Back in 2015, I visited the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. The purpose of my visit was to spend time at the museum with which Louise Brooks was so closely associated for many years — and, to read Brooks’ unpublished notebooks. It was a trip five years in the making. Back in October of 2010, I wrote a piece for examiner.com, which was reworked for the Huffington Post, titled “Louise Brooks Journals to be Revealed, and Perhaps Published“. My piece was occasioned by an announcement by the then George Eastman House that it had unsealed the actress’ unpublished notebooks. Brooks had bequeathed her notebooks to the museum with instructions they remain sealed for 25 years following her death. Brooks passed away in 1985, and in her will, she gave the museum her notebooks, her personal library, and other papers and photographs. My piece drew the attention of various interested individuals, including the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert, as well as the bestselling author and Louise Brooks’ fan Neil Gaiman. Both tweeted about my article.
As my 2010 piece mentioned, Brooks kept journals from 1956 until her death in 1985. According to the Eastman House, there are 29 research journals ranging in size from 20 to 120 pages — each of which contain notes from her reading and film viewing. All together, these working journals approach 2000 pages of hand-written text. Over the years, notably, Brooks went back and reworked material in various notebooks. She also added a table of contents to the cover of each volume. Brooks’ addition of a table of contents reflects, in my opinion, not only a handy organizational tool, but the preparation of her notebooks for posterity.
My first opportunity to check out the notebooks occurred in 2015. I traveled to Rochester, and allotted myself two and one-half days to read / skim / survey the material — which amounted to thousands of pages of mostly handwritten, sometimes difficult to read (as in sometimes illegible) material. There were also clippings as well as typewritten material pasted onto the pages of the various notebooks, or inserted into binders. For two days, I showed up as soon as the museum opened, and left as it closed, taking time out only for lunch. After I was done, I felt I had barely scratched the surface.
The material in the notebooks is largely just that — brief notes on all manner of subjects. There are some sustained passages among numerous short and shorter bits. One typical anecdote reads, “Hal Phyfe shot at least sixty pictures of me, changing back grounds, lighting, poses, playing the percentages — if you shoot enough, the odds are that you’ll get one good pictures — also Steichen studied me for 20 minutes while we talked and he set up the lights — got me in position, and took three pictures in 20 minutes.”
Brooks read a lot. Often, Brooks listed and transcribed passages of interest out of books (mostly non-fiction works like biographies, memoirs, film histories) and magazine articles she read. One such item I came across was “What Does Acting Do to the Actor?”, an article by Louis E. Bisch which ran in Photoplay in January 1928. Brooks filled a page with extracts from Bisch’s psychoanalytic-tinged piece. It was of interest to her: she was trying to understand her craft, and herself.
Brooks also recorded the titles of many if not most of the films she viewed and where she saw them, either at the Eastman House’s Dryden Theater, or on television. (Back in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s — long before home video and streaming, broadcast TV provided most individuals with their only access to films from the past, unless one happened to live near a film archive and was friendly with its staff. Back then, as well, “old movies” including silent films showed up on TV far more often then they might today.) Brooks also recorded key information about each film — its year of release, its director, its leading actors, etc… — along with her thoughts on what she had seen. All together, these lists suggest Brooks had nearly as much interest in the films of the thirties and forties as she did in the films of teens and twenties. It was also Brooks’ habit to compile filmographies of many of the leading film personalities of her time (this was long before IMdB, as well as before many of the film books we know now were published). All this conglomeration of detail left me with the impression that Brooks had the notion to write some sort of grand history of film as a way of understanding her small part in it.
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| At my research station, where I read through Louise Brooks’ notebooks | The George Eastman Museum, in Rochester NY |
There are passages on numerous movie stars including the Talmadge sisters and the Bennett sisters, as well as Thomas Ince, William Desmond Taylor, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Leni Riefenstahl, Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Grace Moore, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty. There are, as well, anecdotal remembrances of encounters with individuals such as the director Jean Renoir (at a party in Paris in the late 1950s) and the actor Roddy McDowell (who came to her apartment to photograph her). Notably, in the margins of one notebook, Brooks’ recorded the fact G.W. Pabst had once called her on the telephone while she was living in New York City in 1948.
