This page gathers brief excerpts from biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs which mention Louise Brooks. In general, these brief excerpts are not drawn from books by or about film stars Brooks’ knew or worked with, but from the works about other of her contemporaries, including a few actors as well as writers, singers, and others. That’s what makes them especially interesting…
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MARTHA GRAHAM (dancer)
Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
— Brooks is referenced and pictured in this autobiography from the acclaimed dancer
Page 79-82: “Louise Brooks was a member of the Denishawn company and breathtakingly beautiful. She wore her hair always in that pageboy. Everything that she did was beautiful. I was utterly absorbed by her beauty and what she did. Even before she was introduced to me, I remember watching her across the room as she stood with a group of girls from Denishawn, all dressed alike. Louise, though, was the absolute standout, the one. She possessed a quality of strength, an inner power that one felt immediately in her presence. She was very much a loner and terribly self-destructive. Of course, it didn’t help that everyone gave her such a difficult time. I suppose I identified with her as an outsider. I befriended her, and she always seemed to be watching me perform, watching me in the dressing room. She later said, “I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance.
Louise was quite young, sixteen or so, and had a habit of wearing a very tight pair of shoes. Well, this made me angry, and before we were to go on the stage one evening for a performance, I grabbed her, shook her, and yelled at her that she was going to ruin her feet with those tight shoes.
I remember one time with Louise in the wings when we received a phone call from Ted Shawn. We were on the road, on the circuit, without him, and he was calling to tell us that our work was unsatisfactory…. Once, Louise and I were backstage preparing to go on, and I was pinning flowers into my hair, arranging the bottles of makeup that were in front of me, deciding which creams to apply. We had our own Denishawn body cream that we used to cover our skin, and since it was specially made for us, we had to carry around our own bottles on tour. Louise was on my right in the dressing room, and a few other girls were there as well.
I cannot say for certain what I was thinking of, but some anger seized me — and I took one of the bottles and smashed it against the mirror, which shattered into a thousand pieces. I said nothing. Louise said nothing. I simply gathered my belongings and moved to another mirror. I happily applied my makeup; we went onstage.”
SYDNEY GUILAROFF (hairdresser)
Guilaroff, Sydney. Crowning Glory. Santa Monica, California: General Publishing Group, 1996.
— the one time MGM hair stylist and “Hollywood’s favorite confident” tells the story of how, early on, he helped shaped Brooks’ distinctive bob
Page 34-35: “One day an attractive young lady of no more than eighteen walked into the salon and was assigned to me. Her hair was cut in what was then called a Buster Brown style, curled under around her neck, and she said she wanted something different because the cut looked like so many other women’s hair. I took a chance. Separating her hair into sections, I decided to shorten it drastically, and she loved the look. I cautioned her that the back would need to be shortened to match the front in what came to be known as a shingle. She nodded her assent.
This distinctive young woman was so elated with her new look that she summoned the manager and complimented me on my work. The cut cost $1.50—quite expensive for those days. She offered me a generous tip, but I was embarrassed and refused it. My reward was simply that she was able to walk out of the salon with a haircut unlike that of any other woman. A few months later, when I was at the movies, I was startled to see the same young woman on the screen: She was Louise Brooks! A silent screen film star was wearing my haircut! I practically floated out of the theater.”
GINGER ROGERS (actress)
Rogers, Ginger. Ginger: My Story. HarperCollins, 1991.
— autobiography of the film star and dance part of Fred Astaire; a romance between Brooks and Jimmy Walker is not mentioned in the Barry Paris biography
Page 77-78: “Jimmy Walker was the mayor of New York and a frequent customer at the Mayfair. Walker was a fashion plate and was constantly in the newspapers. He escorted the most attractive women of the day, including society beauties and actresses. His favorite lady, at the time, was the very stunning screen siren Louise Brooks, who had decided to leave Hollywood for New York. They went everywhere together. No wonder I was surprised when my mother announced one day that Jimmy Walker had invited me to a party at the Mayfair. Why had he asked me instead of his steady girlfriend?
I shall never forget walking into the Mayfair on the arm of the mayor. We stood at the top of the twenty steps which led down to the dance floor and the mayor removed the white mink jacket from my shoulders. I was wearing a long green chiffon gown with four tiers of handmade chiffon petals, which started four inches above my ankle and cascaded down to the floor. Around my shoulders, the same petal trim created a cowl effect that made me appear very tall. I could sense how fluttery and graceful the petals must have appeared to the onlookers on the dance floor. I felt terrific. Mayor Walker gave me his arm, and we walked down the long steps together. I felt the five hundred pairs of eyes watching this entrance and I could imagine the whispering. “It’s not Louise Brooks. Who is that with Mayor Walker? Oh, it can’t be. Yes, but it is . . .” And suddenly I was a gossipy news item, however unintentionally.
