Louise Brooks

Mary Louise Brooks was born on November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kansas, the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, and Myra Rude, a pianist who introduced her children to the music of Debussy and Ravel. The family relocated to Independence, Kansas, in 1919, and then to Wichita in 1920. Brooks would go on to become an American film actress of the 1920s and 1930s and a Broadway performer whose stage career spanned from 1924 to 1931.

At fifteen, in 1922, Brooks joined the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in New York, a modern dance company whose members included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn as well as a young Martha Graham. The company traveled abroad, with Brooks spending a season in London and Paris. In her second season she advanced to a starring role opposite Shawn, but a personal conflict with St. Denis led to her dismissal in the spring of 1924. St. Denis fired her in front of the other company members, telling her she wanted life handed to her on a silver salver. Brooks was seventeen at the time. Through her friend Barbara Bennett, sister of Constance and Joan Bennett, she quickly found work as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a semi-nude dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street.

Her Broadway career encompassed a range of productions across multiple genres. Her stage credits included the musical Louie the 14th, the revue Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1925, the musical Half a Widow, the musical Fioretta, and the play Louder, Please, among other productions. Her work in the Ziegfeld Follies brought her to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, who signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925. That same year, at a cocktail party hosted by Wanger, Brooks met Charlie Chaplin, who was in New York for the premiere of The Gold Rush at the Strand Theatre on Broadway. Chaplin and Brooks had a two-month affair that summer while he was married to Lita Grey.

Brooks made her screen debut in an uncredited role in the 1925 silent film The Street of Forgotten Men and subsequently appeared in a series of silent light comedies and flapper films, starring alongside Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. Her bob hairstyle became widely imitated, with many women styling their hair after both Brooks and fellow film star Colleen Moore. She gained a cult following in Europe for her role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent film A Girl in Every Port. That same year she took the lead role in Beggars of Life, directed by William Wellman, playing an abused country girl who kills her foster father and escapes the law disguised as a boy alongside co-stars Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery. During this period she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and a frequent guest of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

Dissatisfied with her roles in Hollywood, Brooks traveled to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that brought her international recognition: Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both directed by G. W. Pabst and released in 1929, and Miss Europe, also known as Prix de Beauté, released in 1930. By 1938, she had appeared in fourteen silent films and ten sound films. After retiring from acting, Brooks faced financial hardship and described herself as having become a kept woman to three wealthy men. She struggled with alcoholism and suicidal episodes for approximately two decades.

Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, Brooks began writing articles about her film career, and her essays drew considerable critical attention. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Brooks died of a heart attack on August 8, 1985, at the age of seventy-eight. She is remembered as an icon of flapper culture, in part because of the bob hairstyle she helped popularize during the height of her career.