Silent Film Legend with a Legendary Spirit
I started a deep fascination with Louise Brooks when I was about 22 years old. After reading the book, Louise Brooks: A Biography by the fabulous author Barry Paris, my admiration for her ran deeper than her looks. The essence of Louise Brooks is really of a modern day woman above and beyond what the standards of 'modern' were of the day. She enjoyed the freedoms of the flapper lifestyle, but she bored easy of them also. She was only sixteen years old when she kicked off her career as a young dancer for the Denishawn modern dance company. This dance troupe was created by Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and a young Martha Graham. Louise however, had a way of seeing things her way, therefore, causing brew ha ha between her and St. Denis. She was fired from the troupe during her second season. This wouldn't be the first time that she would enrage people. She then found herself dancing as a chorus girl in the George White's Scandals and even was a featured dancer of the 1925 famed Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. It was there that she was discovered for the movies. She was on her way.
Louise didn't fare well with the Hollywood big wigs. She did some cute comedies and played a vamp in Howard Hawk's "A Girl in Every Port", but one of her finest American films was "Beggars of Life" where she was an abused country girl on the run with a group of hobos, dressed as a young man traveling the rails. It was during this film that she experienced an utter distaste for Hollywood and chose to turn her back on it.
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| Louise Brooks in "Beggars of Life" |
After being denied a promised raise, she left for Europe to film with the great G.W. Pabst. He was a German Expressionist director. He and Louise would make three of the finest silent film movies ever made. The were controversial and gorgeous films:
Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beaute (1930).
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| Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box" |
She was pretty much blacklisted from Hollywood once she returned. Her independent streak did cost her dearly. She did a few unmemorable films and called it quits. Her existence after this was topsy turvy and it wasn't until the early 1950s when the French film historians rediscovered her films. She was proclaimed by this group in the following quote. "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks". The cult of Louise Brooks was born.
The best of Louise came out again when she began to author books of her life. They were honest tales of the young woman she had been and the people she surrounded herself with. They were fun and witty books; giving a tell-tale sign of her unusual style of charm.
Her legacy lives on in the hair helmut bob she made famous, to the amazing essence of her presence on screen, to the inspiration of an era long since gone, but not forgotten.
Louise Brooks ~ I'm so glad you were born. Thanks for the inspiration that I found in you in my youth. Not only in my haircut, but in digging your heels in and being who you are no matter what the other's want you to be. Even in her older age, she found a second career and therefore, leads me into further inspiration as I too get older and catch up with her in age. What a gal! ~ x Melissa
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| Louise Brooks with her Suzy in 1964 ~ Louise passed away in 1985 |
For further reading on Louise, I highly suggest the book authored by Barry Paris. There are tons of fabulous stories of Louise in this book, along with her affairs with Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Sutherland, Victor Fleming, George Preston Marshall, and even Greta Garbo.
