Louise Brooks

Biography

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she performed opposite Ted Shawn. After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals and as a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and signed a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). During this time, she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and joined the elite social circle of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (Prix de Beauté) (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in 14 silent films and 10 sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became what she termed "a kept woman" to three wealthy men. For the next two decades, she was alcoholic and suicidal. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78.

== Early life ==

Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually preoccupied with his legal practice, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who said that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves". Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music. Brooks described the hometown of her childhood as a typical Midwestern community where the inhabitants "prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn." When Louise was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused her. Beyond the physical trauma at the time, the event continued to have damaging psychological effects on her personal life as an adult and on her career. That early abuse caused her later to acknowledge that she was incapable of real love, explaining that this man: "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure ... For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough — there had to be an element of domination." When Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading him on". In 1919, Brooks and her family moved to Independence, Kansas, before relocating to Wichita in 1920. Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in New York at the age of 15 in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. As a member of the globe-trotting troupe, Brooks spent a season abroad in London and in Paris. In her second season with the Denishawn company, she advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. But one day, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in the spring of 1924, telling her in front of the other members: "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver." These words made a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave the tenth and final chapter. Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal. Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, the sister of Constance and Joan Bennett, Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a semi-nude dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street. As a result of her work in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures. An infatuated Wanger signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925. Soon after, Brooks met movie star Charlie Chaplin at a cocktail party given by Wanger. Chaplin was in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush (1925) at the Strand Theatre on Broadway. Chaplin and Brooks had a two-month affair that summer while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey. When their affair ended, Chaplin sent her a check; she declined to write him a thank-you note.

== Career ==

=== Paramount films ===

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. At the time, Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone. Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him. Despite his advice, she accepted Paramount's offer. During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her." A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery). Brooks's disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies. The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be an ordeal for Brooks. During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who, the next day, spread a false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted syphilis during a previous weekend stay with a producer, ostensibly Jack Pickford. Concurrently, Brooks's interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated, as Arlen was a close friend of Brooks's then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Brooks, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members. Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly climbs aboard a moving train.

Soon after the production of Beggars of Life was completed, Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies's lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer. While partying with Lederer, Brooks had a brief sexual liaison with her. At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction. Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer — Brooks's closest friend and companion — committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window. This event traumatized Brooks and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast. Brooks, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian director. On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. Thirty years later this decision would come to be seen as highly beneficial to her career, securing her reputation as a silent film legend and independent spirit. While her snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her altogether in Hollywood, her subsequent refusal, after returning from Germany, to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.

=== European films ===