LOUIS BROOKS , AMERICAN SEXY ACTRESS
IN SILENT MOVIE ERA BORN 1906 NOVEMBER 14
| Louise Brooks | |
|---|---|
(c.1926)
|
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| Born | Mary Louise Brooks November 14, 1906 Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S. |
| Died | August 8, 1985 (aged 78) Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Resting place | Holy Sepulchre Cemetery |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Lulu |
| Occupation | Actress, dancer |
| Years active | 1925–1938 |
| Spouse(s) | A. Edward Sutherland (m. 1926–28) Deering Davis (m. 1933–38) |
Early life
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who determined that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".[1]
Brooks as a sophomore in high school, 1922[2]
Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music.
When she was 9 years old, a neighborhood predator sexually abused Louise. This event had a major influence on Brooks' life and career, causing her to say in later years that she was incapable of real love, and 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".[3] 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".[4]
Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn modern dance company in Los Angeles (whose members included founders Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham) in 1922. In her second season with the company, Brooks had advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. A long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, however,
and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in 1924, telling her in front of the other members that "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver".[5] The words left 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 to the tenth and final chapter.[6]
Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett (sister of Constance and Joan), Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. As a result of her work in the Follies, she came to the attention of Paramount Pictures producer Walter Wanger, who signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925.[7] (She was also noticed by visiting movie star Charlie Chaplin, who was in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush. The two had an affair that summer).[8]
Career
Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show Off (1926)
American films
Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, 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.
She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl in Every Port in 1928.[9]
In an early sound film drama, Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country girl who kills her foster father in a moment of desperation. 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, 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.
By this time in her life, she was mixing with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon, being close friends with Davies' niece, Pepi Lederer. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend; many women styled their hair in imitation of her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.[10] Soon after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.
Paramount attempted to use the coming of sound films to pressure the actress, but she called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her 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. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film,[11] as the studio claimed that Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.
In Europe
Once in Germany, she starred in the 1929 film Pandora's Box, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu.
This film is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first screen portrayals of a lesbian.[12] Brooks then starred in the controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme and also directed by Pabst, and Miss Europe (1930) by Italian director Augusto Genina, the latter being filmed in France, and having a famous surprise ending. All these films were heavily censored[where?], as they were very "adult" and considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality, as well as their social satire.
Life after filmWhen she returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931). Her performances in these films, however, were largely ignored, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".[citation needed]
Despite this, William Wellman, her director on Beggars of Life, offered her the female lead in his new picture, The Public Enemy starring James Cagney. However, Brooks turned down the role in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City,[13] and the part instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Brooks later explained herself to Wellman by saying that she hated making pictures because she simply "hated Hollywood", and according to film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, "she just wasn't interested ....
She was more interested in Marshall".[14] In the opinion of Brooks's biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".[14] She made one more film at that time, a comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by Hollywood outcast Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".
Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932[15] and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a comeback in 1936, and did a bit part in the Western Empty Saddles, which led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. She made two more films after that, including the lead opposite John Wayne in Overland Stage Raiders (1938), a "B" Western[16]
in which she played the romantic lead with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days.
Brooks then briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she said. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."[3] After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned East and, after brief stints as a radio actor and a gossip columnist,[17][18] worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City for a few years, then lived as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients.[19]
I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.[20]
Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14,[21] but she remained relatively sober to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During this period she began her first major writing project, an autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from Goethe's Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.[22]
She was a notorious spendthrift for most of her life, and was kind and generous to her friends, almost to a fault.
Rediscovery
"There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"
Henri Langlois, 1953[23]
French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon, much to her amusement. It would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country.
James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982.
She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl in The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood, a hairstyle she helped popularize.[24]
She rarely gave interviews, but had special relationships with film historians John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s she was interviewed extensively, on film, for the documentaries Memories of Berlin:
The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and for the documentary series Hollywood (1980) by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death, but filmed a decade earlier. Author Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks' apartment for an interview in 1982, and later wrote about the at times awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon With Louise Brooks" that is the lead piece in his book Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers.
Personal life
Marriages and relationships
Brooks in her prime
In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had fallen "terribly in love"[25] with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life".[26] She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928.[27]
In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis, Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her.[28] According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more.[28] The couple officially divorced in 1938.
Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her many lovers from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. According to Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu, Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the rest of her life, and according to the documentary this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point.[citation needed]
She also had an on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall throughout the 1920s and 1930s (which she described as "abusive").[citation needed] He was the biggest reason she was able to secure a contract with Pabst.[citation needed] Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him, but after finding that she had had many affairs while they were together, married film actress Corinne Griffith instead.
Sexuality
By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing fully nude for art photography,[29] and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation.
Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo.[30][31] She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".[32][33] Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:
I had a lot of fun writing 'Marion Davies' Niece' [an article about Pepi Lederer], leaving the lesbian theme in question marks. All my life it has been fun for me. ... When I am dead, I believe that film writers will fasten on the story that I am a lesbian... I have done lots to make it believable [...] All my women friends have been lesbians. But that is one point upon which I agree positively with [Christopher] Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people, although they may accommodate themselves, for reasons of whoring or marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls – they did nothing for me.[34]
Death
On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead of a heart attack[35] after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
Born November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, USA
Died August 8, 1985 in Rochester, New York, USA (heart attack)
Birth Name Mary Louise Brooks
Nicknames Lulu
Brooksie
Scrubbie
Height 5' 2" (1.57 m)
Mini Bio (3)
Mary Louise Brooks, also known by her childhood name of Brooksie, was born in the midwestern town of Cherryvale, Kansas, on November 14, 1906. She began dancing at an early age with the Denishawn Dancers (which was how she left Kansas and went to New York) and then with George White's Scandals before joining the Ziegfeld Follies, but became one of the most fascinating and alluring personalities ever to grace the silver screen. She was always compared to her Lulu role in Pandora's Box (1929), which was filmed in 1928. Her performances in A Girl in Every Port (1928) and Beggars of Life (1928), both filmed in 1928, proved to all concerned that Louise had real talent. She became known, mostly, for her bobbed hair style. Thousands of women were attracted to that style and adopted it as their own. As you will note by her photographs, she was no doubt the trend setter of the 1920s with her Buster Brown-Page Boy type hair cut, much like today's women imitate stars. Because of her dark haired look and being the beautiful woman that she was, plus being a modern female, she was not especially popular among Hollywood's clientle. She just did not go along with the norms of the film society. Louise really came into her own when she left Hollywood for Europe. There she appeared in a few German productions which were very well made and continued to prove she was an actress with an enduring talent. Until she ended her career in film in 1938, she had made only 25 movies. After that, she spent most of her time reading and painting. She also became an accomplished writer, authoring a number of books, including her autobiography. On August 8, 1985, Louise died of a heart attack in Rochester, New York. She was 78 years old.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson
Louise Brooks was one of the most fascinating personalities of Hollywood, always being compared with her most important characterization as protagonist: Lulu in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929). Along with her beauty and talent she had an independent streak and refused to accept the restrictive role that women had in American society, and pretty much went her own way, which caused quite a bit of controversy. Not everyone found her rebellious nature off-putting, though; in 1926 she was the inspiration for the comic heroine Dixie Dugan and in the zenith of her fame for Valentina of Guido Crepax. She started her career as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, and Hollywood soon came calling. She didn't care for the Hollywood scene at all, though, and traveled to Europe, where she made her most memorable films. Her dissatisfaction with Hollywood in general led her to quit films altogether in 1938; she was at the peak of her career, but just gave it all up. After that she spent her life writing, reading and painting until her death in 1985.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Volker Boehm
A legendary actress of the silent film era. She epitomized the flapper age with her bobbed hairstyle, while blatantly flaunting the accepted sexual and societal roles of women at the time. She is best known for her starring roles in G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl," which were both filmed in Weimar Germany in 1929. She quit acting in 1938 at the age of 32. Several of her films are considered lost. She spent many years living in obscurity until her remaining films were rediscovered in the 1950s to great acclaim. Her status as one of the great actresses and beauties of motion pictures continues to this day.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Heidi MacDonald
Spouse (2)
William Deering Davis (10 October 1933 - 9 December 1937) (divorced)
A. Edward Sutherland (21 July 1926 - 20 June 1928) (divorced)
Trade Mark (1)
Bob hairstyle
Trivia (34)
Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#44) (1995).
Her cremated remains are interred at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York. At her memorial service, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" was played and passages from "Lulu in Hollywood" were read.
Trying to make a Hollywood comeback after working in Europe, she turned down an offer to star with James Cagney in the classic The Public Enemy (1931). The role could have revitalized her career.
As a child, one of her best friends was Vivian Vance who played Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy (1951).
After retiring, she went on to write many witty and intelligent essays on the film industry.
Opened a dance studio in Beverly Hills. It failed because of a financial scandal involving her business partner. On 30 July 1940, Brooks boarded a train back to Kansas, leaving Hollywood for good. She opened a dance studio in Wichita and wrote a booklet, "The Fundamentals of Good Ballroom Dancing."
Briefly the mistress of CBS founder William Paley, who secretly provided her with a yearly pension for the rest of her life.
On February 6, 1932, she filed for bankruptcy and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living.
A 20th Century-Fox talent scout spotted a girl named Linda Carter in a play and offered her a screen test. Linda Carter was actually Brooks, who was attempting a comeback. [July 1938]
Was the inspiration for the stage play "Show Girl", which, in turn, inspired the comic strip "Dixie Dugan". She was also the inspiration for Italian cartoonist Guido Crepax's comic strip/graphic novel "Valentina". Brooks and Crepax became pen pals as a result.
Marlene Dietrich was sitting in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's office, ready to accept the role of Lulu in Pandora's Box (1929) at the same time Brooks walked out on her Paramount contract.
Her first autobiography, entitled "Naked On My Goat", she was thrown into an incinerator by her own hand.
In Neil Gaiman's novel "American Gods", the character Czernobog called her the "greatest American actress of all time".
Her favorite actress was Margaret Sullavan.
Provided the inspiration for the British band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's 1991 hit "Pandora's Box". The promo video clip features lead singer Andy McCluskey intercut with images from Pandora's Box (1929).
Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 106-107. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
By 1946, she had to take a $40-a-week job as a sales girl at Saks Fifth Avenue to make a living.
Her father, Leonard Porter Brooks, was a lawyer. Her mother, Myra Rude Brooks, was a talented pianist.
She left her home at age 16 to join Ruth St. Denis' and Ted Shawn's Denishawn modern dance company.
Was a dancer-showgirl before becoming an actress.
Considered three of her favorite films to be Pygmalion (1938), The Wizard of Oz (1939) and An American in Paris (1951).
She personified the rebellious young woman of the 1920s who came to be known as a "flapper".
Celebrity spokesperson for Lux Toilet Soap (1931).
She was a left-wing liberal Democrat and socialist.
Was close friends with IT Girl Clara Bow.
During the mid-1940s, when she was not appearing in films, she lived in New York City and worked a variety of jobs, some of which included working as a sales girl at Saks Fifth Avenue, gossip columnist and radio commentator.
Director husband A. Edward Sutherland blamed his impotence on Brooks' promiscuity.
Originally cast as a manicurist in "A Social Celebrity," Brooks was pushed into the lead opposite Adolph Menjou when leading lady Greta Nissern dropped out of the cast.
Brooks claimed she fell in love with William 'Buster' Collier and wrote to Kevin Brownlow in 1966 that he was "the only actor I had ever cared for".
As a young aspiring actress, she became good friends with Barbara Bennett, sister of Constance Bennett and Joan Bennett.
Early in her career, Brooks took up residence in the Algonquin hotel where she was befriended by director Edmund Goulding and initially turned down his offer of a screen test because she thought he was trying to seduce. Her personal behavior got her thrown out of the Algonquin and she moved to the respectable Martha Washington, where too she was asked to leave. She said, "Within a month, my wearing apparel had got me kicked out of two hotels.".
Turned down the Jean Harlow role in The Public Enemy (1931) made by former director William A. Wellman in favor of going to New York to be reunited with George Marshall. Brooks is sometimes erroneously credited in cast lists for the movie as "Bess".
In 1943, she was paid $1500 for the rights to publish her ghostwritten story by "The American Weekly" magazine, but it was never published because Brooks refused to name names or provide salacious details.
She auditioned unsuccessfully for the Louise Platt role in Spawn of the North (1938).
Personal Quotes (16)
Love is a publicity stunt, and making love - after the first curious raptures - is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call.
Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.
I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance and I learned how to dance by watching Charles Chaplin act.
When I went to Hollywood in 1927, the girls were wearing lumpy sweaters and skirts... I was wearing sleek suits and half naked beaded gowns and piles and piles of furs.
A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.
The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.
[on W.C. Fields] He was an isolated person. As a young man, he stretched out his hand to Beauty and Love and they thrust it away. Gradually he reduced reality to exclude all but his work, filling the gaps with alcohol. He was also a solitary person. Years of traveling alone around the world with his juggling act taught him the value of solitude and the release it gave his mind.
[on Margaret Sullavan] Do you know my favorite actress? She was very special in her appearance, her voice was exquisite and far away, almost like an echo. She was an excellent actress, completely unique. This wonderful voice of hers -- strange, fey, mysterious -- like a voice singing in the snow.
I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.
[on shooting Pandora's Box (1929)] Kortner [co-star Fritz Kortner] hated me. After each scene with me, he would pound off the set and go to his dressing room. [Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst] himself, wearing his most private smile, would go there to coax him back for the next scene... One sequence gave Kortner an opportunity to shake me with such violence that he left ten black-and-blue fingerprints on my arms.
[on Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle during the filming of The Gas Bag (1931)]: He made no attempt to direct this picture at all. He just sat silently all through the three days of filming in his director's chair like a dead man. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. But it was such an amazing thing for me to come in to make this broken down picture, and to find my director 'William Goodrich' was in fact the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer... a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge donut... really delightful.
I like Bette Davis. I think she's a real actor, don't you? I never liked Joan Crawford at all. Never. I hate fakes. She was an awful fake. A washerwoman's daughter. I'm a terrible snob, you know.
[on actress Clara Bow] She wasn't acceptable socially. Eddie Sutherland, my husband, gave absolutely the best parties in Hollywood. So I asked him one day to invite Clara Bow and he said, "Oh, good heavens, no! We can't have her. We don't know what she'd do. She's from Brooklyn.".
I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita. How I have existed fills me with horror for I failed everything. Spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart.
[In a summer 1936 interview] I am delighted with my role in Empty Saddles (1936). It gives me an opportunity to do something, not just stand around and look pretty. I wouldn't trade it for all the other roles I ever had because I am really acting now, not just being an ornament, and I feel that, a last, I am on the road toward getting some place in pictures.
[on Charles Chaplin]: I never heard him say a snide thing about anyone. He lived totally without fear.
Salary (5)
A Social Celebrity (1926) $250 per week
The Canary Murder Case (1929) $250 /week
Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931) $500 for 3 days' work
Empty Saddles (1936) $300
Overland Stage Raiders (1938) $300
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