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Louise Brooks called herself “the best-read idiot in the world.” The only part of that that isn’t true is the “idiot” part. She was no idiot.
If you’re interested in this book, you probably know that Brooks was a film star, mainly in silent movies in the 1920s. Despite her years in Hollywood, her best and best known films were made in Germany with Director G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl) and France (Prix de Beauté).
The book contains 8 essays written by Brooks, a short piece on her by Lotte Eisner, and a long introduction (40 pages) by Kenneth Tynan. There are also many pictures — movie stills, publicity photos, etc.
Brooks herself doesn’t give anything like a linear account of her life. The essays take particular events, friendships, and topics as organizing themes. Especially in her later years, after her acting career was long over (she left Hollywood for good in 1938), she wrote these essays on life, film, and the film industry.
The essays include ones on her background in Kansas, and her introduction to the movies and Hollywood, numerous friendships and working relationships, major figures in the movie industry of the time, and the industry itself. There are depictions of Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marion Davies, Brooks’ longtime friend Pepi Lederer (Davies’ niece), William Randolph Hearst, and many more.
To the extent that there is a straightforward biography here, it’s the introduction by Tynan. Normally I’m not a fan of long introductions, but I was grateful for this one. It provides the context in which to read Brooks’ own thoughts about herself, her life, and the movies.
I think what makes Brooks likable, and she is very likable, is a kind of guileless guile. The quote about being the “best-read idiot in the world” is a good example — she’s messing with us in such a transparent, self-effacing way, we can’t help but walk right in where she wants us and smile along with the gag.
And it’s the same with her character, Lulu, in the first of her German movies. She’s the “bad girl” — a prostitute, an amoral figure that floats above the categories of victim, perpetrator, and observer. But it’s as if she doesn’t know why anyone would think anything wrong with being the “bad girl.” And when someone does, she’s disappointed and even a little confused.
What’s wrong with pleasure? What’s wrong with using the power you have, as little as it might be? She seems to walk around with permanent thought bubbles over her head asking questions like that.
She seemed very uncomplicated. She liked dancing, sex, drinking, and reading. And she liked those things a lot, on the same moral plane, without apology or guilt.
She does call herself an “idiot,” but she’s an idiot who quotes Goethe and Proust, who reads Schopenhauer on set while waiting between scenes, and whose insights on the movie industry cut through the glossy story to the reality of the years of the studio system.
She talks a great deal about the power of the studio and the studio executives. Her own struggles with the studio system undoubtedly limited her career. In the transition from the silent era to talkies, the studios used the uncertainty of actors’ and actresses’ speaking talents to hedge their salaries. Brooks declined the studio’s contract offer, turned on a dime to go to Germany to work with a director she’d never heard of, and made her landmark movies there.
Brooks, by my reading, retained power over herself at the cost of power over her situation. Maybe that’s the cost of authenticity. Even in her interview with Tynan toward the end of her life, no apologies, no regrets, no guilt, and maybe now that there’s no point to guileless guile, just guileless.
I think the theme of power in the lives of actresses in the twenties and thirties, and in the roles they played is fascinating. Brooks takes one path — maybe we can call it authenticity. Others had different paths — Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Barbara Stanwyck, Norma Shearer, and many others — and all of them are interesting in their own ways. Partly because they had to navigate a world of power in which they had none by default. They picked their battles and strategies.
Maybe Brooks fought the good fight, and in some ways she lost, but she seems to have won what was most important to her.
Unlike some others of her time, she didn’t die young. She lived more of her life after Hollywood than before, long enough to be interviewed much later in life by Tynan when she lived in a one bedroom apartment in Rochester, New York. Her insights in that interview are as sharp, unpretentious, and transparently revealing as ever.
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Reviews with images
Great content, Low illustrations
The content is great. The reason that the Expanded Version is rated only three stars is the illustrations are of very poor quality.
