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Louise Brooks

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For the American socialite, see Louise Cromwell Brooks.
Louise Brooks
(c. 1926)
Born
Mary Louise Brooks

(1906-11-14)November 14, 1906
Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S.
DiedAugust 8, 1985(1985-08-08) (aged 78)
Rochester, New York, U.S.
Resting placeHoly Sepulchre Cemetery
NationalityAmerican
Other namesLulu, Brooksie, The Girl In The Black Helmet
Occupation(s)Actress, dancer, writer
Years active1925–1938
Spouse(s)
​
​
(m. 1926; div. 1928)​

​
​
(m. 1933; div. 1938)​

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), known professionally as Louise Brooks, was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is noted as a flapper icon and sex symbol, and is famous for her bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.

Brooks is best known as the lead in three feature films made in Europe: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were made by G. W. Pabst. She starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films before retiring in 1938. Brooks published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982; three years later she died of a heart attack at the age of 78.

Early life

Brooks as a sophomore in high school, 1922.[1] She had worn bobbed hair since childhood.[2]

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas,[3] Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks,[4] a lawyer, who was usually preoccupied with his legal practice, and Myra Rude,[4] an artistic mother who said that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".[5] Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music.[6]

When Louise was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused her. This event had a major influence on her 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".[7] 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".[8]

Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles in 1922.[9] The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham.[10] In her second season with the company, Brooks advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. However, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in Spring 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".[11] 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.[12] Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal.[13]

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,[14] followed by an appearance as a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.[14] 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.[15] 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 a two-month affair[a] that summer while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey.[16][17] When their affair ended, Chaplin sent her a cheque in the mail, but she declined to write him a thank-you note.[7]

Career

Paramount films

Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show-Off (1926)
Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show-Off (1926)

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925.[18] 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.[18]

Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures, and after her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts.[19] Wanger tried to encourage her to take the MGM contract in order to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him,[19] but she nevertheless decided to accept Paramount's offer regardless.[20] During this time, she gained a cult following overseas in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port.[21] Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend; many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.[22]

In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country girl who kills her foster father in a moment of desperation.[23] 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.[24] In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery).[23] 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,[23] 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.

Brooks and Gustav von Seyffertitz in The Canary Murder Case (1929)
Brooks and Gustav von Seyffertitz in The Canary Murder Case (1929)

Soon after Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks began filming the Pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time in her life, she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies' lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer.[25][22]

Brooks, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise.[26][b] Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled[c] her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G.W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.[26]

As such, on the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case,[26] Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst.[26] It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit.[27]

While her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her later 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.[28] Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures,[d] and another actress, Margaret Livingston,[e] was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.[29]

European films

Further information: Pandora's Box (1929 film) and Diary of a Lost Girl
Publicity photo, c. 1930

After her arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by 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 overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian.[30]

After filming concluded, Brooks had a brief one-night stand with Pabst,[f] and the director cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the controversial book by Margarete Böhme.[31] She next appeared in Miss Europe (1930) by Italian director Augusto Genina,[32] the latter filmed in France and having a famous surprise ending.

When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks' German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style.[27] Viewers purportedly exited the theater vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!"[27] In the late 1920's, cinemagoers were habituated to theatre-style stage acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Yet Brooks's acting style was deliberately subtle as she knew the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary.[27] When explaining her acting method, Brooks posited that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation."[27] This innovative style continues to be used today by film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all.[27] Film critic Roger Ebert later noted that, by employing this acting method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."[27]

Return to America

Brooks and Jack Shutta on the lobby card for Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)
Brooks and Jack Shutta on the lobby card for Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)

Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929.[33] When Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances in these films were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".[d] As the sole member of the cast who had refused to return to make the talkie version of The Canary Murder Case, Brooks became convinced that "no major studio would hire [her] to make a film."[34]

Purportedly director William Wellman—despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life[24]—offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney.[35] Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City,[36] and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow,[35] who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Brooks later explained to Wellman that she simply "hated Hollywood" but, 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".[37] In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".[37]

She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 per week salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn.[38] She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".[38]

Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932,[39] and she began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a comeback in 1936, and did a bit part in the Western film Empty Saddles,[40] 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 Overland Stage Raiders (1938), a "B" Western[38] in which she played the romantic lead, opposite John Wayne,[41] with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days.[38]

Life after film

Economic hardship

By 1940, Brooks's career prospects as a film actress had significantly declined.[7] She discovered that "the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me." As the circumstances of her unemployment grew worse, she was warned by her friend Paramount executive Walter Wanger that, if she remained in Hollywood, she would likely "become a call girl."[7]

Heeding Wanger's warning, Brooks briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised,[42] but this undesired return "turned out to be another kind of hell."[7] "I retired first to my father's home in Wichita," she later recalled, "but there I found that the citizens could not decide whether they despised me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a failure in their midst."[42] For her part, Brooks admitted that "I wasn't exactly enchanted with them," and "I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."[7] After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City.

