“Ein Wenig Louise Brooks” or “A Little Louise Brooks” is the first published piece attributed to Louise Brooks which she probably wrote. (If Brooks did not write this piece, then she more than likely had a hand in its composition.) This autobiographical sketch was written sometime during Brooks’ second stay in Germany, while she was filming Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (The Diary of a Lost Girl) with director G. W. Pabst. It was translated into German by Lothar Wolff, a Pabst publicist who was friendly with Brooks, and published in Film Photos Wie Noch Nie by Giessen: Kindt & Bucher Verlag, in 1929. (A collectible, the book was reprinted in 1979 by Walther Konig, a Cologne publisher.)
Film Photos Wie Noch Nie is a softcover, German-language book which features stories and photographs of European and American film stars. The bulk of the book is given over to images of various actors and actresses, though a small number, including Garbo, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Swanson, Fairbanks and Brooks, are additionally highlighted with a feature article. Notably, the actress is also featured on the books’ illustrated endpapers, which show Brooks in scenes from the then recently released Pandora’s Box. [ A copy of Film Photos Wie Noch Nie is housed online on the Internet Archive, and may be read of browsed online. ]
The translation of “Ein Wenig Louise Brooks” included below is based on three different translations sent to the Louise Brooks Society from Gabrielle, Kris Kohlmeier, and Kees Wor. My thanks to each. I have also tinkered with the language of the piece. If your read German and can help smooth out this translation, please CONTACT the Louise Brooks Society.
A Little Louise BrooksI was born 21 years ago in a little town in the State of Kansas in the USA. (If you are reading this in 20 years, I am going to be forty-one.) I went to school in Kansas City where my parents moved when I was twelve years old. When I was fifteen, I left home, as seems to be normal for future movie stars. With the money I saved, I went to New York, where I offered myself as a dancer to the very famous and celebrated Ruth St. Denis. I was fortunate, because she taught me. Then Florence Ziegfeld saw me and took me into the group of his famous girls and soon I had great success in his shows. I went to London, where I danced in the “Cafe de Paris”. After my return from England I went back to Ziegfeld. One day Walter Wanger, an executive producer with Paramount, saw me in a show. He seemed to like me, because he arranged for a screen test at the Long Island Studio, which unexpectedly went well. They gave me a small role in a movie by Herbert Brenon, the director of Beau Geste. The role was very small, but everybody found my work satisfactory. I got a long term contract with Paramount and moved to Hollywood – the City of Disappointments. Here I played in different movies. In one of them I co-starred with Menjou. After the premiere of one of my movies I couldn’t save myself from all these letters from moviegoers. I got approximately 2000 in a week. People who know me said I didn’t need more than one package of letter paper to answer them. One day I got an unexpected telegram from Germany, in which I was asked to play the lead role in a German movie. After brief negotiations I got the role. And so I ended up playing “Lulu” in the movie Die Buchse der Pandora. I don’t know if I should say it, but before that I had never heard of Wedekind. The first time I heard what kind of role I was going to play was when I arrived in Germany. It was a great pleasure to work with G.W. Pabst, I never had during my whole movie career such a director, who showed so much understanding of the art of film-making. After that exhausting work I went back to New York, where I recovered from my European film trip. In May 1929 I went to Paris and then to Berlin, where I played, much to my enjoyment, the leading role in Tagebuch einer Verlorenen — Berlin is wonderful. I found it very funny that Anita Loos, the well-known author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes once said to an interviewer that the most successful blondes are the Dolly Sisters and me. We all have dark colored hair. Anita Loos said that the actual hair color isn’t important and that we have a blonde nature. So I am now a black-haired blonde. The work in German studios is a pleasure. Everybody is so nice and polite and they try to talk with me in English. I like to read a lot. I just finished reading the book All Quiet on the Western Front (naturally in the English translation). It left a very strong impression on me. After finishing Tagebuch einer Verlorenen I am going to Paris to play the leading role in Rene Clair’s movie Beauty Prize. I’ve never worked in France before and am rather curious if I’m going to like it as much as I liked working in Germany. |
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Lothar Wolff, who translated Brooks’ autobiographical sketch from English to German, is a significant figure in the story of Louise Brooks. The two had met in Berlin in 1928, when “Woofie” was just nineteen. Though young and inexperienced, he handled publicity for Pabst on Pandora’s Box (and later Diary of a Lost Girl), and succeeded in placing stories and pictures of the actress in publications all across Europe. According to “Reminiscences of an Itinerant Filmmaker,” a 1972 article by Wolff published in the Journal of the University Film Association, Wolff was at least partly responsible for helping Brooks land the role of Lulu in Pandora’s Box. Still just a teen, Wolff had a fan’s crush on Brooks, who he described as “extremely beautiful.” At the time, Wolff was junior employee at Parufamet – the European distributor for Paramount, UFA, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – who handled publicity materials for the three studios. As he admitted, his job amounted to little more than stamping the backs of images “Please credit …”. One day in 1928, according to Wolff’s account, Pabst visited Parufamet while searching for an actress to play Lulu. When he met the director, Wolff put forward the little-known Brooks. “My boss asked me – since I handled hundreds of stills of American actresses – for suggestions when Pabst came to see him one day. I presented him with stills of my favorite actress. She was an ex-Ziegfeld girl, a Paramount star: Louise Brooks. The search was over. She got the part and I got the job, moonlighting, doing the production publicity.” Wolff and Brooks remained friends, and the two renewed their friendship in the early 1940s when Wolff relocated to New York City, where Brooks was then living.
As mentioned, both the front and rear end papers of Film Photos Wie Noch Nie show scenes from Pandora’s Box. They are reproduced below. Aren’t they cool?
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| Front end paper of Film Photos Wie Noch Nie | Rear end paper of Film Photos Wie Noch Nie |