"Lulu Baby," by Anita Loos

While I was strolling through the park one day, in the merry, merry month of May (1980), just as in the old vaudeville refrain, a polite young stranger approached me to ask, "I beg your pardon, but aren't you Louise Brooks?"

Now Louise Brooks and I had met many years ago when we were working as novices at the old MGM Studio in Culver City. At that time the two of us had several points in common that might have given that movie fan some basis for his confusion.

But to be mistaken for Louise Brooks, at any age, was a double compliment. She was by far the prettiest girl in Hollywood, a fact which was only the beginning of her incredible career. For today's film critics all agree that Louise Brooks became the greatest actress in the history of moving pictures.

During a span of about twenty years, most of which were spent in idleness, she made only two movies of major importance, but they established a cult for Louise Brooks that is mounting steadily as time goes on.

The resemblance between Louise and me started with our measurements; at a height of four feet eleven inches, we each weighed a meager ninninety-two popounds; and, in a world where it was almost an obligation to be blond, we never tampered with the blue-black color of our hair. We wore it at shoulder length and were the first of the trend-setters to venture into bangs.

Our jobs at the studio varied; Louise took the easy way and settled for playing extras, bit roles and posing as "cheesecake" for the publicity department. I earned my keep by concocting movie plots.

But there was a magnet in the guise of snobbery that drew us together. Among the mishmash that made up the personnel at MGM, we avoided the actors as bores who took themselves too seriously.

I used to be put to all kinds of trouble by one superstar who was finicky about the close-ups I planned for him. He accused me of introducing embraces into his scenes with a leading llady who suffered from halitosis. He would drag me from the set to complain, "Look here, young lady, if I've told you once, I've told you scribblers a dozen times to keep that dame and me at arm's length."

I tantalized him by promising to write him into a double exposure against Louise Brooks. It was a feeble joke, but the very idea brought forth a grin that lit up almost all his teeth. "Well," said Mr. Gable, "now you're talking like Shakespeare!"

There was no question that Louise was looked on by the younger directors as their own special property. They were as yet too inexperienced to be handling anything but slapstick comedy; so Louise's contribution had little to do with acting, but it provided endless excuses for "cheesecake."

We girls considered i~ chic to rebel against custom, so we refused to dine at the studio commissary. At lunchtime our boss, Louis B. Mayer, used to make the rounds, stopping at every table to describe the merits of his chicken soup, the recipe of which had been handed down through generations of Yiddish grandmothers.

As an escape from such boredom, the younger producers organized a Dining Club where the elite gathered at the lunch hour. It was restricted to movie intellectuals such as Walter Wanger, A. Edward Sutherland, and Willis Goldbeck; all of whom boasted college backgrounds. There were always a few men-about-town from Los Angeles and the polo teams joined us from Santa Barbara.

Le Club occupied a tacky bungalow in Culver City, complete with bootlegger and a black "fry cook," who provided comedy relief. The Club garden was so cramped that a neighborhood apartment dweller once complained, "Every time I go to my window for a breath of air, your cook grabs his skillet and bastes my bald head." We laughed off such repartee, drank our martinis out of tea cups, and looked down our noses on such earnest "drips" as Greta Garbo and Kate Hepburn, who still paid homage to Daddy Mayer's chicken soup, a single helping ofwhich would have made a potful of the brew they served us at le Club.

Louise and I earned plenty of money, most of which we spent on hats and frequently borrowed them from each other. I remember a favorite straw sailor with a single flower sprouting on a long wire stem. Its gyrations increased our impertinence as we lolled around the Club bar.

I, being hooked on a career, occupied myself writing movie plots. Louise became a sort of magnificent floater who took no interest in where she was headed. Ultimately, she outgrew her more-or-less unconcluded affairs at le Club and became a girl-about-town, under the protection of the young director Eddie Sutherland, the Beau Brummel of that era.

Louise's connection with Hollywood was finally broken by a gentleman from the East on a business trip to California. He had invented a process of washing dirty linen "en gross," and then turning it over to housewives to do their own ironing. George Marshall made millions by such simple means as smoothing wrinkles out of unpressed laundry. As a reward for Marshall's devotion to Louise, she peacefully gave him the nickname of "Wet Wash," with which George Marshall was forced to live thereafter. But by his purchase of the Washington Redskins football team, he provided himself with the glamour of a sporting career.

George Marshall might well be called the love of Louise's life, had she ever found a single love sufficient. But George burned with a desire to show the entire world the treasure he had acquired. He spent fortunes on trying to further a career in the movies which Louise didn't want. It interfered with her social life as Queen of the Washington football team. In addition to being lazy, she refused to cooperate in the business contracts George arranged; she liked money well enough, but didn't want to be bothered with it.

I remained at MGM for eighteen years but kept track of Louise through the movie grapevine. It appeared that during her extensive pleasure trips, some of them abroad, Louise's spectacular beauw caught the interest of studios wherever she went. But her favorite form of exercise was walking off a movie set, which she did with the insouciance of a little girl playing hopscotch; thus upsetting George's ambitions to be a Pygmalion.

