by Joshua Zeitz
Quite possibly, these early crimes had something to do with her propensity to detach sex from emotion. “Love is a publicity stunt,” she later mused, “and making love—after the first curious raptures—is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studios to call.”7 One got the sense that Louise Brooks liked sex, but only when it was divorced from other ways of feeling.
If she wasn’t necessarily paying close attention to her daughter’s well-being—once, when young Louise plaintively admitted to breaking a piece of her mother’s prized Haviland china, Myra replied dismissively, “Now, dear, don’t bother me when I am memorizing Bach”—Myra Brooks compensated for her lack of warmth by introducing her daughter to a world that extended far beyond the limits of rural Kansas.8
While most of her classmates didn’t even know what or who Condé Nast was, Louise was a subscriber—courtesy of her parents—to Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. She accompanied her mother to orchestral and dance recitals, took several years of intense ballet training, and knew more about important currents in the performing arts than most New Yorkers, let alone Kansans. In particular, Myra and Louise were both admirers of the new modern dance methods then being pioneered by the disciplines of Isadora Duncan.
A week before Thanksgiving in 1921—only three days after Louise’s fifteenth birthday—Wichita’s Crawford Theater hosted a rare heartland performance by Denishawn, a prominent modern dance company headquartered in New York and directed by the trailblazing husband-and-wife team of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis. Dancing with the troupe that evening were Martha Graham and Charles Weidman, two figures who would leave a permanent imprimatur on American choreography.
Myra and Louise were in the audience that night, and they were spellbound. They knew a little something about modern dance, but they had never seen the likes of Denishawn. Among the twenty-three arrangements the company performed were “Revolutionary Etude,” an early nod to proletarian art featuring Martha Graham and set to a stirring piece by Chopin, and “Xochitl,” based on Aztec themes and set against a rich backdrop of costumes and set designs by the Mexican artist Francisco Cornejo.
Because they were well-known in local cultural circles, mother and daughter were invited backstage after the performance to meet Ted Shawn. Louise must have struck Shawn as uncommonly enthusiastic, lithe, or seductive—or perhaps just persistent. By the evening’s end, he had offered her a place at Denishawn’s summer school in New York—a feeder to the company’s professional ranks. Louise accepted on the spot, and though it took some convincing, Myra was able to talk her husband into covering the $300 tuition and letting his fifteen-year-old daughter venture on her own to the wilds of Manhattan.
Almost on her own, that is. Leonard Brooks stipulated that his daughter be chaperoned by Alice Mills, a middle-aged neighbor whom Louise described as “a stocky, bespectacled housewife.”9 As luck would have it, Louise and Mrs. Mills got along just fine. Louise “tolerated Mrs. Mills’ provincialism” because they shared a “love of the theatre. Together, we saw all of the Broadway shows, one of them being a favorite of mine—the Ziegfeld Follies. In the first act, Fanny Brice’s burlesque of Pavlova’s swan dance filled the New Amsterdam Theatre with laughter.”
That summer, Louise and Mrs. Mills shared a small railroad flat on West Eighty-sixth Street near Riverside Drive, just thirty blocks south of Columbia University. For four hours each day, Louise and the other protégés sweated through grueling lessons in balance work and body control in a sweltering church basement at Broadway and Seventy-second Street. “Even in the ballet work, we danced barefoot,” Louise remembered, “which was painful for unaccustomed feet on the splintering pine floor.10 Having gone barefoot through Kansas summers, I was spared the torn soles and blisters that tormented some of the pupils.”
Of all the summer students, Louise stood out—so much so that in August, Ted Shawn invited her to join the company and tour full-time with the other dancers. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. Louise was smitten by New York, and it didn’t take long before she realized that returning to Wichita was not an option. She never went back to school, and except for a few years in the early 1950s, she never again lived in Kansas.
So began Louise’s stab at the great American art of self-reinvention. It was one thing to take the country girl out of the country. Could she also take the country out of the country girl? With Mrs. Mills back in Wichita, Louise had a chance to find out.
