Like the celebrities of today, Louise Brooks’ name and image was used in a number of advertisements and advertising campaigns. Beginning in 1926 with the “Louise Brooks Evening Gown” and running through the LUX soap campaigns of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks’ name, image and likeness was used to sell all manner of products and services — not only in the United States, but also elsewhere around the world. Here are a few examples of movie tie-in ads related to one of Brooks’ films, Now We’re in the Air.
This newspaper advertisement, for Truso Perfume, appeared in a Chicago newspaper in December, 1927, following the release of Now We’re in the Air and as the film was showing at the Oriental Theater. According to the ad, “Lovely Louise Brooks Starring This Week With Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton in Now We’re in the Air at the Oriental Theatre Is One of the Particular Stars of the Screen Who Prefers the Inimitable Truso Perfume.” By the way, Truso perfume was priced at $3.50 an ounce, and was available at Walgreens and other leading drug and department stores. Did Louise Brooks actually prefer Truso? It is hard to say, as with so many of the advertisements which merely employed a Paramount publicity photo.
Louise Brooks’ name can be found on this full page ad for the Morgan Lithograph Co. of Cleveland, Ohio. The company, which also had branch offices in New York and Los Angeles (near the main hubs of movie production), printed large scale posters for Paramount and other studios, including Essanay, Hal Roach, MGM, and Universal. In fact, according to Mary Malory’s informative article about the company and its colorful posters, Morgan was one of the leading lithographers in the country. The advertisement shown below appeared in Motion Picture magazine in late 1927. Remarkably, this commercial printer is still in business today at www.morganlitho.com
For more about Now We’re in the Air, be sure and check out the Louise Brooks Society filmography page devoted to the film. The Truso ad is pictured in the Louise Brooks Society publication, Now We’re in the Air: A Companion to the Once Lost Film, by Thomas Gladysz. This book was published in 2017.