type in her films.
And it was behind the scenes of It’s The Old Army Game that the film’s director, A. Edward “Eddie” Sutherland, fell in love with Louise and asked her to marry him. At first she just said “no”. But Sutherland insisted, even over long distance phone calls. Finally, without really knowing why, Louise eventually said yes and the two got married in 1926.
After the wedding, Sutherland immediately went traveling to direct a new film, and Brooks had no intention of playing housewife, sitting still waiting for her husband or remaining faithful. Soon after, she would make some of her best American silent films, such as The Show Off and Love ’em and Leave ’em, both in 1926.
In interviews, she did not follow the publicity agenda and showed herself to the world as she really was, to the horror of shallow journalists accustomed to egocentric and dazzled stars. In Hollywood, she found herself out of place. For instance, she was passionate about books, often being seen with a book in her hand — authors such as Proust (one of her favorites) and philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer — in a community where there were almost no theaters, art shows or any type of intelligentsia, and everyone only thought about films, sports, social mobility and partying. As sharp-witted Dorothy Parker once remarked (reportedly), Los Angeles was “72 suburbs in search of a city”.
Not that she didn’t like parties and everything else, but deep down Louise was also a cultured and intelligent young woman — not necessarily intellectual — who ended up isolated within a repressive, conceited and artificial system. Thus, her career was not to last long.
Unfortunately, several Louise Brooks’ American silent films are considered lost to this day.
In 1928, director Howard Hawks hired Louise Brooks for his film A Girl in Every Port. The role of a circus diver was small, but Louise stole the show in all her sequences, demonstrating not only a lot of charisma but also exuding sexual tension. In the director’s words:
“I wanted a new type. I hired Louise Brooks because she was very sure of herself. Very analytical, very feminine. Damn good. Way ahead of her time, a rebel. I like rebels!”
Howard Hawks, director of A Girl in Every Port (and many movie masterpieces to mention)
Her remarkable appearance in A Girl in Every Port eventually caught the attention of Austrian director G.W. Pabst in Germany, resulting in his invitation for her to star in Pandora’s Box.
But perhaps her best American film might be Beggars of Life, directed by William A. Wellman in 1928. Brooks herself considered it her favorite cinematic experience. While working with Wellman, she finally felt at ease with a director and with her own character. The fact that she was filming on location, away from the studio, probably made the whole thing more exciting for her as well.
However, as excited as she was about the experience, it certainly was not a smooth filming. Co-star Richard Arlen was jealous of Brooks because she was increasingly famous and in demand, while he had been in the business for longer and felt unappreciated and unfairly treated. As he was friends with Louise’s husband at the time, Eddie Sutherland, Arlen disapproved of the actress’s uninhibited affairs during the shooting. One day, quite drunk, Arlen said that Brooks was “a terrible actress with her eyes too close together.” And director William Wellman demanded so much of Louise in the action scenes on top of a moving train to the point that she almost died while filming a sequence. Wallace Beery intervened and said that she did not have to risk her life just for the sake of one scene, doing an action sequence that could very well be done by a stuntman.
Then Lulu slept with one of the film’s stunt doubles and the same man told everyone that he had slept with her. Worse than that: in front of everyone he asked Louise to her face if she had syphilis, because “it was common knowledge that she had slept with a producer so and so and everyone knew he had syphilis”. She just fled, completely embarrassed. But despite the shame of the moment, shortly afterwards she shrugged her shoulders and went on with her life, saying “to hell with it”. And if she could (or wanted to) fight back later, she certainly would. She took real pleasure in being unpleasant to others when it suited her.
Her fame was such that men would get angry if she refused to go out or sleep with them. “But you sleep with everyone, why not with me?”, asked one of them, surprised. She only slept with whoever she wanted and that was that.