After brief stints as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist,[43] she worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City. Between 1948 and 1953, Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients.[44] As her finances eroded, an impoverished Brooks began working regularly for an escort agency in New York.[17] Recalling this difficult period in her memoirs, Brooks wrote that she frequently pondered suicide:

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.[42]

She spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment.[17] By this time, "all of her rich and famous friends had forgotten her."[17] Angered by this ostracization, she attempted to write a tell-all memoir entitled Naked on My Goat, a title taken from Goethe's Faust.[7] After working on the manuscript for a number of years, she destroyed her work by throwing it into an incinerator.[45] As the years passed, she increasingly drank more and suffered from suicidal tendencies.

Rediscovery

There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks![g]

In the early 1950s, French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered[27] Brooks's films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon,[46][7] much to her purported amusement.[g] This rediscovery led to Louise Brooks film revivals and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country.[17]

During this era, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City.[27] He persuaded her in 1956 to move to Rochester, New York, to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career.[47] With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer.[27] Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14,[48] she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career. (A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood,[49] was published in 1982 and was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable."[17])

In her later years, Brooks rarely granted interviews yet 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 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. In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood.[2][50] In 1982, writer Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks' small apartment for an interview, and later wrote about the often awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon with Louise Brooks".[51]

Death

On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead of a heart attack[52] after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

Personal life

Marriages and relationships

In her later years, Brooks's friend and lover, William Paley, founder of CBS,[27] gave her a check every month until her death.[17][53]

In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland,[54] the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated[55] with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team,[54] following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life".[56] She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928.[57] Marshall was purportedly "her frequent bedfellow and constant adviser[c] between 1927 and 1933."[7][53]

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall which she later described as abusive.[53] Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him but, after learning that she had had many affairs while they were together and believing her to be incapable of fidelity, he married film actress Corinne Griffith instead.[53]

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.[58] According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more.[58] The couple officially divorced in 1938.

In her later years, Brooks insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime: "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."[7] Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her many paramours from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS.[27] Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point.[17][53]

Sometime before 1955, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism.[59]

Sexuality

Brooks in a studio portrait taken in the 1920s
Brooks in a studio portrait taken in the 1920s

In a 1979 New Yorker profile of Brooks, theater critic and writer Kenneth Tynan described her as "the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid. She's the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known."[7][46] By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, even posing nude for art photography,[60] 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,[61] including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo.[62] She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".[63][64] 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.[65]

Legacy

I went to my father [film director Vincente Minnelli], and asked him, what can you tell me about thirties glamour? Should I be emulating Marlene Dietrich or something? And he said no, I should study everything I can about Louise Brooks.

     — Liza Minnelli, Inside the Actors Studio, on her portrayal of "Sally Bowles" in Cabaret (1972)[66]

Following her death, Brooks has had a significant legacy in novels, comics, music and film.

Film

Brooks has inspired cinematic characters such as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret. For her portrayal of Bowles, Liza Minnelli reinvented the character with "Lulu makeup and helmet-like coiffure" based on Brooks' 1920s persona.[67] Similarly, films such as Jonathan Demme's Something Wild features a reckless femme fatale (Melanie Griffith) who calls herself "Lulu" and wears a bob, and in the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, Isabella Rosselini plays Lisle von Rhoman, a character inspired by Brooks. More recently, Laura Moriarty wrote The Chaperone, which depicts Brooks's initial arrival in New York, plus her career decline as an actress. The film stars Haley Lu Richardson and Elizabeth McGovern.

Novels

Brooks' film persona served as the literary inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image.[68] In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies". Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fiction elements, served as a basis for Alain Resnais's 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.[68]

In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, the character Czernobog refers to Brooks as the greatest movie star of all time.[69] In her 2011 novel of supernatural horror, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as an actual character in the leading character's visions. Brooks appears as a central character in the 2012 novel The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. In Gayle Forman's novels Just One Day and Just One Year, the protagonist is called "Lulu" because her bobbed hair resembles Brooks.

Comics

Brooks also had a significant influence in the graphics world. She inspired the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel.[70] The strip began in the late 1920s and ran until 1966, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, Show Girl, that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway.[71]

Brooks also inspired the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years.[72] Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

Other comics have drawn upon Brooks' distinctive hair-style. Brooks was the visual model for the character of Ivy Pepper in Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy comic series.[73] More recently, illustrator Rick Geary published a 2015 graphic novel entitled Louise Brooks: Detective in which Brooks, "her movie career having sputtered to a stop," returns to her native Kansas and becomes a private investigator who solves murders.[74]

Music

Brooks has been referenced in a number of songs. In 1991, British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released "Pandora's Box" as a tribute to Brooks' film. Similarly, Soul Coughing's 1998 song "St. Louise Is Listening" contains several references to Brooks, and the song "Interior Lulu" released the next year by Marillion is a reference to Brooks and mentions her in its first lines.

