A Legend in Her Time

...take this about Fritz Kortner, her grand costar in Pandora's Box "Death scenes are dearer than life to an actor, and Kortner's, spectacularly colored with years of theatrical dying, went unquestioned during rehearsal " Kind and cruel, our Louise, and full of paradoxes Though, to her, every new love affair "was an adventure into the unknown" (which, it seems, kept the more cautious Bogart from getting involved with her), being driven to a mountain location by Wallace Beery was agony because she was always "scared stiff when anyone drove faster than 40 miles an hour " She has never fully explained the perverse self-contradiction in her nature that made her refuse to return to Hollywood for retakes on The Canary Murder Case(1929), when Paramount wished to re-edit it with sound The studio kept offering her larger sums, she kept refusing, prompting Paramount to start the rumor that Louise's speaking voice was bad (It wasn't) This incident drove the biggest nail into the coffin of her career Perhaps the best summation of herisTynan's " What she meant by liberty was what others defined as irresponsibility and self-indulgence " Knopf has put out Lulu in Hollywood attractively, with many pictures and a filmography But, as the title suggests, it is still a skimpy exploitation job There is no bibliography, no date or source for the essays, and we get only about a third of Brooks' not very extensive output Yet we want all of Louise between the covers, as well as a list of references for further reading Thus readers should be directed to such a book as Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By , where Brooks says, among other smart things, "The auteur theory is crap It took me two hours and three dictionaries through the Bazin auteur article to find out what everybody has known since the beginning of films I do hope Louise Brooks will reconsider and write her autobiography, whether or not she bares herself astride that goat If not, the epitaph she drew from Goethe for Pepi Lederer will also have to serve for her "For a man remains of consequence not so far as he leaves something behind him but so far as he acts and enjoys, and rouses others to action and enjoyment...

