Brooks, (Mary) Louise 1906-1985

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BROOKS, (Mary) Louise 1906-1985

PERSONAL: Born November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, KS; died of a heart attack, August 8, 1985; daughter of Leonard Porter (a lawyer and assistant attorney general of Kansas) and Myra (a homemaker; maiden name, Rude) Brooks; married A. Edward Sutherland (a film director), July 12, 1926 (divorced, 1928); married Deering Davis (a dancer), October 10, 1933 (divorced, 1938). Education: Attended Wichita College of Music, c. 1919-21; studied under Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis at Denishawn School of Dance, 1922-23. Religion: Catholic.

CAREER: Dancer, actress, and writer. Denishawn Dancers, New York, NY, member of dance troupe, 1923-24; Café de Paris, London, England, Charleston dancer, 1924; Ziegfeld Follies, New York, dancer, 1925; Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, sales clerk, 1946-48. Actress in motion pictures, including The Street of Forgotten Men, 1925, The American Venus, 1926, A Social Celebrity, 1926, It's the Old Army Game, 1926, The Show-Off, 1926, Just Another Blonde, 1926, Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, 1926, Evening Clothes, 1927, Rolled Stockings, 1927, Now We're in the Air, 1927, The City Gone Wild, 1927, A Girl in Every Port, 1928, Beggars of Life, 1928, The Canary Murder Case, 1929, Pandora's Box, 1929, The Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929, Beauty Prize, 1930, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, 1931, It Pays to Advertise, 1931, God's Gift to Women, 1931, Empty Saddles, 1936, King of Gamblers, 1937, When You're in Love, 1937, and Overland Stage Raiders, 1938; actress in radio soap operas, including Hobby Lobby and Ellery Queen, 1943. Worked variously as a dance instructor, model, and publicist.

WRITINGS:

The Fundamentals of Good Ballroom Dancing, privately printed, 1940.

Lulu in Hollywood (essays), introduction by William Shawn, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982, reprinted with introduction by Kenneth Tynan, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

Brooks's papers, left to the George Eastman House, are sealed until 2006. Contributor to books, including William Wyler: An Index, by Richard Roud, British Film, c. 1958; Pandora's Box, Classic Film Scripts, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1971; Double Exposure, by Roddy McDowall, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1976; John Wayne, by Allen Eyles, A. S. Barnes, 1976; and Louise Brooks: Portrait d'une anti-star, edited by Roland Jaccard, Phebus, 1976. Also contributor to various film magazines, including Film Culture, Focus on Film, Image, London Magazine, Objectif, Positif, and Sight and Sound.

SIDELIGHTS: Silent film beauty Louise Brooks became immortalized during the early days of Hollywood through her dazzling and carefree performances on and off the screen. World renowned for her short, bobbed haircut, delicate features, daring style of dress, and disregard for conventional mores, Brooks embodied the spirit of the flapper during the 1920s—a postwar era marked by people's pursuance of all things pleasurable. Dancing on Broadway at the age of eighteen, she became a motion picture star before her twentieth birthday and retired from the business in her early thirties, after failing to land a leading role in films for eight years. Brooks's stunted movie career as well as the politics of filmmaking during Hollywood's infancy are two of the subjects she would later describe when she pursued her writing career in earnest in her fifties. Her effect on Hollywood during the Jazz Age and the importance of her films have been discussed at length in critical studies, particularly Kenneth Tynan's profile of her in a 1979 New Yorker article, which is reprinted in Tynan's Show People: Profiles in Entertainment. Combined with the publication of her semi-autobiographical book Lulu in Hollywood, such tributes have renewed interest in her work and elevated her legendary films to cult classic status.

Born in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, Brooks began dancing at age ten. She set her sights for the stage in her youthful years as she performed at various local events and club meetings, accompanied by her mother, a talented pianist. Brooks attended the Wichita College of Music but was expelled by the age of fifteen due to poor behavior. Within a year, she was accepted into the New York school run by professional dancers Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, and soon began touring with the Denishawn Dancers. As chronicled in Lulu in Hollywood, Brooks was introduced to big city nightlife during her two-year stint with the troupe by a group of affluent stockbrokers who escorted her to fashionable clubs, dressed in scintillating gowns and furs. She wrote, "The most eligible bachelors in their thirties, finding debutantes a threat, turned to pretty girls in the theatre, whose mothers weren't husband-hunting....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."

