Hollywood’s Lost Starlet
In the 1940s, Louise Brooks disappeared from Hollywood. Years later, a film historian finally tracked her down, and what he found broke his heart.
From the moment she was born, Louise Brooks had the arts at her fingertips. Her father, Leonard Brooks, was a lawyer with a magnificent library, and her mother, Myra, was an accomplished pianist with an unrivaled passion for music and books. Surrounded by inspiration, Louise became a pleasure-seeker at a young age. When she was only nine years old, Louise met a neighbor known as Mr. Flowers. However, he was nowhere near as pleasant as his name suggested. In truth, Mr. Flowers was a vicious predator who targeted Louise and mistreated her. This formative experience scarred her psyche forever. Later, Louise cited this nightmare as the reason for her inability to find real love.
As much as Louise’s mother entranced her children with the tranquil melodies of Debussy and Ravel, she also had a strong rational streak that made her eager to foster a sense of independence in them. By the time she was 10 years old, her mother had already honed in on her impressive dancing abilities, of which there was glorious potential. Louise’s road to stardom began on the small stages, but even then, people started taking notice of the young girl’s magnetic presence. And by the time she turned 11, Louise was dazzling audiences with her performances at the neighborhood Opera House.
Louise’s dancing career truly took off when she moved to New York City, a whole new world that contrasted her small-town upbringing in Kansas. It was here that Louise joined Denishawn, one of America’s most renowned modern dance troupes. During her second year with Denishawn, Louise climbed the rankings and even landed a coveted role opposite one of the troupe’s founders, Ted Shawn. She felt every opportunity open up to her as she continued to hone her skills. There was, however, just one problem: Louise had a rivalry with the other founder, Ruth St. Denis, and it was about to ruin everything she’d worked for. To Ruth, Louise seemed like an entitled princess. So, just as Louise’s career with the dancing troupe took off, Ruth dealt her a brutal blow in front of the other dancers. She singled out Louise and fired her. And like most pivotal moments in Louise’s life, the memory of this humiliation stuck with her.
Thankfully, Louise managed to bounce back from her dismissal and found something even better. She landed work as a chorus girl in George White’s “Scandals,” which helped catapult the careers of other huge stars like the Three Stooges and Ray Bolger. In 1925, she was also a featured dancer in the “Ziegfeld Follies.” By this time, Louise was a shining showgirl in her own right, and Paramount Pictures producer Walter Wanger wasn’t about to let a talent like her slip through his fingers—professionally or romantically. While Louise and Wanger frolicked in secret, he had a wife waiting for him at home. Paramount offered Louise a five-year contract. This was a brand-new chapter for her, but if she had expectations of becoming a superstar, she was in for a crushing disappointment.
Around this time, Louise caught the eye of Charlie Chaplin. At the time they met, Louise was 18, and Chaplin was a 36-year-old married man. They were never destined to go the distance, but they managed to share a fiery and passionate summer fling. One of Louise’s most important roles was in “A Girl in Every Port,” where she plays a vamp. But perhaps more than her acting chops, it was Louise’s singular look that gained her a faithful cult following. With her sleek ebony bob and striking features, the up-and-coming actress started a trend. Soon, women across the country were requesting the same daring haircut, wanting to look just like Louise.
By the summer of 1926, Louise had married film director A. Edward Sutherland. As a free spirit, she soon grew restless in her marriage, her eyes wandering over other potential suitors. Only a year after marrying Sutherland, Louise Brooks met millionaire George Marshall. She was completely infatuated, but it soon became clear that her taste for pleasure wasn’t limited to admiring handsome men from afar. In 1928, she was cast in the film “Beggars of Life.” Unfortunately, her experience on set quickly turned into a nightmare. After a one-night stand with a stuntman, a rumor spread that Louise had a venereal disease. More than that, he had insinuated that she’d contracted the disease after sleeping with producer Jack Pickford. Her co-star Richard Arlen was friends with Louise’s husband, and he watched with disdain as she earned her adulterous reputation.
On top of alienating everyone around her, Louise also butted heads with the film’s director, William Wellman, and for good reason: Wellman didn’t exactly put the safety of his actors first. During one scene, he expected Louise to climb onto a moving train, but due to the dangerous nature of the stunt, she almost died in the attempt.
Louise Brooks continued to betray her husband over and over again, but the most crushing betrayal of all was her affair with George Marshall. Completely infatuated with her new beau, she decided to divorce Sutherland. Her rejection sent him reeling, and it drove him to attempt the unthinkable: on the first night following their breakup, he overdosed on sleeping pills. Fortunately, he pulled through, and after that, Louise and Sutherland went their separate ways.
By 1929, Louise Brooks was no stranger to schmoozing with rich and famous people. Perhaps most notably, she embarked on a scandalous relationship with Peggy Fears, niece of actress Marion Davies, whose partner was media magnate William Randolph Hearst. Louise had met Peggy at a party, and together they embarked on a daring romance. However, when Hearst caught wind of Peggy’s bedroom preferences, he put a diabolical plan into motion: he had Peggy committed to a mental hospital under the pretense that she had a drug addiction. Only a few days after Peggy arrived at the institution, she leapt from her hospital window, plunging to her death. This traumatic loss devastated Louise and marked one of the darkest turning points in her life.
Before long, Louise became increasingly dissatisfied with Hollywood and her life on the West Coast. When Paramount refused to give her a raise, it was the last straw. At the time, it was George Marshall who gave her some sage advice: he painted a very alluring picture of Europe and how Louise could build her career there. It was a risky and rebellious move on her part. To her peers in Hollywood, she seemed like a fool. Thirty years later, however, she owed her legacy to this one life-changing decision.
