Louise Brooks (1) (1906–1985)

Silent film star Louise Brooks is known mostly for her films with German director G.W. Pabst (‘Pandora’s Box’ and ‘Diary of a Lost Girl’), and for soon disappearing from movies, despite her iconic looks and talent. This is a collection of essays that she wrote for various publications in the 60’s and 70’s, along with an excellent introduction by Kenneth Tynan who visited her in 1978, which help us piece together the story of her life. As she was well-connected with people in the film industry, she also gives us interesting insights and anecdotes.

Despite her popularity and her routinely staying out ‘til the wee hours of the morning partying, Brooks was a bit of a loner, and private. After an introductory chapter on her early years, moving from Kansas to New York with a chaperone at the tender age of 15 to pursue dancing (where she is friends with the Bennett family), we get one on the filming of ‘Beggars of Life’ at age 22. There are then several chapters mostly focused on others (Marion Davies’ Niece, Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo), but we get glimpses of her life through her interactions and memories of them. The result is incomplete as autobiographies go, but fascinating nonetheless. And, if you have any interest in those actors, want to get a sense of the theater scene in New York or movie scene in Hollywood/Berlin, or want a behind the scenes look at some of Brooks’s bigger films – this is a book definitely worth reading. I also loved the many pictures it included.

Brooks points out several of the uglier aspects of the film industry, for example, how producers deliberately tried to lower popularity of stars like Gish in order to save money, through the films they gave her and controlling the movie press. Gossip was also difficult, especially with the double standard – when Brooks had one-night stands, it immediately spread, including one incident during the filing of ‘Beggars of Life,’ and another with Jack Pickford. She also points out several instances when ‘film history’ was fabricated or falsified. It’s interesting that she doesn’t mention this, but Tynan does – in 1930, when she went back to Hollywood to negotiate a contact with Columba, “Harry Cohn, the head of the studio, summoned her to his office for a series of meetings, at each of which he appeared naked from the waist up.” She rebuffed him, and her career immediately tanked, complete with him trying to humiliate her seven years later by giving her a lowly part in the corps de ballet for a film. Even with G.W. Pabst, whom she had a consensual affair with, had an “extraordinary collection of obscene stills”, because “in the twenties it was the custom for European actresses to send naked pictures of themselves to movie directors.” It’s sad to think of the decades and decades this behavior went on, routinely, and I’m sure Brooks is smiling somewhere over the #metoo movement.

In the chapter on Pepi Lederer, she relates finding out who it was that raped Pepi when she was dead-drunk, and that he “told me with smiling satisfaction” that “whenever he had the opportunity he escorted drunk women friends home and performed in the same manner.” Still worse, in the interviews with Tynan, Brooks reveals that at age 9 she was sexually molested by a 50 year old family friend, that it had a part in forming her attitude towards sexual pleasure (“there had to be an element of domination”), and that her own mother – her own mother! – blamed her, saying she must have led him on in some way, when she told her years later as an adult.

Despite being ‘black-balled’ as she puts it, I have to say, I don’t think Brooks helped her career any by refusing to participate in converting the silent film ‘The Canary Murder Case’ (1929) that she was in to a talkie, and turning down other offers, including the one for ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931) that Jean Harlow took. She was genuinely difficult to work with, prioritizing her life over work and not enamored with Hollywood, and in 1940 age 34, she would be gone for good. Just six years later, this woman who had regularly partied in Hearst Castle, had an affair with Charlie Chaplin, had been the lover of George Marshall (millionaire owner of the Redskins football team), and who had overcome her humble origins to become a sophisticated, worldly cosmopolitan, was working as a salesgirl at Sak’s Fifth Avenue. It’s not the tale of a victim, or even a tragedy; Brooks would live until 79 and have her silent films rediscovered along the way. It’s just a shame that she didn’t make more of them, and that she didn’t write about more of her life. She was well-read, nonconformist, intelligent, and empathetic, on top of the screen presence she had. We get a little window into a lost world in what we do have, though.

Just one quote, on achievement:
“Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration. Paying attention.”… (more)