Brooks wrote about Tallulah Bankhead on a few occasions, and was seemingly considering writing a piece called “Brooks on Bankhead.” In Notebook A B5, for example, Brooks referred to Bankhead’s “dreadful imitation of Garbo”. And then there is this gossipy anecdote: “New York: Spring, 1935. Bankhead’s suite at the Gotham — I was dancing at Plaza and did not drink — Tallulah was high on cocaine — she was broke — she was trying to sell Clifford Odets the idea to write a play for her — she sat on couch with legs apart showing cunt — she fought with drunken B. Daley [Blythe Daley] to recite in French from Phèdre — she read the Bible in her father’s, the senator’s Southern accent (which was fine). She explained her lesbian fame with Nazimova and Eva Le Gallienne at the Algonquin (the three horse women of the A.) as the madness of youth seeking publicity and fame. She defended dope charge with ‘Anyhow cocaine isn’t habit forming – I ought to know, I’ve been taking it for 17 years.’ When she heard the entrance door closing, she ran to stop Odet’s departure — but he left…. Not even the offer of a lady would keep him.” About Bankhead, she also wrote: “… at 60, she has at last become a great popular star. No longer concerned with imitation or sex — and not much with how she looks — her comedy is as easy and sure as a slap in the face. Her dramatic work learned down to essential impact. Her face too has remained the same.”
There are just as many pages of notes on Garbo — including one nine page passage which, tantalizingly, includes references to Garbo’s apartment. About Mae Murray she wrote: “She belongs to that long list of women (pretty with a fine figure) whose boundless ambition and will drive [them] into the theatre…. I had heard that Murray affected the lifted chin because of its fatness, but in the black dress in Merry Widow, with no furs or veiling at the throat, in profile, a far more important reason is revealed. The long, sharp, witch chin destroys instantly the whole image of the adorable kitten which she has so painfully patched together. Suddenly, she is old and vain and grasping.” Elsewhere, she characterized Pola Negri as the “grandest star on the lot,” Ernest Lubitsch as “VERY GAY,” and Mabel Normand as “read Freud and ate ice cream for breakfast.” About the Talmadge sisters, she wrote, “Constance and Norma Talmage were the only aristocracy of movies. Their pictures were a pastime – they took, they gave, they lost — they had every material possession — Natalie — .. all still rich.”
Brooks watched lots of films, including those directed by D.W. Griffith (namely Broken Blossoms and Way Down East) and Erich von Stroheim (such as the The Merry Widow, Greed and Queen Kelly — notably, her opinion on the director, who she once met, changed over time). She also watched films starring the likes of Marion Davies (Blondie of the Follies and Cain and Mabel, the latter was given five pages of notes), as well as films starring Marlene Dietrich (such as The Blue Angel and I Kiss Your Hand Madame). About Dietrich and The Blue Angel she wrote, “marvelous in early scenes in the flip upskirt — seems unaware / or takes for granted her charms — great with Jannings in breakfast scene — falls apart when she is called upon to do any complex thinking.” She also watched William Wellman’s The Public Enemy, a film in which she was initially cast. Brooks commented, “Wellman, only a director of things. No characterization or development of people. Blondell, Clark, Harlow, simply females to hit at.” She was especially taken with John Barrymore’s performance in Maytime (1937), and wrote, “The greatest acting I ever saw.” She was also taken with Metropolis. After viewing the film, she commented “Brigitte Helm — marvelous body and movements.”
Among other films Brooks viewed, of which I was both desperate and unable to record a compete list, were Anna Christie, Dinner at Eight (with Marie Dressler), Lifeboat (starring Tallulah Bankhead), Ivan the Terrible, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, Jean Renoir’s Nana (on two occasions), and G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, The Love of Jeanne Ney, and Threepenny Opera. There are others, many others. Besides watching films, Brooks also researched them. She looked up articles and reviews about individual movies, including, at one point, what she could find on Pandora’s Box. [When I visited, I learned the George Eastman Museum has Brooks’ “score” for Pandora’s Box, a listing of 78 rpm recordings which Brooks selected to accompany the film.]
