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A conversation with Louise Brooks di Donald McNamara |
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THE TYNAN PROFILE
As you know, Lotte Eisner has written several
great books. She was one of the first who started me on my second period of
fame which began in the Fifties when she got Henri Langlois to show Pandora's box and Diary of a lost girl at the Cinémathèque. In 1958 I went
over to Paris for this homage. And Lotte was with me every day. She gave me
an education. You know, I really am a student. Well, I really am. I'm a
learner. The first time I saw Love 'em and leave 'em was in 1958. I was
sitting in the projection room at the Cinematheque with all these people,
and everyone would laugh at these scenes I was in. And I realized that I was
funny. But I was pretty serious because Frank Tuttle, the director, was
smart not to tell me that I was supposed to be funny. The sound of my voice - that is not the pioneer woman! I don't want to hear my voice. I have heard it in talking pictures and in everything. I remember Tynan was playing it back. You see, most people adore hearing themselves. Tynan taped me because he loved to hear himself - that Cambridge accent. You know, when I quit Paramount I wouldn't do the talking version of a picture called The Canary murder case. I said I hate Hollywood and I'm not going to go back. I don't care how much money you offer me, I won't take it! I hate Paramount and I hate everybody that has anything to do with it. So, at great expense, they had to dub my voice in The Canary murder case for the talking version. Unfortunately they used for my double darling Margaret Livingston, who later married Paul Whiteman. But Margaret was from Brooklyn (or is, if she is still alive). Paramount put out the publicity that I had to leave pictures because my voice didn't record. That absolutely infuriated me, you know. So, Jimmy Card got a copy of it up here. I'd never seen any of my films. You see, most people say they don't like to see their films, but they're lying. You should see your films, if you're serious. What is so important in Tynan's profile in The New Yorker is that anyone who writes about me ever again will go to that as the source. When Tynan was here, he was here just three evenings. He looked at the films at the Eastman house for three days and then he'd come here after dinner. Then it was time to go back to the hotel and call his girlfriend in Spain. He'd go on back to the hotel and take a sleeping pill. So we really just gossiped here, as I say, mostly about our friends. You see, most of the profile was made up from my letters or quotes from my articles. But Tynan puts them together so neatly that you don't realize it. When Bill Shawn edited it, he put back where the various things came from. I wrote Tynan ninety-two letters after the interview. It was the gossip that got to be in ... that sexpot business ... that I said to Bill Shawn I didn't like and said would be pretty racy. But he was right to keep it in. Now I see that. See, I would never write that stuff, and I wanted him to take it out. And if he had taken it out, it wouldn't had been Dear Darling Marie-Louise Brooks. The rest of it, all the stories I tell about Chaplin, stories I tell about Buster Keaton and so on, are all things I wrote to Tynan in those ninety-two letters. Everyone kids me about never making any money. You know, now that I have all these offers to do my memoirs, I think I'll tell Bill Shawn that I think we ought to send me a check for fifteen dollars because if I wrote ninety-two letters to Tynan which gave him all the material for the profile, I should be reimbursed for the postage, don't you think? Some writer wanted to do a biography of me, and I said: "I am writing my memoirs". But the reason Tynan is sore at me is that Mike Nichols wanted me to sign a release and give them the rights to do my story on film. Of course, I wouldn't do that. Then Ken could make some money writing the script. I wouldn't do that because you can imagine turning them loose. Can you imagine turning Tynan and Mike Nichols loose? And I said, "Why don't you ... you want a sex picture? You've got a pretty interesting sex life. Write about yourself!". So, of course, I wouldn't sign the release. I can sell it myself, for God's sake, to the movies when I write my memoirs. Of course, a lot of people don't think I am really going to write my memoirs. He thinks I'm using that just as a gag, to keep him from doing the film. And Mike Nichols hasn't make a good picture in a long time, has he? I don't need anyone to help me write my memoirs. Bill Shawn, when he speaks to