Even with stumbling blocks in the way, Louise never dropped the ball. She had enemies and was considered persona non grata by many, but she did not give a darn. Her social life continued at full steam, especially as she was part of the circle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his lover, never official wife, actress Marion Davies. Brooks was one of the usual guests at the Hearst Castle, which hosted many of the mythical parties of the classic jet set at the time. But Louise’s real friendship was with Marion Davies’ niece, Pepi Lederer.
Pepi was openly lesbian and did not hide her romantic involvements from society, to the shock of her aunt Marion Davies and company. Pepi had artistic aspirations, but these were never taken seriously by her family, who at most got her irrelevant extra roles in Davies’ films. She was even taken to New York, so that her bohemian lifestyle would not cause scandals on the West Coast. There Pepi became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage, which seriously compromised her health. It was later discovered that Pepi became pregnant after being the victim of a rape on New Year’s Eve from 1929 to 1930, as she never slept with men.
Finally, in 1930, Pepi received a job from Hearst as a writer in one of the millionaire’s magazines, The Connoisseur, in London. It was one of the few happy periods in Pepi’s life, and there she remained for 5 years. Unfortunately, Lederer had a drug problem, and when she returned to the United States in 1935 she came with her girlfriend, which did not please her family. The last time she saw her friend, Louise Brooks noticed in Pepi’s eyes that she was using heavy drugs, and the first thing Pepi said to Lulu when they met was: “Get me cocaine.”
It is not known whether it was because of her addiction or because she was a lesbian (or both), but Pepi was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward by her family. Less than a month later, Pepi Lederer killed herself by jumping from the clinic’s sixth-floor window. She was only 25 years old.
That episode had a big impact on her friend Louise Brooks. Like a final straw, Pepi Lederer’s suicide in the 1930s would increase Brooks’ contempt for Hollywood and the California jet set more than ever. In her book Lulu in Hollywood, Louise dedicated one of her texts to her friend Pepi, entitled Marion Davies’ Niece.
Regarding her relationships with women, Brooksie never beat around the bush. She had a considerable number of relationships with women, usually fleeting and for just one-night stands. She preferred men, but she valued feminine beauty — like a gay man would do. Most of her female friends were lesbians, as was Pepi Lederer, and it greatly amused her to leave the idea of being a lesbian in the air, as in the end this only enhanced her aura as a wanton and provocative woman. Her most memorable one-night stand was certainly with reclusive actress Greta Garbo, a personality as complex as Louise was. According to Lulu, Garbo was quite masculine, but a “charming and tender lover”.
In the end Louise hated labels. She herself did not believe in bisexuality, and although she had sporadic relationships with women, it was more fun at the time and she seemed to “appreciate the female sex as much as a gay man”, reflected Barry Paris in his biography of the actress, which saw the Louise’s sexuality as just sexuality, fluidly, without hetero, bi or homo labels. Now her considerations about sexuality may sound dated, but this was the point of view of Louise Brooks and her acquaintances during their lifetime. It was another era so we have to understand and analyse it by its context.
According to intimates, in Louise’s opinion, masturbation was the supreme art of sex, and not the intercourse itself.
While she was married to playboy director Eddie Sutherland, she lived more apart than close to him. In addition to distance and incompatibility, what most motivated the separation was Louise’s relationship with businessman George Preston Marshall. Brooksie, who wasn’t much for getting involved, became obsessed with Marshall and the two maintained an on-and-off affair (typical of Lulu) until the mid-1930s, in a relationship that Louise considered years later to be abusive. Yet, Marshall proposed marriage more than once, and she never accepted. Anyhow, she stated that Marshall was not only her bedfellow but also her constant advisor. He, Marshall, was the one who advised Brooks to accept Pabst’s invitation to work in Germany. After all, Louise didn’t even know Pabst and didn’t speak a word of German, but as she was bored with Paramount and all that frivolous routine, she ended up accepting the offer and left for the other side of the world. Even though it cost her her Hollywood career, she simply left without looking back.
