Louise Brooks, intervista di John Kobal II

JK	Did you read Mae Murray's biography, The disenchanted or The self-enchanted? ... (It had just been published when I called Louise)
LB	No, I must get it. You know, it's so unfair ... Wait (We pause for breath) ... It's so unfair the way they treat people. Now, for instance, von Stroheim has become an idol, you see, and so Mae Murray just stinks all around, all over. Now, she was the most ridicolous woman, and a most ridicolous actress, and let us say insane. In a way. On the other hand, she was a great success, and anyone who made a success in the business has something, believe me. It's the roughest, toughest, most humiliating and degrading job in the world. So they will not allow her to be even barely good, let's say in The merry widow. It was the best performance she ever gave, and it is cruel, when she was an old woman, not to give her credit for what she had: a lovely body, a certain kind of grace, a kind of silly personality. The fact is, her pictures kept Old Man Mayer (Louis B.) going to Metro for a long time, so she must have had something, for in the end it is the public that matters with films. It was the same with Clara Bow. You know, I talked to Kevin (Brownlow) about her. I was so mad when he didn't go to see her in Hollywood. He said: 'Well, I don't think she's so much'. And in that year she died. 1965. She was born in 1905. And that was the last chance anyone had to interview her. And he didn't think she was much. And, my God, she was a terrific star! It isn't like great literature which very few people can understand and those few people had to pass it down from century to century. Anyone who goes to a movie can understand it; whether it catches them emotionally or not isn't the answer. All you have to have is an eye and an ear, to have lived, spoken, felt, eaten, drunk and so forth. That's the whole terrible thing about this movie cult, these movie curators (she curdles her voice on the word), these film archives ... they go from cult to cult. This year they're mad about Japanese films and everything else stinks, and next year it's Ingmar Bergman and everything else stinks and it's an idiotic, childish way to view ... The films aren't art; it's like the public library, it's full of books from the beginning of printing, and it doesn't make any difference whether they're old or new. Some are good, some are bad, and to be a cult in reading is as idiotic as - well, to be a cult with film, I think, is equally idiotic.
JK	In a sense, I think it's because people only rediscover one person at a time. It allows them time to explore their films, their directors ... Still, I agree, cult is stupid.
LB	Well, that's true about anyone who is inspired and exhilarated and enthralled and enlightened by art. Everyone used to kid me. I remember a blind date, he said: 'Don't talk to Brooksie about anything but Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, she's going through her Russian period and won't listen to anything else'. And then I went through my Dickens period, and my Thackeray. Now, he was making great fun of me, but as these enthusiasms simmered down, I put them all in their places in my pantheon, And I can love them all. They're all unique. Just as each director is unique ... Well, I forgot the point, what the hell am I getting at?
JK	How one can appreciate so much more than just one ...
LB	Oh, yeah. Every picture is worth something to somebody, and there's always a reason for saving it, for not discarding it, for not going .... I remember in 1943 Iris Barry, who started the Museum of Modern Art Film Department, had me to lunch with a local wolf and she said she wasn't going to get a copy of Pandora's box, that it had no lasting value. That kind of saying, you see; and James Card here at the Eastman House Film Museum, through me and through Marion Davies' nephew, Charlie Lederer, had an opportunity to get the Marion Davies films. That was back in 1958 before she died, and he was too busy collecting foreign films that he could now get for a dime a dozen, all he wants, and in the meantime they've given the Marion Davies films, which are absolutely fabulous because of Mr. Hearst and his supervision ... they've given all of her films to the Hollywood Museum. That is what this prejudice and this silly judgements out of left field ruins; that is why they ruin archives, and ruin the curator's work, and ruin for the viewer, for you and me who just go to look at films: that's why these people aren't necessarily instructive. They shoud grab everything they can get hold of, for sooner or later it's going to be precious.
JK	Isn't it funny? Over in England and France they collect the American films like mad because they realize American films are the most precious gold mine of all cinema history.
