Lulu in Hollywood Louise Brooks

Paramount films

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925.[37] Soon she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields,[30] among others.[37]

After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts.[38] At the time, Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone.[5] Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him.[38][39] Despite his advice, she accepted Paramount's offer.[40] During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port.[41] Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.[42][43]

In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her."[8][44] A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him.[45] In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery).[8] Brooks's disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men.[46] Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border,[8] and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies.[47][48]

The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be an ordeal for Brooks.[49] During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who—the next day—spread a malicious false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted a venereal disease during a previous weekend stay with a producer,[50][51] ostensibly Jack Pickford.[b] Concurrently, Brooks's interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated, as Arlen was a close friend of Brooks's then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Brooks, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members.[53] Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking[54] directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly[c] climbs aboard a moving train.[56]

Soon after the production of Beggars of Life was completed, Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929).[51] By this time she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon,[10] being intimate friends with Davies's lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer.[9][42] While partying with Lederer, Brooks had a brief sexual liaison with her.[57] At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction.[57] Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer—Brooks's closest friend and companion—committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window.[57] This event traumatized Brooks and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast.[10]

Brooks, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise.[58][d] Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled[e] her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian director.[58] On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case[58] Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst.[58] It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit.[59]

While her snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her altogether in Hollywood, her subsequent refusal, after returning from Germany, to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist.[60] Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures[f] and another actress, Margaret Livingston,[g] was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.[61]

European films

Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by Marshall and his English valet.[36] The German film industry was Hollywood's only major rival at the time, and the film industry based in Berlin was known as the Filmwelt ("film world"), reflecting its self-image as a highly glamorous "exclusive club".[62] After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period.[63] Pabst was one of the leading directors of the filmwelt, known for his refined, elegant films that represented the filmwelt "at the height of its creative powers".[64] The film Pandora's Box is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora),[65] and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu.[65] This film is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian.[66]

Brooks's performance in Pandora's Box made her a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old and too obvious".[51] In choosing Brooks, a relative unknown who had only appeared—not to very great effect—in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him.[67] Brooks recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street."[68] Brooks claimed her experience shooting Pandora's Box in Germany was a pleasant one:

In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in my fan mail. In Berlin I stepped to the station platform to meet Mr. Pabst and became an actress. And his attitude was the pattern for all. Nobody offered me humorous or instructive comments on my acting. Everywhere I was treated with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me in Hollywood. It was just as if Mr. Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly where I needed assurance and protection.[68]

After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Brooks had a one-night stand[h] with Pabst,[69] and the director cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme.[70] In performing Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks drew upon her memories of being molested as a 9-year-old and then being blamed by her mother for her own molestation, later recalling on that day she became one of the "lost".[71] On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to continue her career as a serious actress.[68] Pabst expressed concern that Brooks's carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's".[68][72] He further cautioned Brooks that Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled.[68][72]

When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks's German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style.[59] Viewers purportedly exited the theatre vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!"[59][73] In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to stage-style acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Brooks's acting style was subtle because she understood that the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary.[59] Explaining her method, Brooks said that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation."[59] This innovative style continues to be used by contemporary film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all.[59] Film critic Roger Ebert later wrote that, by employing this method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."[59]

Her appearances in Pabst's two films made Brooks an international star. According to film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "expos[ed] her animal sensuality and turn[ed] her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen—the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in Diary of a Lost Girl and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in Pandora's Box."[67]

Near the end of 1929, English film critic and journalist Cedric Belfrage interviewed Pabst for an article about Brooks's film work in Europe that was published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture.[74] According to Belfrage, Pabst attributed Brooks's acting success outside the U.S. to her seemingly inherent or instinctive "European" sensibilities:

the eminent Herr Pabst described it to me over a cocktail in the Bristol Bar, Berlin. "Louise,'" said Herr Pabst, "has a European soul. You can't get away from it. When she described Hollywood to me—I have never been there—I cry out against the absurd fate that ever put her there at all. She belongs to Europe and to Europeans. She has been a sensational hit in her German pictures. I do not have her play silly little cuties. She plays real women, and plays them marvelously."[74]

Belfarge elaborated on Brooks's opinion of Hollywood, and referred to Pabst's firsthand knowledge of that opinion. "The very mention of the place," he stated, "gives her a sensation of nausea."[74] He continued, "The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity—no, no, that is no place for Louise Brooks."[74]

After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film, Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina.[75]

Return to America

Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929.[76] When she returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".[f] As the sole member of the cast who had refused to return to make the talkie version of The Canary Murder Case, Brooks became convinced that "no major studio would hire [her] to make a film."[77]

Purportedly, Wellman—despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life[45]—offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney.[78] Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit Marshall in New York City,[79] and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow,[78] who then began her own rise to stardom. Brooks later claimed she declined the role because she "hated Hollywood,"[51] but film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, said that Brooks "just wasn't interested ... She was more interested in Marshall".[80] In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".[80]

She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 weekly salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn.[81] She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle,[82] who worked under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".[81][83]

Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932,[84] and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles,[85] a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus.[86] In 1937, Brooks obtained a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey, who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses."[86][87] Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks's scenes were deleted.

Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne,[88] with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days.[81][82] In contemporary reviews of the film in newspapers and trade publications, Brooks received little attention from critics. The review by The Film Daily in September 1938 provides one example, barely mentioning her, saying only, "Louise Brooks makes an appearance as a female attraction."[89] Variety, the nation's leading entertainment publication, also devoted very little ink to her in its review. "Louise Brooks is the femme appeal with nothing much to do", it reports, "except look glamorous in a shoulder-length straight-bang coiffure."[90]