The head of Paramount, B. P. Schulberg, had said that he would not give her a raise — either she stayed at the studio as she was or asked to leave. With the end of the silent era and the advent of sound, stars were accepting anything to stay on top. Louise chose to leave, much to the executive’s shock. She was free to play Lulu in Pandora’s Box.
The quest for the actress to play Lulu in Pandora’s Box (literal translation of the German title Die Büchse der Pandora) in Germany was as fierce as was Scarlett O’Hara for Gone with the Wind. Just like Vivien Leigh, an Englishwoman, playing a young Southern belle during the American Civil War, there was now Louise Brooks, an American woman from Kansas, hired to play one of the most iconic characters in German theater, to the shock and horror of many German purists. Even part of the German cast had contempt for Louise. The first choice for Lulu was Marlene Dietrich, but Pabst thought Marlene was “too old and too obvious” for the role, much to the fury of Dietrich who was ready to sign the film contract when Louise’s telegram arrived from the United States accepting the role.
Austrian G. W. Pabst was an erudite man, and according to Louise, he was often furious because he could not communicate with her in an intellectual way, since in Lulu’s words, she was “not an intellectual and knew nothing about anything”. While he tried to promote the actress’s artistic career and make her more well-behaved, Lulu enjoyed herself in the nightlife of Berlin, still free from Nazism and all the gloom of the following years. But Louise Brooks was perfect for the role of Pandora’s Box, chiefly because she had no acting techniques or affectations. She could play herself and “do nothing”, something she was already used to in her silly Paramount movies. But in this “doing nothing” routine, in fact, she did everything. Even though she was not aware of it at the time, Louise was one of the pioneers of the most real and natural acting style possible. Unlike the exaggerated and far-fetched style of some actors in theater and silent films, Pabst never encouraged Louise to make exaggerated expressions or use affected mannerisms and gestures. Without the need for excessive restrictions or training, she made art with just her free spirit and her mere presence on stage. Pabst would just give her specific direction, in a few sentences, and focus on a single emotion per take.
In Brooks’ words, a true performance does not need to be stamped on one’s face or in their physical gestures, but in one’s soul, eyes and entire body. Perhaps the fact that she was a dancer with a broad sense of body control added a lot to her performances. Lulu (the character) was actually a dancer in the film, and Brooks was encouraged to dance like never before during filming. The triumph of the film was to portray mundane German life: desire, violence, lust and the most primitive feelings of the human soul in a realistic, natural way, without embellishment or glamour. Lulu is the axis of this world of desire and violence — neither guilty nor innocent, she lives her life carefree, oblivious to the destructive power she carries within her. Her looks, her dancing, her deadly sexuality. Louise Brooks, as fatal as she is naive, knew how to convey all of this convincingly, without premeditation or trying hard to be sexy. She was what she was and that was all that she was.
At that time, however, Louise Brooks was considered a mediocre actress. Movie critics and the general public were used to trained actors, full of exaggerated mannerisms and specific methods, so she was considered bad because she supposedly wasn’t doing anything, she wasn’t “acting properly”. Lulu, in turn, did not consider herself an established actress and assumed that she was not doing anything, she was simply “playing herself”, which according to her was “even more difficult than playing a character”. And perhaps this was Louise Brooks’ greatest artistic and personal achievement: she was always herself (a unique personality) and in the end this was her supreme art, and at the same time her greatest tragedy.
Soon after, Diary of a Lost Girl (original Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) went into production. It was also directed by Pabst — with a title that perfectly suited Louise Brooks, considered by many, and even by herself, a “lost girl”, a tormented soul. This film suffered even more than Pandora’s Box with cuts and censorship over the years, becoming a truly shredded film. Nowadays, with due restoration and care, the film is distributed as close as it was designed at the time of its production.
