Louise Brooks: 'If I Ever Bore You, It’ll Be with a Knife.’
'I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept it without wishing I had given it away.'
Louise Brooks
I recently read ‘Lulu in Hollywood,’ the collected essays of Louise Brooks - legendary silent screen actor, dancer, writer and icon of the Jazz Age.
Brooks defined a naturalistic approach to performance that was years ahead of its time. With her sharp bobbed hair, hedonistic lifestyle and independent spirit, she epitomised 1920s flapper cool. And with her acerbic wit she shone a light on Hollywood’s guilty secrets.
Let us consider what we can learn from this thoroughly compelling character.
1. You Have to Leave Home to Find Yourself
Mary Louise Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas in 1906. Her father was a virtuous lawyer, and her mother a talented amateur pianist who inspired her with a love of books and music. She grew up in a household without discipline, ‘where truth was never punished.’
When Brooks was 9 she was sexually abused by a neighbour.
‘We were Midwesterners born in the Bible Belt of Anglo-Saxon farmers, who prayed in the parlor and practised incest in the barn.’
At 15 Brooks joined the Denishawn School of Dancing, a company that included a young Martha Graham. It provided her with an escape route.
‘I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.’
2. ‘Excellence Comes from Ceaseless Concentration’
Brooks toured the United States with the Denishawn Company and spent a season abroad with them in London and Paris. She was reputed to be the first person to dance the Charleston in London. Then, in 1924, she moved to New York, finding employment as a chorus girl in ‘George White's Scandals’ and the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’
‘The rest of the girls wore smiles as fixed as their towering feather headdresses. I decided right then that onstage I would never smile unless I felt like it.’
Brooks took to New York life with enthusiasm. Dropping her Kansas accent, she stayed at the Algonquin, rode in Central Park West and swam off Long Island Sound. Courted by Wall Street bankers, she dined at 21 and the Colony, and partied on Park Avenue. Hobnobbing with millionaires, she danced at the Ritz, drank cocktails at the El Fey club and slept with Chaplin and Garbo.
Brooks still found time for her work, which equipped her for subsequent success.
‘Nobody can learn to dance without complete attention and sustained concentration on the disposition of the head, neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet – on the use of every muscle of the body as it moves before the eyes with the speed of motion-picture film… Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration. Paying attention.’
3. It’s Not Just Your Time, It’s Your Life
In 1925, spotted by a Hollywood producer, Brooks was signed on a five-year contract with Paramount. Soon she was playing the female lead in silent light comedies and flapper films.
'Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.’
On the West Coast Brooks launched herself into a similarly hedonistic world of glamour, gossip, liquor and cocaine; of all-night parties at the beach house and a suite at the Beverly Wilshire; of sexual experimentation and tragic suicides. She was a frequent guest of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.
‘He was always standing up as he sat down and going out as he came in.’
Perhaps inevitably for someone who was at heart independent, bookish and fiercely truthful, Brooks grew tired of Hollywood.
‘The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity - no, no, that is no place for Louise Brooks.’
As the studios switched over to talkies, they took the opportunity to cut contract players’ salaries. When Paramount denied Brooks a promised pay raise, she stood her ground. Eventually she’d had enough and walked out.
‘That’s what we are paying you for – your time.’
‘You mean my life.’
4. Playing Yourself Is the Hardest Thing in the World To Do
Brooks leapt at an offer to travel to Germany and work with Expressionist director GW Pabst. He was casting for his next film ‘Pandora's Box,’ which was based on the plays of Frank Wedekind. He just stopped short of offering the lead to Marlene Dietrich.
Brooks found that for the first time in her acting career she was taken seriously.
‘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 Mr Pabst and became an actress.’
At that time film acting still shared many of the characteristics of its stage counterpart. It was all exaggerated body language and pronounced facial expressions. In ‘Pandora’s Box’ Brooks’ gestures, by contrast, were more subtle, her movement was more graceful, her posture less affected.
‘The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movements of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.’
Brooks was pioneering a more psychologically nuanced, more naturalistic style of acting.
‘I was simply playing myself, which is the hardest thing in the world to do – if you know that it’s hard. I didn’t, so it seemed easy.’
Inevitably perhaps, when audiences and critics first viewed her performance, they were bewildered.
‘Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer. She does nothing.’
Louise Brooks and friends at Joe Zellis Royal Box nightclub in Paris May, 1929
5. They Can Control Your Circumstances, But They Can’t Control Your Soul
‘Pandora’s Box’ (1929) is one of the masterpieces of the silent era. It follows Lulu, a carefree young woman whose raw sexuality and uninhibited nature bring ruin to herself and those who love her. The film is remarkable for its frank treatment of sexual attitudes, including one of the first screen portrayals of a lesbian.