The next day a large bouquet of red roses arrived. The note said, “It was charming of you to go out with me. Did anyone ever tell you, you’re an excellent dancer? Thank you so much, Jimmy Walker.” Later, I learned through the gossip mills that Louise Brooks had walked out on the mayor a few days before I had received his invitation. So much for my being a stopgap in one of New York City’s famous romances.”
PAUL ROBESON (singer, actor & activist)
Duberman, Martin B. Paul Robeson. New York: Knopf, 1988.
— according to Essie Robeson’s diary, Brooks met Paul Robeson at a party in April 1925 at the home of Walter White, the longtime head of the NAACP
Page 74: “Essie carefully noted in her diary the star-studded lists of guests she and Paul now met regularly on their round of parties. At the Van Vechtens’, Theodore Dreiser told Paul he had seen The Emperor Jones six times, and took him aside for a long talk. At the Whites’, the panoply of glamour included Sherwood Anderson, Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, Prince Kojo Touvalou Houenou of Dahomey (nephew of the deposed King and a graduate in law and medicine from the Sorbonne, active in publicizing French colonial injustices — Essie found him “a typical African in appearance, but charming and cultured and interesting”), Roland Hayes, the novelist Jessie Fauset, Rene Maran (the French West Indian author of Batouala who had won the Goncourt Prize in 1921), the poet Witter Bynner (“tall and clumsy and very friendly. I never saw anything quite so funny and froglike as he attempts to do the tango with Gladys [White], and his attempts at the ‘Charleston’ “), Louise Brooks she “was very late and I couldn’t wait for her, but . . . Paul said she was very conceited and impossible”), and the red-haired singer Nora Holt (Ray), half Scottish, half Negro, known for her dalliances. (“Her trail is strewn with bones,” Van Vechten wrote H. L. Mencken, “many of them no longer hard”).
LIBBY HOLMAN (actress & torch singer whose hits include “Am I Blue?” and “Body and Soul”)
Bradshaw, Jon. Dreams That Money Can Buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
— two short passages concern meetings between Holman and Brooks
Page 38: “In Manhattan, Smith [Reynolds] cavorted with his sister Nancy and his brother, Dick, who had come to the city to relieve the tedium of rural life in North Carolina, to play, to spend and to ingratiate themselves with the fashionable theatrical set. The actress Louise Brooks encountered them occasionally at Connecticut weekends and Manhattan dinner parties. Smith was married, of course, but Miss Brooks believed that all three of them were casting about for potential mates, that they were simply up for grabs. But who would have them? In Louise Brooks‘s view, the Reynoldses were a humdrum clan, little more than illiterate farmers.”
Page 77: “Libby had an excellent figure and was inordinately fond of it. Actress Louise Brooks spent a weekend at Tantallon, Dwight Deere Wiman‘s house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Libby was also a guest. Because the house was full, the two girls shared a bedroom. On Saturday morning, when the naked Libby left her bed to have a shower, Miss Brooks was amazed to see that she had a body like one of those exquisite bronze figurines that rise from Roman fountains. It was ripe and unashamed and Miss Brooks was full of admiration.”
HANS CASPARIUS (German photographer)
Casparius Hans. In My View: A Pictorial Memoir. Berg Publishers, 1987.
— illustrated memoir by the noted photographer and occasional actor
Page 22: “Pabst brought Louise Brooks over from America to platy in these two films, so beautiful and so mysterious. In The Diary of a Lost One Louise and her boyfriend were running from the police. They escaped from the hotel where they were staying by jumping out of the window. I was an evil hot-dog seller and they came running to see me, elbowing past my customers to ask me if I knew a place where they could hide. I took them to a brothel where there was a party going on. The proprietress received them with open arms, and I, as a reward, was asked to join the party.”
HENRI LANGLOIS (French film preservationist)
Roud, Richard. A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française. New York, Viking, 1983.
— there are images and a small number of extended passages discussing Brooks in this account of Langlois’ life; here are two
Page 8: “One film we know he saw was A Girl in Every Port; years later he was to write that the screening of it in Paris in 1928 was a double discovery — that of the director, Howard Hawks, and that of the star, Louise Brooks: “To the Paris of 1928, which was rejecting expressionism, A Girl in Every Port was a film conceived in the present, achieving an identity of its own by repudiating the past. To look at the film is to see yourself, to see the future.” So, for Langlois, even at the age of fifteen, there was no dividing line between Hollywood and the avant-garde film….
