WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE?

BARBARA BENNET INTRODUCED LOUISE BROOKS TO WALL STREET MEN

Louise Brooks was invited to their parties by Randolph Hearts and his mistress Marion Davies both in California and New York.  She was also a friend of the Bennett family, known for the actress Constance Bennett, Joan Bennett, and Barbara Bennett.  Barbara was a good friend.

pages 14 - 15 of LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by Louise Brooks

... Among the Hollywood detestables, even I was no match for Constance, who could sit across from me at the dinner table in Marion Davies' beach house and never acknowledge my existence with so much as an icy nod....

It was then that Barbara introduced me to a group of Wall Street men who made it possible for me to buy expensive clothes.  These most eligible bachelors in their thirties, finding debutantes a threat, turned to pretty girls in the theatre, whose mothers weren't husband hunting.  Cafe society developed about this time.  The theatre, Hollywood, and society mingled in the monthly Mayfair dances at the Ritz, where society women could monitor their theatrical enemies and snub them publicly.  All the rich men were friends who entertained one another in their perfectly appointed Park Avenue apartments and Long Island homes.  The extravagant sums given to the girls for clothes were part of the fun - part of competing to see whose girl would win the Best-Dressed title.  Sexual submission was not a condition of this arrangement, although many affairs grew out of it.  For a time, Barbara was kept by William Rhinelander Stewart, who gave her a square cut emerald from Cartier.  One night when we were swimming of Caleb Bragg's houseboat, the Masquerader. she watched it slip off her finger into Long Island Sound.  She kept this hilarious accident secret from Stewart by buying a fake emerald from Denis Smith, whose jewelry business was unknown to innocent lovers.  They would have been staggered to learn how many of their gifts were converted into imitations and cash.  Truly, ours was a heartless racket.  After receiving an ermine coat from Jaeckel's, the gift of a stockbroker named John Lock,  I let him take me just once to a tea dance at the Biltmore Hotel.

I HAVE A LEANING FOR YOU

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

WOMEN IN FLAPPER ERA ADVERTISEMENTS

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!