It is not known exactly when or where Louise Brooks and Herman J. Mankiewicz first met, but the showgirl and the writer (whose screen credits would include Citizen Kane) likely became acquainted sometime in 1925, around the time Brooks, a chorus dancer, was appearing in the Summer edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. According to the Barry Paris biography of Brooks (who cites letters the actress wrote in the 1970s), Brooks’ dressing room in the New Amsterdam theater (which she shared with Peggy Fears) was regularly visited by a number of admiring gentlemen who enjoyed the company of the vivacious 18 year old. Among them were writer Michael Arlen, producer Walter Wanger, film star Charlie Chaplin, and Herman Mankiewicz, then a second string drama critic / assistant theater editor for the New York Times.
The showgirl and the writer hit it off. She was a high school dropout with a literary bent. He was a wordsmith, part and parcel of NYC’s Jazz Age intelligentsia and someone who seemed to know just about everybody, including the various celebrated personalities associated with the Algonquin Roundtable. (For a short time, Brooks lived at the Roundtable’s main stomping ground, the Algonquin Hotel …, and perhaps that is where the two met.) However they first became acquainted, Mankiewicz took Brooks under his wing, and gifted her with conversation as well as contemporary books by the likes of Aldous Huxley. She gifted him with her presence. They were platonic, literary friends. In an interview with Kevin Brownlow, she called him “my favorite person.” (In his 1982 New York Times review of Lulu in Hollywood, John Lahr described Mankiewicz’s mentoring of the aspiring actress as forming the “Louise Brooks Literary Society.”)
Brooks’ restlessness – usually in the form an invitation to a night out, led to an increasing number of absences from the Follies. One such occasion was an invitation from Mankiewicz to attend the September 16th Broadway opening of No, No, Nanette, a stage play which Mankiewicz was assigned to review. (The newspaper advertisement shown above is for the play’s Wednesday night opening at the Globe theater.) At dinner before the show, Mankiewicz downed a number of cocktails, and according to the Paris biography, he was “too drunk to stay awake, much less write a coherent review.” And so, as the biography also notes, “the secretly literate Louise rose to the occasion, took notes, and wrote it for him.” Brooks’ review, titled “No, No Nanette Full of Vigorous Fun,” was published in the New York Times on September 17, 1925. At the time, no one knew the piece, which largely mirrored the opinion of other New York City critics, was actually penned by a teenage chorus girl with a penchant for slightly purple prose.
Louise Brooks never got credit for having written a respectable review on short notice. She never asked for credit, and likely forgot she had penned the piece. However, her review lived on… if only in an archive or book of press clippings. Fifty one years later, in 1976, yet another revival of No, No Nanette was opening — this time in San Antonio, Texas. One local critic, Robert Pincus, writing in the San Antonio Express, made a point of referencing the 1925 New York Times review of the play, and then quoted from Brooks’ review, which described the play as a “merry musical comedy . . . a highly meritorious paradigm of its kind.” Highly meritorious might also apply to Brooks’ effort.