During the years when Louise Brooks was almost totally forgotten elsewhere, Langlois considered her one of the great figures of the cinema. Miss Brooks, he wrote, was … ‘the modern artist par excellence. … Those who
have seen her can never forget her. . . . As soon as she comes on the screen, fiction disappears along with art, and one has the impression of watching a documentary. The camera seems to have caught her by surprise, almost without her knowing it. She is the intelligence of the cinematic process, of all that is photogenic; she embodies all that the cinema rediscovered in the last years of silent film: complete naturalness, and complete simplicity. Her art is so pure that it becomes invisible’.”
Page 94-95: “Taking advantage of the sixtieth anniversary of the first Lumiére film show in Paris in 1895, he organized a huge exhibit—‘‘60 Years of Cinema”—at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. In spite of the uncertainties which might have paralyzed the energies of another man, the show, which ran from June through September, was magnificent. I’ll never forget walking into it: the entrance was dominated by two huge blowups, one of Falconetti, star of Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, and the other of Louise Brooks in a scene from Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (or Lulu, as it is sometimes called). When a French critic asked why he had chosen
Miss Brooks — a “nobody” — over Garbo or Dietrich, Langlois yelled, “There is no Garbo. There is no Dietrich. There is only Louise Brooks.
Thanks to the resources of the Musée d’Art Moderne, he was able to put together the first of his sumptuous catalogs. It was well illustrated and contained some of his inimitable texts, going from the prehistory of the cinema up to 1955. It was for this catalog that he wrote of Louise Brooks: “Greater than Garbo are the face, the eyes, the Joan-of-Arc-style haircut, and the smile of Louise Brooks. Those who have seen her can never forget her.”
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD (English writer, author of The Berlin Stories)
Page, Norman. Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. New York: St. Martins Press, 1998.
— Brooks’ film work is referenced a few times in this account of the lives of the two English writers
Page 148: “In Berlin he continued to indulge his enthusiasm for what the generation would have called the silver screen, and in his Californian old age would recall with pleasure the films, stars and directors he had long ago admired, many of whom – Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Louise Brooks, Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre and others — had by then taken their place in the histories of cinema. During the Berlin years, references to cinema visits in the company of Auden and Spender are on record.
Isherwood, Christopher. Liberation Diaries.Volume Three: 1970-1983. HarperCollins, 2012.
— contains a few references and entries on Brooks
January 28, 1977: “Oh horror—at the end of next week, Sunday February 6th, we leave to tour the frozen cities of Rochester, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis, where blizzards are still raging. Someone said that there may actually be a 100 degree difference in temperature between here and there! Ordinarily, Rochester would be fun; we are going there to view Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl and to meet its star, Louise Brooks, now poor, arthritic, cranky and as old as I am….”
February 18, 1977: “Our best experience: the meeting with weird old Louise Brooks and seeing her marvellous young self in The Diary of a Lost Girl and Miss Europe (Prix de Beauté)….”
October 10, 1979: “I will perhaps write about the deeper significance of the party some other time, when I see it at more of a distance. Superficially it was a “success.” Ken Tynan carried on about Louise Brooks, thereby oddly annoying George Cukor, who seems to disapprove of her chiefly because she left the movies before they ceased to want her, finding the life of sound pictures boring because you had to learn your lines in advance of time and there fore couldn’t stay up all night at parties, as you could during the silent picture days. Ken says he had a four-hour sex talk with Louise, during which she told him that women can ejaculate just as men do; she herself had been masturbating recently and had shot a spurt of liquid right across the room. He also told me that she is anti-queer and that this is characteristic of women whose lives are centered on sex—they have no use for men who don’t desire them.”
August 1, 1980, regarding Kenneth Tynan’s funeral: “Well, it didn’t turn out like that. I decided to read Ken’s diary extract from Show People about his feelings for Louise Brooks. I said a few words about this and then read the William Penn, and that was that. Not a distinguished tribute, but many of the guests liked it because I spoke briefly and clearly, which neither Shirley MacLaine nor Penelope Gilliatt did. Both of them were embarrassing. Shirley looked upward and addressed Ken directly as though he was hovering under the roof beams.”
WILLIAM S. PALEY (media mogul, founder of CBS)
Smith, Sally Bedell. In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley the Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle. Random House, 1990.
