A conversation with Louise Brooks

di Richard Leacock

 

"... as I understand it, when you decided to go, Pabst had never seen you, you'd never seen him, and I doubt if you even knew who he was"

"Well, let me tell you about it. In September 1928 1 had been three years at Paramount in Hollywood, and I was terribly in love with George Marshall, he was a very rich young laundry man, had made a fortune in Washington with his laundries. He later became the owner of the famous Redskin Football team. He called me one day and said, 'you know, in September, you know tomorrow your option comes up'. He called me from Washington. I said 'really'. He said  'your friend Monty Bell from MGM called me and told me all about it'. And he said  'now look, when you go in to see Mr. Schulberg he's going to tell you that he will keep you on at $750 a week but he wont give you a raise on your option' and he said  'I also know that some guy in Berlin called Pabst wants you for a very famous picture I hear. And he'll give you a thousand dollars a week.. So you let Schulberg talk and when he's finished you say, thank you Mr. Schulberg but I'll quit and go to Germany'. And that is what I did, much to Mr. Schulberg's surprise. And of course later he put out the story that I left because my voice was bad and didn't record well. So George wanted to go to Europe, and Pabst had never seen me, he'd seen one picture called A girl in every port [directed] by Howard Hawks... And of course I'd never heard of him, but we met on the platform of the station Am Zoo ... I don't know, it was just as if we had known each other for ever and it was marvelous... and it was the most curious experience I've ever had in my life, he understood me absolutely perfectly ... because that really was his genius"

"Now, he spoke English, but you didn't speak German, right?"

"I never learned to speak any language..."

"Did he speak good English?"

"Oh he spoke excellent English, he spoke rather slowly and precisely and I've heard him speak German, French, Czech, English and he speaks them all exactly the same, as if he is attaching his words to your brain..."

At this point a fuse blew and our lights went out ... delay!

"From what I understood you were given an English version of the script but from what I remember you started shooting immediately..."

"Yes, and although we'd never met and never seen each other and knew nothing about each other, I say there was this marvelous affinity between us; and the second thing was this terrible shock when he saw George Marshall, tall, handsome guy with a ..."

"Oh! He came with you?"

"Of course! That's why we went, because George didn't care about the film, he wanted to go to Europe for fun. And Pabst looked around and of course George was a huge, big, handsome, black-haired man with a drunken English valet. And don't forget, George was from West Virginia and he talked rather like that (spoken with a heavy southern drawl). And his valet staggering around with huge amounts of luggage and Pabst said ... and George explained who he was and immediately took charge of everything and Pabst was perfectly furious... and of course that was only the beginning, because every time we met I always had a guy, and a different guy and it was a long series, over the years, of his getting madder and madder; but at any rate we started the picture"

"So OK, I'm thinking of two things at once; how long did George last?"

"Well, he drove Pabst absolutely insane because we started the picture. You see, they'd been waiting me for a long time, he'd been looking all over Europe for a girl to play this part, and he was going to give it to ... to ... er Marlene Dietrich, she was too old and the girl ..."

"And this is the early, the early Dietrich"

"Yes, she was five years older than 1, I was 20, she was 25, but don't forget, she'd been around for years in Berlin where it was really rough ..."

"I remember the early Dietrich, it was the pre ..."

"The European when she was ... the Blue Angel"

"Yes"

"But you know, she was very knowing and suave, and as he said, onelook and Lulu would be dead. But at any rate, it was very hard to find a truly beautiful woman in Europe. Did you know that in Europe they weren't beautiful all over. And she came the closest and he said, 'the very day I got the cable from you saying that you would come, she was sitting in my office and I was going to sign her'"

"But what I'm trying to get at is something that I think you quote from ... um I think in your article which says Lulu is not a real character but ..."

"Exactly"

"But a compilation of primitive sexuality who inspired evil, unaware, she plays a purely passive role"

"Yes"

"Now you weren't aware of this, right?"

"No"

"You didn't even know who Lulu was!?"

"I'd never heard of Wedekind, I'd never heard of Pabst I didn't know anything, I never did"

"So he gave you a script"

"Oh yes, you want to know about the script. That was amusing. He had all these German Jewish assistants, that's one reason I could never understand the Jews turning on him, because most of the ones who did turn on him, had worked for him, he had given them their fist jobs, and they were very grand and they ordered me about...'Fraulein Brooks komen Sie hier!' and so on. He had to stop that, by the way, because I jumped, it was like they beat on my door 'Fraulein Brooks ... !' and he said 'Now Falkenberg, you mustn't do that, she gets very nervous'. But at any rate, they brought it to me with a great, how do you call it, manner. I was sitting on the set with Josephine and my bottle of Vermouth and they brought me a huge script, I say it was this thick. He always had a huge script, he never used it, because he knew every instant what he was going to do, weeks before! He never touched the script"

"But he knew it cold?"