me, never talks about that. He did think I could write kind of a spotty memoir - more like S. N. Behrman's. Shawn helped him put together that memoir. And that is rather spotty. My first chapter is really about Tot Strickland. She put it in my mother's mind that I should dance and that I was going to be beautiful and I should go to New York and have a career. She built a gorgeous house in this little town of Cherryvale, Kansas, with only two thousands people living there. And her husband, as I said, made a fortune in oil there. Instead of moving out to Kansas City or anywhere, she would go to New York and buy her clothes or to Texas. Magnificent house, jewels, gorgeous clothes. And it was she who started me dancing. She used to call me Lou-ai-see which is my favourite nickname - Lou-ai-seh. It's Lou-ai-seh M. Alcott. I also have a long section about Martha Graham. And I adore Mr. Hearst, William Randolph Hearst. I have a section to write about Marion Davies and Mr. Hearst which has never been written. Marion was not the real darling, sweet kid she professed to be. WORKING IN HOLLYWOOD I'll tell you my favourite story about Clarence Badger. He would rehearse Clara Bow in a scene, and then she would go do something else. "Oh, my God!" he'd say. "I can't use this!". And then he would run the rushes that night and he would find out that she was marvelous. My favourite scene (and he told me she had thought it up by herself) was in It. In It she's been to Coney Island and she comes home with one of those little woolly dolls ... you know, those little stuffed dolls - a little black and white dog. So she is sitting in the window sill of her apartment and she's thinking over the evening and thinking, "Gee! I had a very good time! This is a very cute dog". And she's looking at it. She's got it sitting in a close-up. She's got the dog facing her. She turns it around, picks up its tail, and looks at his ass. Clarence said he was astonished when she did that, that he couldn't see how he could leave that in. You know, when she picks up its tail, she's looking right at his asshole. But he said he had left it in because it was absolutely marvelous. Everything she did was like that. I did tell a couple of stories about Mary Pickford trying to shoot Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. She went to Prospect Park in San Francisco to shoot the great progressions of the horses and whatnot. Well, she had a drunken director, Mickey Neilan, and her brother Jack was always drunk, and they were supposed to photograph all these horses and costumed riders at Prospect Park. No director! No Jack Pickfors! No Mickey Neilan! And Charles Rosher, the cameraman, didn't know what to do. So finally, Mary says "What the heck. I know as much about pictures as Mickey. I'll direct it". And she and the cameraman directed the scene! And while they were checking things over and keeping the people back by the barrier, the cameraman was walking along the barrier, and there's Mickey, the director - dead drunk. He said: "Hey! You're doing pretty good! You don't need me at all". And he disappeared. Those days, pictures didn't cost a hell of a lot. And they wereall presold with block booking. So you could clown around. You can't do that in pictures anymore. They cost millions now. Herman Mankiewicz was one of my best friend. I adored Mankiewicz. Herman used to bring up a group of men to my dressing room. Oh, this is one of the names that Shawn took out of my Tynan profile - Michael Arlen, because Michael Arlen's son does the TV commentary for The New Yorker. And I said to Shawn: "Why did you take out Michael Arlen's name? Because he came to the Follies to my dressing room?". "Well" he said "I thought his son might mind". And I thought to myself: "Well, what the hell do you mean by that". Because it was Herman Mankiewicz who used to bring me all these books. Of course, they really wanted to get into the Follies dressing room because I dressed with Dorothy Knapp, and she was always posing practically naked in front of her mirror. But the gag was that they were coming up to hear me review the latest Huxley book or something like that - Michael Arlen, Gilbert Miller, Walter Wanger. Of course, Ziegfeld stopped that, too. I want to tell you while writing my articles, I came across a very curious thing. All my friends were at Metro-Goldwin-Mayer. Paramount was not an interesting company because they didn't have an active head on the lot working there. Zukor was always in New York, Lasky was always in New York. And so there was no big commissary and no big guy like Louis B. Mayer, right there, within the gates in his kingdom, in his great offices, with