— multiple references to Brooks
Page 80-81: “Paley rebounded quickly. Toward the end of 1929 he developed a passion for a woman considerably more unconventional than Dorothy Meacham. Louise Brooks, a former Ziegfeld girl, had just finished making a scandalous film in Germany called Pandora’s Box. Brooks had a breathtaking beauty that rivaled Garbo’s. Her face was a porcelain oval, with an exquisitely sculpted nose, perfect bow lips, and enormous dark eyes. She was known as the girl in the black helmet, after her sleek jet black bob with long straight bangs. She was overwhelmingly erotic, and the role she played in Pandora’s Box, directed by G. W. Pabst, exploited her sexiness to the utmost. The film tells the story of a prostitute named Lulu, an unrepentant hedonist, who destroys her lovers and is ultimately killed herself. Lulu is seen embracing women as well as men. Although she made other films in Hollywood before and after, Louise Brooks became identified in the public mind with the kinky Lulu.
Kenneth Tynan, the British theater and film critic who wrote a profile of her many years later, saw Brooks as a “shameless urchin tomboy … a creature of impulse, a temptress with no pretensions, capable of dissolving
into a giggling fit at a peak of erotic ecstasy; amoral but totally selfless . . . lesbian and hetero.” Kansas-born, Brooks came to New York and, like Paley, reinvented herself, but with a higher degree of self-awareness. She was a free-thinking rebel, an avid learner, a withering observer and, it later turned out, a skilled storyteller. Paley was bowled over by Louise’s independent spirit, and found her as amusing as she was seductive. For her part, she appreciated his “screwy sense of humor.” Almost at once they plunged into an affair. She was twenty-two years old and living in an apartment two blocks away from Paley, at Park Avenue and 56th Street. She was also engaged to marry a man named George Marshall, a Washington businessman who had made a fortune with a chain of laundries. When Marshall heard Louise was two timing him, he shot off a telegram: “Next time bring your little Paley and shovel.” Marshall’s anger subsided, and he took her back, but only temporarily. “He had given up all thoughts of marrying me,” Brooks later wrote. “He had repossessed me for reasons of pride and jealousy, but now, viewed in a sensible light, I threatened to become an expensive burden.”
Paley was exceedingly proud of his fling with Louise Brooks. Not only did he boast about it later in life, he expressed a touching gratitude to her privately. Perhaps he had a lingering sense of guilt, since he had ruined her prospective marriage. Twenty-five years later, according to Brooks, after hearing that she was living in poverty, he arranged for the Paley Foundation, which he set up in 1936, to provide her with $400 a month
for life, thus ensuring her some degree of comfort and security. The foundation shows no record of this expenditure, and such a stipend would seem to violate its purpose, which is to aid organizations involved in education, cultural programs, and health. Whether from his own pocket or through his official philanthropy, Paley managed to get the funds to her.”
KENNETH TYNAN (English critic)
Tynan, Kathleen. The Life of Kenneth Tynan. William Morrow, 1987.
— biography of the theater critic and journalist; contains a 17 page chapter (not excepted here) largely focused on Louise Brooks as well as other significant references, as well as a portrait of the actress in her later years, and even a picture of Tynan dressed as Brooks
Page 461: “In May Ken decided to dress as his screen heroine Louise Brooks for a fancy-dress ball. To this end he wore a wig modeled after the hairstyle of the young Brooks, a feathered blue Lurex gown, sequined underwear, a garter belt and black stockings. He carried a handbag and a six-inch ivory cigarette holder. I was elected to make him up for this event, a procedure he submitted to with the utmost seriousness. He found the idea of dressing as a woman very appealing.”
Page 511: “‘He had received a note from Louise Brooks congratulating him on his [Dick] Cavett performance in New York. “As for the fabulous Louise Brooks whom you have invented, don’t you think you should hold me down a bit?” She told him that she had recently been hospitalized, and that she too had emphysema. Could Ken advise? Ken wrote back to tell her not to get into a panic, that there were hundreds and thousands of people suffering from the disease. “Since physical exercise is not your specialty, try learning some breathing exercises. . . . The important thing is to keep your lungs as flexible as possible. Everything follows from that. Since worry will make them tense, don’t worry. Just relax and write. Louise replied some weeks later, to tell Ken that she loved him and that she felt “‘subhuman not to have understood when I firs met you that you were very ill.” She had fallen apart with sickness “Just lying here.”
