Newspaper readers got a shock of surprise the other day when they read
how Miss Louise Brooks, a rising young movie actress, was demanding that
John De Mirjian, the well known photographer, stop selling or circulating in
any other way certain photographs of her which he had made when she was a
chorus girl on the Broadway stage.
This was certainly a very
unusual stand for an actress and former chorus girl to take. Ordinarily such
young women are delighted to have their portraits circulated just as widely
s possible and their usual complaint is that they are not getting all the
photograpic publicity to which they think their beauty ought to entitle them.
But Louise Brooks made it plain
that she was, in this respect, a most exceptional woman of the stage. When
Mr. De Mirjian did not pay proper heed to her written and spoken protests in
the matter, she engaged a lawyer and had him bring suit to restrain the
photographer from passing out any more of the pictures she had decided to be
objectionable.
Mr. De Mirjian
specializes, it should be explained, in what he is pleased to call 'draped'
photographs, but many would think they would be more accurately called 'undraped'.
In these pictures the subject wears only a single piece of drapery that is
flung carelessly about her, covering sometimes one portion of the body and
sometimes another, but always leaving a liberal expanse of flesh quite
unclothed.
The easy grace with which
the scarf is draped and the contrast between this dark folds and the pink
and white of the flesh are thought by many connoisseurs to get off the
beauties of a woman's face and figure to great advantage and to make the
pictures real works of art. Consequently, they have been in great demand
among famous beauties and also among the theatrical managers who exploit and
glorify feminine charms.
Then why should Miss
Brooks, herself much admired as a beauty, object to these photographs?
Why should a former
chorus girl who has repeatedly capered about the stage in very scanty
costumes object to the circulation of pictures of herself posed in the way
Mr. De Mirjian and many others think so alluring?
And why on earth, if she
feels such compunctions against these photographs now, did she ever pose for
them in the beginning?
Louise Brooks has what she thinks very good
reasons for her attitude. Some of them are ones of self-interest and others
are based on high moral grounds which she feels should apply to every woman.
Let Miss Brooks explain in her own words.
"My first reason for seeking to enjoin Mr. De Mirjian from circulating my
photographs" says Miss Brooks "is a purely selfish one. I am not longer a
chorus girl. I have embarked on a serious career as a motion pictures
actress. And I fear it will injure my chances of success in my new
profession to have those draped photographs of myself scattered about the
country.
"In my new profession I am called upon to play many innocent heroines, girls
who are models of modesty and respect for all the time-honored conventions.
In fact, my directors tell me that these are the roles for which I am
preeminently suited".
"It would be too great a shock. I fear, for moviegoers who had admired me in
one of these roles to come across a photograph of me as I looked when I posed
before Mr. De Mirjian's camera wearing only a carelessly flung scarf, with
sometimes a pair of sandals. The contrast would be pretty certain to
destroy or weaken some of the illusions of innocence and unsophistication my
acting had created on the screen".
"So I feel it my plain duty to myself to divorce my new career completely
from the one I followed as a chorus girl by putting a stop to the
circulation of these photographs".
"I do not think there is anything essentially immoral or immodest in the
photographs of me or in many of the similar pictures of other young women
which Mr. De Mirjian has made. If I had thought so, I certainly never would
have posed for them".
"But I do think that such photographs ought to be restricted to art lovers
who can appreciate their aesthetic qualities and to the legitimate purposes
of theatrical exploitation. Because I fear that my pictures may be given a
far wider distribution, because I am afraid they may be put indiscriminately
into the hands of all sorts and conditions of people, is one of the main
reasons why I want them taken out of circulation".
"I am not playing the hypocrite as many people seem to think. I am not the
least bit ashamed of my chorus girls days and I do not think the often
rather scanty costume worn in the modern revues and musical plays is the
least immoral or immodest. They are in many cases necessary for dancers to
do their best and they all help to heighten the beauty of these stage spectacles".
"But there would, of course, be shocking immodesty in wearing such costumes
out on the street or into a drawing room. It was on this very principle that I
was acting when I instructed my lawiers to bring suit against Mr. DeMirjian".
"Somebody has said that modesty
is something that is continually varying with
the time and the place and the person involved, and I think this is very
true. A decollete evening gown is perfectly all right at the dinner hour and
after, but its wearer's modesty would be seriously questioned if she wore it
earlier in the day".
"According to the conventions the one-piece bathing suit that is allowed on
certain beaches can never toleraded in the ballroom. And I have known many
chorus girls who looked perfectly modest in certain very scanty costumes,
while other girls, in precisely the same costumes, could not keep from
appearing shockingly immodest".
"Since I have changed my profession I must change my standards of modesty.
The standard that I had to conform to when I was a chorus girl will not do
now that I have be come a movie actress".
The line that separates modesty from immodesty is so finely drawn and is so
constantly varying according to the time and the place and the persons
involved that philosophers have never been able to agree about where it
should be placed and some of them think it can never be permanently fixed.
The widespread belief that certain things which are perfectly proper in one
place are not at all so in another often gives rise to many puzzling and
rather comical situations. One such arose in the little New Hampshire
village of Hanover one day this winter while the students of Dartmouth
college were entertaining hundreds of guests from far and near at their
famous annual carnival of winter sports.
The telephone in the office of one of the college officials rang. The call
was
from a prominent woman resident of the town and she had an indignant
complaint to lodge with the college authorities.
"There are the most disgraceful goings on at the fraternity house next door"
she said excitedly. "Two of the students and two of their girl guests are out
on the front porch nothing on - with nothing on but bathing suits!".
"They are climbing up on the porch rail and jumping head over heels
into the snowdrifts. I was never so shocked in my life. It is positively
indecent for them to be performing like that with nothing more on than they've
got, and I think something ought to be done about it".
The college
authorities investigated. They find the young men and the women doing
exactly as the telphone report had said. They were taking the snow baths,
they said, becase they found them excellent fun and also because they
thought them splendidly invigorating and the best possible preventives of
colds.
But the college
officials, seeing that the snow bathers were clothes in suits that would be
regarded as ultra modest in any bathing beach in the country, allowed them
to continue their unusual sport without interference.
The woman who
telephoned the protest remains shocked and indignant. She is
firmly convinced that the morals of the college and the town have gone to
ruin. In her estimation the bathing suits that are perfectly proper on a
summer beach become scandalously immodest things when
worn to dive from a fraternity house porch into 3-foot snowdrifts in zero
water.
Some champions of modesty carry their ideas to such extremes that they would
bar from our art galleries the classic statues of ancient Greece or have them
covered with concealing draperies. "When the artistic value of a work of art is
universally recognized as very high then those who would withdraw it from
the public gaze reveal thereby their own state of mind" says Prof. Herbert
Sidney Langfeld, of Harvard University.
"To insist on the draping of Greek statues of the classical period is not so
much a crime against art as it is an insult to the community".
"On the other hand, it
is even more reprehensible to appeal, as is frequently
done, to the baser motives of the human race under cover of art. Even when
the object has some artistic value, it is very probale that the public will
not respond as intended to the art form, but rather to the suggestive
content".
"It ceases to be as object of art and there exists
then sufficient reason why it should be withdrawn from that particular
community"
"Even the statue of
the Venus de Milo or Praxitele's Hermes would have no place in an
environment where it was accepted merely as the representation of a naked
human form".
Anonimo,
Where and why Miss Brooks draws the line, "Washington Post", March
21, 1926. Lo stesso articolo apparve, nello stesso
giorno, sul "Philadelphia Inquirer" (riprodotto in parte nella biografia di
Barry Paris, p. 117) e sul
"Sacramento Union" |