White Girls (23 page)
“Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer. She does nothing,” wrote yet another critic of one of my early performances. In this review, the language is more to the point, although it, too, conveyed little of what I actually did: it does not analyze why I chose not to “act” but, rather, to be, and was among the first of my kind to do so.
One of the essential rules of screen acting is not to “do” anything at all. This happens when, and only when, one is free or absent enough from one’s self to believe we have nothing to lose. Which I did not: before I had lived, my life was lost to me at the hands of a man who did things to me that hurt and hurt. And about my “life” as it was lived: the biographer, Mr. Barry Paris, describes the events constituting it with such caution and at such a remove that my life, in the reading, becomes yet another experience of nonreading; I am less written about in his book than chronicled. There is nothing to suggest “How I Became Louise Brooks,” yet another thing I should have written.
Several biographical details for the more documentary-minded among you: I was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906, and raised in Wichita, Kansas; from my father I inherited my eyebrows and love of scholarship; from my mother I inherited everything that was inattentive, moody, critical. I became interested in dance at an early age; I danced and danced; I left home to dance with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and their troupe, Denishawn, another member of which was Martha Graham; I left Denishawn at the insistence of Miss St.
Denis (I was too critical of others, she said, and too lax with myself). I was asked to perform with the Ziegfeld Follies; I was the most hated Follies girl, ever (too well-read, too much attitude); I was loved then and only then by several lesbians of intellectual distinction and many fairy boys who drank and wrote; I left the Ziegfeld Follies to make films. I slept with Chaplin, Garbo, Pepi Lederer (Marion Davies’s niece), William S. Paley, G.W. Pabst—in no particular order. I married twice but, by my own admission, loved only one man, George Marshall, who never restricted himself to the role of fan. I made a number of films, here and in Europe—twenty-four in all; was roundly hated for doing as I pleased and was regarded by many as a child to be cast out, especially in Hollywood—the studio system as fucked family. Many years of drinking; years of writing or not writing. Several people along the way fell in love with me for what I once had been: that image played in their minds as my self, old, stooped, a recluse, talked some to some and little or nothing to others.
There is something to be said for dropping out, saying no, the gin in bed, and books, reading those writers who probably didn’t give a damn about their bodies and tried to write them away. Writers’ bodies don’t make sense in a place like Hollywood: soft and white, defenseless in a town where everyone’s defended, right up to their celluloid tits. Maybe that’s why I drank so much and did so little during at least part of the second part of my life: Did I lose my dancer’s body and slowly acquire a writer’s in preparation for writing? I could only be what I played, and for years before I started writing, I played the dropout. I saw little of my old friends and gradually withdrew my swinish behavior from the so-called pearls who wanted to convince
me the world wasn’t a sty after all, like Lillian Gish. Or Garbo, who saw me from her automobile once—I was living in another hole then, reading and drinking; I was maybe forty, through with being looked at, or so I thought. Me and Garbo shared a moment back in the day; what the hell, we both squandered her beauty. When she saw me from the car window, the sun was so sad; it slanted through the Third Avenue El train tracks; it was winter, I was growing older. I had on a black coat. I was carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. I think she saw me before I saw her, but I knew it was her the minute I saw her car, and then I saw her face, that face, in a passenger seat, I saw her eyes, she wanted to offer me a ride, but just looking at me she could also see that I wasn’t up for a reunion, or even her help, and so she drove right by, what grace.
Here’s the thing: if you drop out you’re not so much bottoming out but rising: above the mundane, above being anyone’s wife. The pots and pans, kids, it’s your call, honey, someone else’s needs—they are beyond you. You float in your own thin air, your time is your own. Admittedly, I wouldn’t have made it out of my little flat in New York, where I supported myself in my early forties as a kind of call girl sometimes, or (more disastrously) as a counter girl in a department store, who cares, I drank most of my earnings away, but I wouldn’t have made it on those scullery-maid wages anyway were it not for the largesse of former lovers like William S. Paley, the CBS head, who gave me a monthly stipend that kept a roof over my head and in gin and books until I died. Sometimes I wonder when he wrote the check what he
smelled like when he looked down the ledger of his life and saw my name. My pink skin, his hand imprinted on my neck, my black bangs?
It takes great courage to do nothing. You wear the world’s tolerance down with your passivity and mind for nothingness. You have no season like spring in you to be reborn, because nothing has been planted. People leave you alone, because you are the face of that which they fear most: failing, not caring, doing nothing. In that freedom you have time, then, to face what most performers never face, and that I could face, with all that time on my hands: how little I wanted to be seen even as I longed to be seen. Back in Cherryvale, the same old story: the elderly man who finds me, a little girl, charming, and then his cunty fingers in my mouth; don’t tell the folks; it’s your fault; I have to lick myself off his fingers; this pleases him; I gag, but I do it because, after all, what’s a body for? What does beauty mean? And I smile as I do it, and gag; and, after all, how different is that smile from smiling in toe shoes, standing on a block of wood, en pointe, smiling under the Ziegfeld brand or taking a movie light on the chin, the light like a fist assaulting the mug that launched a disappointment? Once you give up on trying to change any of that, which is to say, reversing your story so it jibes with the American way of health—I will be a beautiful and free and prosperous white woman, I know I am, you must work to deserve me—you can relax and sink into being as dull and monstrous as the mirrors you once plagued looking for someone called I am Louise Brooks, whom no man will ever possess.