"Yes. This was the script that they carried around; very important! In their white coats!"

"So he wasn't improvising the script?"

"He created all the time, he knew exactly. He had fun writing the script with the writer. They brought me this huge script, they put it on my lap and I looked at it. I had never read a script in my life! and I haven't yet! I opened it and read a few pages. I thought, oh my God! And it was very expensive, it was all translated! So I put it down by my chair and went on without it. When I came back it was gone. Zorn, Falkenberg ... Lothar Wolf[f]I liked, he was Pabst's assistant, he was a very nice man, adored Pabst... but one of them picked it up furiously! Josephine said 'you should have kept that!' Gee! I wish I had. It would be valuable now!"

"So actuary, when you got around to reading ... to discovering what Lulu was about ..."

"When I started writing here about ten years ago. I hadn't the vaguest idea ..."

"Twenty years after the film was made ..."

"Thirty! Let me finish about George Marshall because this is very funny. Pabst and George and Pabst's wife Trudi; she was quite young and had a little boy, I think he was about two, Peter who came to a tragic end. So Pabst and Trudi and Marshall and ... Marshall would take us ... Marshall had a gift for finding ... we'd go to Horsch's marvelous restaurant and always in tails. I don't think Pabst liked to get dressed up in tails and I don't think Trudi had many evening dresses. We had this wild week. I had to be on the set every morning, hot or cold, whether he used me or not, at nine o'clock, and George would have me up all night ... and Pabst was furious. We'd all go out to dinner and Trudi would glare at me and refuse to speak English and Pabst was furious with George and George didn't give a damn! He spent a week there, he had my manager-, he had appointed my manager whom I gave a hundred dollars a week to, he told me how to pay each person and... took him to all the most expensive bordellos ... oh he had an absolutely marvelous time. He was taking me to the theatre every night and I'd come on the set with klieg eyes ... and so Pabst was furious; he didn't ask when he was leaving but suddenly one morning; I remember, we were shooting the murder scene and ..."

 

"Where you murdered Doctor Schoen? [Schön]"

"Yes, and Kortner was wandering around testing chocolate syrup to see whether it was sweet enough, you know, he had a sponge ... and George came on the set and he said to Pabst, 'you'll be very happy' he said 'I'm leaving tomorrow!' And Pabst said 'I'm very happy ...' [LAUGHTER] So after that Pabst would not let me... every night someone would say to me, Louise does not go out to night! She goes to bed! So I would go to bed. The funny thing about Lulu was this; he knew instinctively that I was Lulu and that was fine in the picture. Making the movie was perfect, he just turned me loose and I'd be all right, but off the set, he wanted me to be an intelligent woman, a well disciplined actress, and I wasn't! He kept taking drinks out of my hand; seeing that I was kept in my room and ... and he was furious because he approached people intellectually and you couldn't approach me intellectually because there was nothing to approach! So he was always a little bit mad at me"

"But at the same time he was aware that you were a Lulu"

"Oh! Absolutely! But he didn't like it! You see, he was mad at George, he was mad at all the succession of men"

"Since you did not know the story, I've seen directors who take the actors and describe the whole motivation of the picture ..."

"I knew nothing about the film! Never did until ten years ago"

"I've seen the American film Love them and leave them which is very different from Pandora's box so I was wondering how he discussed the motivation; how did he work?"

"That's what I'm getting at. That is why, as I say, he was a great psychologist. He treated every one in a completely different manner. Most directors, most great directors, for instance Lubitsch, used the same technique with everyone. Lubitsch acted out every scene and acted it marvelously! I don't know whether I could have worked with him"

"Showing the actor how to do it"

"Every move! Every move! Eddie Goulding, the same way. He even showed Garbo how to cross the library, I mean the hotel lobby in Grand Hotel and he was right! Because they were extraordinary ... but most directors are terrible ... but Pabst never acted out anything and he treated everybody completely differently. For instance, he sat one day with me and we were chewing on some old sauerkraut or something and he said 'Louise! This afternoon you must cry!' and that's all he told me about the scene and I went into the scene and I cried. He would mostly give me a floor plan, he was more a choreographer with me, and I was a dancer, than anything else ... you come in slowly and you do this ... and this is the situation ..." and that was the end"

"Did he know that you were a dancer?"