“In 1922,” she later wrote, “if I was to create my dream women, I had to get rid of my Kansas accent, to learn the etiquette of the social elite, and to learn to dress beautifully.11 I could not correct my speech at a fashionable girls’ school. I could not learn table manners from escorts embarrassed by my social inferiority. I could not afford Fifth Avenue couturiers. Therefore, I went for my education directly to the unknown people at the bottom who were experts in such matters—the people at the bottom whose services supported the people at the top of New York.”
For elocution lessons, Louise turned to a working-class undergrad at Columbia University who was financing his college education by moonlighting as a soda jerk at a Broadway drugstore. Addicted to fudge sundaes, Louise was a regular at the counter and just barely tolerated the young man’s uncanny aptitude for mimicking her flat midwestern accent.
“One day when the soda jerk was making the customers at the fountain laugh with a story about ‘mulking a kee-yow,’ I stopped him, saying, ‘Instead of making fun of me, why don’t you teach me how to say it?’ While he was concocting a banana split, he began to smile at the fancy of becoming my Pygmalion.”
What the soda jerk lacked in charm—“Not ‘watter’ as in ‘hotter,’ ” he snapped, “but ‘water’ as in ‘daughter.’ And it’s not ‘hep,’ you hayseed—it’s ‘help,’ ‘help,’ ‘help!’ ”—he made up for in precision. A few weeks and not a few fudge sundaes later, Louise graduated from the drugstore academy pronouncing her words like a real northeasterner.
The soda jerk on Broadway wasn’t much help when it came to clothing and comportment, but Louise was a quick study. Through one of her friends, Barbara Bennett, the scion of a prominent stage family, Louise met a wide assortment of bankers and lawyers “who made it possible for me to buy expensive clothes. These most eligible bachelors in their thirties, finding debutantes a threat, turned to pretty girls in the theatre.” She would later describe the delicate game of give-and-take by which “the extravagant sums given to the girls for clothes were part of the fun—part of competing to see whose girl would win the Best-Dressed title. Sexual submission was not a condition of this arrangement, although many affairs grew out of it.”
When her wealthy escorts weren’t looking, Louise consulted the waiters at Manhattan’s best restaurants—the same watering holes that Lipstick gossiped about in the pages of The New Yorker—for tips on what to order and how to order it. Her syllabus at the Colony included “how-to-bone-a-brook-trout night, how-to-fork-snails night, how-to-dismember-artichokes night, and so on, until we came to the bottom of the menu, which included a dessert [requiring] the understanding and proper pronunciation of French words.”
It was easy enough for Louise to keep her romantic and sexual exploits from the Denishawn dancers when the company was rehearsing in New York. But when they were on the road, her loose lifestyle led her to clash with Ruth St. Denis, the famously stern matron of the company, who closely guarded her dancers’ morals.
Louise was a skilled performer and an important member of the troupe. She enjoyed billings with Martha Graham. But “she was very flirty in the hotels,” another Denishawn dancer recalled, “and it was quite easy for men to have a conversation with her. … 12 Somebody did say one time that she stayed with somebody one night. We were so excited about that we didn’t know what to do!”
Matters came to a head late in the spring of 1924, two years after Louise joined Denishawn. Rumors of Louise’s extracurricular activities—not to mention her strong resistance to authority,
which manifested itself increasingly during rehearsals—were causing a disruption among the other dancers. With the full company assembled, St. Denis dealt her a crushing, public blow. “Louise,” St. Denis began, as everyone else looked on, “to be brief and to the point—not to keep you from your more pressing concerns—I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver.”
Louise didn’t even know what a salver was. She had to ask Barbara Bennett. “At 17,” she wrote years later, “my first and blackest humiliation—and in public too.”
Things got worse. Shortly after her unexpected departure from Denishawn, Louise moved into a suite at the Algonquin Hotel.13 How she paid for it, she never explained. From a corner perch in the Rose Room, she observed “Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker and a lot of other people jabbering away and waving their hands at the Round Table, wondering what made them so famous.”
But Louise’s reputation quickly caught up with her. Before long, Frank Case, the owner-manager, cornered her as she walked out of the elevator.
“How old are you, Miss Brooks?”14 he asked.