Brooks noted in Lulu in Hollywood that her newfound popularity propelled her to shed all traces of her rural upbringing and incorporate a new sophisticated image. She accomplished this by ridding herself of her Kansas accent with the help of an articulate soda fountain employee, discovering the essence of dress from a shop girl, and studying etiquette with cultured waiters. According to various Brooks biographers, the change in her demeanor and subsequent lack of dedication to her work reportedly led to her dismissal from the Denishawn Dancers in 1924. Immediately after, she tried Broadway and secured a part as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, but her work in the musical was short-lived, as she quit within a matter of months, seeking a job as a Charleston dancer at a London nightclub. Quickly bored, she returned to New York and became a chorus girl in Florenz Ziegfeld's musical comedy Louis the 14th. She was again hired by the producer for his 1925 Ziegfeld Follies stage show, starring Will Rogers and W. C. Fields, despite her continued unpredictable behavior. During her initial dancing career, Brooks also found time to model, posing semi-nude for theatrical photographer John De Mirjian.

Brooks's Broadway chorus line days were numbered as she successfully tested for a bit part in the Paramount Pictures film The Street of Forgotten Men. She was soon offered contracts from both Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount, and opted for the latter, quit dancing, and made six films at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in New York. Her work in The American Venus inspired the "Dixie Dugan" comic strip by John H. Striebel, which ran for more than thirty-five years. (Guido Crepax would also base his comic strip "Valentina" on her in 1965.) According to Barry Paris in his biography Louise Brooks, the actress continued her fast-paced, flamboyant lifestyle, which included numerous affairs with wealthy men and such Hollywood notables as comedian Charlie Chaplin. Attempting to settle down, she married A. Edward Sutherland, who directed her and Fields in It's the Old Army Game in 1926. When Paramount shifted its New York operations to Hollywood in 1927, Brooks soon developed a dislike for her new surroundings. According to Tynan's New Yorker profile, Brooks wrote that "in Hollywood . . . the studio was run by B. P. Schulberg, a coarse exploiter who propositioned every actress and policed every set. To love books was a big laugh. There was no theatre, no opera, no concerts—just those g————d movies."

Brooks's brief marriage to Sutherland ended in 1928. By that time, her meteoric rise to fame had given her sex symbol status throughout the industry, and her increasing box office appeal prompted her to demand a pay raise under the terms of her contract. Her request fell on Paramount head Schulberg's deaf ears at a time when Hollywood was converting from silent to sound pictures. Brooks later observed that studios used this transition to reduce salaries and void contracts, claiming that actors' voices had not been tested in the silent movies, and the paying public might reject the stars if their voices were deemed inappropriate to their onscreen silent image. As a result, the actress was denied an increase in income and broke her contract with Paramount.

Aware that German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst had asked Paramount repeatedly to borrow her for films, Brooks ventured abroad. In Lulu in Hollywood she recalled, "In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in my fan mail. In Berlin, I stepped onto the station platform to meet Pabst and became an actress. I would be treated by him with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me in Hollywood. It was just as if Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly where I needed assurance and protection."

In fact, Pabst had first seen Brooks in the 1928 film A Girl in Every Port, which she had made while on loan from Paramount to Twentieth Century-Fox. In what biographer Paris equates to David O. Selznick's later search for the perfect Scarlett O'Hara for the 1939 classic film Gone with the Wind, Pabst scouted the world's film industry for the ultimate femme fatale for his 1929 picture Pandora's Box. Pabst selected the American Brooks, much to the chagrin of up-andcoming star Marlene Dietrich, hundreds of other German actresses, and the country's curious public. In Pandora's Box, Brooks portrays Lulu, a bewitching siren who responds with innocent calm to the destruction her beauty and amorality yield. Based on nineteenth-century German playwright Frank Wedekind's initially banned 1895 Der Erdgeist and its 1904 sequel Die Buechse der Pandora, the film follows the pleasure-seeking life of Lulu, a character who would be frequently compared to the actress herself. Tynan quoted Brooks as saying, "She's just the same kind of nitwit that I am. Like me, she'd have been an impossible wife, sitting in bed all day reading and drinking gin." Pabst and Brooks's presentation of Lulu as a victim, however, was a significant factor in the film's universally poor reception by critics and audiences alike. In fact, the film was not acknowledged as a masterpiece of the silent cinema until some twenty-five years later. Brooks made two more films abroad before returning to Hollywood despite Pabst's warning, "Your life is exactly like Lulu's, and you will end the same way."

Despite her earlier success in silent films, Brooks was unable to land a leading role in talkies upon her return to the United States in 1930. Some biographers have claimed that her failed comeback was tied to both her dispute with Paramount and the nature of the erotic films she made in Germany, while others have speculated that her reputation for being unpredictable and difficult abbreviated her movie career. Brooks contended, however, that her acting days were stunted by her innate honesty and need for independence. In Lulu in Hollywood she explained, "My parents' resolute pursuit of their own interests also accounted for my own early autonomy and my later inability, when I went to work in the Hollywood film factories, to submit to slavery." After a promised contract with Columbia Pictures did not materialize, she landed bit parts in movies and again tried theater. She married dancer Deering Davis in October of 1933, and left him after six months. She toured the nightclub circuit with a dance troupe in 1934 and 1935, and later returned to Hollywood for several small roles, including one in 1938's Overland Stage Raiders with John Wayne. She obtained an official divorce from Davis and quit the business shortly after the western was completed.

