HOW I FOUND BROOKSIE
I have always loved movies--especially
classic ones. I was a child of the fifties,
so I grew up with black and white. But even
as a kid, the older the movie, it seemed the better I liked it.
I've collected movie books for years,
and in my senior year in high school, I bought a copy of Joe Franklin's Classics of the
Silent Screen. As I leafed through it, I
thought, They can't be
serious.
The hairstyles and clothes were so old fashioned as to be outright
prehistoric--especially to an 18-year-old girl. I
was no fashion plate, but this was too much. In
fact, the pictures were so dated and the material so foreign, I thought that maybe this
guy was making the whole thing up--maybe this was just his idea of what silent movies were
like. However, as I read each movie synopsis
and star bio more closely, I was fascinated with the richness of the stories and the
colorful actors who brought them to life. I
began to think that maybe there was something to this silent movie business after all.
I had yet to see a silent movie, but I
knew of Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and, of course, Clara Bow. The others were complete strangers to me. When I came across the bio on Louise Brooks,
though, I couldn't believe how beautiful and modern she looked. Not at all like the other ladies with their curly
blonde locks and powder puff faces. Pretty
though they were (and Clara was absolutely the cutest), Louise's sultry, exotic beauty
really grabbed me. She looked so timeless,
like someone you might expect to see walking down your very own street (if you lived in a
ritzy part of town, of course) at that very moment. She
might have stepped out of the pages of a current fashion magazine. It was also fascinating to see a photo of Louise
in drag from Beggars of Life. She
appeared stunning and quite sexy in men's clothes. ,and I hadn't seen many women in drag,
so this impressed me.
Unfortunately, at this time, we didn't
have videos or the web, and I wasn't really into spending all my free time in the library
looking up books about obscure silent movie stars (I did enough "library time"
during school hours). So I forgot about the
silent movies and Louise--at least for the time being.
About five
years later, I bought a book called Hollywood Babylon, which consisted mostly of
crude pictures depicting live and dead
celebrities and the scandals
which ruined most of them. A bright spot was
this photo of beautiful Louise. Her career was
summed up in a couple of short sentences about how she fell from grace in Hollywood only
to work at a Macy's department store counter. That
was the only mention of her, and I thought, How terribly sad. Again, though, I didn't pursue it and got on with my life.
Some 23 years, one husband, and two kids later, I noticed in my cable channel guide that TCM was showing a documentary on Louise Brooks. I immediately thought, "I remember her!", and proceeded to watch Hugh Neeley and Elaina Archer's "Looking for Lulu" and "Pandora's Box" which followed. I began searching the web for more information about her. I read Barry Paris' biography about Louise and her unorthodox and colorful life. The rest is history. I was--and am--hooked. Thanks, Hugh and Elaina!