“Seventeen,” Louise replied.
“Are you sure you aren’t fourteen?”
“Yes.”
“Does your family know you are here?”
“Yes.”
“Well, George Cohan”—George M. Cohan, the Broadway musical composer—“just phoned me to tell me last night that he came down the elevator with a fourteen-year-old black-haired girl in a little pink dress. Where were you going at two-o’clock in the morning?”
It didn’t help matters when Louise admitted she had been on her way to Texas Guinan’s El Fay Club. Case didn’t need any trouble in his hotel. He arranged for Louise to move into the Martha Washington, “a respectable women’s hotel on East Twenty-ninth Street.”
Louise rebounded. She was an exceptional dancer, and she knew a lot of famous and influential New Yorkers. Late fall found her appearing in George White’s Scandals, the great rival act to the Ziegfeld Follies and the very same show that saw a hopelessly inebriated Scott Fitzgerald strip off his clothes along with the professional performers back in 1920 or 1921.
Less stuffy and a little more risqué than the Follies—in many numbers, the dancers appeared almost completely nude—the Scandals was quick to incorporate into its acts the latest dance crazes sweeping black Harlem and white collegiate America. And Louise excelled like no other dancer at the Charleston, a Harlem import that dominated the Broadway stage in 1923 and 1924.
Restless as always, Louise quit the Scandals in 1924, spent a few weeks in London, where she danced in local cabaret performances, and returned, dead broke, to New York, where Florenz Ziegfeld was happy to hire her for the 1925 run of his Follies.
Life was pretty good as a Follies girl.15 The pay wasn’t bad—normally between $250 and $300 per week (Louise would have been on the higher end of the scale), equivalent to an annual salary of about $150,000 in today’s money. There were also plenty of ways to line one’s pockets with still more money. “There was a hand-picked group of beautiful girls who were invited to parties given for great men in finance and government,” she later explained to a correspondent. “We had to be fairly well bred and of absolute integrity—never endangering the great men with threats of publicity or blackmail. At these parties we were not required, like common whores, to go to bed with any man who asked us, but if we did the profits were great. Money, jewels, mink coats, a film job—name it.”
It was an extraordinary lifestyle, quite unlike that led by most American women. Or was it? Though Louise Brooks dined at the best restaurants, wore the best clothes, went to the best shows, and associated with the best people, the delicate art she practiced every day—the unspoken exchange of sex and romance for material satisfaction and financial security—was being lived out on a lesser scale by millions of underpaid shopgirls, garment workers, and office secretaries whose every date to Coney Island or to the movie theater was fraught with subtext and negotiation.
Yet unlike those other women, Louise Brooks was plunged deep into the excess and affluence of the fabled 1920s. By mid-1925, she was newly installed in a plush apartment-hotel at 270 Park Avenue and was a regular at Texas Guinan’s nightclubs, where adoring fans beseeched her to take the stage and dance the Charleston.
That same year, she entered into a summer affair with Charlie Chaplin—arguably the most famous Hollywood figure of his time and certainly one of the most famous personalities of the age—who was in town for the premiere of his new film, The Gold Rush. Louise was eighteen; Chaplin was thirty-six. They spent weeks together, trolling the nightclubs until daybreak, sleeping until noon, and taking long walks—sometimes for hours—through Central Park and in downtown Manhattan. They also indulged each other’s boundless sexual appetites.16 Over one weekend, Brooks and Chaplin disappeared into a hotel suite with their friends A. C. Blumenthal, a film financier, and Peggy Fears, a close companion and fellow Ziegfeld girl. They didn’t emerge until Monday. Years later, Louise admitted to a friend that the foursome spent most of the forty-eight hours in a state of undress and complex sexual entanglement.
If someone had bothered to call Louise Brooks a flapper, she would have shrugged off the charge (or compliment). “The flapper,” she wrote years later to her brother, “did not exist at all except in Scott Fitzgerald’s mind and the antics he planted in his mad wife Zelda’s mind.”17 As for Louise, she was just living her life the way she knew how. She wasn’t trying to be a flapper. She had, in fact, been wearing her hair bobbed since the age of nine or ten. But Hollywood had a different idea.
