LOUISE BROOKS UPDATE - NEW DOCUMENTARY FILM "THE CHAPERONE"

DAILY MAIL :LOUISE BROOKS : FILM :Julian Fellowes :The Chaperone

EXCERPT : For she was Louise Brooks - enigmatic sex siren of the silent screen era and arguably the most outrageous actress in Hollywood History.  Her relationship with Ms. MIlls (her 36 year old chaperone when she was 15 years old and going to New York City to learn dance) is the subject of The Chaperon, a new film written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes...  ELIZABETH McGOVERN - aka Lady Cora in Downton - plays the chaperone while her headstrong and flirtatious charge is portrayed by young American actress  HALEY LU RICHARDSON. ....

'At these parties we were not required, like common wh9ores, to go to bed with any man who asked us, but if we did the profits were great.  Money, jewels, mink coats, a film job - name it.' ... One of these powerful men with film industry connections was Daily Express newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook...

NOTE FROM MISSY : I believe this might be the same Lord Beaverbrook who was part of Mistress Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman's story.

FEBRUARY 2014 featured LOUISE BROOKS as Mistress of the Month here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT.  Check out those posts!

You can search for her name, or also search for tags such as Hollywood, and may also be interested in CLARA BOW.

LOUISE BROOKS SPEAKING OF THE LIFE SHE LEAD IN 1948 and 1953 AS A KEPT WOMAN

Kenneth Tynan writing in the introduction of the book "Lulu in Hollywood".  This is what LOUISE BROOKS told him, printed on page xxxiv.

"Between 1948 and 1953, I suppose you could call me a kept woman," she said.  "Three decent rich men looked after me.  But then I was always a kept woman.  Even when I was making a thousand dollars a week, I would always be paid for by George Marshall or someone like that.  But I never had anything to show for it - no cash, no trinkets, nothing.  I didn't even like jewelry - can you imagine?  Pabst once called me a born whore, but if he was right I was a failure, with no pile of money and no comfortable mansion.  I just wasn't equipped to spoil millionaires in a practical, farsighted way.  I could live in the present, but otherwise everything has always been a hundred percent wrong about me.  Anyway, the three decent men took care of me.  One of them owned a sheet-metal manufacturing  company, and the result of that affair is that I am now the owner of the only handmade aluminum waste basket in the world.  He designed it, and it's in the living room, my solitary trophy.  Then a time came, early in 1953, when me three men independently decided that they wanted to marry me.  I had to escape, because I wasn't in love with them.  As a matter of fact, I've never been in love.  And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him?  Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it.  It was clever of Pabst to know even before he met me that I posses the tramp essence of Lulu."


Book
Lulu In Hollywood
by Louise Brooks, with Introduction by Kenneth Tynan.
C 1974 and 1982 by Louise Brooks
University of Minnesota Press

LOUISE BROOKS IN PANDORA'S BOX 1929

 UPDATE JUNE 2021  STOP!  Due to a copyright claim to YouTube the film has been taken down.

I'm linking to the full film on YouTube  YOUTUBE LOUISE BROOKS IN PANDORAS BOX 1929

Check YouTube for trailers and clips.  So Sorry!

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.

LOUISE BROOKS THE FLAPPER

LOUISE BROOKS TO KENNETH TYNAN ON BEING MOLESTED AS A GIRL

To Kenneth Tynan in the Introduction of  of LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by LOUISE BROOKS.

"Having paused to light a cigarette, which provoked a mild coughing spasm, Brooks resumed her story.  "I almost forgot a strange incident that happened in 1952.  Out of the blue, I got a letter from a woman who had been a Cherryvale neighbor of ours.  She enclosed some snapshots.  One of them showed a nice-looking neighbor of ours.  She enclosed some snapshots.  One of them showed a nice looking gay haired man of about fifty, holding the hand of a little girl - me.  On the back she'd written, 'This is Mr. Feathers, an old bachelor who loved kids.  He was always taking you to the picture show and buying you toys and candy.'  That picture brought back something I'd blacked out of my mind for - what? - thirty-seven years.  When I was nine years old,. Mr. Feathers molested me sexually.  Which forged another link between me and Lulu: when she had her first lover, she was very young, and Schigolch, the man in questions, was middle -aged.  I've often wondered what effect Mr. Feathers had on my life.  He must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude towards sexual pleasure.  For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough - there had to be an element of domination - and I'm sure that's all tied up with Mr. Feathers.  The pleasure of kissing and being kissed comes from somewhere entirely different, psychologically as well as physically.  Incidentally, I told my mother about Mr. Feathers, and - would you believe it? (Peal of laughter.) She blamed me!  She said I must have led him on.  It's always the same, isn't it?"  And Brooks ran on in this vein, discussing her sex life openly and jauntily, unbuckling one more notch of the Bible Belt with every sentence she uttered."

Excerpted from LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by Louise Brooks

LOUISE BROOKS - FREE SPIRITED SILENT SCREEN STAR : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH FEBRUARY 2013

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!