Asked why Hollywood kicked her out: “I like to drink and fuck too much.”
Louise Brooks was popular but only mildly successful in her day. She appeared in twenty-four films, the best being Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beauté (1930). Brooks didn’t help her career by turning down the lead in the Cagney classic The Public Enemy to visit her married lover in New York. She claimed she was blacklisted in Hollywood after refusing to sleep with studio head Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures) and retired from film in 1938. Brooks first moved home to Kansas, then to New York, where she worked as a salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1955, she was unexpectedly championed by new wave filmmakers and became an international cult figure, celebrated for her realistic acting style, her flapper bob haircut (“The Black Helmet”), and her open disdain for Hollywood studios. In 1982, at age seventy-five, Brooks published her critically acclaimed memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, about her time in Hollywood, which is still considered one of the best inside accounts of American film.
NOW THAT SHE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, of course she would stay. Three days earlier, Louise Brooks and her then-husband, director Eddie Sutherland, had arrived at the Ranch for a getaway weekend.
“The Ranch” was everybody’s nickname for San Simeon, the estate of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The 250,000-acre, ten-home expanse had become a nexus of Hollywood social life, courtesy of actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress. Eddie Sutherland declared it all very boring, unless you worshipped opulence or celebrities. But Louise Brooks had found a third object of worship: Pepi Lederer, Davies’s seventeen-year-old niece. Pepi lived at San Simeon; she and Brooks became fast friends, and the teenager implored Brooks to stay a day or two longer without her husband. It ended up being three weeks.
Brooks was only twenty-two, but already she’d been notorious for almost a decade. She stood up to studio heads. She turned down choice parts. She had affairs with men and women alike, and spoke frankly about sex. When she was eighteen, she had a two-month fling with Charlie Chaplin, and she loved telling friends the glowing red penis story: Apparently, Chaplin had heard that a drop of iodine on your penis could prevent venereal disease. During a three-day sex bender with Brooks and another couple, he decided to be extra cautious. He emerged from the bathroom naked, with an erection, his storied “eighth wonder of the world” penis completely covered with red iodine. He proceeded to chase the screaming girls around the suite.
Brooks was only twenty-two, but already she’d been notorious for almost a decade. She stood up to studio heads. She turned down choice parts. She had affairs with men and women alike, and spoke frankly about sex.
Brooks herself drank inconceivable amounts of gin. In fact, her lifelong dedication to a good drink was so unwavering that she actually got kicked out of the Algonquin Hotel during the Round Table years. And during her San Simeon stay, gin was again her biggest problem. Specifically, that she couldn’t find any. Famously concerned about his mistress Davies’s drinking problem, Hearst had forbidden almost all spirits on estate grounds, rationing one cocktail at meals, some sherry and champagne here and there, or a few bottles at a business meeting. But while the teenage Pepi could get champagne easily by flirting with Hearst’s assistant, Brooks preferred gin.
One afternoon, Brooks and Pepi were carousing in the swimming pool, drinking and “fooling around a bit,” when word came that a group of Hearst newspaper editors were in one of the outbuildings for a meeting. Brooks knew what that meant: real liquor. Good liquor. Within minutes, she, Pepi, and eight teenage girls, all in bathing suits, danced in a line through the meeting-room door. The men were seated at a table, well fortified with booze and cigars. As the parade of flesh shimmied past, startling, distracting, and entrancing the men, ringleader Brooks snatched a few bottles from the table. Their mission accomplished, the line of girls left as hastily as they had come.
The door closing, one confused newspaper editor turned to a housekeeper. “Does Mr. Hearst know these people are here?”
When Italian director Augusto Genina began shooting the French noir film Prix de Beaute, he could scarcely believe the daily schedule of Louise Brooks, the American actress who, twenty-five years later, would become history’s most revered flapper. Then she was just a stunningly pretty second-tier Hollywood actress with a work method that, had he not already fallen in love with her, Genina would never have tolerated.
This would be Brooks’s last European film and first talkie, although since she hardly spoke a word of French, all her dialogue and singing would be dubbed—probably a good thing, given her lifestyle. Brooks woke up at 4 a.m. and drank a bottle of champagne. She’d be asleep again by six. At which time a small crew would enter her hotel room and carry her, asleep, to a car. The car was driven to the lot. She was then carried, still asleep, to the makeup room.
The hair and makeup people did their entire job while Brooks still slept. Finally, when a scene was close to rolling, they would somehow rouse her. She would emerge on the set, nail her scene, return to her dressing room to drink gin, and fall back to sleep until the next scene was ready. Brooks was somehow able stay on her feet through a few hours in the late afternoon, only to return to the hotel and fall asleep at around midnight. This pattern continued for the duration of principal photography. Except the last day.
On that final day of production, Brooks didn’t show up at all. Desperate to finish the film, after twenty-four hours, Genina had to call in the police. Three days later, they found her holed up in a chateau. Her boyfriend at the time—the bartender from the hotel.