One of Louise’s occasional paramours in 1925 was Walter Wanger, a producer for Paramount Pictures who persuaded her to do some motion picture work. Famous Players-Lasky, the studio that formed Paramount’s core, was still headquartered in Astoria, Queens, so Louise could easily shoot scenes during the day and make it back to Manhattan by dusk to perform in the Follies.
Her debut screen performance, The Street of Forgotten Men, was so strong that it soon earned her competing offers of a five-year contract from Warner Brothers and Paramount, both of which were in bad need of a flapper starlet to compete with the likes of First National’s Colleen Moore. (Clara Bow hadn’t yet moved over to Paramount.) Louise wasn’t particularly interested in the movies, but she was restless, and the money was good ($250 per week to start, rising to $750 per week by the end of the decade), and she figured she could still do some stage work.
Wanger told her to sign with Warner Brothers; their relationship was an open secret, and he didn’t want her career or reputation to suffer from the whisperings of jealous rivals and gossipmongers. Louise ignored the advice and went with Paramount. Over the next two years, she churned out a series of box office flapper hits like Love ’Em and Leave ’Em, a comic exposé of “modern youth’s system of loving,” as the studio ads billed it. Brook’s character, a department store salesgirl named Janie Walsh (“like the crazy flapper you fell for last year,” Paramount promised viewers), steals her sister’s boyfriend, gets in way over her head at the racetrack, and, for good measure, tries to make off with the Employees’ Welfare League fund to pay off her gambling debts. The opening scene finds her luxuriating in bed, her jet black bob mussed and her negligee revealing more than just a little skin. It was easy for Louise to play the role. She was the real thing.
When Louise wasn’t on the set, she could sometimes be found at William Randolph Hearst’s vast, rambling estate, San Simeon, where the famous newspaper magnate lived with his mistress, actress Marion Davies.18 There was nothing quite like it. Acres of well-manicured grounds surrounded an enormous main castle, three guest villas, swimming pools, tennis courts, a working cattle ranch, horse stables, and a variety of wonderland attractions. Though theoretically a guest of Marion Davies’s, Louise was really a favorite of the self-styled Young Degenerates—a motley group of teenagers and twentysomethings anchored by Pepi Lederer, Davies’s seventeen-year-o
ld niece. Pepi lived off Hearst’s generosity and dedicated most of her time to liquor, women (she was unapologetically gay in an era when it was all but impossible to be out of the closet), and cocaine.
Louise wisely stayed away from the cocaine, but she passed weeks on end at San Simeon, drinking from Hearst’s stockpile of expensive champagne, partying with the Degenerates, and working to circumvent the old man’s strictures against hard liquor.
“The most wondrously magnificent room in the castle was the dining hall,” Louise remembered. “I never entered it without a little shiver of delight. High above our heads, just beneath the ceiling, floated rows of many-colored Sienese racing banners dating from the thirteenth century. In the huge Gothic fireplace between the two entrance doors, a black stone satyr grinned wickedly through the flames rising from logs propped up against his chest. The refractory table seated forty. Marion and Mr. Hearst sat facing each other in the mottle of the table, with their most important guests seated on either side.” Louise was normally relegated to “the bottom of the table, where [Pepi] ruled.…
“At noon one day,” Louise remembered, “before Marion and Mr. Hearst were onstage, we were swimming in the pool when Pepi learned that a group of Hearst editors solemnly outfitted in dark business suits, was sitting at the table, loaded with bottles of scotch and gin, in the dining room of the Casa del Mar—the second-largest of the three villas surrounding the castle. Pepi organized a chain dance. Ten beautiful girls in wet bathing suits danced round the editors’ table, grabbed a bottle here and there and exited.” One of the stunned newspapermen turned to another and asked, “Does Mr. Hearst know these people are here?”
Louise had slept with women before, but usually in the context of group sex. For good measure, she slept with Pepi. Later in life she’d claim to have had little interest in women, but she never held to a hard and fast rule. Rumor held that she had even had a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. Privately, Louise acknowledged it was true.