During her years of misbehavior, Louise's movie offers dwindled to a paltry few. When she found herselfat odds with Marshall, there were numberless others waiting to take his place. Louise became a full-term "kept lady." But sometimes when pressured by George, she went back to him for a while.

Then on one fateful day, a Berlin movie producer named G. W. Pabst, who was a friend of George Marshall's, was preparing to make a film of two of Wedekind's famous sex-ridden plays called Pandora's Box, and in describing his project to George he explained a major difficulty: that the leading lady must be "the most beautiful girl in the world." George Marshall felt his destiny as Pygmalion had arrived. "That girl has got to be Louise Brooks!"

When approached to consider yet another unwelcome job, Louise's first question might well have been, "What time would I have to report on the set?"

But when she read the Wedekind plays, Louise's attitude began to change. As an ardent lover of life she found little "life" in those film scripts that came her way. Activity perhaps—but that was not enough.

Her exceptional beauty had brought Louise offers of such innocuous roles as Goethe's Marguerite, or the even more pallid Charlotte of The Sorrows of Werther. English movie companies had tried to tempt Louise with such loffipops as Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall or SweetNell of Old Drury. But as Lulu in Wedekind's Pandora's Box Louise found a heroine that she could get her teeth into.

Lulu was a creature of flesh and blood, especially blood. A sequence in Wedekind's play that particularly fascinated Louise was one in which its heroine confesses that her most cherished daydream was to be ravished and murdered by an insane rapist.

Louise accepted the role of that gore-soaked victim with an eagerness very foreign to her supine and fi.m-loving nature. Her performance as Lulu turned out to be a showstopper even to the dissolute Berliners. Louise's boyish "patent-leather hair," which had caused her to look like a healthy young Lochinvar-out-of-the-West, turned her into a creature of Oriental decadence.

There are not many actresses who will allow an audience to know what they're thinking. At any rate, most of those thoughts are too self-centered to have any relation to life outside an actress's looking glass. But Louise was no dissembler; she had faced her own life with a gaze ofpeerless clarity. She was too honest to "play it coy," to delve in self-pity, to hide behind the mask ofher fabulous face, or to smear the ugly scars of human nature with "Covermark."

As she played Lulu, the venal thoughts of that prostitute reach out and grip the audience as in a vise. And after the vise is released, it leaves a scar on one's mind that will never disappear.

Movie critics have tried to explain what it is that turned Louise Brooks's erotic ecstasy into a masterpiece. One is tempted to quote a few international film writers on the subject, viz:

"Louise Brooks is much more than a myth, she is a magical presence."

"Louise Brooks by merely walking across a stage creates a work of Art!"

And from Henri Langlois, the late director of the Cinémathèque Française: "The camera seems to have caught her by surprise, without her knowledge. Her art is so pure that it becomes invisible."

And the most hard-boiled of British critics, the late Kenneth Tynan, had to resort to poetry to express his feelings about Louise. "For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night!"

With the release of Pandora's Box, not even Louise realized what she had done with Wedekind's monstrous study of an adulteress.

That Pandora's Box was more than an accident was proved when Louise was enticed into one more film, Prix de Beauté, which turned out to be as great a work of art as Pandora. A few years later, possibly because of boredom, Louise quit acting forever and never made another picture.

She had given a full account of all the lessons her own life had taught her. She had asked all those questions for which humanity will never find an answer; and she had the smile of the Mona Lisa with its wit, guile, and cruelty.

"I don't think I ever loved anyone," Louise once told me, although, for a short two years. she had married Eddie Sutherland. But when in need of funds, she intermittently went back to Marshall until the day he died. (She confessed to having lived with three men of wealth at one time without their being aware of the deceit.)

But finally crippled by arthritis, she had found a new diversion. She enjoyed talking. She and I had a mutual friend in Tom Curtiss, the drama editor on the International Herald Tribune, and his latest report on Louise is of a series of addresses she made to Parisian film aficionados. But they were so full of German technicalities that the French couldn't understand them.

"You'd never recognize the Louise of today if you saw her," Tom Curtiss wrote me. "Her hair is almost white. She looks and even talks like a New England schoolmarm. And for the first time in her life she has become bitter."

Like a homing pigeon who never had a home, Louise fluttered to a nest at the Rochester Academy of Motion Picture Arts, of which she was its brightest and most revered adjunct.

Everybody who loves the movies has got to adore Louise Brooks because of what she has put into our lives through them.

In order to see these miracles, one is forced to hie to the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where only seven films of Louise exist. But you had best be warned, that Pandora's Box may sear your eyesight.

On that day in the park when I said goodbye to that stranger who had so poignantly brought back the past, I expressed regret at not having been Louise. "Don't apologize," said he, and added with a sigh, "but I sure am sorry never to have met Lulu!"