When Louise Brooks stepped onto German soil in 1929, it was the beginning of something new and exciting. The German film industry was booming, even giving Hollywood a run for its money. It was finally time for Louise to get her big break. The film was “Pandora’s Box,” a suggestive story that also included one of the first on-screen depictions of lesbian characters. Unlike her other film set experiences, Louise found “Pandora’s Box” to be a dream come true. She said she was treated with a kind of decency and respect unknown to her in Hollywood. The director, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, would cast her again in “Diary of a Lost Girl” that same year. And this role was especially emotional for Louise: in her attempt to get into character, she drew upon recollections of her childhood assault, bringing painful memories to the surface.
Louise’s acting style was ahead of its time. Like modern actors, she opted for a more subtle approach and refrained from overly exaggerated facial expressions. Some viewers absolutely despised her acting style, but this was all a part of Louise’s appeal. By starring in two of Pabst’s films, Louise gained worldwide recognition. But even though she found herself the subject of high praise, she became restless once again. She’d gotten her fill of Europe and wanted to move on. Pabst encouraged the actress to remain in Germany and focus on her career. He saw in her a free and wild spirit that didn’t take her work seriously enough. Pabst knew how easy it would be for Louise to fall from grace and that if she wasn’t careful, she’d easily fall prey to the ravenous entertainment industry. But Louise marched to the beat of her own drum and did what she felt was right: she tired of Europe and had plans to return to America.
Upon returning to America, Louise Brooks dug her own professional grave: she outright refused to do the sound retakes for her film “The Canary Murder Case.” After that, studios blacklisted the prideful actress. As her career dipped into decline, Louise began to realize the slippery nature of success. And to make matters worse, her time with George Marshall had run its course. As much as Louise adored him, she couldn’t reign in her infidelity. He, on the other hand, had asked her to marry him multiple times, to no avail. Their tempestuous romance continued into the early 1930s, but eventually, Marshall realized that Louise was never going to surrender her appetite for philandering. Stung by Louise’s unbridled affairs, Marshall married actress Karin Booth instead. Louise was cast as the villain, but she wasn’t the only one at fault; later on, Louise revealed that Marshall could be quite the brute behind closed doors.
Unfortunately, Louise quickly became her own worst enemy. When Columbia Pictures came to her rescue and offered her a $500-a-week salary, she screwed it up by shunning a screen test for a western film, and they withdrew her contract. To make matters worse, the few films she did manage to scrape up didn’t garner her any attention. Floundering, Louise found herself in dire straits. By 1932, Louise had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. In order to stay afloat, she began frequenting the nightlife circuit, dancing in clubs. Every once in a while, she’d snag disappointing bit parts, but nothing even remotely comparable to the celebrity status she’d once enjoyed.
Then finally, in 1938, she landed a role with the power to turn her luck around. After being down on her luck for so long, Louise was cast in the western “Overland Stage Raiders.” She was the romantic lead, playing opposite John Wayne. And that wasn’t all: she traded in her trademark hairstyle for a longer one that left her almost completely unrecognizable. But unfortunately for Louise, this was no glorious comeback. Despite having a lead role, she flew under the radar. By the time the next decade hit, Louise could no longer consider herself a working actress. Plagued by unemployment, Louise finally decided to move back to her home in Wichita, Kansas.
But she didn’t fit in at all. The townspeople looked down on her with reservation and judgment; she was both a success and a failure wrapped into one, and they couldn’t make heads nor tails of her. It wasn’t long before she yearned to escape again. Returning to New York City, she did everything and anything: she was a radio actor, a gossip columnist, and a salesgirl. But between 1948 and 1953, she turned to a whole new profession, one that she’d been warned against time and time again: she became a courtesan. Her clients were wealthy men, and soon an escort agency offered her a steady job. Unsurprisingly, this line of work took a heavy toll on her mental health. From actress to escort, Louise knew that she’d fallen on hard times. She said, “I found that the only well-paying career open to me as an unsuccessful actress of 36 was that of a call girl, and I began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.”
Holed up in a tiny New York apartment, Louise fell deeper into drink and depression. During this volatile time, the fallen actress lived in obscurity and poverty for years, her glory days fading away. That is until a French film historian named Henri Langlois uncovered her films and saw something special in them. After all, in 1955, he resurrected Louise Brooks as one of the great artistes. He even considered her to be better than some of her more successful contemporaries.
In the mid-1950s, film curator James Card managed to track Brooks down, and he was heartbroken at what he saw: the once-famous star was now living as a recluse in New York City. But he decided to give her a golden opportunity: he convinced her to move to Rochester, New York, in order to write about her past career. It was this that helped spark a new beginning and a promising new career writing essays for film magazines. Turns out, Louise was quite a talented writer, and in 1982, she even published a book titled “Lulu in Hollywood.”
But as promising as her new literary life was, Louise still had grim thoughts about her failed relationships and tragic love life. In fact, Louise believed that she’d never actually loved anyone she’d ever been with. Completely incapable of love, Louise lived a terribly lonely existence right to the bitter end. In her old age, she battled osteoarthritis and emphysema. And when she was 78 years old, she died after suffering a heart attack.
No matter how hard she tried, things had never seemed to go the way she wanted; her life was always a mess. After a life and career so full of promise, Louise once said that she considered herself somewhat of a failure.
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