In 1959, Brooks’ viewed Earth Spirit, an earlier film version of Wedekind’s Lulu starring Asta Nielsen. She was excitedly impressed, writing “the most astonishing, unpredictable, fascinating, personality of the screen. Her wonderful costume sense, the opening Pierrot costume, the black winged costume, the tight wrapped, silver lame dress, the absolutely stunning affect of her face in close ups. It is fascinating to see what Mr. Pabst took from this series of impressionistic sketches and how he changed Lulu from the man eater to Lulu a force of nature.”
On October 29, 1959 Brooks watched another of her films, Empty Saddles, a 1936 Buck Jones B-western in which she had a supporting role. Brooks saw the film at the Eastman House, and wrote “First film I ever heard my voice.” She wrote in her notebooks that she thought her voice “cultured”. However, she critiqued her physical appearance, making note of her sense of stillness. She also noted her sway back from having danced with Dario, which she notes she later corrected through exercise from 1938 through 1943.
Brooks took in the world however she could. She watched television programs and listened to the radio. If something stood out, she recorded a few thoughts in her notebooks. She once watched William S. Paley on Meet the Press. And on June 26, 1960, she recorded seeing “Yuriko (Martha Graham’s greatest pupil)” rehearsing two male dancers, adding “She is astonishingly like Martha, small, compact. With the same strong, straight back and neck all of which give her the powerful balance of the greatest dancers.” This entry was followed by a page of Brooks’ thoughts on dance. A couple months later, on September 28, 1960 she recorded watching Fred Astaire on a program on NBC.Other entries in the notebooks are devoted to Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky. In another note, she wrote how it was Martha Graham “who created the dance of inner life.”
Besides the movies and dance, Brooks also had a longtime interest in literature. For example, in 1958, Brooks noted watching the poet W.H. Auden on television (two pages on Auden followed), and listening to a local radio program on the critic H.L. Mencken. Many different things interested her. Brooks even seemed to have something of a liking for the once popular band-leader Mitch Miller, and recorded hearing him on the radio at least a couple of times.
On occasion, Brooks was a list maker. There was one list which noted the twelve painting she had completed up to that time. Brooks’ first painting dated to September 1949, while the last (according to this list) was completed in March 1960. There was another list mentioning “geniuses I have known: Chaplin, Gershwin, Graham, Thalberg, Gish, Garbo”. Years later, she revised the list to “Chaplin, Gershwin, Graham, Thalberg, Gish, Garbo“. Another list recalled some of the books she read in the 1920’s (Chrome Yellow by Aldous Huxley, Zuleka Dobson by Max Beerbohn, South Wind by Norman Douglas, Anna Karinina by Leo Tolstoy) and the books she intended to read which were about the 1920s (titles by Gilbert Seldes, Gertrude Stein, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Van Wyck Brooks, Stark Young and Michael Arlen). One list detailed her spiritual life, noting her conversion to Catholicism, her baptism, first communion, the times she went to confession, attended mass, and committed mortal sins. One other list, from the early 1970’s, detailed where and for how many years she had lived in any one place. It reads:
18 Kansas
21 New York
9 Hollywood
16 Rochester
1 Europe – Chicago
As mentioned, the notebooks also contain a number of clippings, many of which were obituaries of individuals Brooks had known, including the actor Addison (Jack) Randall, Clifton Webb, NY MoMA film curator Iris Barry, dancer Ruth St. Denis, and others. Usually, these clipping came from either Variety or TIME magazine, two publications which she seems to have had regular access. Brooks also seems to have had access to a run of past issues of both Vanity Fair and Photoplay magazine, as she references each.