people waiting to see him. So, all of my friends worked at MGM. When I was doing these articles, researching those people, I began to wonder why all the finest directors and some of the finest actors always got fired or let out or ... they disappeared. And who was left at MGM? They threw out the most marvelous director, almost ever, a genius - von Stroheim. They almost threw our King Vidor because he was getting a percentage of the gross. And you know what it boils down to in the end? I don't care how beautiful you are, how talented, how marvelous, if you are not liked, if people are not happy working with you, if your director, like von Sternberg, comes on the set, makes a lot of trouble, fights for the actors or if you are an actor like John Gilbert who gets drunks and fights with everyone, I don't care if you are the biggest star on the lot, the finest director, if you make more money (and this almost goes in every profession if you stop to think of it), the directors who stayed on and on, and the actresses who stayed on and on at MGM were the nicest ones. Not necessarily the best. Bob Leonard, Jack Conway, and the actors who stayed on and on and on were always the people who were easy to work with, who didn't cause a lot of trouble. I think that's why they had Herman Mankiewicz there, because if they got in a fight in a story conference they'd always send for Herman to come down and tell a funny story. He would have them all laughing. Because he never did any work. He was always drunk. He would just come to the office and take a nap. You heard Anita Loos' story about when she was working in the story department there? She was working on a Heddy Lamarr picture called I take this woman. (As a joke, they called it I retake this woman). She said: "When we started the story conferences for this film, I began knitting this scarf. It wasn't a very long scarf". By the time she finished it, she figured it cost MGM $70,000. That's how long she was on salary before they finally got the script together. BUSTER KEATON Buster was born a fine, decent person. But you know, booze destroys the brain tissue. You cannot be a drunk for fifty years. Remember, people would say, years ago, you never die of booze, it's always something else. It's cirhosis of the liver, it's this, that, and the other. But now they know for a fact that, after a certain amount of booze, you destroy the brain cells. At the end, when I saw him the last time, he said he didn't remember his best friend Buster Collier. He made a commercial over at Eastman Kodak just before he died. Jimmy Card and I went over to the Sheraton to see him. He was not supposed to be drinking. In this big suite he was in, they had a regular kitchen. He was in there with a couple of reporters. Jimmy Card and I and his wife noticed that Buster would poor himself a beer, the he would walk into the sitting room, into the bedroom, and then he would disappear into the can. So obviously, he was in the bathroom pouring a little bit of booze into his beer. You know, the boiler -maker. Getting himself soused. Roddy McDowell was with him when he died. He said that when he came home that night, he was still up on his feet. He didn't know he had lung cancer. And he was drunk too. Can you imagine? You are dying ... you would think you would be in some terrible pain, woldn't you? And Roddy said that night when he was over at Buster's house, Buster came home and had a couple of drinks and went to bed and died. But here was a man dying of lung cancer and didn't know it. No one could have that beautiful a face and not be beautiful inside.He pretended not to know me when I went to his room there at the hotel. He stared at me for a long time. Because he connected me, of course, with Buster Collier and Constance and old Peg and the whole thing. You see, his mind had reached the point where he blamed everybody else for what happened to him. You see. And that's when I tell this marvelous story about how Buster Collier and I drove with Buster Keaton back to the studio one night. For no reason at all, he said: "Let's go over to the studio". He had a private bungalow at the back of the Metro-Goldwin-Mayer lot. Now you see what Joe Schenk did ... they wanted to harness ... when Chaplin got away from the big studios and he got fifty percent of his films, they sewed up Fatty Arbuckle and they tried to get Keaton and that's what they did. Joe Schenk sold him to Nick Schenk at Metro-Goldwin-Mayer. Keaton's last great picture was The general. When they put him under contract, that was the beginning of the end of Buster Keaton. And they'd rather have him fail, of course, than release his pictures independently and