Louise Brooks - Biography

Louise Brooks' position in the Hollywood pantheon of stars is a unique one; although her smirking bobbed visage is now as famous (and reproduced) as Garbo or Dietrich, her reputation rests almost solely on two films, G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both of which were all but ignored upon release. For most of her life she lived in relative obscurity, only to be rediscovered decades after her early retirement. But as Brooks herself wrote, “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.” In just a few films, Brooks powerfully essayed “movements of thought and soul” so modern in style and morality that it would take the world a quarter century to comprehend them, those handful of reels alone elevating her from “intense isolation” into the most sublime realm of stardom.

Brooks was born in 1906 in Cherryville Kansas, the second of four children raised by Leonard and Myra Brooks. Her father was a lawyer for the Prairie Oil Company; her mother was a woman of fierce independence and passion for the arts - qualities she would ferment in young Louise, who was encouraged to become a professional dancer by age ten. At fifteen, Brooks left for New York with her dance instructor where she was invited to join the edgy Denishawn company - meeting her lifelong friend Martha Graham.

After two years of rigorous touring and discipline, Brooks found her interests waning and was soon discharged from the troupe. Taking a decisive turn towards the popular arts, Brooks became a showgirl under the rubric of George White's celebrated Scandals revue. The mercurial Brooks then bowed from Scandals for an extended lark in London. Once that city's charms quickly lost her interest, she bounced back to New York and landed a job with legendary stage impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Although Brooks' flighty ways persisted - she would sometimes drop out of performances in the eleventh hour if a more toothsome social engagement would arise - her moxy and presence sufficiently charmed the Great Ziegfeld. Brooks tapped for the 1925 go-around of Ziegfeld's Follies (alongside Will Rogers and W.C. Fields), gaining exposure which earned the entertainer a bit part role in Paramount's Street of Forgotten Men, shot in Astoria Studios.

While the Follies took its show on the road, Brooks remained in New York where she found herself courted by men and studios alike, quite often at the same time. Although Paramount exec Walter Wanger suggested Brooks sign with MGM to suppress rumors of their mixing of business with pleasure, she signed with the former in a characteristically cavalier move and began to appear in that studio's output with regularity.

Early films from Brooks' resumé include Malcolm St. Clair's A Social Celebrity and The Show Off, and the W.C. Fields vehicle It's The Old Army Game. (This last was directed by Edward Sutherland, with whom Brooks embarked on her first short lived marriage.)

Brooks followed Paramount to Hollywood when they relocated to the West Coast in 1927, and continued a holding pattern of supporting then-popular stars like Adolphe Menjou and Wallace Beery. It was in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port, made with Brooks on loan to Fox, that the tide turned in the actress' career. As a seaside siren that pries between the prototypical Hawksian buddies Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong, Brooks brought to the screen the rudiments of a kind of femme fatale the world had not yet seen, a star presence not lost on German director G.W. Pabst, who saw the film in Berlin. Although this performance did give momentum to Brooks' popularity and choice of roles, Paramount exec Ben Schulberg told Brooks that because of the advent of sound production, a promised salary increase would be cancelled. When Brooks defiantly rejected Paramount's new terms and quit the studio, the surprised Schulberg confided in Brooks that Pabst had been hounding him for use of the star in what would become Pandora's Box. What Schulberg didn't know was that this news had already been leaked to Brooks, who wired Pabst her acceptance reportedly only minutes before the director was about to hire Marlene Dietrich instead.

As is often the case with boundary-breaking works of art, it would take several decades for Pandora's Box to find its deserved reputation. The film's scandalously adult universe brought on censorship and a limited release schedule, with an icy critical reception to boot. Upon her return to New York, the proud Brooks refused both a contract with RKO and a command from Paramount to re-shoot sound sequences for The Canary Murder Case, the Philo Vance detective film that had been her last effort for the studio. In retribution, Paramount planted a story that Brooks was dumped because of an unpleasant voice. This totally unfounded rumor, grafted onto her already tenuous persona of expatriate portrayer of libertines, coalesced into a soft blacklisting for Brooks as a Hollywood star.