LB	And the hardest to get because they used to, after they sent in the copyright negatives, they would collect back all the prints and just ship them off to Eastman Kodak here and have them melted down to get back what money they could get out of the silver in the films. They keep talking now about deterioration and how the films are lost. They always forget that the big way they were lost was because the studios themselves had them burned up and melted down to sell for silver content. They used to make $2 or $3 million a year that way, reclaiming the film.
JK	How did you feel suddenly about 1956-57 when this terrific resurgence in your popularity came about?
LB	Oh, I got an enormous kick of it. I was killed dead when Pandora's box failed, so from that time on, I just didn't care. I lived for years and years with this terrible sense of failure ... and to be suddenly reclaimed from the dead was marvelously exciting, and it made me enormously happy. Of course it did! If you lived for years thinking you were a perfect failure and then suddenly you have lived long enough ... Most people die before things like that happen - to find that you are to a certain extent admired. It's a wonderful blessing. But I was always perfectly willing to face that I'd made my own partcular hell. I never tried to push the blame on anybody but myself. I knew I'd done it all myself.
JK	But it didn't provide you with an impetus to go back to films?
LB	You know I never did go out anyplace in my life when I didn't have to do some kind of work. You cannot drag me out. I would still be in Kansas if my mother hadn't sent me off to Ruth St. Denis in New York.
JK	That's right ... You were with Ruth St. Denis.
LB	And Ted Shawn. That's how I began. I'm a dancer.
JK	**Yes, of course, of course. And you danced with the Ziegfeld Follies too, right?**
LB	Well, yes, after I left St. Denis and Shawn. You know what burns me up? For years, John, my whole career as far as these charming United States of America are concerned has been a blank. Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis must have given thousands of lectures, and they've wirtten between them fifteen books, and they have never found me worthy of so much a mention of my name, ever having been with them, and it's the same thing with the Follies. Because Ziegfeld was going to star me in the Follies when I left, you know. I was supposed to do Show girl and wouldn't do it, so they gave it to Ruby Keeler. But in all of hundreds of books that have been written about the Follies or connected with the Follies or pictures of the Follies girls, my name, my picture, nothing. And if it hadn't been for the German films I made, and being advertised in Europe, my name would still never be mentioned in movies.
JK	But I didn't discover you in your German films. I first saw you in A girl in every port.
LB	Yeah, but don't you see, all that was built up beforehand. By Pabst's Pandora's box and Prix de beauté, made in Paris, because before that no one could remember me. And it's just as ... For instance, I was looking through (Richard) Griffith's book ... what is it called? ... The films. No, The movies. And do you know that there is not one picture of Betty Bronson? I mean, she was incomparable in Peter Pan. And not one picure of her. And so it goes, you see. Well, now keep your mouth shut because I'm goign into a monologue about Josef von Sternberg. So, quiet. I'm going to tell you about having read Fun in a chinese laundry. Well, you know the first thing I ask myself when I read a book is. 'Why that kind of book? Why did he write it?'. Because all of us write because we have suffered some terrible humiliation and we've got to set the record straight and get even somehow. And of course I discovered that Sternberg wrote this and, instead of giving us that gag title from one of the first Edison pictures, he really should have called it 'Why I am greater than Marlene Dietrich'. Because the whole thing is this argument to prove that he was a great director of genius and she was his puppet, manipulated and created by him. And it is a long, long argument about direction and acting; and what makes that particularly interesting is that today film writers who write about directors work are impossible, they never mention actor's names. And they never tell you what's happening on the screen. A person who never saw a film, or never heard of a film, wouldn't know from these books that people came to see those pictures to see certain actors with certain personalities perform. It's amazing, because, as Sternberg shows in his book, the whole problem of a director is how to find out what an actor can do and how to get him or her to do it. And I can tell just from experience, because I was married to Eddie Sutherland and I rememeber he would come home every night after work, throw his feet down on the couch, grab a martini and start talking about Bill (W. C.) Fields: what he did at home, what he did in the scene, what is going to do tomorrow. He wasn't occupied with the lighting or the camera or the costumes or the scenery, but with his