Like Pandora’s Box, the story of Diary was also very close to Louise Brooks’ personal life, as the social drama followed in the footsteps of a raped young woman who, after giving birth, refuses to marry her abuser and ends up in a reformatory. Afterwards, she runs away from the place, and upon discovering that her child had died, with no prospects, she ends up in a brothel and rises socially by having a relationship with a rich count. Louise in real life was also haunted by her past just like Thymian, the lost girl from Pabst’s film: she became “lost” right when she was sexually abused in Kansas in her childhood, and was even considered guilty for the whole situation. A trauma that followed Brooks until the end of her life and shaped her self-destructive personality.
But Louise at that time was so absent-minded and unaware of things that it was only decades later, when she rewatched the films with proper attention, that she realized the historical, social and cultural importance of those films. Ironically, her naivety and happy-go-lucky way of being at the time added a lot to her performances. She later said during an interview that she was simply “playing herself”. According to her, that was one of the most difficult things to do, since most actors are able to play any kind of parts, whereas they get extremely self-conscious and helpless when asked to play themselves.
Pabst was in love with Brooks, perhaps in a more platonic way, rather than emotional or sexual. The two went to bed eventually, but it wasn’t much more than that. Furthermore, Pabst liked Louise and believed in her potential, as if he was her protector. In an outrageous real-life scene in Paris, Louise received a bouquet of roses from Pabst. Then Louise, angry with one of her male interests (Townsend Martin), simply took the bouquet and hit the man right in his face. Martin, with his face bruised and bleeding, tried to laugh it off and not make much of it, but Pabst got furious and took Louise away from the restaurant immediately.
After shooting the two films back to back, Pabst almost begged Louise to stay in Europe and make a career there, under his direction. He promised to make her greater than Garbo. Louise refused; she was bored with the Old Continent and decided to return to the United States. Unfortunately, nothing prosperous awaited her there. Pabst had said that if Louise left and continued leading that life of excess and self-destruction, without taking her career seriously, she would end up like Lulu in the film (I will not give any spoilers lol). She did not want to listen and simply left. It was the beginning of real hell in Louise Brooks’ life.
Back in the USA, more precisely in New York, Louise promptly received a warning from Paramount to return to California for retakes for The Canary Murder Case, her last film at the studio before going to Germany. With the advent of sound, they now wanted to remake the film by adding sound dialogues. Louise just said “I hate Hollywood, I hate California and I’m not going back.” If her leaving Paramount had been affront enough, now she refused to complete an unfinished film. This caused Schulberg’s fury, who spread the rumor that Brooks had a terrible voice (a fact that destroyed careers in the early days of talkies), to get revenge on her. It was a lie, as Brooks had a wonderful voice with perfect diction, as we can hear in her sound films and interviews. But the truth did not matter; the fact was that Louise Brooks was now blacklisted from Hollywood. Jobs would become increasingly scarce and she found herself forced to accept mediocre roles in forgettable B productions. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired to dub Louise’s lines in The Canary Murder Case, a film that featured William Powell and Jean Arthur in the main cast.
The last role that could have given Louise Brooks a new chance in Hollywood was the female lead in The Public Enemy, in 1931. Director William Wellman, despite the clash of temperaments with the actress, admired her talent and her personality. But Louise decided to turn down the promising female role in the film, as she was fed up with Hollywood and preferred to travel to New York — she was still in love with George Marshall, who lived there. Without Louise in the cast, James Cagney and Jean Harlow (in the role firstly offered to Brooks) achieved stardom starring in that same film.
Due to the general ignorance of Americans at the time, Louise’s films made in Europe were not successful and went almost unnoticed upon their releases on theaters. Not even in Europe did they receive their due during their debut season. In America, everyone only wanted to know about the new talkies, which only made the distribution of her silent films worse. Pabst’s films were victims of censorship and retaliation, damaging his work badly, not to mention that few understood those films as pieces of cinema art. Furthermore, Brooks’ performance was only seen as weak and talentless (by general acting standards of that period).
In 1932, at the age of 26, Louise Brooks filled for bankruptcy.