Brooks noted the many books she read. They include James Joyce’s Ulysses (the 1934 Random House edition), a couple different translations of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, Lytton Strachey’s book on Queen Victoria, King Vidor’s autobiography, memoirs by Adolphe Menjou and Ethel Merman, a biography on Wyatt Earp and another on D.W. Griffith, and Jim Tully’s A Dozen and One, for the chapter on Paul Bern. She also read Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, which contains a chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Brooks commented, “The best piece on Scott Fitzgerald — confined to Wilson’s experience — like Shaw on Wilde — exactly what I forget I want to do in Women in Fllm.” The latter is the title of a book Brooks intended to write long before she put together Lulu in Hollywood. Her notebooks contain an extensive list of subjects and chapter titles which she hoped to include in Women in Film; they range from Betty Bronson and the Bennett Sisters to Norma Shearer, Janet Gaynor, Bette Davis, Hedy Lamarr and Merle Oberon.
One of my favorite drafts is for an unpublished piece titled, “Breasts – Sex in Film.” It begins “I was about 12 in 1918 when I discovered breasts” and continues in a very non-sexual, human, and honest way. The notebooks also contain the drafts of other unrealized, half-started, incomplete articles like “Clara Bow / Jazz Baby,” “Acting Out” (from 1977), “Girl Child in Films” (11 pages), “This Thing Called Corn” (8 pages), “The Garbo Mystery” (1 1/2 pages), and an untitled piece on Marilyn Monroe (22 pages). Brooks thought Monroe misunderstood, and she viewed her as someone who was built up as a dumb blonde and lived her publicity. In her notebook, Brooks copied a statement from L’osservatore Romano, a Vatican newspaper. It described Monroe as a “victim of a mentality and a way and conception of life of which she was forced to be the symbol.”
Brooks once read a book about the composer George Gershwin, someone she first met and flirted with during her brief time with the George White Scandals. In one entry, she recorded an impressionistic memory, “at Scandals 1924 rehearsals George took off coat — played in vest — sometimes with a cigar in his mouth”. From her reading, she took notes on Gershwin’s upbringing, on his compositions, and on his early death on July 11, 1937, adding in parenthesis “Two weeks before at the Clover Club George asked me to dance and seemed brilliantly healthy.” Brooks also read a book on composer Alban Berg which included material on his opera, Lulu. Brooks took two pages of notes on the Berg book which included a singular observation, “the death dance of social machinery in which Lulu, the prostitute, is slowly atomized.”
Brooks read Nancy Milford’s groundbreaking 1970 book on Zelda Fitzgerald, and took 15 pages of notes, followed by 4 more pages of analysis. Brooks also read and wrote this about Bernard Sobel’s 1953 book, Broadway Heartbeat: Memoirs of a Press Agent. “This book reveals a man (who I thought to be so sweet and defenseless) of the meanest spite and undying malice. Apparently unable to express himself in any other way, he became a writer out of necessity and became a press agent in order to share the glamor of the theater. His writing is grammatically frightful, his choice of incident petty, and his observations on people’s character so blurred by his maniacal concern with whether they treat him with the attentive respect that in the end they all become the same character – his enemy (like Winchell) who abuses his help and friendship. No wonder that Bernie, when i was in the Follies, did not want to publicize me, that he excluded me tacitly from the Ziegfeld club and in almost 40 years never once used my name or photo in countless Ziegfeld follies publications. Until I read his book, i did not understand how my ordinary indifference could arouse such deathless malevolence in any man.”
I came across a good deal of surprising material reading through Brooks’ notebooks. She read about saints, suffragettes, marriage and divorce, and slavery, specifically sexual slavery and polygamy. She was fascinated with Queen Elizabeth’s 1959 visit to the United States, and seemingly watched its extensive coverage of the event on television. She also recorded more than 4 pages of her thoughts on the occasion. For a while, Brooks was interested in the Sigmund Freud, whose writings she saw as his confession and self-justification. Brooks was also deeply interested in existentialism, a philosophical movement very much in vogue in the 1960s. She recorded reading a few books on the subject, as well as couple by Jean Paul Sartre. She disliked Simone de Beauvoir, and said so in the pages of her notebooks. [Curiously, Sartre records in his own journals that he once asked de Beauvoir on a date to see A Girl in Every Port, a film which co-starred Brooks.]