actors, which is the whole essence of direction. And of course, in stating his case against Dietrich, Stenberg talks about this over and over, endlessly. Incidentally, his book is very well written. He wrote it himself, and it was wonderful cross-cutting, and movement back and forth in time. It's really an expert job of editing. But to go on - he does a marvelous portrait, of course, of Dietrich. and he does also a grand, illuminating portrait of (Emil) Jannings, because everything he writes about Jannings, his malice and his fights, his jealousy and how he tries to foul up the other actors so he could steal the scene, and his cattiness, you now it's true. You see all this on the screen when you see Janning's pictures, you know it's true. But to go back to Dietrich, the most marvelous things about Sternberg's direction, whether he knew it or not, but in telling about Dietrich he solves the terrific mistery of her mistery! You know, most directors, or at least all directors whom I've worked for, give the choreography, the action and the words, and leave you inner thoughts alone because on the screen, like in life, a person is doing one thing and thinking another. Just as I'm talking to you now. You can also see that in Garbo, who I think is the greatest actress in the world, you can see that along with her actions in this wonderful, mysterious thought line moving below, but it's harmonious, she's at one with her thoughts. But Dietrich always used to mistify me because I wondered what she hell she was thinking about with that long, gorgeous stare. And of course he tells you in one simple line of direction: he said to her: ' Count six, and look at this lamp post as if you couldn't live without it'. So, giving her these strange thoughts which she was able to concentrate on to fill her mind, he also gave her this strange air of mistery, which of course she never had with any other director. He says that she used to work with other people and say: 'Oh, Joe, where are you?'. And you can understand why. He was the greatest director of women that ever, ever was. Most directors, you know, can direct certain women marvelously, and some can't direct them at all. But he could take the most gauche, awkward, sexless dame and turn her into a dynamo of sex. There are three marvelous examples, and all are full of contrasts; they are Dietrich, Evelyn Brent and Betty Compson. First, you see, he's a very dispassionate man. I can't imagine he ever was very much in love, because most men look at women and they feel either a sexual urge or not, but they never analyze it ... or they can't analyze it. And, you know, the direction, the terrible things that still go on, and go on from Mary Pickford - when every director says 'act like mary Pickford', and then Lillian Gish, Clara Bow or Garbo .... then Monroe and Bardot. That's the best most directors can do in trying to form an actress into an attractive shape. But he, that man, Sternberg, with his detachment, could look at a woman and say, this is beautiful about her and I'll leave it, not change it, and this is ugly about her, so I'll eliminate it. Take away the bad and leave what is beautiful so she's complete. As I say, with this Dietrich, if you ever saw her in those pre-Sternberg films, she was just a gallopping cow, dinamic, so full of energy and awkward, oh, just dreadful, and the first time he saw her, he saw her leaning against the scenery, very bored, because she was working in a play, Zwei Kravatten, and didn't give a damn. And he saw that and it was lovely. But all of her movements were horrible. So he simply cut out the movements and painted her on the screen in beautiful, striking poses staring at a lamp post. And in direct contrast was Evelyn Brent. I made a picture with her, and Evelyn's idea of acting was to march into a scne, spread her legs and stand flat-floated and read her lines with masculine defiance. Oh, I thought she was dreadful, and then I saw her in Underworld, and Sternberg softened her with all these feathers, and he never let her strike attitudes at all. He made her move, I remember the opening of Underworld ... he makes her entrance the loveliest, most feminine things, like bringing her from standing at the top of those stairs and reaching down, pulling up her derss, fixing her garter, I think. Anyhow it's lovely, it established her as lovely and feminine. And the other woman, who was so utterly feminine that she had no more impact than a powder puff, was Betty Compson in The docks of New York. Well, you know, Betty was so soft, so frail, so delicate, so empty headed that she was just meaningless on the screen, and he gave her emotional depth. He tells himself how he did it. For this one scene he had her sew the torn pocket back onto (George) Bancroft's coat. And of course every woman in the world knows that if she's in a tough situation with a man, that if she can prepare for his angry entrance by being found, you know, with a bit of sewing, stitching under the lamplight, that she's got everything going for her. And this is all I have to say about a really remarkable book.
