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Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an cultural icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob cut that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn school where she performed opposite Ted Shawn. After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals and as a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and signed a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). During this time, she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and joined the elite social circle of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.
Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (Prix de Beauté) (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in 14 silent films and 10 sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became what she termed "a Sugar dating" to three wealthy men. For the next two decades, she was alcoholism and suicidal. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78.
Brooks described the hometown of her childhood as a typical Midwestern community where the inhabitants "prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn." When Louise was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused her. Beyond the physical trauma at the time, the event continued to have damaging psychological effects on her personal life as an adult and on her career. That early abuse caused her later to acknowledge that she was incapable of real love, explaining that this man: "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure ... For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough — there had to be an element of domination." When Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading him on". In 1919, Brooks and her family moved to Independence, Kansas, before relocating to Wichita in 1920.
Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn school modern dance company in New York at the age of 15 in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. As a member of the globe-trotting troupe, Brooks spent a season abroad in London and in Paris. In her second season with the Denishawn company, she advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. But one day, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in the spring of 1924, telling her in front of the other members: "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver." These words made a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave the tenth and final chapter. Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal. Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, the sister of Constance and Joan Bennett Bennett, Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a semi-nude dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street.
As a result of her work in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures. An infatuated Wanger signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925. Soon after, Brooks met movie star Charlie Chaplin at a cocktail party given by Wanger. Chaplin was in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush (1925) at the Strand Theatre on Broadway. Chaplin and Brooks had a two-month affair that summer while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey. When their affair ended, Chaplin sent her a check; she declined to write him a thank-you note.
After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. At the time, Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone. Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him. Despite his advice, she accepted Paramount's offer. During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob cut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.
In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her." A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery). Brooks's disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies.
The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be an ordeal for Brooks. During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who, the next day, spread a false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted syphilis during a previous weekend stay with a producer, ostensibly Jack Pickford. Concurrently, Brooks's interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated, as Arlen was a close friend of Brooks's then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Brooks, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members. Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly climbs aboard a moving train.
Soon after the production of Beggars of Life was completed, Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies's lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer. While partying with Lederer, Brooks had a brief sexual liaison with her. At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction. Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer — Brooks's closest friend and companion — committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window. This event traumatized Brooks and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast.
Brooks, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrians director. On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit.
While her snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her altogether in Hollywood, her subsequent refusal, after returning from Germany, to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.
Brooks's performance in Pandora's Box made her a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old and too obvious". In choosing Brooks, a relative unknown who had only appeared — not to very great effect — in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him. Brooks recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street." Brooks claimed her experience shooting Pandora's Box in Germany was a pleasant one:
After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Brooks had a one-night stand with Pabst, and the director cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme. In performing Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks drew upon her memories of being molested as a 9-year-old and then being blamed by her mother for her own molestation, later recalling on that day she became one of the "lost". On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to continue her career as a serious actress. Pabst expressed concern that Brooks's carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's". He further cautioned Brooks that Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled.
When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks's German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theatre vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to stage-style acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Brooks's acting style was subtle because she understood that the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. Explaining her method, Brooks said that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used by contemporary film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all. Film critic Roger Ebert later wrote that, by employing this method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."
Her appearances in Pabst's two films made Brooks an international star. According to film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "exposed her animal sensuality and turned her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen — the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in Diary of a Lost Girl and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in Pandora's Box."
Near the end of 1929, English film critic and journalist Cedric Belfrage interviewed Pabst for an article about Brooks's film work in Europe that was published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture. According to Belfrage, Pabst attributed Brooks's acting success outside the U.S. to her seemingly inherent or instinctive "European" sensibilities:
Belfarge elaborated on Brooks's opinion of Hollywood, and referred to Pabst's firsthand knowledge of that opinion. "The very mention of the place," he stated, "gives her a sensation of nausea." He continued, "The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity — no, no, that is no place for Louise Brooks."
After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film, Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina.
Purportedly, Wellman — despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life — offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit Marshall in New York City, and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow, who then began her own rise to stardom. Brooks later claimed she declined the role because she "hated Hollywood," but film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, said that Brooks "just wasn't interested ... She was more interested in Marshall". In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".
She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 weekly salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn. She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Roscoe Arbuckle, who worked under the pseudonym "William Goodrich". Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932, and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western film that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. In 1937, Brooks obtained a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey, who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses." Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks's scenes were deleted.
Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. In contemporary reviews of the film in newspapers and trade publications, Brooks received little attention from critics. The review by The Film Daily in September 1938 provides one example, barely mentioning her, saying only, "Louise Brooks makes an appearance as a female attraction." Variety, the nation's leading entertainment publication, also devoted very little ink to her in its review. "Louise Brooks is the femme appeal with nothing much to do", it reports, "except look glamorous in a shoulder-length straight-bang coiffure."
Brooks briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised, but this undesired return "turned out to be another kind of hell". "I retired first to my father's home in Wichita," she later recalled, "but there I found that the citizens could not decide whether they despised me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a failure in their midst". For her part, Brooks admitted that "I wasn't exactly enchanted with them," and "I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."
After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City. Following brief stints there as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist, she worked as a Retail clerk in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Between 1948 and 1953, Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients. As her finances eroded, an impoverished Brooks began working regularly for an escort agency in New York. Recalling this difficult period in her memoirs, Brooks wrote that she frequently pondered suicide:
Brooks spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment. By this time, "all of her rich and famous friends had forgotten her." Angered by this ostracism, she attempted to write a tell-all memoir titled Naked on My Goat, a title drawn from Goethe's epic play, Faust. After working on that autobiography for years, Brooks destroyed the entire manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator. As time passed, she increasingly drank more and continued to suffer from suicidal tendencies.