"Yes, I say we knew each other. He found out during the picture. In the very first sequence I do a dance, old Shigoisch [Schigolch] is playing the violin or something and Pabst said '... just make up some silly little dance ...' and so of course, I went into an old Denis Shawn routine and when the scene was finished he grabbed me and said 'Ah! But you are a dancer!', not a very good one! But, but what I'm getting at is, that he treated everyone completely different. Now Kortner, the great actor from the theater! He would take him aside and he'd rehearse very carefully, they would talk over everything, but that didn't really mean anything because Pabst never wanted a set performance! He wanted it to be new and... so he would fool Kortner, for instance in the murder scene, to go back to that. I told you, Kortner had it all worked out and Pabst agreed, yes, so we started, mostly in a two shot, the gun going off, so Pabst kept changing the set up. Or he would take the gun out of Kortner's hand at a different time, so that in the end you see, Kortner wasn't giving a set performance at all. Of course any director can keep an actor fresh but he always treated Kortner as if he was going to do exactly the way that they had talked about. Kortner began to bellyache about his back, this marvelous back being humped over so many scenes, and he said  'but you're only showing Miss Brooks ...' and this started the thing that he was spoiling me ... This was a difficult picture because we were all difficult, the old man, was difficult, he was always getting drunk ..."

"Shigolsch [Schigolch], but he should be ..."

"He was a marvelous actor ..."

"But he was right!"

"Yes he ..."

"... a dirty old man, maybe your father! And maybe your lover!"

"He was marvelous, he was perfect. He stunk! But the one he had real trouble with was Alice Roberts, her husband had put some money into the picture, she was a Belgium, is it Belgium? Yes?"

"Belgian, yes"

"Belgium ... Alice Robear [PHONETICALLY]"

"I always thought it was Roberts [AS IN ENGLISH]"

"You're just a lousy American!"

"That's right!"

"But she spoke just enough English to insult me! She was very tall and precise ..."

"But did she have any idea that she was to play a lesbian?"

"No! That's the joke!"

"She was the Countess Geschwitz"

"Yes, and the scene she played, this was the very first scene she played in this picture, the wedding night when Kortner finds me dancing the tango with her, we are having a love affair on the side, ... I've forgotten her name, the Countess something, you just said it ..."

"The Countess Geschwitz"

"Well I'll call her Alice Roberts ... she rehearsed the scene [SINGING] Adios muchachos ... and she absolutely froze! And walked off the set , and Pabst, he was always very calm, and I thought, gee this is pretty funny because I'd known lesbians all my life ..."

"I think you said that your best friend was a lesbian ..."

"I was just reliving Lulu but I thought; now, what the hell is he going to do? Well, pretty soon he went off and I saw them talking, she in her black satin dress, and he was talking to her in French ... and pretty soon they came back and she was smiling, and this is what he did. He let her look like as cross as possible in a two-shot because it was marvelous, she looked like a very repressed lesbian who was hiding ... that glare! ... Then when he did close-ups with her, he would stand off and play the scene with her so that she could do a true love scene with him!  [LAUGHS] And she turned out to be marvelous. He was a director like ... almost every director follows a pattern, pretty much treats everyone the same, but he didn't"

"This scene had repercussions later on didn't it? One of the scenes, if I remember rightly, was completely cut out in England; in America it survived"

"Oh no, they showed it in the States. What really killed the picture for us was the talkies [WHICH] came in just at that time. I remember it ran on 55th street and they asked me to kind of make a personal appearance. I'd never seen it. I never saw it until I came-here in '56 and Jimmy Carr showed it to me. And I wouldn't go"

"You mean you'd never seen it?"

"No"

"There is another question I want to ask in relation to Pabst. During the making of the film did you see the rushes?"

"No! He ... That's where he was very good, I said I didn't care to see the rushes any more than I care to hear this [INTERVIEW] but when we made Diary one day he said 'you did that scene very well, come on in ...'well, where ever he ran the rushes, 'come into the studio' and I went in and I was just horrified and I heard him say to Faulkenberg 'great mistake! Never do that again, never!' and that was it, he never did that again so I never knew at all, and never want to"

"What horrified you about it?"

"About it?"

"I mean, because you looked gorgeous ..."