get all the money. You know that no major studio is going to have that. They fought Chaplin until he was deported and they were mainly responsible for that. I don't think Keaton was aware of all this. That night when we drove to the back lot where his little bungalow was, he was drunk, but I didn't know it. Buster Collier didn't know. He was driving a car, but he had marvelous coordination. We walked in, locked the door, and turned on the lights. All around his bungalow were these built-in bookshelves with glass cases. And for no reason at all (see, you never knew what Buster was going to do anyhow; he was always thinking up gags), he picked up the baseball bat, and we're just standing there and nobody was thinking about anything, and he goes to each bookcase and smashes out the glass in each one. In other words, there is that feeling that I am ruined, I am trapped, I'm caught at Metro-Goldwin-Mayer, I'm finished, I'm done. And I don't think he was aware of it, and, of course, we didn't know it either. He didn't say a word about anything. He didn't talk a lot, ever. No, he just broke all the bookcases, and then we turned out the lights and left. WORKING WITH PABST Tynan was the first person to realize why I was good in the movies - because I didn't think about myself at all. I had never thought of it that way. I'd go out in front of the camera (you could wake me out a dead sleep) - I didn't even know what was in the script! I saw Pabst had his script translated into English, and I looked at it and I said: "This is sure heavy!". I threw it down on the chair and never looked at it again. I don't think Pabst ever saw it either. He knew everything he was going to do. Everyday Pabst would be on the set at seven o'clock, and he'd set up the shots with the cameraman. To direct, he just used to give me a few words. Just an emotion. He would say, eating a self-sandwich: "After lunch, you have a cry". "All right" I'd say "I'll cry". It was all emotional, and so it was coreography. I'd been a dancer with Ruth St. Denis. As I say in one of my articles (and Tynan quotes it): "All I ever learned about acting, I learned from watching Martha Graham, and all I have learned about movement, I learned from watching Charlie Chaplin". That's a switch, but it was true. Pabst used lock me up every night. I lived across from the zoo at the Eden Hotel, and he wasn't going to have me romping around. My idea of life - oh hell with the movies - was to have fun. As you know, Berlin was full of all these dives. There was a lesbian palce and homosexual places - all kind of places to go. Pabst would have Josephine, my maid, (she was scard to death of Pabst) - he would have her drag me off as soon as work was finishe, give me a bath, and throw me into bed. Then I would sit and listen to the poor animals across the street in the zoo. They were locked up too. The most I'd ever do would be to go down and have one drink at the bar. He wouldn't allow anyone to take me out. I couldn't go anywhere. . No, no, because I'd be up whether I worked or not. I had to be at the studio. They didn't do that in Hollywood. If you din't have to work, you didn't have to turn up. I adored Pabst and Pabst adored me. We didn't have to speak at all. We didn't need any lenguage a tall for me to understand him. He understood me far too well because he said: "You know, all these rich people you live around, they're going to toss you of the playpen some day you're going to wind up like Lulu". And, as I said in that article for Sight and Sound, I almost did. He didn't think I took movies seriously. You see, they all thought that, because most actors sit on the set, and they make love to their directors, and they talk to each other about how wonderful it is and how marvelous and how happy they are. Of course, they all hate each other ... actors all hate each other. But to get back to Pabst. Pabst's direction was just superb. Pabst had a hard time directing Kortner in Pandora's box because Kortner had a huge back and Pabst would photograph him very often just for his back. Kortner was a famous stage actor, and it's pretty hard to translate a theater actor to the movies. You see, with me, all you had to say was cry and I cried. I didn't have to know why. S o Pabst had a hard time getting Kortner to play the scenes the way he wanted them. He would trick him in all kinds of ways. Kortner, of course, detested me. Everyone detested me. You see, they thought a German girl should play Lulu. Playing the part of Lulu was like Vivien Leigh playing the part of Scarlett in Gone with the wind. Before Pabst chose me, he saw me in a film called A girl in every port, which I have never seen. I