During this time, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City. He persuaded her in 1956 to move to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career. With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer. Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14, she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career. A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982 and still in print, was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable."
In her later years, Brooks rarely granted interviews, yet had special relationships with film historians John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death but filmed a decade earlier. In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood. In 1982, writer Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks's small apartment for an interview, and later wrote about the often awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon with Louise Brooks".
Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall, which she later described as abusive. Marshall was purportedly "her frequent bedfellow and constant adviser between 1927 and 1933." Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him but, after learning that she had had many affairs while they were together and believing her to be incapable of fidelity, he married film actress Corinne Griffith instead.
In 1925, Brooks sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risqué studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious.
In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye ... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938.
In her later years, Brooks insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime: "As a matter of fact, I've never been in love. And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him? Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it." Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks." Her many paramours from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point.
Sometime in September 1953, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964.
Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover". Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:
According to biographer Barry Paris, Brooks had a "clear preference for men", but she did not discourage the rumors that she was a lesbian, both because she relished their shock value, which enhanced her aura, and because she personally valued feminine beauty. Paris claims that Brooks "loved women as a homosexual man, rather than as a lesbian, would love them. ... The operative rule with Louise was neither heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality. It was just sexuality ..."
In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, the character Czernobog refers to Brooks as the greatest movie star of all time. In Ali Smith's 2011 novel There But For The, the character Brooke Bayoude is revealed at a dinner party to have been named after Louise Brooks, though in a play on Brooks's name the dinner guests apparently mistake Brooks for Debbie Flood or Louise Woodward. In her 2011 novel of supernatural horror, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as an actual character in the leading character's visions. Brooks appears as a central character in the 2012 novel The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. In Gayle Forman's novels Just One Day and Just One Year, the protagonist is called "Lulu" because her bobbed hair resembles Brooks'. In the German novel The Director (2023) by Daniel Kehlmann, Brooks, as well as G.W.Pabst, appears as a character.
In 1987, the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans published a book, The Saint of the Clockmakers, in which Louise Brooks plays a role.
Brooks also inspired the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent of Brooks late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.
Other comics have drawn upon Brooks's distinctive hair-style. Brooks was the visual model for the character of Ivy Pepper in Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy comic series. More recently, illustrator Rick Geary published a 2015 graphic novel entitled Louise Brooks: Detective in which Brooks, "her movie career having sputtered to a stop," returns to her native Kansas in 1940 and becomes a private investigator who solves murders.
In 2011, American metal group Metallica and singer-songwriter Lou Reed released the double album Lulu with a Brooks-like mannequin on the cover. In Natalie Merchant's self-titled 2014 album, the song "Lulu" is a biographical portrait of Brooks.
As of 2007, Miss Europe and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release. Her short film (and one of her only talkies) Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released on VHS and then in 2012 on DVD.
| 1925 | The Street of Forgotten Men | A Moll | Herbert Brenon | Incomplete (missing reel 2) The Street of Forgotten Men (filmography page) at Louise Brooks Society |
| 1926 | Miss Bayport | Frank Tuttle | Lost film. In the late 1990s some fragments in both black & white and color were found in Australia. In 2018 a three-second-long technicolor screen test featuring Brooks was discovered by archivist Jane Fernandes, the only color film footage of the actress during her prime known to exist. Another lost scene was found in 2018 in a YouTube video that had been uploaded to the site in 2007. | |
| 1926 | Kitty Laverne | Malcolm St. Clair | Lost film | |
| 1926 | It's the Old Army Game | Mildred Marshall | A. Edward Sutherland | Extant |
| 1926 | Clara | Malcolm St. Clair | Extant | |
| 1926 | Just Another Blonde | Diana O'Sullivan | Alfred Santell | Fragments survive |
| 1926 | Love 'Em and Leave 'Em | Janie Walsh | Frank Tuttle | Extant |
| 1927 | Evening Clothes | Fox Trot | Luther Reed | Lost film |
| 1927 | Rolled Stockings | Carol Fleming | Richard Rosson | Lost film |
| 1927 | Now We're in the Air | Griselle/Grisette | Frank R. Strayer | In 2016, a 23-minute fragment was found at the Czech national film archive in Prague. The surviving material was preserved and shown for the first time at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on June 2, 2017. |
| 1927 | The City Gone Wild | Snuggles Joy | James Cruze | Lost film |
| 1928 | Marie, Girl in France | Howard Hawks | Extant | |
| 1928 | Beggars of Life | The Girl (Nancy) | William A. Wellman | Extant: Sound version is considered lost; only silent version survives. |
| 1929 | Margaret Odell | Malcolm St. Clair | Extant: Silent and sound versions survive. | |
| 1929 | Pandora's Box | Lulu | G. W. Pabst | Extant |
| 1929 | Diary of a Lost Girl | Thymian | G. W. Pabst | Extant |
| 1930 | Miss Europe | Lucienne Garnier | Augusto Genina | Extant - Alternate title: Prix de Beauté ''Beauty. Brooks's first sound film. Silent and sound versions survive. |
| 1931 | It Pays to Advertise | Thelma Temple | Frank Tuttle | Extant |
| 1931 | God's Gift to Women | Florine | Michael Curtiz | Extant |
| 1931 | Windy Riley Goes Hollywood | Betty Grey | Roscoe Arbuckle | Extant |
| 1936 | Empty Saddles | "Boots" Boone | Lesley Selander | Extant |
| 1937 | When You're in Love | Chorus Girl | Robert Riskin | Extant (Uncredited role) |
| 1937 | King of Gamblers | Joyce Beaton | Robert Florey | Extant (Scenes deleted) |
| 1938 | Overland Stage Raiders | Beth Hoyt | George Sherman | Extant |
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