"Well you know ... don’t you see, that's why I was never an actress. I never was in love with myself. I would go to a party and I'd see Dolores Del Rio and Constance Talmadge and Constance Bennett ... all these beautiful women and I'd say, you're the ugliest one here, you're black and furry, you've got freckles, your dress is not as attractive ... in the end ... so, unless ... you can't be a great actress unless you think you're beautiful and you ... it's of the essence"

"I'm wondering in what sense you mean a great actress, because you're a contradiction of this ..."

"No! To be a great actress you must know what you are doing. When I write my little pieces I know exactly what I am doing. When I acted I hadn't the slightest idea of what I was doing; I was simply playing myself, which is the hardest thing in the world to do. You can give most actors any part in the world and they can play it but you say 'be yourself' and they get terribly self-conscious. This is why I never learned to act. I never had any trouble playing myself"

"Was Pabst involved in choosing your costumes, in your taste and-the way you used your body?"

"He went to every fitting with me, he chose all my costumes. And for instance the wedding dress, we got into a fight about that because I said 'why have you got my train tied all around my waist for God's sake? It looks silly!' He said 'you've got the train tied on because when you get in a fight in the bedroom scene you mustn't have that train and you've got to sit down and untie it ... and will you shut up!' Everything, the material ... the costume in the nightclub was just two strips over my bosom; he would test all these things out. But what was I getting at? Something about Pabst and clothes. Oh! then, I'll never forget, he went to my trunk in the hotel Eden and he said 'now look, lets go through your clothes, you have to pick out something for the last scene when you are down and out in London and whoring'. And he went through everything ... dozens and Josephine pulled out all these things and finally he picked out my favorite suit, it was blue ... that's what makes it work ... In America, the United States, most directors have no idea what a girl should wear in a picture. The dress designer would come down on the set with a lot of designs, the director would look at them, okay them and that was all, he was not connected in any way really, with the picture except in the direction. The same about the set, Pabst himself, some days, would go around if he wanted shadows for instance going up into the attic in London where they lived. These marvelous stairs and Pabst himself would supervise the spraying of what you make it smoky with. Everything was integrated with him. So back to the suit, I said  'well that’s my favorite suit and it's damned expensive!' and he said 'no no, that's all right ...' So he took it away and the morning came to shoot the scene and Josephine disappeared and came back with my suit ..."

"It was your own suit? Right?"

"He often used my clothes.. half the clothes would be mine because he changed the scene and I ... he'd say 'bring me a dressing gown ...' bring anything and so on ... so she came back with my costume and I looked at it. My God! The skirt had been torn and ripped and dipped in oil, the lovely blouse was a mess, the coat he threw away ... I only wore the blouse and I began to weep ... I said, but that's my suit ... oh, it's the way he did things that was so amusing, because anybody else would have gotten some rag tag ... bought something to do that ... but he wanted something that was mine, that I loved, so that I would feel terrible in it and I did ... you know ... my beautiful suit and it was ruined so it made me feel like this ... and that's how I was in the end of the picture ..."

"This, compounded with the fact that the man who played Jack the Ripper was someone that you found enormously attractive ..."

"Yes ... he was very clever about knowing whom I found attractive, that's why I couldn't go out with this one or that one you see, 'but you can go out with him!'. He knew that I detested Franz Lederer, who later became Frances [Francis]Lederer here in America, he ... he felt that I was important since Pabst was so fond of me that he should pretend to be in love with me, that's a great actor's trick, so he would bring me his photograph and give it to Josephine; he didn't speak English, so he would bring a bouquet of flowers and of course I would be very annoyed. Alva loved this because he's a very weak man in the film as Dr. Schon's son and I don't really like him in the picture, when I kissed him and made love to him I was just doing it to pass the time. But the moment that Diesel [Diessl] came on the set for something or other, I don't think he (Pabst) had given him the part yet, they were very close friends, Diesel [Diessl] worked in practically every picture that Pabst made until he (Diesel) [Diessl] died ... and he (Pabst) saw that we just adored each other and I think that was the happiest scene of the whole picture, the final scene which he did ... he (Pabst) shot as much as possible in sequence, he could do that because it was almost all interior, in the studio and he had all the sets built and ready to go when we started. And this was very intimate, there was only Diesel [Diessl] ... and I and the cameraman and they didn't have a huge staff the way they have now, and we had a lovely time between scenes. Here he is with a knife which he's going to stick up into my interior, thrown on the table and we'd be singing and I'd be doing the charleston, you know most actors and directors, between scenes in a tragic thing like this ... they're all getting into the mood of the nude, as we say in Kansas, and concentrating perhaps on the dialogue ... Pabst said I needed music because it was the fashion in America ... he had an old piano player ... I really didn't want it ... and it was very useful between scenes. So as I said, we had a wonderful time, Diesel [Diessl] and I and Pabst, laughing and talking we'd do this whole tragic ending, you would never know, you'd think we were ... it was a Christmas party!"