During our subsequen interview Louise began to leaf through a book of film-star portraits of the '40s, and to comment on their rumored private sex lives
1982
LB	I don't think it matters. Oh, I mean, look at him! He was the boy next door and with her. That's funny. They became the all-American couple; she was a nymphomaniac and he was a homosexual, and there they were on the screen, the ideal couple for the cinema. Oh, yeah, well, they put Billy Haines out when they found out he was a homesexual. And they hate lesbians even more. See, I don't know what goes on in movies ...
JK	(indicating pictures in the book). There's Claire Bloom. And that's Jean Peters, she was married to Howard Hughes. Did you know Claire Bloom has just written her autobiography?
LB	Peters was the one married to Hughes? He's another one they say was a pansy. Did you know that?
JK	Well, if he was, he did it a lot from himself.
LB	All he did was look at movies and take drugs ... what was that drug he was on? And he was always surrounded by men. But what were the drugs he was using ... pills and things? Oh, well. Look, here's Cyd Charisse. She was a marvelous dancer, really wonderful.
JK	Did you see Singing' in the rain? Remember when Cyd did Louise Brooks?
LB	No, I was told about it. I was told she was going to do it. I've forgotten what she does ...
JK	Well, she comes on with their hair scalloped the way yours was, with the bangs and black shellac, and she comes into this club and she's a gangster's moll and dances with Gene Kelly.
LB	I heard him in an interview, a very interesting interview, and I thought it was a dead giveaway. He said: 'You know, it's a shame that a guy can't dance without being called a homosexual', and then he went into this long routine defending himself - you know, 'I'm married and have kids'. Now, look at Fred Astaire ... I don't think he had any sex life! (She bursts out laughing). But he got married again, didn't he? At eighty-two. Isn't he amazing? No one could dance like that. I didn't care for Ginger Rogers. He didn't care for Ginger Rogers either.
JK	Here's Clark Gable.
LB	Who told me that story about him? When he was out in location someplace where they had a public fountain to drink out of, and he took out both sets of his teeth and them washed them off! Isn't that marvelous? He's so natural.
JK	So wonderful for a man who had such a powerful image. I think it was Carole Lombard who, when somebody asked what it was like being married to the King of Hollywood, said that if his pecker was one inch shorter, he'd be called the Queen of Hollywood.
LB	Oh! Oh, his pecker! You know, a personality is a fashinating thing, isn't it? That's what it comes down to. This may be the most beautiful girl in the world, this the most ugly. In the end, it's personality. Look at Debbie Reynolds ... Jesus! She ruined Singin' in the rain for me. Oh, look, here's Ava Gardner. I just hate posed sex pictures. I must say, I never meant to look sexy in my pictures.
JK	I don't think she means to look sexy.
LB	Are you kidding?
JK	No, I think her head is somewhere else. It's a job. Like Marilyn Monroe who knew so well the art of the camera.
LB	Monroe had one great physical fault she overcome, that she had to overcome. Do you know what it was? When she smiled, her upper lip went right up under her nose. She had to learn to control it. Oh, I loved Marilyn in that thing where she lived upstairs. What was that? The seven year itch. She was no fool. She was very smart. What did she do? Accidentally take an overdose? You know, I'm taking that Valium, which is a tranquilizer. And you take more and more because they cease to affect you. And more and more and more and more, like Judy Garland and Elvis Presley, no matter who you are ...