It didn't take much, then, for Pabst to lure Brooks back to Paris to shoot Prix de Beauté, originally to be co-produced by Pabst and directed by René Clair. By the time Brooks arrived in France, Clair had bowed out of the project. Rather than chalk up the trip as a debacle, Brooks agreed to return to Germany with Pabst to create a follow-up to Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl. Every bit as compelling as Pandora's Box, Diary mapped out the darker terrains of human desire and sexuality in much the same way as its companion piece and was similarly pushed into obscurity by a hostile public. By the wrap of Diary, a new director for Prix de Beauté was found in Augusto Genina, and Brooks completed shooting of that film in the summer of 1929. Another tale of deadly sexual jealousy and power, it was Brooks' first talking picture (though re-dubbed), and her last role of real merit.

Upon Brooks' return to Hollywood in 1930, the actress was greeted with the kind of sleazy sexual blackmail found within her Pabst films. Brooks had come back to the States on the promise of a contract with Columbia, but soon discovered the deal implicitly entailed a “casting couch” arrangement with the studio's notorious tyrant Harry Cohn. Other jobs were scarce and unfulfilling;minor roles in films like Michael Curtiz's God's Gift to Women and old friend Frank Tuttle's It Pays to Advertise. Fed up with the industry, Brooks moved back to New York for an attempted return to the stage, only to be fired from a pre-Broadway run of Norman Krasna's Louder, Please, which ended the actress' career on the stage.

The remainder of the decade was a slow grind back into obscurity. After a six month marriage to Chicago playboy Deering Davis, Brooks spent a year as a nightclub dancer, appearing at the Plaza Hotel's Persian Room. A flicker of hope came with a U.S. visit by Pabst, who was hoping to frame a version of Faust with Brooks and Greta Garbo, but this tantalizing possibility was never realized. From then on Brooks' only work was to be found in a few undistinguished B Westerns, and humiliatingly, a widely publicized demotion back to a rank-and-file chorus girl in Capra screenwriter Robert Riskin's When You're in Love. Made at Columbia, this last film was another lash of revenge from the monstrous Harry Cohn, still sore over a rejection from years before. After playing second-fiddle in the low-budget John Wayne oater Overland Stage Riders in 1938, Brooks called it quits and effectively retired from the screen at age 33. (Notably, Brooks's early withdrawal was at an even younger age than Garbo's more celebrated retreat.)

Completing the modern mythic circle of a Hollywood rise and fall, Brooks returned to her family in the heartland of Kansas in 1940, whose people “either resented me for having been a success or despised me for being a failure”. When an attempt to launch a dance studio proved unprofitable, Brooks returned to New York in 1943, where she worked for several years in radio soap operas rather ironically, given the smearing she received from Paramount in the late 20s. By the mid-40s, Brooks found herself working as a salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue and soon finding this unsatisfactory, made ends meet by being the mistress of three wealthy men. All three proposed marriage in 1953, and all three were given a flat refusal, forcing the now-middle aged Brooks out in the cold.

Fortuitously, Brooks' luck returned again in 1955, when a group of old friends from Hollywood arranged a modest annuity to keep the former star out of poverty. That same year, head of the Cinémathèque Français Henri Langlois dynamically boosted Brooks' critical reputation by placing her films prominently in his influential “Sixty Years of Cinema” retrospective, stating “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!”, in defense of his then unorthodox valuation. (Years later, Brooks would return the favor by threatening to pull her films from the Cinémathèque when Langlois was deposed by the government.) Further cementing her beloved status with cinephiles, Brooks moved to Rochester, New York in 1956 to help with preservation work at the George Eastman House,remaining there for the rest of her life.

From then on, the legend of Louise Brooks only grew, initially from continued feting by Langlois and eventually through writing, in the burgeoning filed of film studies. Brooks herself demonstrated to be a witty and perceptive writer herself, and wrote a number of essays published in Sight and Sound, Objectif, Positif, and Film Culture. Famed critic Kenneth Tynan wrote a profile of Brooks in a 1979 issue of The New Yorker, which single-handedly sparked enormous interest in the actress' life and films, chiefly her work with Pabst.

Louise Brooks was one of the few Hollywood stars to leave behind a body of writing about film that demonstrated insight into the craft as well as the business, and her collection of essays Lulu In Hollywood, published to unanimous raves in 1982, was a treasure trove of stories and wit. After decades of exile, Miss Brooks lived to see the reverence due to her before she passed away in 1985.