"I'm tempted to ... I was very impressed reading last night in your article on this whole thing ... to me it’s ... it sort of gave me goosepimples, can you read it without glasses?"

"No ..."

"Because I can ..."

"No, you read it ..."

"I'm not sure that I can ... I’m getting old ... 'it is in the worn and filthy garments of the street walker that she feels passion for the first time; comes to life so that she may die; when she picks up Jack the Ripper on the foggy London street, he tells her he has no money to pay her, she says "never mind, I like you". It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood, death by a sexual maniac'. I think you wrote that ... not Wedekind ..."

"[INDIFFERENTLY] Yes.. Yes ..."

"To me it is very moving ... Now, what haven't we talked about?"

"Well, let me go on chronologically ... oh you want to talk about Lulu?"

"I'd sort of like to ... What intrigues me is the Lulu in real life. To what extent ... having made the film not knowing really what Lulu was about ... to what extent has your life been, in a sense, a life of Lulu ... and I'm wondering about other people ..."

"Well, let me go on with the story and I'll get to that. We finished the picture at the end of November and I returned to New York and George Marshall met me. Now mind you, he loved beautiful women and he loved famous women and my being a famous actress was part of his affection for me. So I got back to New York and he said now, we've opened up a new company, RKO-1 Joseph Kennedy has formed the company and they want you to sign a contract. And I said no, I said I hate California and I'm not going back! Now George was a man who never said anything, he never complained to me about anything, he always went into action ... So I went over and they said 'we'll give you five hundred a week to do ...'. I think they wanted to do a well known book called Bad girl, I think they finally did it at Universal. And I said 'Well ... no' I said flatly 'I don't want to do it'. So George didn't say anything ... We went back to the Lombardy, he had a couple of drinks and he gave me one shove and knocked me against the bed and I split my head wide open ... I'd been wearing my hair up ... so I put my bangs back. Then he said 'Well ... what do you want to do?' and I said 'I don't know' ... so he went back to Washington and left me there in a huge suite at the Lombardy and as usual I was running out of money; although I made an awful lot of money it seemed to disappear all the time and of course he would spend a lot of money on me too and he didn't like that a terrible lot and so ... we got into a fight and I ... disappeared ... with another man ... and, about that time, in April, I got a cable from Mr. Pabst and he said that Rene Clair was making a picture Prix De Beauté in Paris and he wants you to play the part ... so come at once! He always gave me orders, so I ... although I wouldn't go to Hollywood, I would go to Mr. Pabst. So I got on a boat and I got there in May and I went to get photographed, still, publicity pictures made with René Clair, who spoke very little English. He was a very small, demure, rather fragile man..."

"I never met him, I've always admired him enormously"

" ... and he took me back to the hotel in a cab afterwards. We finished the photographs and were riding down the Champs Elysèes and he said 'Look, you know I'm not going to make this picture', he said  'Dr. Pinet says they haven't any money even to start the picture, it'll be months before they get it together ... I'm backing out and if you're wise you will too'. I said 'Well, I have a contract and it's all signed and sealed in New York and George Marshall made it so that I can't get out of it, I'll have to do it'. Well, exit Rene Clair. So there I was, holed up in the Royal Monceaux with nothing to do. I didn't know anybody and all of a sudden Mr. Pabst appeared. He was on his way to London and he asked me out, and this is a rather strange happening. I went with him and Dr. Pinez and somebody else and they said 'where do you want to go?' and I said Chez Laurent, it was a place with a colored band, I went there every night. So we went there and we sat down and Pabst wasn't pleased with me, I was drinking. His idea of a drink for me was a fruit salad in a pitcher surrounded by a little Champagne, a Kaiser Cup or some such thing, but I was drinking a brandy or something ... and over across the way I saw Townsend Martin, he was one of the aristocrats in New York who'd gone into movies and wrote the script, incidentally, for Love 'em and leave 'em but he quit then, he didn't care, he was rich; and there he was, sitting with this great English lady, the Honorable Mrs. Daisy Fellows, did you ever hear of her? ..."