Page 519, describing Tynan’s memorial: “The little chapel filled up with about seventy people on the afternoon of the thirty-first. There was some organ music, and a short service conducted by the Reverend M. G. Richards. Three friends spoke. First, Christopher Isherwood quoted a paragraph from Ken’s profile on Louise Brooks, and then read a passage from the Quaker William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude. Shirley MacLaine stood up next. “Ken, there are some things I didn’t get to tell you…” she began. She said everyone in the room would help look after his family, and that the thought of his smile lit up her heart. It was about 95 degrees in the chapel, and the atmosphere—as at all funerals—mixed tears, embarrassment and slight hysteria. The third speaker was Penelope Gilliatt, who spoke about Ken’s courage.”
MAURICE GIRODIAS (French publisher)
Girodias, Maurice. The Frog Prince. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.
— memoir (originally published in France in 1977) of the infamous publisher
Page 65-66: “Along with my political and other writings, I hoard in my desk a treasure I have patiently collected, which consoles me for many things: a notebook in which I paste photos of all the movie actresses I admire. Brigitte Helm in profile, a marvel of Teutonic purity. The green eyes of Louise Brooks sparkling beneath her thick black bangs. Dita Parlo’s small mouth, which gives me such an intuition of perversity. . . The voluptuous body of Pola Negri. . . Raquel Meller. . . Lillian Harvey. . . Josephine Baker, whose thighs are the ultimate and threaten to make me lose my head!
Scissors in one hand, glue pot in the other, I collect women. I scrutinize their contours, compare them, divest them of their bathing suits, and dispose them, nude and languid, around the swimming pool. I stretch Josephine Baker out on a hammock that sets off her shiny dark flesh, I get Louise Brooks to dance one of her wonderful athletic jigs, I turn Pola Negri over to two strapping masseurs who, alas for her, are eunuchs. From time to time I take a dip in the pool to refresh myself, but the irresistible form of Raquel Meller swims toward me underwater and entwines me in a slow-motion pas de deux of such powerful sensuality that I nearly succumb, until Simone Simon dives to the rescue and snatches me gracefully away from the American vamp. Ginger Rogers displays her superb strawberry-blond body to perfection, as she dances, naked, with the black-and-white silhouette of Fred Astaire in a routine full of splits; all of it dedicated to me! Oh, the movies! What an invention, and how bleak my desk would be without this inexhaustible harem, swirling, cooing, begging for my attention, submissive to my whim. . . . The world’s most beautiful women belong to me, and believe me, they know it.”
Page 366: “Cinema is the only thing that’s thriving in Paris these days. ‘These nights,’ rather, since we seem to be living in perpetual penumbra, even in full daylight — that time just after sunset when you start thinking that you’d really like to see a good movie, and actually begin to see it rolling on your inner camera! Our dreams are thus given a dimension of absolute need, the need to recapture the world we have just lost. They wear the very specific coloring of the recent past in the form of films by Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, René Clair, and Marcel Carné…. When Jean Dasté and the great Michel Simon bring to us in L’Atalante an alien wind, a touch of foreign madness on a super-French background, it reaches me just as deeply as Bunuel’s surrealistic paranoia of Un Chien Andalou. The women are less dazzling, less colorful, because this is really not their moment of glory here in France; no Annabella, Yvonne Printemps, Danielle Darrieux, or Michèle Morgan can hold a candle to the Garbos and the Marlenes, and even less to my own personal goddess, Louise Brooks.”
LEE ISRAEL (biographer and forger)
Israel, Lee. Can You Ever Forgive Me? Simon & Schuster, 2008.
— Lee Israel enjoyed a reputation as an author before turning to a criminal life as a forger of celebrity letters, including those of Brooks, about which there are numerous passages and references; here is one
“The idea of growing my newfound vocation came with the discovery of a luscious collection…more than 150 long letters, “TLSs” (typed letters signed), written by Louise Brooks from Rochester, New York, to her friend, film archivist Herman G. Weinberg. Louise’s letters were done between December 1962, when she was fifty-six and beginning an enormously satisfying literary career, and October 1983, by which point she was suffering from emphysema and osteoarthritis and unable to type… I sat now … taking extensive notes from the letters, most of which had been typed by Louise on plain paper. She used an assortment of hot-colored pencils—orange, red, and purple—to underline violently and to sign her name. Getting through the collection took weeks of assiduous attention, but by the time I had read all the letters, most of which ran to about three hundred words, I had a nook-and-cranny familiarity with the passionate Louise Brooks, silent-film star turned cranky, iconoclastic critic of movies, movie stars, and Hollywood hagiography.”