In 2011, American metal group Metallica and singer-songwriter Lou Reed released the double album Lulu with a Brooks-like mannequin on the cover. And, more recently, Natalie Merchant's self-titled 2014 album, the song "Lulu" is a biographical portrait of Brooks.[75]

Filmography

As is the case with many of her contemporaries, a number of Brooks's films are considered to be lost.[76] Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, which have been released on DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively.

As of 2007, Miss Europe and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release. Her short film (and one of her only talkies) Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released on VHS and in 2012 on DVD.

Year Title Role Director Notes
1925 The Street of Forgotten Men A Moll Herbert Brenon Incomplete (missing reel 7)
1926 The American Venus Miss Bayport Frank Tuttle Lost film. In the late 1990s some fragments in both black and white and color were found in Australia.[77] In 2018 a three second long technicolor screen test featuring Brooks was discovered by archivist Jane Fernandes, the only color film footage of the actress during her prime known to exist.[78][79][80] Another lost scene was found in 2018 in a YouTube video that had been uploaded to the site in 2007.[77]
1926 A Social Celebrity Kitty Laverne Malcolm St. Clair Lost film
1926 It's the Old Army Game Mildred Marshall A. Edward Sutherland
1926 The Show Off Clara Malcolm St. Clair
1926 Just Another Blonde Diana O'Sullivan Alfred Santell Fragments survive
1926 Love 'Em and Leave 'Em Janie Walsh Frank Tuttle
1927 Evening Clothes Fox Trot Luther Reed Lost film
1927 Rolled Stockings Carol Fleming Richard Rosson Lost film
1927 Now We're in the Air Griselle/Grisette Frank R. Strayer In 2016, a twenty-three minute fragment was found at the Czech national film archive in Prague. The surviving material was preserved and shown for the first time at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on June 2, 2017.[76]
1927 The City Gone Wild Snuggles Joy James Cruze Lost film
1928 A Girl in Every Port Marie, Girl in France Howard Hawks
1928 Beggars of Life The Girl (Nancy) William A. Wellman Sound version is considered lost; only silent version survives
1929 The Canary Murder Case Margaret Odell Malcolm St. Clair Silent and sound versions survive
1929 Pandora's Box Lulu G. W. Pabst
1929 Diary of a Lost Girl Thymian G. W. Pabst
1930 Miss Europe Lucienne Garnier Augusto Genina Alternate title: Prix de Beauté [Beauty Prize] - silent and sound versions survive
1931 It Pays to Advertise Thelma Temple Frank Tuttle
1931 God's Gift to Women Florine Michael Curtiz
1931 Windy Riley Goes Hollywood Betty Grey Roscoe Arbuckle
1936 Empty Saddles "Boots" Boone Lesley Selander
1937 When You're in Love Chorus Girl Robert Riskin Uncredited role
1937 King of Gamblers Joyce Beaton Robert Florey Scenes deleted
1938 Overland Stage Raiders Beth Hoyt George Sherman

References

Informational notes

  1. ^ In 1979, Brooks recalled her liaison with Charlie Chaplin: "I was eighteen in 1925, when Chaplin came to New York for the opening of The Gold Rush. He was just twice my age, and I had an affair with him for two happy summer months. Ever since he died, my mind has gone back fifty years, trying to define that lovely being from another world."[7]
  2. ^ Brooks claimed she departed Hollywood as soon as circumstances permitted: "It pleased me on the day I finished the silent version of The Canary Murder Case for Paramount to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for [G.W.] Pabst."[26]
  3. ^ a b Brooks credited George Preston Marshall for her decision to star in Pandora's Box: "I'd never heard of Mr. Pabst when he offered me the part [in Pandora's Box]. It was George who insisted that I should accept it. He was passionately fond of the theater and films, and he slept with every pretty show-business girl he could find, including all my best friends. George took me to Berlin with his English valet."[7]
  4. ^ a b Brooks asserted her career was sabotaged by Paramount when she refused to record her dialogue for The Canary Murder Case.[34] "Goaded to fury, Paramount planted in the columns a petty but damaging little story to the effect that it had been compelled to replace Brooks because her voice was unusable in talkies."[7]
  5. ^ According to Brooks: "When I got back to New York after finishing Pandora's Box, Paramount's New York office called to order me to get on the train at once for Hollywood. They were making The Canary Murder Case into a talkie and needed me for retakes. [...] I said I wouldn't go [...] In the end, after they were finally convinced that nothing would induce me to do the retakes, I signed a release (gratis) for all my pictures, and they dubbed in Margaret Livingston's voice."[26]
  6. ^ Brooks insisted her affair with Pabst was brief. "In 1929, though, when he was in Paris trying to set up Prix de Beauté, we went out to dinner at a restaurant and I behaved rather outrageously. [...] I slapped a close friend of mine across the face with a bouquet of roses. Mr. Pabst was horrified. He hustled me out of the place and took me back to my hotel [...], so I decided to banish his disgust by giving the best sexual performance of my career. [...] He wanted the affair to continue. But I didn't."[7]
  7. ^ a b According to critic Roger Ebert, Brooks visited Paris "for a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, where rumpled old Henri Langlois declared, 'There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!' Brooks must have smiled to hear her name linked with two of her reputed lovers."[17]

