From our Archive Issue, out this week: The film critic Kenneth Tynan profiles Louise Brooks, “an emblematic figure of the ’20s, epitomizing the flappers, jazz babies, and dancing daughters of the boom years.” NewYorkerArchive
None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before. Even for Channel 28, it was an eccentric piece of programming.
I had now, by courtesy of Channel 28, seen “Pandora’s Box” for the third time. My second encounter with the film had taken place several years earlier, in France. Consulting my journal, I found the latter experience recorded with the baroque extravagance that seems to overcome all those who pay tribute to Brooks. I unflinchingly quote:
The stages were freezing in the winter, steaming hot in the summer. The dressing rooms were windowless cubicles. We rode on the freight elevator, crushed by lights and electricians. But none of that mattered, because the writers, directors, and cast were free from all supervision. Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, and Walter Wanger never left the Paramount office on Fifth Avenue, and the head of production never came on the set. There were writers and directors from Princeton and Yale.
In September, 1925, the “Follies” left town on a national tour. Brooks stayed behind and sauntered through the role of a bathing beauty in a Paramount movie called “The American Venus.” Paramount and M-G-M were both pressing her to sign five-year contracts, and she looked for advice to Walter Wanger, one of the former company’s top executives, with whom she was having an intermittent affair.
To return to Frank Tuttle’s film: Tempted by a seedy and lecherous old horseplayer who lives in her rooming house, Brooks goes on a betting spree with funds raised by her fellow-shopgirls in aid of the Women’s Welfare League. The aging gambler is played by Osgood Perkins , of whom Brooks said to Kevin Brownlow years afterward, “The best actor I ever worked with was Osgood Perkins. . . . You know what makes an actor great to work with? Timing. You don’t have to feel anything.
Footnote: During the transvestite scenes, several dangerous feats were performed for Brooks by a stunt man named Harvey. One night, attracted by his flamboyant courage, she slept with him. After breakfast the next day, she strolled out onto the porch of the hotel in the California village where the location sequences were being shot. Harvey was there, accompanied by a group of hoboes in the cast. He rose and gripped her by the arm. “Just a minute, Miss Brooks,” he said loudly.
First sequence: Lulu in the Art Deco apartment in Berlin where she is kept by Dr. Ludwig Schön, a middle-aged newspaper proprietor. Dressed in a peignoir, Lulu is casually flirting with a man who has come to read the gas meter when the doorbell rings and Schigolch enters—a squat and shabby old man who was once Lulu’s lover but is now down on his luck. She greets him with delight; as the disgruntled gas man departs, she swoops to rest on Schigolch’s lap with the grace of a swan.
Intermission at the opening night of Alwa’s revue: Pabst catches the backstage panic of scene-shifting and costume-changing with a kaleidoscopic brilliance that looks forward to Orson Welles’ handling, twelve years later, of the operatic début of Susan Alexander Kane. Alwa and Geschwitz are there, revelling in what is obviously going to be a hit. Dr. Schön escorts Marie, his fiancée, through the pass door to share the frenzy.
Day Two: My first view of the second Pabst-Brooks collaboration—“The Diary of a Lost Girl,” based on “Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen,” a novel by Margarethe Boehme, and shot in the summer of 1929. After finishing “Pandora,” Brooks had returned to New York and resumed her affair with the millionaire George Marshall. He told her that a new movie company, called RKO and masterminded by Joseph P. Kennedy, was anxious to sign her up for five hundred dollars a week.
Hereabouts, unfortunately, the film begins to shed its effrontery and to pay lip service to conventional values. Thymian catches sight of her father across the dance floor; instead of reacting with defiance—after all, he threw her out of his house—she looks stricken with guilt, like the outcast daughter of sentimental fiction. In her absence, Papa has married his housekeeper, by whom he has two children.
For Brooks, as for millions of her compatriots, a long period of unemployment followed. In 1933, determined to break off her increasingly discordant relationship with Marshall, she married Deering Davis, a rich young Chicagoan, but walked out on him after six months of rapidly waning enthusiasm.
She has not left her apartment since 1960, except for a few trips to the dentist and one to a doctor. “You’re doing a terrible thing to me,” she said as she ushered me in. “I’ve been killing myself off for twenty years, and you’re going to bring me back to life.” She lives in two rooms—modest, spotless, and austerely furnished.
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