"No"

" ... well she had a yacht and Townsend loved money, like all rich people. So I was very bored with the people I was with ... and sent the waiter over to tell Mr Martin to come to my table .. he was in love with me, we'd come over on the Ile de France together. He didn't come ... and Mr. Pabst, in the usual German fashion, had given me a bouquet of roses, a cluster of roses ... well, finally Townsend came over, and he was a tall blond man and he bent over to me and he said 'I'm terribly sorry Louise but I couldn't leave Daisy alone..' Whereupon I took this bouquet and sliced him across the face, leaving a trickle from the thorns ..."

"Of blood?!"

"Of blood of course ..."

"Oh marvelous ..."

"And he was a gentleman and he laughed ... but Mr. Pabst ... I thought he was going to kill me right there, and all the men sitting at the table ... and Mr. Pabst said  'Oh! I'm terribly sorry ...'. He knew Carlton ... Carlton said  'that's all right ...' he said, so Mr. Pabst grabbed me and took me back to the Royal Monceaux. The next morning he said he had to go on to London, so we said good-bye and I thought nothing more about it. So I went down to Cannes, my rich friends had paid my fare, I was getting a thousand a week but they paid my fare to Cannes and set me up in a hotel ... no, we went to Antibe and I stayed there for a week and came back and they still didn't have a director for Prix de beauté". Then the phone rang one morning and said 'Louise? Mr. Pabst!'. I said 'yes', he said  'I'm going to make a picture with you in it and you're to come to Berlin'. I said 'All right' and he said  'Now of course it's my company and I can't pay you a thousand a week, I'll give you $500 and you get on the train and come'. So I got on the train and I went and that is how we came to make Diary but then again, this time I had in tow the Eskimo. He was half Swedish and half English, a darling boy! They had sent him to Lon ... to Paris to work in a bank there but he would turn up in the morning in tails so he got fired! He was living on a small allowance and I met him at a party and he came to live with me and so naturally when I went to ... they called him the Eskimo because his hair was perfectly blonde so it looked like a fur cap, so he was called the Eskimo. So when I got off the train and I had a ... my finger was broken because I had shut the door and I had to be taken at once to have my fingernail taken off, and there was the Eskimo and he (Mr. Pabst) said 'And who is this?', and I said 'The Eskimo! The Baron Biek!'; he was really a Baron but that didn't impress Pabst ... so all the time we made Diary I had Eskie in tow ..."

"Wait ... you had Eskie, who else was in your entourage, who sort of traveled with you?"

"That's all ..."

"Just the two of you ... huh? I'm beginning to have visions of your maid ..."

"No, no! Oh the maid, only the maid ..."

"Only your maid ..."

"Yes, so ... er ... but Mr. Pabst was very firm about the Eskimo. The Eskimo would come to the studio every day, he would get up at about eleven, he'd go to the Eden bar and bring out a lot of cold meats and Mr. Pabst and he and I would have lunch. When we went to do the location shots at the end of the picture, Mr Pabst took me aside and said 'you are not to bring that boy with you, do you understand?' and so I did not bring him along ... and an amusing thing about how clever Mr. Pabst was with me; our cameraman on that picture was Seff Algier [Sepp Algeier], he's the one that made six pictures with Leni Riefenstahl including Pitzpaloo [The white hell of Pitz Palu] with Pabst and he also shot Triumph of the will for Leni ... do you know, she had 18 cameramen on that picture and forty-four on Olympia! Can you imagine? Oh, so I liked Seff  [Sepp Algeier]very much, he was the only cameraman I was always really attracted to. He was a beautiful Austrian blonde, marvelous muscles, a champion skier, and one day he even came on the set in his shorts, and Mr. Pabst said 'what are you doing coming out here?' 'Well he's showing his muscles ... go out and put your pants on'. One night in a hotel there was practically no one there except us, every one had gone to bed except Seff  [Sepp Algeier] and I and we were sitting at the bar. He was drinking beer and I was having something, we were having a lovely time, the whole place to ourselves when suddenly the bar door opened and Pabst stuck his head in and said  'Louise! Go to bed!' ... how he knew we were there I don't know, and he gave Seff  [Sepp Algeier] a dirty look and so we disappeared. What else do you want to know about Diary?"

"You did mention that you were drinking ..."

"Oh, I didn't drink much then, no, no"

"No?"

