November 14, 2006
The Girl in the Black Helmet Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 PM EST Today would have marked the hundredth birthday of Louise Brooks who, along with Clara Bow and Colleen Moore, was part of Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate in the silent-film era. If Colleen Moore was Hollywood’s archetype of the safe flapper—unthreatening, endearing, hapless, more bark than bite (see, for instance, Flaming Youth)—and if Clara Bow represented the naughty flapper who flirted and smoked a lot but could always be counted on to see the error of her fast-living ways (as was the case in her best-known film, It), Louise Brooks was the real deal. In an age of sexually liberated women, she stood out for her extremes. “I like to drink and f--k,” she announced to friends and acquaintances. Years later, she privately estimated that “at a modest 10 a year from [ages] 17 to 60,” the number of men she had “been to bed with” numbered somewhere around 430. A former Martha Graham dancer and Ziegfeld Follies performer, Brooks was a reluctant film star, an autodidact who never felt at home in Hollywood. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked. “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.” Unlike many silent-era screen stars, Brooks could have survived the transition to talkies. When Paramount transitioned to sound, in 1928, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Studio chief Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary, $750 per week. Hardly top-scale at the time, but exponentially more money than the average American family earned in half a year. Brooks stunned Schulberg and the entire industry by walking away. She traveled to Berlin, where the German director G. W. Pabst recruited her to play the lead role in his pioneering work Pandora’s Box. It was arguably the last great film of the silent era, and it was her finest performance. But the critics panned it. Louise stayed in Europe to shoot another film with Pabst, and several more in England. Then she ran out of money. She crawled back to California on her knees. But by the time she returned to Hollywood in 1930, she was persona non grata. Friends helped her secure a few minor parts here and there. By 1938, however, it was obvious that her film career was over. She moved back to Wichita and operated a dance studio for a few years. Then she returned to New York and worked behind the sales counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, picking up occasional voiceover work for radio soap operas. Salvation came in the 1950s when film buffs rediscovered the silent era. In 1955 Cinémathèque Française featured Brooks in an exhibit entitled “Sixty Years of Cinema.” The following year, with few other prospects, she accepted an invitation to move to Rochester, where she began a new career as a film historian at Eastman House. By 1979, when Kenneth Tynan revisited her early career in pages of The New Yorker (his article was entitled, simply, “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” an homage to Brooks’s distinct 1920s bob), she had been canonized as one of the most brilliant figures of the silent-film era. Louise Brooks died alone at her home in Rochester in 1985. She was 78 years old.
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