"Louise Brooks," by Richard Lamparski

The immortal of the motion-picture screen was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906. Her father was an attorney. When she was fifteen years old her pianist mother enrolled her at the famous Denishawn Dance Studios in New York City. She toured for two years with the late Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and then joined the chorus of the George White Scandals of 1921, with Dolores Costello and the late Dorothy Sebastian. That fall she left Scandals to dance at the Café de Paris in London. In 1925 she returned to Broadway to work for Flo Ziegfeld in Louie the 11th and the Ziegfeld Follies. Late that year she signed a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures. For two years Louise worked at their New York studios until they closed and moved to the Hollywood lot. Paramount used her often but never to any advantage. In all, she played a bit part in The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), went into The American Venus (1926) which starred Esther Ralston, A Social Celebrity (1926) with Chester Conklin, It's the Old Army Game (1926) with W. C. Fields, The Show-Off (1926) with Lois WiWilson (unmarried and living around the corner from United Nations headquarters in Manhattan), Just Another Blonde (1926) with Dorothy Mackail (who lives at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu), Beggars of Life (1928) with Richard Arlen, and The Canary Murder Case (1929) with William Powell and Jean Arthur (who lives with a lady companion in total seclusion in Carmel, California).

In October 1928 her option was up for renewal. Sound had come to the movies and Hollywood was in a state of panic. Paramount cut salaries, and studio head B. P. Schulberg told Louise she could continue at the weekly seven hundred fifty dollars she had been getting but without the $250 increase her renewal called for. But Louise accepted an offer from the great German director G. W. Pabst. Together they made the masterpiece PPandora's Box (1929), which is still shown throughout the world as an example of the silent film at its very best. Pabst also starred her in The Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)‚ which created a great stir because of its sordidness. Even the censors who criticized it acknowledged its great artistry. Louise left for France and made Beauty Prize (1930)‚ highly praised by film buffs even today.

When she returned to New York, Paramount ordered her to report for work on the sound version of The Canary Murder Case (1929). She refused. Instead, the voice of Margaret Livingston, the widow of Paul Whiteman (she lives in retirement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania) was dubbed in for the remake. Meanwhile, Paramount let it be known that Louise Brooks had failed in talkies because her voice was unsuitable. Actually, it is doubtful that any producer would have touched her because of Hollywood's unwritten law never to hire stars who are litigants against you and / or refuse to do a picture, whether justified or not.

The girl whose bangs inspired the comic strip Dixie Dugan continued to make a film now and then, but the parts were humiliatingly small and few. Fatty Arbuckle directed her in Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931) and director Norman Foster used her in It Pays to Advertise (1931). After that she made God's Gift to Women (1931) with Laura La Plante. From 1933 to 1935 she was with the ballroom dancer Dario at the Persian Room of the Hotel Plaza in Manhattan. Following that she made Empty Saddles (1936) and Overland Stage Raiders (1938). Harry Cohn talked her into dancing in the corps de ballet for the Grace Moore movie When You're in Love (1937) in exchange for a screen test.

In the early forties Louise worked in radio for a few years in New York City, doing soap operas, and then she spent two years in a publicity office followed by two years as a salesgirl on the seventh floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. "Then I became more or less a bum until I was rescued by a famous millionaire friend who has given me a small monthly allowance ever since — God bless him!" In 1956 she moved to Rochester to do research at the Eastman House film collection for a book she plans to write, which seems to be a career in itself. Many of Louise's articles on motion pictures have been in movie magazines both in the United States and abroad.