Louise Brooks — knickname Lulu — was a silent film star and very independent actress who left Hollywood and went to Germany when Talkies came out — not because she didn’t sound good, but because she refused to take a pay cut. She hit a homerun in Europe — becoming an even bigger star with several silent movies made in Germany, “Pandora’s Box”, “Diary of a Lost Girl”, and “Miss Europe (Prix de Beauté).”
She hated Hollywood and you glean the details of why in this book — a collection of 8 essays on her life and other subjects (like an entire essay on Humphry Bogart) that she wrote for various film journals in the 1950’s thru 1970’s, and compiled into this book published in 1982 when she was 72. She died in 1985 at age 75.
Lulu is to the point and spares no prisoners in detailing her life in Hollywood and her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, G. W. Pabst, and others. She also writes about her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer.
You have to buy the book — it is not available for free pdf download at the usual sources despite its age — although you can rent the book for free on the Internet Archives — below. You must sign up for a free account to ‘rent’ the book, aka view it in their viewer:
It is a fascinating read. She details exactly what she was thinking at the time during her many life events — kind of hideous in a way to “know what people really think” — she seems never to have been young and hopeful and naive, even in her seemingly naive 20’s in the 1920’s, when all sorts of guys were coming on to her.
Of course some of the details may have been influenced by what she thought 30 years after an event, looking back.
The book presents many rabbit holes to travel down. For example her essay on Marion Davies, which starts:
“Nobody can know for certain why anyone commits suicide, but it seems likely that being Marion Davies’ niece was one of the reasons for my friend Pepi Lederer’s killing herself in 1935. And Marion’s being the mistress of William Randolph Hearst was probably another. In 1929, and again in 1930, Pepi attempted to escape the effect of their overpowering celebrity and boundless wealth upon the subhumanity of Hollywood, which regarded her as nothing more than a sign pointing the way to Marion’s beach house in Santa Monica; to Wyntoon, Mr. Hearst’s estate in Northern California; to San Simeon, his castle overlooking the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco; and to St. Donat’s, his castle in Wales.”
The Marion Davis beach house in Santa Monica rings a bright bell for a travel article already in the works on Ignoranttraveler.com. Life is like one big puzzle; the puzzle pieces are all right there you just have to see them and put them together. And at the end you will still be confused.
Reading Lulu’s essays gets you less confused on the ruthlessness of Hollywood’s cowboy days of the 1920’s, and gives you some fun-to-read puzzle pieces.
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