...And, surely, a major contribution to Louise Brooks' becoming an international cult figure was that, at the age stars begin to hit their stride, she kissed Hollywood good-bye—or forced them to sack her, it scarcely matters which When, four years ago, Kenneth Tynan wrote his glowing profile of Louise Brooks for the New Yorker (reprinted in his collection Show People), a reputation that had steadily been growing among European buffs, and had its underground boosters in the United States as well, became emblazoned on the public consciousness Tynan had chanced upon Brooks' most famous film, Pandora's Box, on his box in California and was hooked Off he went to Rochester, where Louise was (and still is) living, and where the Eastman House cinematheque holds several of her old movies He loved her work even in dreadful films, and soon struck up a relationship with the then 71-year-old actress that, except for sex, seems to have had all the aspects ot a passionate atlair His profile trod delicately bclween intelligent tribute and love letter But, then, despite ardent exaggeration in many quarters, Brooks wasn't your ordinary Hollywood actress—and is certainly no run-of-the-mill scribbler, as her collection of essays, Lulu in Hollywood, attests She was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906, the daughter of an honest, dedicated lawyer and a dilettante mother who played Debussy on the piano, gave book reports to the local women's club, and amiably neglected her four children There were books in the house American and English classics, and a German writer, Goethe, whose lines Louise pasted up in the fly leaves of one of her dictionaries She studied dancing, and by age 16 was good enough to go to New York and gain admission to the famous Denishawn school, where she was soon appearing with the great Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, and absorbing a lot from watching her colleague and friend Martha Graham Never one for sustained hard work, she quit to become a nightclub dancer and playgirl about town, bankers like Otto Kahn, producers like Walter Wan-ger, stars like Charlie Chaplin, and various rich men became her protectors or unprotecting lovers Meanwhile she cultivated her mind and manners, learning how to speak, dress and eat correctly She worked in musical comedy but, too undisciplined even for that, switched to dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies Gradually, she drifted into movies, first in New York then in Hollywood, which she loathed, or so she repeatedly avers in the course of Lulu in Hollywood, as well as in numerous interviews elsewhere Nothing is simple with Louise Brooks, she also told Tynan, "I know I knock the studio system, but if you were to ask me what it was like to live in Hollywood in the twenties, I'd have to say that we were all—oh1 —marvelous-ly degenerate and happy " She made some headstrong choices and refused to sleep with producers such as Harry Cohn or accept salary cuts from such as B P Schulberg Her most important lover during the vears 1927-33, George Marshall, the selt-madc laundry magnate and owner ot the Washington Redskins, advised her to accept an offer from the distinguished German director G W Pabst, and play Lulu, the heroine of Pandora's Box (1929), based on Wedekind's famous plays In Berlin with Pabst, she achieved her most celebrated performance as the amoral Lulu living for her whims and passions, and causing death or misery for all who love her, until, reduced to a prostitute in London, she is killed by Jack the Ripper This and another film for Pabst, The Diary of a Lost Girl, remain the cornerstones of her legend Dogged by bad luck and her own irresponsibility and fastidiousness, Brooks made 24 movies during her brief career, most of them poor, many of them lost Her last picture, in 1938, a cheap Republic Western, costarred her with a still obscure actor, John Wayne Though she hung on in Hollywood two more years, her reputation for being difficult kept her from getting work Returning to her native Kansas, she opened a dance school that soon failed In New York, she washed out of two publicity jobs and, upon taking a sales job at Saks, lost her society friends After flirting with suicide and with becoming a call girl, she was eventually kept by three very nice men, all of whom (though unaware of one another) simultaneously decided to marry her She self-protectively converted to Catholicism, so as to make her divorce from the film director Edward Sutherland, as it were, retroactively invalid Later, she left the church In 1956 she became the girlfriend of James Card, a curator of Eastman House, and so moved to Rochester At Eastman House, she started to view old movies, including her own, which she had always avoided seeing Festivals in Europe began turning her into an international celebrity, and the articles she was now writing about the film world?with Eastman House facilities supplementing her (otal recall—began appearing in film magazines the world over Although a crippling hip disease has made her a semi-inv alid and almost total recluse, she keeps reading, granting the odd interview , and writing sporadically She has had to give up drink Much has been made of her excellence as an actress By the standards of her time, she certainly acted with restraint, but a couple of exposures to her greatest performance, as Lulu, have left me unimpressed I fail to see, for instance, "the great interior power" David Robinson ascribes to her Her own definition of acting as "the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation," made her, according to David Thomson, "one of the first performers to penetrate to the heart of film acting," and it sounds fine, if only I had more evidence of her having applied it (But I must confess to not having seen any of her American films ) The most passionate tributes, however, single out her looks or intellect rather than her acting As for the looks, they were considerable (the first priest giving our Thais religious instruction had to be promptly shipped off to California, the second, a dour young zealot, was soon suggesting additional evening sessions at her place), especially if you go for the raven hair cut in that "shiny black helmet" style, as Louise puts it Tynan variously speaks of "that sleek jet cloche of hair that rings such a peal of bells in my subconscious," and of her face being framed with a "black proscenium arch " For me, the fact that, once you disregard her usual six-inch heels, she was only 5'2Vi" tall is a bit of a turnoff, but Hollywood stars started small Mabel Normand was more than an inch shorter yet, and Mary Pickford all of five feet Still, Brooks has provoked some of the most orgasmic testimonials ever To Ado Kyrou (Le Surrealisme au cinema), her "hps are calls to murder of all that is not love", she is "the most scandalous cinematic apparition whose least gesture becomes an invitation to the maddest love" and "triumphant proof that life is not a vale of tears " The late Henn Langlois, legendary head of the French Cinematheque, declared "There is no Garbo1 There is no Dietrich' There is only Louise Brooks'" Ask not for whom the cloche tolls And what about the fabled intellect7 Louise speaks of her passion for reading with an engaging modesty "I'm probably one of the best read idiots in the world " She tells of the writers and producers who gathered at her Ziegfeld Follies dressing room ostensibly to hear her review the books that Herman Man-kiewicz (for whom she ghost-wrote a Times drama review) would give her to read, but actually to watch her gorgeous dressing-roommate, Dorothy Knapp, strip and make love to herself in front of the mirror And she remarks "As an idiot, I have provided delight in my time to a very select group of intellectuals " Tynan found in her apartment stacks of books that included Proust, Schopenhauer, Ruskm, Ortega y Gasset, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Wilson, and many such others In a salute to Brooks that concludes Lulu m Hollywood, the film historian Lotte Eisner tells us that she first met her on Pabst's set reading Schopenhauser's Essays Fancy reading was not that rare among early Hollywood stars who were looking for the cachet of art and culture In her absorbing book about Mabel Normand, Betty Harper Fussell evokes Mabel as " plough [ing] indiscriminately through Schopenhauer [again'], Bran-der Matthews, Francois Coppee [incredible'], Montaigne, Heywood Broun, Conrad, Baudelaire, Freud," and makes clear that such reading was superficial When Mabel inscribed a book with a quotation from "Erontion," Swinburne was crudely misquoted Louise got more out of her reading, in the short essay on W C Fields in the present book, there are apt enough quotations from Johnson, Thomas Gray and Rus-kin, along with a telling allusion to The Old Curiosity Shop Elsewhere, she quotes Tolstoy, Goethe and Proust with relish, albeit with a certain cavalier vagueness as to exact provenance There are no great speculative heights in Lulu in Hollywood, but there are shrewd observations and anecdotes on acting, filmmaking, the chicaneries of Movieland, famous and obscure people, and life itself By far the best two pieces are the account of working with Pabst and the biographical sketch of Marion Davies' niece, showing what unearned luxury without a chance to use her writing talent did to a clever, madcap, overweight young girl, Pepi Lederer After much indulgence in drink, drugs, practical jokes, lesbianism, and the humiliation of being a permanent poor guest of Davies and W R Hearst, Pepi ended her life at 25 by jumping through a wire-meshed insane asylum window These are longer pieces, based on first-hand knowledge The opening autobiographical essay is somewhat disappointing, largely because, for all her outspokenness about herself and others, Brooks cannot quite, as she puts it, unbuckle the Bible belt where she was born and tell all For this reason, she incinerated her book-length autobiographical manuscript, Naked on My Goat (the title comes from Faust) Along with many others, I wish she hadn't Other pieces ramble too much "On Location With Billy Wellman," though interesting, tells too little about Well-man as a director, and too much about Louise's unhappy one-night-stand with a daring but dastardly stuntman The pieces on Humphrey Bogart and W C Fields, although not without pawky insights pungently expressed, are too slight and padded with asides, because Brooks did not know these men that long and that well The short sketch "Gish and Garbo" is too much of a piece a these, even manipulating the facts to prove that studio bosses—capaciously, lecherously, greedily—make stars only to stupidly break them...