Despite her going downhill, Brooksie still managed to find acting jobs in two mainstream films in 1931: God’s Gift to Women and It Pays to Advertise. Critics ignored her work in both films. In order to pay her bills, she returned to Hollywood and was even willing to sign up with Columbia, but refused to do a screen test and (allegedly) also declined Harry Cohn’s offer to sleep with her in return for the movie role. With the Columbia contract falling through, Louise went on to do the B short film Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, directed by another cinema renegade: Fatty Arbuckle, the famous silent film comedian of the 1910s who had his career destroyed when he was unjustly accused of the death and alleged rape of actress Virginia Rappe (who in the end was discovered to have probably died from cystitis and then peritonitis). Arbuckle was innocent, there was never any concrete evidence against the actor and he was legally acquitted, but his career was already destroyed by a media scandal that marked the 1920s forever. The famous Hollywood scandals of the 1920s like Arbuckle’s eventually fueled the creation of the infamous Hays Code of censorship in American cinema.
Without many job offers, Brooks returned to dancing in cabarets and bars to earn a living, without much return. Little by little, her rich and famous friends began to forget or move away from her, as she was now blacklisted from the industry. In 1934, she randomly married millionaire Deering Davis, one of her wealthy admirers. But five months later she abandoned him, leaving only a written note. The official divorce would only come out four years later. Lulu later said that none of her marriages were for love. And about never having had children, she never considered the idea, calling herself “Barren Brooks”.
Before retiring from acting, she did some irrelevant films such as Empty Saddles, a B Buck Jones western movie, and uncredited roles in When You’re in Love and King of Gamblers (her scenes in the latter were left in the cutting room). Finally, Brooks put an end to her career in 1937 with Overland Stage Raiders. She no longer wore her hair in a bob style and her flapper days were behind her, but Louise was still a very beautiful woman in her thirties. She was fascinated by John Wayne, her co-star who was still a beginner in the movie business making one B-film after another. She predicted he would become a star soon, and she was right. Brooksie, in turn, was heading towards limbo. The film earned her two weeks of work and $300 dollars in salary for the entire film. At her peak during the silent days, she made $750 a week at Paramount.
She was living modestly in a small apartment in West Hollywood. In 1938 she officially divorced her random husband Deering Davis. Her friend and ex-lover Walter Wanger warned her that if she stayed in Los Angeles, she would end up becoming a call girl out of necessity. Pabst’s words in Europe, about her ending up like Lulu from Pandora’s Box (who ultimately becomes a prostitute to survive), echoed in her mind. She decided to pack and return to her family’s home in Wichita, Kansas. Louise would never return to Hollywood.
As expected, Lulu’s reception from her townsfellows was not at all inviting. If she were still the star of the moment, maybe they would roll out a red carpet (even if they hated her or were secretly jealous of her). But the glory days were gone. In her own words, the mediocre population of Wichita “couldn’t decide whether they hated her for having been famous far away from there or then for her being a failure among them.”
She spent her days scrubbing the floor of her family’s house, fighting with her relatives, locked in her room reading, or getting into trouble, usually drunk, on the outskirts of the city, ending up at the police station a few times.
Even flopped in the middle of nowhere, Lulu tried a little bit of everything at that time. The best idea was to open a dance studio in Wichita, but the project did not go very far because of her prickly personality. Still, she continued to participate in dance events in the city and always ran ads offering her services as a dance teacher and even “coaching” for women (tips on how to behave in society “with elegance and attitude”). Before becoming a writer years later, she self-published a booklet about dancing called The Fundamentals of Good Ballroom Dancing.
In 1941, Louise was in a serious car accident. With head injuries, she had to cut off part of her beloved hair. The following year, 1942, with no progress in her dancing career, Lulu worked at Garfield’s department store in Wichita for just over a month.
In January 1943, wealthy New York investment banker Albert Archer called Brooks in Wichita, and she asked him to send her money to travel to New York. Four days later, Brooks left Wichita by train, with a stop in Chicago. On January 15, she arrived in New York City. Her hollow interlude in Wichita had come to an end.