"Well, drinking was part of life, I grew up in that prohibition and everyone drank"

"There is something I'd like to know more about. As a boy, I must have been thirteen, someone in London took me to a dance recital. I'd never been to a dance recital, I'd been to the Ballet but this was modern dance and the name (of the dancer) stuck indelibly in my head, I don't know a blessed thing about dance; it was Valeska Gert, I remember it vividly because she had a very loose costume on, and her breasts kept flapping out, and I was terribly impressed. So then I saw the credits on The diary of a lost girl and there was that name and then, to make another huge jump, the name appeared again on Fellini's Eight and a half  [8 1\2] ... so you knew her and worked with her"

"She asked me out too because I adore going to lesbian and pansy places and those were among the things I wasn't allowed, so Pabst very cleverly told her that I didn't like ... he didn't say I didn't like her but he said that in our scenes she'd been rather rough, if you remember she was the head of the reformatory and I was one of the inmates and that is when she does the wonderful scene of the orgasm which was cut in most places ... It's marvelous ... oh she was great, Pabst's reaction to actresses is very interesting, he adored Valeska Gert and he used her in three picture, he used her in Diary, Joyless Street ... she played the marvelous scene with the butcher where instead of ..."

"I haven't seen that ..."

"Oh it's wonderful, it's all set up, the man who set it up was the big fat butcher, to have an affair with Garbo, and he's sitting there with pail, languid (Garbo), and suddenly over the screen which is dark at the top, you know those French screens, through the screen he sees this leering face with a slight black moustache. In fact she was the Madame, so he says to hell with this milkless, bloodless thing and goes to bed with Gert ... oh it was a wonderful scene ... Pabst adored Gert ..."

"He (Pabst) would be on the set at seven in the morning, with the cameraman and by nine o'clock he and the cameraman ... he was behind the camera almost as much as the cameraman, everything was so easy, there was no strain about it ever ..."

"I was fascinated with Pabst and his women, how he felt about them. Garbo, when I met Pabst in '28, he said you've met Garbo, I said yes. Do you know her pretty well? I said pretty well, one's always very careful of this; oh he raved about her and one day we had tea in his apartment, Heinrich Mann and other people, a very intellectual tea and very boring, but he took me to a big cupboard and he had just hundreds of stills of Garbo. Oh he thought she was marvelous, and he showed me all these stills and talked about her and talked about her and then he talked about Lilli [Lili]Damita. Damita was the one who went to America and married Errol Flynn. She was a Portuguese girl who grew up in France and had the most beautiful body I ever saw; not the face ... not so good, and she never was a success ... but she had the temper of an absolute devil. I got in a fight with her once and she damn near killed me. So one night, after the bouquet incident, back in a night club in Berlin, Pabst said ... you know I haven't forgotten that ... you make me think of Lilli [Lili] Damita, he said, she's the only girl... Lilli [Lili] incidentally was a lesbian, he said  'We were sitting in this very restaurant with Lilli  [Lili] Damita and she got mad at someone across the room and she picked up one of those big iron ashtrays we used to have and threw it across the room and missed this man by just that and broke the mirror...' and somehow I could tell he had forgiven me but he never forgave Lita and I'm talking about people who worked with him, Lita ... that's a person he hated and he usually didn't talk about her ..."

"In your article you describe Pabst, in relation to Pandora's box where in a sense you felt that Pabst was also acting the role of Dr. Schön in relation to you, and I think you say that he was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth ..."

"... sexual love ..."

"... it was sexual hate which engrossed his whole being with flaming reality ..."

"Yes, he didn't believe in any kind of ... he was not a sentimental man which was the one thing that made him great because that didn't bother him. But I want to finish this. The other woman who had such an influence on his life and connected him so closely to Nazism was that Leni Riefenstahl. He had made Pitzpaloo [The white hell of Pitz Palu]with her before he made Diary. I'd heard a lot about all the dangers of Pitzpaloo [The white hell of Pitz Palu] and I knew she was a good friend of Seff Alger's [Sepp Algeier]... but suddenly she started coming on the set every day.. and she was a strange looking girl, front face she had a rather oval face, mildly pretty, and the profile was sharp, intelligent, a hook nose, a strong strong face ... but she came on the set to make love to Mr. Pabst and that made me mad because I was the star of the picture. She had beautiful legs and that annoyed me too, and she would always be grabbing him and taking him off to corners, and I watched all the time to see how he reacted to her and although now she talks as if she could just twist him around her fingers but she worked out on him and of course she learned from him ... oh, she was very intelligent, she learned an enormous amount about directing from him ... but I knew she was trying to wheedle him into using her in a picture, and I would watch him and he was so clever, and so nice but he always pushed her away"

"You know Leni Riefenstahl did an hour's TV show on Camera Three telling about how abused she'd been and what not. She told some terrible lies ... she said she didn't know in 1939 until she went to New York, and the reporters asked her if she'd heard about the persecution of the Jews and she said no, she hadn't heard a thing about it, she thought it was just an ugly rumor, propaganda ... so she's been all these years trying to put Pabst into the Nazis ..."

