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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Louise Brooks Lulu Forever by Peter Cowie Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever by Peter Cowie. Born 14 November 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, USA, as Mary Louise Brooks. Died 8 August 1985 in Rochester, New York, USA, of a heart attack. Maried director Edward Sutherland; divorced. Louise Brooks began entertainment work as a professional dancer. Her work on Broadway led to an offer in films from Paramount. Acted in a series of Paramount films from the mid to late 1920s, before leaving the United States for work in Germany and her greatest artistic successes for director G.W. Pabst in the late 1920s. Louise Brooks Silent Era Filmography Book : Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. Book : Louise Brooks by Barry Paris. SUPPORT SILENT ERA USING THESE LINKS WHEN SHOPPING AT AMAZON. Louise Brooks. Louise Brooks (14 November 1906 – 8 August 1985) was an American dancer, showgirl, and silent film actress. She became, at the end of her life, a writer and critic of the silent film era. Contents. Early life. Born Mary Louise Brooks in Cherryvale, Kansas, she was a daughter of a lawyer who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and an artistic mother who determined any "squalling brats" she produced could take care of themselves. Although she inspired her children with a love of books and music—she was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for Louise—Myra Brooks failed to protect her eldest daughter from childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a neighborhood predator. This single event was a major influence on Louise's life and career, causing her to say that she was incapable of real love, and that she always had "a passion for some kind of bastard". Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, appearing in her teens with the revolutionary Denishawn modern dance company whose members included Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. After being dismissed from Denishawn under a cloud, due to her stubborn temperament, she turned to her influential friends and quickly found work as a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, where her beauty was noticed by the then New York-based movie studios. She was also noticed by visiting movie star Charlie Chaplin, in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush —the two had an affair that summer. Hollywood film career. Signing with Paramount Studios, where she stayed for most of the remainder of her American film career, her screen debut was in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl In Every Port in 1928. It has been said that her best American role was in one of the last silent film dramas, Beggars Of Life (1928), as an abused country girl on the run with Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery playing hoboes she meets while riding the rails. Much of this film was shot on location, 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. At this time in her life, she was rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon, being close friends with Marion Davies's niece, Pepi Lederer. Her distinctive bob haircut, which became eponymous and still recognised to this day, had started a sensational trend, as many women in the Western world cut their hair like hers. Soon after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Louise, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the great German Expressionist director. Paramount attempted to use the coming of sound films to strongarm the actress, but she called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. In Europe. Once in Germany she starred in the remarkable 1928 film Pandora's Box , in which her waiflike role as the doomed flapper, Lulu, who meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper after a series of salacious escapades, made her an icon of life and death in the Jazz Age. This film is notorious for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including the first screen portrayal of a lesbian. Louise then starred in the controversial social dramas Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beaute (1930), the latter being filmed in France, and having a famous, but mesmerizing, shock ending. All these films were heavily censored, as they were very "adult" and considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality, in addition to being highly critical of society. Although overlooked at the time because "talkies" were taking over the movies, these three films were later recognized as masterpieces of the Silent Age, with her role of Lulu now regarded as one of the greatest performances in film history. Life after film. When she returned to Hollywood, in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift to Women (1931) and "It Pays to Advertise" (1931). Her performances in these films, however, were largely ignored. She found herself effectively black-listed, and never again enjoyed her previous success. Rumors purportedly sent out by the studios claimed she had the wrong voice for the new sound films, but she actually possessed a beautiful and cultured voice. After the humiliation of being cast in B pictures by studio executives as punishment for her outspokenness and disdain for ill-written scripts, she retired from show business in 1938, briefly returning to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she wrote. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature." She returned East and worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City for a few years, then eked out a living as a sort of courtesan, with a few select wealthy men as clients. Louise unfortunately had a lifelong love of alcohol, and was an alcoholic for a major portion of her life, although she exorcised that particular demon enough to begin writing about film, which became her second life. She was a notorious spendthrift for most of her life, even filing for bankruptcy once, but was kind and generous to her friends, almost to a fault. She was married twice, but never had children—she referred to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her first husband was director A. Edward Sutherland; they Divorced. Her second husband was Chicago millionaire Dearing Davis; they married in 1933, she left him five months later, and they divorced in 1938. Her many lovers from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS, who quietly provided for her while she was an outcast from the entertainment world, and living frugally. Rediscovery. French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon (Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"), much to her amusement, but it would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood , was published in 1982. She was famously profiled by the noted film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl With The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over. She rarely gave interviews, but had a special relationship with John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow, the film historians, and they were able to capture on paper some of her amazing personality. In the 1970s she was interviewed extensively, on film, for the documentary Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin. Running 50 minutes, Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll in the year before her death. She had lived alone by choice for many years, and Louise died from a heart attack in 1985, after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years.