...What did more for Saint Francis talking to birds and kissing lepers or divesting himself of the last stitch of paternal riches in the main square of Assisi...

...Let me quote from its conclusion, by way of a sample of Brooks' nervy, vigorous, easeful style "Compared to [Photoplay editor] Quirk's polished mauling of Lillian Gish, M-G-M's application of the dig-your-own-grave technique was a sloppy job, and it was not to achieve a slick finish till after the death of Irving Thal-berg, in 1936, when Mayer began restocking his stables with actresses closer to his heart, working on that insoluble problem of how to make a box-office star without at the same time making her unaffordable Eased out with full approval, in the perfection of their beauty, art, and popularity, were Jean-nette MacDonald, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and finally Garbo herself Sixteen years passed between the public execution of Lillian Gish and the bloodless exile of Greta Garbo Hollywood producers were left with their babes and a backwash of old-men stars, watching the lights go out in one picture house after another across the country " Nice writing, but not strictly true Gish made several comebacks, the elder male stars kept pulling in crowds, and not that many cinemas went dark—where they did, it was not just for those reasons Yet how touching and persuasive is this about Fields "As a young man, he stretched out his hand to Beauty and Love and they thrust it away Gradually he reduced reality to all but [she really means "nothing but"] his work, filling the gaps with alcohol whose dim eyes transformed the world into a distant view of harmless shadows " To be sure, she can be just as cutting as she can be kind...

...A Legend in Her Time Lulu in Hollywood By Louise Brooks Knopf 209 pp $15 00 Reviewed by John Simon Let's face it, nothing succeeds like success cavalierly discarded Would all his poetry have earned Rimbaud the fame he garnered by throwing it away to go gun-running in Abyssinia'' Did not Garbo's early retirement retroactively enhance her acting career...