Brooks returned to Wichita and opened a dance studio in 1940. When this enterprise failed in 1943, she relocated to New York City and worked in radio soap operas for six months. "I moved on to New York," Brooks observed in Lulu in Hollywood, "where I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl. I blacked out my past, refused to see my few remaining friends connected with the movies, and began to flirt with fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills."

In the mid 1940s, Brooks was employed by various publicity agencies and, for a short time, wrote a gossip column. She also signed on as an instructor for one week at an Arthur Murray dance studio. Nearly broke, she obtained a job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she worked from 1946 to 1948 as a sales clerk. In 1948, Brooks began a memoir titled "Naked on My Goat," after a passage in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust that reads, "I sit here naked on my goat and show my fine young body." In Focus on Film magazine she recalled that she destroyed the work, as she could not write the sexual details of her life, a history she believed was necessary to make her autobiography of interest to readers. Burt A. Folkart quoted her in the Los Angeles Times as stating: "Nobody needs a book of mine to learn how to make a mess of life."

As documented in Tynan's New Yorker article, several men paid for Brooks's living expenses from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, until she ended those relationships. Destitute by 1954, she began receiving an annual annuity from former lover and friend William Paley, chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, to help subsidize a new writing career. After a move to Rochester, New York, in 1956, she began jotting down memories of her early life and days in Hollywood for magazines such as Film Culture, Focus on Film, and Sight and Sound. In the mid 1950s and early 1960s, Brooks's film career finally received the recognition it had been denied for almost a quarter of a century when her work was featured in a major exhibition in Paris and when French director Jean-Luc Godard modeled the heroine of his film Vivre sa vie after Brooks.

The actress was in her seventies, virtually reclusive, and frequently bedridden due to osteoarthritis and acute emphysema when Tynan met with her to prepare his New Yorker article, "The Girl in the Black Helmet." Consenting to the interview at the urging of her friend, actor Roddy McDowall, Brooks took a liking to Tynan who, according to Paris, described her as "the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid . . . the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known." Paris noted that Brooks and Tynan's friendship ended bitterly, however, for she feared he was exploiting her to further his already successful career, although she had approved his manuscript prior to publication. Paris wrote that Brooks told film historian Kevin Brownlow, "Ever since old Tynan double-crossed me by converting sex gossip into the New Yorker profile, I have been battered with publishers' offers to print cheap sex memoirs and offers from three film outfits." She opted to compile her life's story herself and prepared Lulu in Hollywood, a combination of previously published manuscripts and new writings.

Although Lulu in Hollywood is only a partial autobiography, it features some 130 photographs from Brooks's early days of filmmaking. Its more than 100 pages include seven essays devoted to her early life in Kansas, the filming of Beggars of Life, her work with Pabst on Pandora's Box, and her observations of various Hollywood notables, including Humphrey Bogart and Fields. Generally well-received by critics, Lulu in Hollywood also features a discussion of Brooks's distaste for the Hollywood system, which she said destroyed many great talents, including Greta Garbo, Jeannette MacDonald, Joan Crawford, and Lillian Gish. "These essays become another kind of legacy from her," noted Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "and a testament to survival." James Wolcott in Esquire deemed Lulu in Hollywood "a very tart, fleet, gossipy book, a whip-flicking display of wit and spite." And Sara Laschever remarked in New York Review of Books, "One of the most distinctive features of Brooks's memoirs is the almost total absence of regret. Still, she is true to the persona she imagined for herself, and her self-portrait is the one undeniable success of the book."

Brooks died of a heart attack in her Rochester apartment on August 8, 1985. She summed up her career in a letter to her brother Theodore, which was published in Paris's biography: "I never read anything about myself that doesn't make me puke. That doesn't mean I don't love my latter-day fame; I simply reserve the right to find the whole thing ridiculous."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Atwell, Lee, G. W. Pabst, [Boston, MA], 1977.

Biographical Dictionary of Film, Morrow (New York, NY), 1976.

Brooks, Louise, Lulu in Hollywood (essays), introduction by William Shawn, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982, reprinted with introduction by Kenneth Tynan, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade's Gone By (essays), Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Jaccard, Roland, editor, Louise Brooks: Portrait d'une anti-star, Phebus, 1976, translation published as Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star, [London], 1987.

Liebman, Roy, Silent Film Performers, McFarland and Co. (Jefferson, NC), 1996.

The Oxford Companion to Film, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1976.

Paris, Barry, Louis Brooks, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

Tynan, Kenneth, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1980.