"I want to get back to Pabst and his feel for materials and clothes. When we did the scene in Diary, Fritz Raft [Fritz Rasp], as you know, plays the role of the chemist ... er ... chemist's assistant, who seduces me first, and come the time when we were to do the scene where he has made me promise that I would get out of bed at eleven at night and come down and meet him in the pharmacy so that he ... Pabst went through a lot of nightgowns, felt them and finally he picked out a nightgown and now, he said, you've got a lot of Japanese robes of silk like this but softer ... he said let’s go and look in your trunk, so we went and looked in my trunk and he picked out a soft blue and white one and he said, that's it, so I wake up in bed and I get up and I come down, and the scene begins where we talk and then Ralph [Fritz Rasp] holds me and then we turn and ... he was a very big man which helped, and I liked him very much of course ... and then I faint and fall down and just ... in one marvelously graceful swoop, he picks me up ... just like a beautiful piece of silk ... and that's all! Really, sex is so different now, isn't it? But you got more sex out of that scene ... just the way he picked me up and moved out through the curtains ... They cut the scene where he takes me up to bed and the wine is spilt across the bed. This was all a scene of touch ... almost no words ... it was really a ballet!"

"At Eastman House, Jim Card showed me a print of  Love 'em and leave 'em and almost every other scene seems to be a title. You see somebody talking and then there is a title, you see somebody talking and there's another title, title, title title ... and then you look at a Pabst picture and my memory of that is very few titles. There are titles but dialogue titles are very few"

"Is that right?"

"It seems sought of magic, so much of it is done visually, to act from dialogue to dialogue ..."

"You know I think you are right, contrary to the opinions of peoples jokes, that you could say anything and be vulgar and talk about other things while you were playing a scene .. it wasn't true ... because all the dialogue I ever spoke, and usually I spoke it in German ... for instance when ..."

"You were given German lines to read?"

"Well, he usually directed in German, but I remember when I looked down I said 'Der Blut' that was one of my best German lines ... Oh I must tell you about that, German ... Pabst directed almost entirely in German because he had this thing, and he hadn't much to say to me and I learned a few words ... so we did a scene where I run out of the apothecary to find the housekeeper who was played by Ludmila Schmidt, she jumped out of the window and I find her ... so I rushed out the door and stopped, he said 'Duer! Louise, Duer! Damn it! can't you speak English?' [Die Tür zu, Die Tür ist zu]. So I stopped dead, then I looked around and realized that if I didn't shut the door it wasn't lighted er ... it wasn't lighted to leave the door open. He would get so confused ... that's why I think he directed mostly in German ... after that I learned what it means to close the door ..."

"I'm wondering about your life today, I know you're writing a lot ..."

"I just live very quietly here. I don't live any differently than I've always lived. I remember in New York, sometimes the maid or some one would be sent to knock on my door, I wouldn't go out for a week. It's always been my habit to live very much alone but once in a while I miss very much knowing brilliant and intelligent people from whom I've learned everything. I've even forgotten ... I was rereading that marvelous book, South Wind by Norman Douglas ... I hadn't read it since I was young and I was astonished, I couldn't remember the meaning of the words and couldn't pronounce half of them, my vocabulary has decreased to nothing because I don't meet any brilliant people anymore, I'm just left with myself and my writing ..."

Richard Leacock, Conversation with Louise Brooks, New York, 1973


Index ] Pagina superiore ] Louise Brooks, intervista-scritto francese ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Ruth Waterbury ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Vincenzo Mollica ] Louise Brooks, intervista di George Fronval ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Kenneth Tynan ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Vibeke Brodersen ] Louise Brooks, intervista di John Kobal II ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Chris Chase ] Louise Brooks, intervista di John Kobal III ] Louise Brooks, intervista di John Kobal I ] Louise Brooks, intervista di J. Vincent Brechignac ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Patrice Hovald ] [ Louise Brooks, intervista di Richard Leacock ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Donald McNamara ] Louise Brooks, intervista di Kevin Brownlow ] Louise Brooks, intervista del Washington Post del 29 Luglio 1928 ] Louise Brooks, intervista del Washington Post del 21 Marzo 1926 ] Louise Brooks, intervista del Daily Mirror del 30 Novembre 1925 ]