Her years alone, poor, floundering in New York were perhaps the most difficult of her entire life. To survive and pay bills, she had several different jobs: radio soap opera actress, gossip columnist and advertising agent. Between 1946 and 1948, in an attempt to be “a normal person”, Louise worked as a saleswoman at Saks store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Already aged and without her famous old haircut, she was rarely recognized. She made fun of customers by showing contempt and indifference. If women expected her to zip up their clothes for them or things like that, Lulu just stood there and did nothing on purpose. She was never fired however; she simply asked to leave when she could not stand the job anymore.
According to Brooks, when she worked at Saks as a saleswoman, her “social death” among the wealthy was declared, and almost all of her former rich friends turned their backs on her. As a revenge and also an attempt to rise from the ashes, Louise Brooks began writing a revealing autobiography, which she thought of naming Naked on My Goat (title taken from an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust). Brooks spent years writing the book, but ultimately she gave up and threw the entire manuscript into the incinerator. Sadly, we will never know the whole truth about Louise Brooks’ intimate life. She later commented in the epilogue of her book Lulu in Hollywood “why I will never write my memoirs”. She did not want to simply throw everything to the fan without a truth, an intrinsic purpose that meant her entire trajectory. In her words, when comparing herself with other artists who have not also been delved into their intimate lives by biographers:
‘I am unwilling to write the sexual truth that would make my life worth reading. I cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt.’
Lulu
Upon leaving Saks in 1948 until 1953 she began working as an escort girl for “well-selected” rich and influential men. In her studio apartment, alone and poor, Louise sank into drink and obscurity. The idea of suicide constantly haunted her, saying that at the height of her despair she “flirted with sleeping pills”. The only relief during this period was the help of one of her former lovers, the founder of CBS William S. Paley, who began to give Louise an allowance so that she could make a living and give up her suicidal tendencies. Paley paid Brooks the same amount every month until her death in 1985.
To the surprise of many, Louise converted to Catholicism in 1953, perhaps in an attempt to find peace of mind. She left the church 11 years later, in 1964. In any case, she was not at all averse to religion, with one of her charcoal drawings being of a religious figure that she was very fond of. At the end of her life, however, she questioned whether there really was a God capable of allowing people to suffer as she did in the worst moments of her emphysema.
The 1950s were much more fruitful for Louise Brooks. Finally, her films (and those of her contemporaries) were being brought out of obscurity, due to the fascinated interest of new filmmakers and historians. In 1953, film historian James Card discovered Louise’s whereabouts and began a lovely friendship with the reclusive actress. He was the one who encouraged her to move to Rochester, as the George Eastman House (now Museum) was located there, for the preservation of films and photography. More than that: Card encouraged Louise to write about cinema; about that world she was part of and helped to build. After being ostracized for so long, Brooksie accepted the challenge and pursued it with all her might.
Louise wrote articles and attended several events at George Eastman, in addition to traveling to Europe, where she received honors and had her legacy as an actress enhanced like never before. Despite being a Garbo-style recluse, Brooks gave some rare interviews to critics and journalists. And even though she had serious problems with alcohol, Lulu remained focused on her writing and continued producing several articles, resulting in her book Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982 and still available for sale (highly recommended).
“As she careens from one man to another, the only constant factor is her will: She wants to party, she wants to make love, she wants to drink, she wants to tell men what she wants, and she wants to get it. There is no other motive than her desire: Not money, not sex, just selfishness. It could get ugly, but she makes it look like fun. You can’t get something for nothing, but if you can put off paying the bill long enough, it may begin to feel like you can.”
Roger Ebert on Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box
Louise suffered serious health problems towards the end of her life. In particular with pulmonary emphysema, due to her lifelong habit of smoking. Also suffering from arthritis in her hips, her mobility was severely impaired. She died of a heart attack in her Rochester apartment on August 8, 1985, at age 78.