Citations

  1. ^ The Wichitan 1922.
  2. ^ a b Sherrow 2006, p. 65.
  3. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 4–5.
  4. ^ a b Brooks 1982, p. 4.
  5. ^ Paris 1989, p. 11.
  6. ^ Brooks 1982, p. 7.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Tynan 1979.
  8. ^ Paris 1989, p. 548.
  9. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 8–11.
  10. ^ Brooks 1982, p. 77.
  11. ^ Paris 1989, p. 53.
  12. ^ Paris 1989, p. 429.
  13. ^ Paris 1989, p. 54.
  14. ^ a b Brooks 1982, p. 17.
  15. ^ Paris 1989, p. 100.
  16. ^ Paris 1989, p. 109.
  17. ^ a b c d e f g h i Ebert 1998.
  18. ^ a b Brooks 1982, p. 132.
  19. ^ a b Brooks 1982, pp. 17–21.
  20. ^ Da & Alexander 1989, p. 50.
  21. ^ Paris 1989, p. 214.
  22. ^ a b Paris 1989, pp. 126–28.
  23. ^ a b c Brooks 1982, pp. 22–23.
  24. ^ a b Brooks 1982, pp. 21–26.
  25. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 34–35.
  26. ^ a b c d e f Brooks 1982, p. 124.
  27. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Ebert 2012.
  28. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 58, 124.
  29. ^ Paris 1989, p. 311.
  30. ^ Pabst 2006.
  31. ^ Böhme 1908.
  32. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 47, 166.
  33. ^ Brooks 1982, p. 47.
  34. ^ a b Brooks 1982, p. 58.
  35. ^ a b Brooks 1982, p. 21.
  36. ^ Paris 1989, p. 358.
  37. ^ a b Paris 1989, p. 359.
  38. ^ a b c d Shipman 1970, pp. 81–83.
  39. ^ Waterloo Courant 1932.
  40. ^ Brooks 1982, p. 166.
  41. ^ Brooks 1982, p. 133.
  42. ^ a b c Brooks 1982, p. 38.
  43. ^ Paris 1989, pp. 408–09, 412.
  44. ^ Paris 1989, p. 421.
  45. ^ Paris 1989, pp. 428–30.
  46. ^ a b c Corliss 2006.
  47. ^ Brooks 1982, pp. 38–39.
  48. ^ Paris 1989, p. 423.
  49. ^ Brooks 1982.
  50. ^ Van Wycks 2014.
  51. ^ Graves 2015.
  52. ^ Mitgang 1985.
  53. ^ a b c d e Looking for Lulu 1998.
  54. ^ a b Brooks 1982, pp. 21, 45.
  55. ^ Leacock 1973.
  56. ^ Paris 1989, p. 199.
  57. ^ Paris 1989, pp. 215, 246.
  58. ^ a b Paris 1989, p. 364.
  59. ^ Farmer 2010.
  60. ^ Paris 1989.
  61. ^ Jaccard & Brooks 1986, pp. 90–94.
  62. ^ Weiss 1992, p. 24.
  63. ^ Wayne 2003, p. 89.
  64. ^ McLellan 2001, p. 81.
  65. ^ Paris 1989, pp. 394–395.
  66. ^ Minnelli 2006.
  67. ^ Garebian 2011, p. 142.
  68. ^ a b DeWeese 2014.
  69. ^ Gaiman 2001, p. 366.
  70. ^ Arnold 1985.
  71. ^ Carnovale 2000, p. 12.
  72. ^ Willan 2003.
  73. ^ Lackadaisy: Ivy Pepper.
  74. ^ Publishers Weekly 2015.
  75. ^ Natalie Merchant 2014.
  76. ^ a b Gladysz 2017. sfn error: multiple targets (3×): CITEREFGladysz2017 (help)
  77. ^ a b American Venus 2018.
  78. ^ Daley 2018.
  79. ^ Hutchinson 2018.
  80. ^ Fernandes 2018.

Bibliography

Print sources
Online sources

Further reading

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