Brooks recorded details about a lunch date she had with Lillian Gish in 1960, noting her height, how she was dressed, her complexion, and the fact that there were “fair paintings” of loved ones in Gish’s apartment as well as a “spread of books.” They ate corned veal, baked beans, and a fruit compote, adding “Lillian folded her lace napkin at end of lunch”. A couple of years later, Brooks met with Buster Keaton and his wife at the Sheraton hotel in Rochester. Brooks recorded her thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor, on George Raft, and even pasted in a clipping on Andy Warhol. She watched television coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s 1957 visit to the United States and Canada, and wrote pages and pages about it. She also penned notes on the Kennedy family, Henry Kissinger, Charles Baudelaire, Ortega y Gassett and the Zen thinker Alan Watts (which tied in with her interest in existentialism). English writers John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, and the American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are referenced time and again. I also came across, in one section alone, five pages of transcribed passages from Marcel Proust. In another, she made three pages of notes from Henry James’ The Art of Fiction.
One of the binders which the Eastman House was bequeathed by Brooks contains even earlier notes, loose leaf sheets dating from as early as the early 1940s. There are pages and pages of notes on the French philosopher Henri Bergson from 1941, on the English writer George Meredith from 1943, on Lord Byron and the qualities of great poetry from 1948, on Gandhi’s Autobiography from 1949, on the letters of Marcel Proust from 1955. There are also scattered notes on art and on modern painters.
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| Image from the George Eastman Museum | Image from the George Eastman Museum |
Considering Brooks never received a high school diploma (she left to join Denishawn in 1922 just after her sophomore year), and was largely self-taught, these notebooks reflect an especially curious mind. Remarkably so. Once a world famous movie star, Brooks found herself living alone in a small apartment in upstate New York, far removed from the glamour and excitement of her younger days. Brooks was striving to understand what happened. She was trying to understand how the world worked…, as it wasn’t just the passing years that led to her fall from grace. Might someone else know the truth, or have the answer? Notably, she was fascinated by celebrity and by authority figures — either spiritual or political or literary or cinematic or romantic. George Bernard Shaw, a once towering figure in world literature, was a major obsession. As much as anything, it seems to me, Brooks attempted to understand the world and herself through the arts, through books, through the pages of literature, and in the biographies and histories of great individuals and momentous times. Her notebooks are a record of her striving.
During my two and a half days reading Brooks’ notebooks, I took lots of notes and transcribed a few interesting passages. That is all researchers may do. Recording devices like scanners or cameras are not allowed. The material above represents a summation of my observations. Brooks’ notebooks are, in my opinion, a goldmine of fascinating and insightful material, of observations both banal and profound, and of remarkable sentences and passages. Here is one more example, “If your name is not in the columns, you’re dead professionally. If your name is in, your dead personally.”
At one point, Brooks read and took notes on another writer’s notebooks, those of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American author best known for Walden. In 1975, Brooks began to have second thoughts about her own notebooks, writing, “Why do I go on with these note books which I shall never use? Never read.” In 1979, she corrected herself, adding “Wrong.”
Among other things, I also came across this recipe: “Brooks’ cookies 18 March 1973”
1 stick butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 table spoon milk
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
dates and nuts. lemon rind
350 degrees 45 minutes cut to squares
Pictured here is your humble narrator’s attempt at making a Louise Brooks’ cookie.
FURTHER READING:
Cohen, David S. “Brooks’ books reveal film criticism.” Variety, October 1, 2010.
— contains a few more bits from Brooks’ notebooks
Gladysz, Thomas. “Louise Brooks’ private journals to be revealed.” examiner.com, October 2, 2010.
— available through NewsBank
Bourne, Mark. “Louise Brooks private journals opened after 25 years.” Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, October 3, 2010.
— movie blog
Gladysz, Thomas. “Louise Brooks Journals to be Revealed, and Perhaps Published.” Huffington Post, October 11, 2010.
— an updated version of my earlier article