Lulu in Hollywood

Life after film

Economic hardship

Brooks's career prospects as a film actress had significantly declined by 1940.[83] According to the federal census in May that year, she was living in a $55-a-month apartment at 1317 North Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood and was working as a copywriter for a magazine.[91] Soon, however, Brooks found herself unemployed and increasingly desperate for a steady income. She also realized during this time that "the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me."[92] That realization was underscored by Brooks's longtime friend, Paramount executive Walter Wanger, who warned her that she would likely "become a call girl" if she remained in Hollywood.[92] Upon hearing Wanger's warning, Brooks purportedly also remembered Pabst's earlier predictions about the dire circumstances to which she would be driven if her career stalled in Hollywood: "I heard his [Pabst's] words again—hissing back to me. And listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas."[68]

Brooks briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised,[12] but this undesired return "turned out to be another kind of hell."[92] "I retired first to my father's home in Wichita," she later recalled, "but there I found that the citizens could not decide whether they despised me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a failure in their midst."[12] For her part, Brooks admitted that "I wasn't exactly enchanted with them," and "I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."[93]

After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City. Following brief stints there as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist,[94] she worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan.[92] Between 1948 and 1953, Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients.[95] As her finances eroded, an impoverished Brooks began working regularly for an escort agency in New York.[11] Recalling this difficult period in her memoirs, Brooks wrote that she frequently pondered suicide:

I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.[12][92]

Brooks spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment.[11] By this time, "all of her rich and famous friends had forgotten her."[11] Angered by this ostracism, she attempted to write a tell-all memoir titled Naked on My Goat, a title drawn from Goethe's epic play, Faust.[92] After working on that autobiography for years, Brooks destroyed the entire manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.[96][97] As time passed, she increasingly drank more and continued to suffer from suicidal tendencies.[92]

Rediscovery

There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks![i]

— Henri Langlois, 1953[1]

In 1955,[26] French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered[59] Brooks's films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon,[1][26] much to her purported amusement.[i] This rediscovery led to a Louise Brooks film festival in 1957 and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country.[26][11]

During this time, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York,[98] discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City.[59] He persuaded her in 1956 to move to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career.[99] With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer.[59] Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14,[13] she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career.[92] A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood,[14][15] published in 1982 and still in print, was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable."[11]

In her later years, Brooks rarely granted interviews, yet had special relationships with film historians John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow.[92][100] In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death but filmed a decade earlier.[101] In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood.[18][102] In 1982, writer Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks's small apartment for an interview, and later wrote about the often awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon with Louise Brooks".[103]


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