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What the mirror shows: your looks looking at you as you change. Your beauty becoming a memory. I am a woman and feast on memory, having had no children to feast on. I kept a scrupulously clean hovel as I worked my way down, always. Meanwhile, my heart beat for that which I couldn’t help but respond to: a director. Whenever one showed up in the guise of a lover, I responded with all my being. I wanted nothing, and a director. Obliteration, and someone to tell me where to hit my mark.
James Card was the next to last man who gave me direction. In 1955 I received a letter from him; some people never give up. His letter said he was the director of the Eastman House in Rochester, New York; it housed one of the great film libraries, a place that contained, he told me, examples of my work, ha, if you want to call it that. Well, he did. In his first letter, he described how, on a recent visit to Paris, he sat with Henri Langlois, the venerable founder of the Cinémathèque Française, when Langlois screened
Pandora’s Box
and
Diary of a Lost Girl
. Langlois was apparently knocked out by what he saw, he had no idea, and was moved to put my picture up, along with Falconetti’s, at the entranceway to his exhibition,
60 Ans de Cinéma
. When people asked why me over Garbo or Dietrich, Langlois is reported to have said, “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!”
In response to Card’s letter and attention, I wrote this:
The mystery of life...that you should, after almost thirty years, bring me the first joy I ever tasted from my movie career. It’s like throwing away a mask. All these years making fun of myself with everyone overjoyed to agree...away all false humility forever!
You see, they had to hog-tie me to get me into pictures. They didn’t know what to do with me, I did not fit into any of it. After the day I went into the projection room with Walter Wanger and the director to my second picture, and they laughed and kidded me about my acting, I vowed that I would never see another picture that I was in—and I never have, not even my pictures made in Europe.
Save me from my past. I was living in grimy shade near the Queensboro Bridge when Card came running to me the first time. He was married, what did I care, it was impossible, I could care, he would never leave his wife for me, I could care less. The point was to hate him for what he did and did not give me: himself. The truth is, I wasn’t interested in any man being there, not completely, and the minute I felt they wanted to be there, I accused them of being unavailable, which scared them off, of course: no one likes being told they don’t exist. But the fact is, most of the men I was with were never smart enough to get the fact that when I accused them of not being available, I was talking about myself.
I moved to Rochester in ’56, something like that, and Card got me writing about cinema by looking at films and thus memories. I looked
at movies starring “her”—myself—and bitterly despised the vomit that lodged in my throat: my sentimental streak. Whatever dream I had about her—myself—was stripped away by my writer’s eyes. I couldn’t pity her! And that’s when I knew I could write about her for real, and give as good on the page as she gave me on the screen, which is to say no pity at all.
Card and I were through by ’63. After him, I wrote and drank for sixteen years in that little room in Rochester. Loneliness is what every writer deserves for all their ruthless betrayals—telling other people’s stories their way—and what every actress deserves for all the intimacies they’re offered because of their beauty, and seductiveness, which the actress does or does not believe in. Either way, she’ll treat you like shit for having fallen for any of it. It’s true because I know it.
I thought I was on my own until the last director or translator or whatever showed up. That would be Kenneth Tynan. But that didn’t last long. Once his
New Yorker
piece about me came out, and I saw what it was—fan-based, he couldn’t be as critical of “her,” as I learned to be; he couldn’t discipline his ardor, but I could; I had to be the best, so vain, it’s true—I jettisoned him from my life, forever. Again and again my dismissal of these men. What can it mean to any of you that that dynamic—the quivering male heart bent in gratitude at the unfeeling heel of my shoe—meant and can mean everything and nothing to someone like me, and that that ambivalence can consume a life? Or
that that is all one’s life sometimes becomes—what Proust called “reciprocal torture,” or what Virginia Woolf called her “looking-glass shame.” Perhaps they did what I sought to do: to become the living embodiment of everything being nothing at all, this Death we live, this life the living never fully comprehend, or claim.
IT
’
S THE QUEERS
who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who—in the same car—asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman’s locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person’s instructions, in my now dead aunt’s little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own ass—“gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet
was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith—he sat in the front seat, I in the back—and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: They said we looked suspicious, we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.
It’s the queers who made me. Who didn’t get married and who said to one woman, “I don’t hang with that many other women,” even though or perhaps because she herself was a woman. Who walked with me along the West Side piers in nineteen eighties Manhattan one summer afternoon and said, apropos the black kids vogueing, talking, getting dressed up around us, “I got it; it’s a whole style.” Who bought me a pair of saddle shoes and polished them while sitting at my desk, not looking up as I watched his hands work the leather. Who knew that the actor who played the Ghost of Christmas Past in the George C. Scott version of
A Christmas Carol
was an erotic draw for me as a child—or maybe it was the character’s big beneficence. Who watched me watching Buddy Ebsen dancing with little Shirley Temple in a thirties movie called
Captain January
while singing “At the Codfish Ball,” Buddy Ebsen in a black jumper, moving his hands like a Negro dancer, arabesques informed by thought, his ass in the air, all on a wharf—and I have loved wharfs and docks, without ever wearing black jumpers, ever since.
It’s the queers who made me. Who talked to me about Joe Brainard’s
I Remember
even though I keep forgetting to read it. Who keep after me to read
I Remember
even though perhaps my reluctance has to do with Brainard’s association with Frank O’Hara, who was one queer who didn’t make me, so interested was he in being a status quo pet, the kind
of desire that leads a fag to project his own self-loathing onto any other queer who gets into the room—How dare you. What are you doing here? But the late great poet-editor Barbara Epstein—who loved many queers and who could always love more—was friendly with Brainard and O’Hara and perhaps the Barbara who still lives in my mind will eventually change my thinking about all that, because she always could.
