Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star

The first and only book about Louise Brooks to appear in her lifetime was published in France in 1977. Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une antistar, edited by Roland Jaccard, consists of the French translations of two of Brooks’ previously published articles, as well as one letter and one other previously unpublished piece, “Une certaine idee de la liberte” [“A certain idea of freedom”], about Brooks’ parents and childhood; it also includes one of Lotte Eisner’s essays about Brooks, and (as Barry Paris put it in his biography) “other ecstatic homages to her beauty”. These homages including three other essays, two by Roland Jaccard and one by Jean-Michel Palmier, and two poems, one by Tahar Ben Jelloun and one by Andre Laude. Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une antistar also includes a few pages of both the Brooks-inspired Dixie Dugan and Valentina cartoons, as well as 90 black-and-white images. Unfortunately, some of the film stills in the book are not well reproduced – nevertheless, there are many scarce images to please fans.

Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une anti-star was first published in hardback by Phébus, a French publisher based in Paris. The book was reissued in softcover in 1982 and again in a differently designed paperback edition in 1985. (The latter was part of the Ramsay Poche Cinema series published by Phébus.) This heavily illustrated, 150-plus page title was subsequently translated into English as Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star and published in the United States by New York Zoetrope in 1986, and then later in England by Columbus in 1988. The book is currently out-of-print in the United States; used copies show up on amazon, ABE.com, and eBay.

Notably, there are some slight differences between the French and English-language editions. Some pages are laid out differently, while the American edition contains a brief Foreword by Gideon Y. Schein, who translated the French text into English. (For more about Schein, read this LBS blog.) The contents of the English-language edition are “The Touch of a Glance” by Tahar Ben Jelloun (now a famous French Moroccan novelist), “Thank God, I’m Alone” by Roland Jaccard, “A Certain Kind of Freedom” by Louise Brooks, “The Passion, Death, and transfiguration of Lulu” by Jean-Michael Palmier, “Pabst and Lulu” by Louise Brooks, “The Other Side of the Camera” by Louise Brooks, “A Witness Speaks” by Lotte H. Eisner, “The Origin of a Myth” by Roland Jaccard, “An Answer to an Admirer” a letter from Louise Brooks to Guido Crepax, and “song of Lulu” by André Laude. The book concludes with a “Filmography of Louise Brooks,’ a list of “Articles by Louise Brooks,” and Illustration credits.


Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une antistar Phébus, 1977 and 1982 front cover	Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star New York Zoetrope, 1986 front cover	Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star New York Zoetrope, 1986 back cover	Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une antistar Phébus, 1985 front cover

In his 1979 portrait of Brooks which appeared in The New Yorker, Tynan wrote: “As I rose to leave her apartment, she gave me a present: a large and handsome volume entitled Louise Brooks—Portrait dune Anti-Star. Published in Paris in 1977, it contained a full pictorial survey of her career, together with essays, critiques, and poems devoted to her beauty and talent. She inscribed it to me, and copied out, beneath her signature, the epitaph she has composed for herself: “I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away.”

Louise Brooks: Portrait d’une anti-star received only a small number of reviews, in Europe and in the United States. What follows is a bibliography of the few articles and reviews I found about Jaccard’s book. Citations are assumed to be from the United States, unless otherwise indicated. An * indicates that a copy of this citation is held in the archives of the LBS. If you know of additional citations, or can provide further information on the entries noted on this page, please CONTACT the Louise Brooks Society. This bibliography has been compiled by Thomas Gladysz, and was last updated in December 2023.

Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star
first published in 1977

**A 1986 clipping of a widely syndicated newspaper article.**

Barrot, Olivier. Ecran, April 15, 1978. (France) *
— review

author unknown. Cinema 78, July, 1978.
— review

Benayoun, Robert. Positif, July / August, 1978. (France) *
— near full page review

Grelier, Robert. Revue du Cinema, January, 1979. (France)
— review

Cluny, Claude Michel. “Louise Brooks, portrait d’une antistar.” Cinema, July 1978. (France)
— review

F., G. “La foto d’archivio.” Cineteca, September 1985. (Italy)
— a brief illustrated appreciation (the author is Gianluca Farinelli); this issue contains reviews of both Louise Brooks. Portrait d’une anti star and Lulu a Hollywood.

Poisson, Roch. “Livres.” Decormag, May 1986. (France) *
— magazine review

Gannett News Service. “Books about silent film star continue despite her death.” Green Bay Press-Gazette, December 14, 1986. *
— syndicated newspaper article

Douin, Jean Luc. “Louise Brooks, Portrait d’une anti-star.” Le Monde, December 11, 1997.
— brief, six line review

Armstrong, Richard. “Her Life to Live.” Audience, 2004. *
— web review

Roland Jaccard (September 22, 1941 – September 20, 2021) was a Swiss-born journalist, editor, novelist and literary critic who was long resident in Paris. Jaccard was a longtime contributor to Le Monde, the Parisian newspaper, where he wrote about psychoanalysis, a topic of special interest. Over the course of his career, he wrote several essays and books on Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Melanie Klein and other related subjects. Jaccard was described as a nihilist and “pessimistic hedonist” who practiced cynicism and cultivated “sardonic disillusionment”. According to his French Wikipedia page, both his grandfather and father committed suicide. In his last autobiographical book, We never recover from a happy childhood, released in 2021 a few weeks before his death, Jaccard announced that he would soon commit suicide, declaring that old age horrified him. He died just a couple of days short of his 80th birthday. (For more on Jaccard and his death, read this LBS blog.) Besides Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star, Jaccard was the author of several books including a fictional autobiography of Lou Andreas-Salomé titled Lou (1982), and Portrait d’une flapper (2014), which centers on Louise Brooks. It is pictured below.

Brooks and Jaccard corresponded in the 1970s. When I visited Paris in 2011, he came to my author event at the Village Voice bookshop (For more on the event, read this LBS blog.) We met up for dinner a few nights later, and Jaccard signed copies of his books and gifted me with some Brooks-related material from his collection, including the letter shown above. When we met, I told Jaccard how, when I worked as a bookseller in San Francisco, I helped drive the American edition of his book out-of-print. I hand-sold lots and lots of copies, and also saw to it the book was stacked up in the front of the store, which helped spur even greater sales. I no longer remember how many copies the store sold all together, but I remember it was in the hundreds — the last remaining copies available from the publisher. The store ordered and sold so many copies that I recall at one time the book was stacked-up, literally, some five or six feet high. When it came time to report the store’s bestselling books to a local publication, Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star made the list — some 12 years after it was first published in the United States.


Aline Weil (the french translator of the Barry Paris biography), LBS director Thomas Gladysz, and Roland Jaccard at the Village Voice bookshop in Paris in 2011.	Portrait d’une flapper (2014) published by PUF	Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star made the Booksmith bestseller list in 1998. This list was published in the SF Weekly, an alt-weekly published in San Francisco.