1906-1985
You may know the iconographic face because of the black helmet of hair worn in a severe bob and the black smoldering eyes peering out directly at you. LOUISE BROOKS, a Flapper, liberated from the fashions that made it difficult to move, became a professional dancer in her teens.
Considered now to be one of the most influential actresses (a word she insisted on rather than the neuter term actor) of the Silent Film era, and associated with free-spirited sex, she would live much of her life after a couple dozen films in obscurity and poverty.
She was born Mary Louise Brooks on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, the daughter of a lawyer and a pianist. At fifteen she began to dance professionally and joined the Denishawn Dance Company (founded by Ruth St. Denis, a contemporary of Isadora Duncan) and traveled. In New York City, through with Denishawn Dance Company and Ruth with her, she became a Ziegfeld Follies performer. She said she was seventeen.
Her acting was natural at a time when others were so overly dramatic. Her peers were Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, two different types, who became more famous. Because her voice was beautiful, she made it into Talkies.
As a young woman she was associated with sex. In the chapter called "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs", of her book (cover above) called LULU IN HOLLYWOOD, she said that she was not degenerate enough for one part of Hollywood and too degenerate for another.
On page 107, she wrote, "I am not speaking of those vulgar brawls publicised as Hollywood orgies, nor of those parties composed of a herd of extra girls (she means movie extras - background actors) infiltrated by producers and actors stimulated by stag movies, nor of those drunken parties that spread into bedrooms and out upon lawns. I am speaking of those rare entertainments which, so far as I know, have never been recorded in any memoir."
Louise wrote a series of essays about her experiences in what I call Hollywood's Golden era, which were published in LULU IN HOLLYWOOD. She gives chapters to W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, and Marion Davies.
She writes about Hearst's management of Marion's career and presumption that he would reign supreme in Hollywood. She writes about her friendship with Marion's Davies' lesbian niece called Pepi Lederer, who had a Black woman as a lover, was raped while drunk and had an abortion, and eventually commit suicide. Louise says she herself was not lesbian but had a couple sexual experiences with women and sometimes encouraged people to think so.
She writes, on page 42, that while a guest of Hearst and Marion's she knew that Hearst was also keeping Maybelle Swor in New York, who lived a few floors below their apartment at the Warwick Hotel. (The first I heard that!)
Louise was never happy with the Hollywood system in which actors were owned by Studios and was outspoken about this unhappiness. It was career suicide. She was too independent though not an outright rebel. So though she made 24 films, it wasn't until she was "rediscovered" for her contribution to the development of acting that people began to look her up, and by then she was old and far removed from her heyday.
After being blackballed by being given lesser and lesser roles until she quit, Brooks bounced around a bit, first going back to her hometown in Kansas where she no longer fit in. She also went back to New York City and worked as a salesgirl at a department store and was shunned by her old friends for working at such a job. She may have become a prostitute for a few years in New York City, something she alluded to as her last option. Finally she settled in Rochester New York, famous for the home of Kodak film and cameras, where she lived alone and isolated, with her books and her cat.
William Paley is said to have provided a stipend to her for all the years of her life when he found out she was destitute, though their long ago affair was said to be brief.
Louise herself wrote that she was a "Kept Woman" but without any one man contributing to her welfare.
Through this month I'll be excerpting from the book LULU IN HOLLYWOOD, which is an introduction by Kenneth Tynan and essays that were written and published by Brooks in the 1960's and 1970's in magazines like Film Culture and Sight and Sound!
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