Louise Brooks’ authenticity was a form of courage, boldness and resistance against any type of repression, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. She managed to be authentic and true, for better or for worse, within a conservative and archaic society. Misunderstood and underappreciated in her time, she was unable to free herself from certain traumas and resentments in life, but even in the most difficult conditions, her love for art and beauty moved her forward. Louise could have stopped in time and lived only on her past glory, like Norma Desmond, but she pursued to write and express herself, and through her ferocious spirit she gave a new meaning not only to Classic Hollywood but also to her own life.
Unaware of her own talent, she ended up becoming even more real and alive in her film performances and in our imagination, as this same carefree attitude she had towards life made her a natural for the medium, youthful and free from dissimulation. From beginning to end, she was always herself and played herself, which did not make her a parody of herself, on the contrary: it made her a true artist. She made her life a work of art: strange, chaotic, vivacious, true and unreal at the same time, as unsatisfactory as life itself. And even without acting techniques and with an irregular career of just a few films, Louise Brooks is today considered by film scholars and cinephiles to be one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Moreover, she is celebrated not for having been a typical successful star by Hollywood standards, but rather for having been a misfit rebel who turned her transgression into art.
Brooks remains a woman ahead of her time. Maybe not necessarily an example to be followed, but a free spirit who never gave up her own truth and way of being, no matter how great the temptations. And no matter how great her setbacks were, Lulu knew how to reinvent herself and give a new meaning to her life and her work. Many of her films remain lost, but fortunately her best works in silent cinema remain available and timeless in many ways. As much as we have special effects, sound and color today, silent cinema still has a lot to teach us in the matter of image, emotion and movement — that is, the very vital essence of cinema in its raw form.
To conclude, there is nothing better than Louise Brooks’ own epitaph, created by her a few years before her death. It reads:
“I never gave anything without wishing I had kept it, and I never kept anything without wishing I had given it”
EPILOGUE: BROOKSIE’S TRIVIA
She loved animals and had several dogs and cats throughout her life.
Her hobbies, besides writing and reading, were painting and drawing.
Her favorite actress was Margaret Sullavan. “That wonderful voice of hers,” marveled Brooks. “Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow.”
We don’t know if he was her favorite author of all, but Louise was obsessed with French writer Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time.
Her life inspired a fiction novel mixed with true facts called The Chaperone, written by Laura Moriarty and published in 2012.
Her favorite films were An American in Paris (1951), The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Pygmalion (1938).
About her lost films:
A Social Celebrity (1926), starring Brooks, was still preserved in the 1950s, when Louise rewatched it at the George Eastman House in 1957. But tragically the George Eastman copy deteriorated, and the other copy at Cinémathèque Française was lost in a fire in 1959. Therefore, as of 2023, there are no known copies of this film and today it is considered a lost movie.
Brooks’ films that to this day are considered lost and without any trace: Evening Clothes (1927), Rolled Stockings (1927) and The City Gone Wild (1927). The latter was almost saved by film preservationist David Shepard in the late 60s but Paramount was quicker and simply discarded the film along with several other already decomposed films.
Fortunately, some excerpts from her lost films have been found: excerpts from The American Venus were found, in particular an excerpt in Technicolor with Louise, something very rare; in 2016 a 23-minute fragment of Now We’re in the Air was found in a national archive in Prague, Czech Republic, and today, now restored, the excerpt can be watched online; finally, an incomplete copy of Just Another Blonde also survives in the UCLA archives.
All other films mentioned and illustrated in the post exist and are available online or in physical media!
In 2023 we are celebrating the 117 years of her birthday. May Brooksie’s legacy live on now and forever!
In addition to Lulu in Hollywood, the greatest source of this text was Barry Paris’ biography released in 1989 (Paris was also Garbo’s biographer, and also a highly recommended book).
Love and light,
Pedro Dantas
November 2023
