LOUISE BROOKS ON BECOMING SOPHISTICATED

page 10  Excerpted from LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by LOUISE BROOKS

..."Culture, I was to learn, was not a prerequisite for becoming a sophisticate New Yorker.  It was, in fact, a handicap.  The rich men who before long were exhibiting me in fashionable restaurants, theatres, and nightclubs shrank like truant schoolboys from the name of Shakespeare, and they looked upon an evening spent at the Metropolitan Opera or at a concert in Carnegie Hall as unthinkable misery.  Since I could not gossip about these socialites' families and friends, did not feel secure discussing the theatre and movies, and detested the vulgar game of dirty jokes and sexual innuendos, I talked scarcely at all.  Years later, the dress designer Travis Banton told me that in 1925, at the Colony - the grandest restaurant in town - he watched from another table and put me in the category of "beautiful but dumb," where I remained to the end of my film career.

In 1922, then, if I was to create my dream woman, I had to get rid of my Kansas accent, to learn the etiquette of the social elite, and to learn to dress beautifully.  I could not correct my speech at a fashionable girls' school.  I could not learn table manner from escorts embarrassed by my social inferiority.  I could not afford Fifth Avenue couturiers.  Therefore, I went for my education directly to the unknown people who were experts in such matters - the people at the bottom whose services supported the enchantment at the top of New York..."

Note: Louise Brooks grew up in a household where there were piles of books everywhere, and in her mid -life became a writer of articles about the Silent Film era.