can't remember a thing about it except that Howard Hawks directed it. And Howard wore beautiful clothes. He never said anything. That's why he was such a terrific director. But, Pabst saw me in that picture and decided he was going to use me. And, if he couldn't get me he was going to take Dietrich. Well, she was already a hardened, tough girl-around-town. MARLENE DIETRICH When I was in Berlin, I saw her in a stage review. She was quite fat. She made these comedies, and she was nobody. But she was quite tough! As Pabst said, just one knowing look and Lulu would have been ruined. He had told Dietrich that if he couldn't get me, he'd use her. One of my best friends at Paramount was the dress designer there. She never writes about him or speaks about him - Travis Banton. He was the one who got Dietrich out of that heavy, silk German hose. He got her hair softened (she had one of those tight, crinkly permanent waves). She wore blue chiffon dresses and carried parasols. When she got to Paramount, he was the one who put her into those marvelous feather costumes and wonderful dresses and fixed her hair and the whole thing. (She has scarcely any hair, you know. One of those blonds with almost no hair, no eyebrows and whatnot). Around 1936 when I went back to Hollywood, I didn't know anything about how great I was, supposedly, in Pandora. I had never seen it! Of course, I couldn't get a job . (You can imagine, after all the things I'd said to them, they were delighted not to give me a job). Dietrich had just left Paramount then. They let her go because her pictures weren't making any money. And Travis said: "I want to tell you what Dietrich said about you: 'Imagine Pabst taking that Louise Brooks for Lulu when they cold have had me! When they could have had me!'". To me the funniest thing I said in the whole profile was about Dietrich writing her memoirs. I said to Tynan: "Why don't I get over and we can write ours together. Or better still, she could write Lulu by Lola and I can write Lola by Lulu". Bill Shawn said to me when he read the profile over (Never mond you! He left in all that sex stuff. Pabst's wife is still alive, she'll read that): "One thing I don't like - when you call Dietrich a contraption". "Why?" I said "That's what she is! She's a contraption. She's made up. She is neither man, woman; she doesn't know what the hell she is herrself! She's gone through all these phases and whatnot. She's a contraption". "Well" he said "it doesn't make you sound very nice". THE PERSONALITY OF THE STAR I remember when I was telling Tynan my favourite movies. I said: "You're not going to like this. My favourite movies are Pygmalion, The wizard of Oz, and some Fred Astaire picture". I would actually get out of bed and put on the TV if I could see Fred Astaire. Do you know? ... We're speaking of generosity now. In an article I wrote for the first part of my memoirs, I said there is no great star without generosity. Escape from self. You see, that's one of the reasons you might like me in films. Garbo was always thinking of her audience. You cannot be a star. I thought Constance Bennett was marvelous looking. (I write quite a lot about the Bennetts, whom I knew well - Joan and Constance, their mother, and crazy old Richard). Constance was a fine actress with a beautiful voice, beautiful diction. She looked gorgeous in clothes. She had just everything to be a great star, but the audience never liked her. She was so selfish. It comes across. Of all the greatest generosity, you have only to see Fred astaire in The band wagon. He throws the action, the dancing, the singing (you can see right in the film as it's directed) - he gives everything to everybody else. The exact opposite of that is someone like Julie Andrews. You see, she's wondered why she's never been a success. Well, it's perfectly simple. She did a Christmas show. She sings every song; she's in every number. How anyone got anything away from her. It's a wonder she didn't turn the camera. I mean ... (that shows you how old I am. Turn the camera). Everything is personality. It goes beyond acting, looks, anything else. And even Al Jolson. Charlie Chaplin said the funniest thing about Al Jolson. When Jolson first came to Hollywood to make talkies, Chaplin said to me: "I never heard such songs". "Mammy" he said. "Well, he's from New York. He never had a mammy. What does that song mean? The lyrics are idiotic". And yet, When Jolson came on and threw himself, you know, just gave himself to the audience, he was irresistible. And, God knows, he did sing the silliest songs I ever heard. Donald McNamara, A conversation with Louise Brooks, "The Missouri Review", Summer 1983 |