Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

I don't want to pretend to give advice to someone dead for forty years. That's the temptation with anyone's memoirs: it's so easy to see other people's mistakes, and point them out in clever or cruel ways, to show how they could have had much better, more fulfilling lives, if only they'd known to do...whatever.

Louise Brooks was a star in early Hollywood. She made two dozen movies, mostly from 1925-1931, including a couple considered major classics, but her career faltered around the time of the transition to talkies and she went on to a long life doing other things. She was born in 1906, in Kansas, and had a short career in New York as a dancer and actress on Broadway and with the Denishawn company even before Hollywood; she wasn't even twenty when she first starred in a movie. And she lived to 1985, with her later years in Rochester, New York, mostly because there was a film archive there she became associated with.

Starting in the late 1950s, she wrote a series of essays for various film magazines around the world, seven of which were collected in a 1982 book, Lulu in Hollywood. An expanded edition of Lulu came out in 2000, including an eighth Brooks essay, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs," and replacing the original introduction by The New Yorker's William Shawn with a 1979 Kenneth Tynan profile of Brooks from the New Yorker, "The Girl in the Black Helmet." Both editions also include Brooks' filmography and an afterword by German film historian Lotte H. Eisner; this one has two extensive sections of black-and-white photos as well. (I imagine the 1982 book had some photos - possibly the same ones, possibly fewer, possibly more.)

Lulu, especially this Expanded Edition, is an assemblage - it was not conceived as a single thing, and it was assembled when, reading between the lines, Brooks was deteriorating and not able to do any editorial work on the individual essays or the collection. So Tynan's introduction tells us things that are in the essays - including extensive direct quotes - and the essays themselves overlap a bit as well.

The reaction to the essays and then the book seems to have been largely astonishment, that a gorgeous girl who ran away from Kansas to be a dancer in her early teens was actually quite intelligent and incisive, a keen observer with a definite point of view and complicated motivations that she somewhat understood and somewhat was willing to explain. It was the old surprise that the beautiful can contribute anything other than their beauty; I suppose the rest of us think they've already been blessed once and getting any more than that is really not fair.

But Brooks was smart, and writes interestingly, if somewhat fragmentarily, about her youth and people she knew (W.C Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Marion Davies' niece) and some movies she made in New York and Hollywood and Berlin.

Again, there are a few major moments in her career - when she was offered initial contracts by two studios and chose the one a mogul advised her against, when she refused to come back and record dialogue for a movie retroactively turned into a talkie, and a couple of others - that an outside observer a century later thinks were not the best choices, and that Brooks might even have known that at the time. But young people will do impulsive things, and Brooks is clear-eyed about how young and impulsive she was - and, even more, about the specific things that led her to make those decisions. We might wish she had done otherwise - it could have led to a longer career, which I think we all would have wanted - but the past is the past. 

Lulu in Hollywood is interesting but not definitive, an assemblage rather than a work created as a single thing, a mosaic (or a collection of small, semi-disconnected mosaics) rather than a portrait. It's got some good insights, and Brooks was a fascinating character, so I do recommend it for anyone interested in the era.