Alwa: Why don't you marry Lulu, Father?
Schön: One doesn't marry such a woman! It would be suicide!
Brooks recognised something of herself in Lulu: spirited, unselfconscious, indifferent to others, living completely in the present.
‘Lulu’s story is as near as you’ll get to mine.’
6. ‘Fashion Changes, Style Endures’
In the 1920s, in the wake of World War I and the suffrage movement, women embraced more emancipated fashions: discarding their corsets, raising their hems and dropping their waist-lines. Brooks was the archetypal flapper. She was short and slender, with big brown eyes and thin, horizontal eyebrows; pale skin and a knowing lip-sticked smile. She wore Mary-Jane shoes, pleated skirts and silk blouses; elegant tank dresses and deep-cut evening gowns with a string of pearls.
And, of course, Brooks had a dazzling black bob - cropped short to the ears with a little fringe, sometimes concealed under a cloche hat. According to critic Kenneth Tynan she was ‘The Girl in the Black Helmet.’
Though indelibly associated with the Jazz Age, Brooks’ look is also timeless. As Coco Chanel observed: ‘Fashion changes, style endures.’
In ‘Pandora’s Box’ we meet Lulu in a diaphanous Jean Patou dress, backless and unstructured. Here’s Lulu in a v-necked white wedding gown with a waterfall hem; Lulu in mourning in a long-sleeved black satin silk ensemble with a veil. Magnificent.
Both Lulu and Brooks gain power from their clothes. Their style makes them more resilient, more confident, more in control.
‘A well-dressed woman, even if her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.’
After ‘Pandora's Box’ Pabst cast Brooks again in his fine social drama ‘Diary of a Lost Girl’ (1929) and he tried to persuade her to stay in Europe.
'She belongs to Europe and to Europeans. She has been a sensational hit in her German pictures. I do not have her play silly little cuties. She plays real women, and plays them marvellously.’
7. There Is a Time to Weep
Nonetheless, Brooks returned to the United States and resumed her quarrels with the film industry.
She refused to go back to Paramount for sound retakes of her most recent American movie. The resentful studio found another actor to overdub her part, placed her on an unofficial blacklist and put out a story that she didn’t have a voice for sound pictures. Columbia offered her a contract, but she wasn’t prepared to pay the price the studio boss was asking. And then, when she was proposed as the female lead alongside James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’, she turned it down and the role went to Jean Harlow.
Brooks’ 1930s were marked by poor roles, poor reviews, bit parts and bankruptcy. She began dancing in nightclubs and writing for magazines to earn a living.
‘The only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me.’
Eventually Brooks retreated to Kansas.
‘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.’
After an unsuccessful attempt at running a dance studio, Brooks moved back to New York. She took work as a radio actor in soap operas, a gossip columnist, a salesgirl and an escort. Living in poverty in a small apartment, she wrote a tell-all memoir, but destroyed the entire manuscript. She drank heavily, was often ‘gincoherent’ and considered suicide.
‘I was navigating, but not seeing.’
8. There Is a Time to Laugh
In 1955 French film historians rediscovered Brooks' work, proclaiming her a neglected cinematic icon. This led to a Louise Brooks Film Festival and the rehabilitation of her reputation in the US. She was persuaded by the curator James Card to move to Rochester, close to the George Eastman House film collection. There she studied cinema and wrote about her career in movie magazines.
Brooks revealed herself to be a talented author, offering frank opinion and lucid observation on cinema, reflecting with sharp wit and total candour on her life.
'I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita in 1922 at the age of 15 to become a dancer… How I have existed fills me with horror. For I have failed in everything - spelling, arithmetic, riding, 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 1985 Brooks died of a heart attack. She was 78 years old.
Louise Brooks was an extraordinary woman. Smart, beautiful, funny and stylish. A gifted dancer, actor and writer. In her total immersion in the present, in her relentless quest for truth and good times, in her seeming indifference to the judgement of others, she was thoroughly modern.
'I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you, it’ll be with a knife.’
Brooks was too intelligent, too thoughtful and questioning, for Hollywood. But thankfully she left us one of the great movies of the silent era and some very witty writing.
In one of her last essays Brooks explained why she had not written her memoir.
‘I am unwilling to write the sexual truth that would make my life worth reading. I cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt.’
'I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free.
I wish I could break
All the chains holdin’ me.
I wish I could say
All the things that I should say.
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear
For the whole round world to hear.
I wish I could share
All the love that's in my heart,
Remove all the bars
That keep us apart.
I wish you could know
What it means to be me.
Then you'd see and agree
That every man should be free.’
Nina Simone, ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’ (B Taylor / D Dallas)
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