HOLLYWOOD’S most VORACIOUS MANEATER
She bedded Chaplin, Bogart and Greta Garbo – and that was just for starters. As the creator of Downton makes a movie of her eye-popping life, look away now Lady Grantham!
BACK in the summer of 1922, a 15-year- old girl and her matronly middleaged chaperone got off a train from Wichita, Kansas, at New York’s Grand Central Station.
She had won the chance to study with a famous dance troupe and was blown away by the big city.
Her respectable companion, Alice Mills, whom she described as a ‘stocky, bespectacled housewife of 36’, impressed her considerably less — particularly when they had to share a lumpy bed each night in their modest rented apartment.
The high- spirited teenager would very soon be sharing hundreds more beds, with rather more alluring partners such as Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and Charlie Chaplin.
For she was Louise Brooks — enigmatic sex siren of the silent screen era and arguably the most outrageous actress in Hollywood history.
Her relationship with Ms Mills is the subject of The Chaperone, a new film written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
Elizabeth McGovern — aka Lady Cora in Downton — plays the chaperone while her headstrong and flirtatious charge is portrayed by young American actress Haley Lu Richardson.
In real life, Brooks had hardly anything to say about her ‘provincial’ chaperone so the film is based on a novel by U.S. writer Laura Moriarty that imagines their testy relationship. It cannot have been easy. Louise Brooks was a handful at any age and never did anything by halves.
She was a heavy drinker from the age of 14 and was wildly promiscuous, leaving that early dance troupe under a cloud amid rumours she was sleeping with all the back stage crew. They were only the start. She ‘got in the hay’, as she called it, with hundreds of men — and women, too.
Renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who was smitten by her, said: ‘She was the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid. She was the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure- seeker, I think I’ve ever known.’
Brooks died in 1985 and her silent films are remembered only by film buffs.
But her rebel image, not to mention her signature bob hairstyle, inspired generations of artistes, from Maurice Chevalier to Liza Minnelli, to memorialise her in film and in music.
With her huge dark eyes, shiny black hair and perfect dancer’s figure, which she clothed with impeccable style, Brooks also had a keen intelligence and razor-sharp wit.
She was both irresistible and terrifying to men. ‘If I ever bore you, it will be with a knife,’ she warned one.
The impetuous Brooks was crowned the archetypal Twenties ‘flapper’ — the pert and provocative ‘It Girls’ of that era. She always made an impression — such as when she visited England she was the first woman to dance the Charleston in London.
A 1926 newspaper photo of her in a swimsuit was captioned: ‘ Several of the reasons that have figured in her success.’ But that wasn’t entirely fair as she was far from the typical Hollywood casting couch operator, sleeping her way to stardom.
Brooks was fiercely independent-minded and rarely exploited any of her famous friends or lovers to advance her career. She put her sex-life before fame or fortune, and paid the price when she spurned the advances of powerful studio bosses.
She would later claim she was ‘kicked out’ of Hollywood because: ‘I like to f*** and drink too much.’ As a close friend liked to quip: ‘ Louise brooks no restraint.’
Unfortunately for her career, Brooks always spoke her mind and admitted she had a ‘gift for enraging people’. Born in 1906 in ‘ Bible Belt’ Wichita, Kansas, to a workaholic lawyer father and a pianist mother, she was left to run wild.
Aged nine, Brooks was molested by a house painter, an ordeal she blamed for her subsequent incapacity to ever feel real love and, instead, seek simple sexual pleasure.
‘Nice, soft, easy men were never enough — there had to be an element of domination,’ she said. ‘The men who were the worst in bed were the men I liked the most.’
AT 17, she became a chorus girl in a Broadway show notorious for nudity (publicity pictures of Brooks wearing only a carelessly flung scarf and a pair of sandals came back to haunt her when she was a film star).
Many showgirls — including her — were glorified prostitutes, as she later admitted: ‘ There was a hand- picked group of beautiful girls who were invited to entertain the
great men in finance and government.’ The girls — screened by two film producers, Walter Wanger and Englishman Eddie Goulding — had to be ‘ fairly well bred and of absolute integrity’, she said.
‘At these parties we were not required, like common whores, to go to bed with any man who asked us, but if we did the profits were great. Money, jewels, mink coats, a film job — name it.’
One of these powerful men with film industry connections was Daily Express newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, who Brooks described as an ‘ ugly little grey man who went directly to his object with no finesse’.
She would later say that her ‘ sexual education had been conducted by the elite of Paris, London and New York’. She got noticed by the right people.
Brooks had no acting training but, aged 18, accepted a five-year contract with Paramount Studios.
Before she left for California, she had a passionate two-month affair with Charlie Chaplin. The British star was twice her age, married and at the height of his fame. They moved into New York’s Ambassador Hotel and spent much time with Peggy Fears, Brooks’ 17-year- old best friend, and Peggy’s fiancé, financier Alfred Blumenthal.
Brooks told friends the foursome once had a three- day champagnefuelled orgy in Blumenthal’s suite at the Ambassador, rarely bothering to get out of bed. Brooks later claimed she and Fears had been lesbian lovers and that Blumenthal had his butler secretly photograph them together.
She caused further scandal by revealing that Chaplin was so scarred by his mother contracting syphilis that he never had sex without first painting his sexual organ with iodine to try to prevent any possible infection.
Brooks hated Hollywood and the shameless sexism of the studio system which regularly tossed aside established female stars for younger, more malleable starlets.
She treated Tinseltown with the insouciance she felt it deserved, never bothering to see her movies and, between takes while filming, burying her face in books by German philosopher Schopenhauer.
When journalists came to interview her, sometimes she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. One described her as ‘exquisitely hardboiled’. Brooks told a biographer: ‘I was always late. But too damn stunning for them to fire me.’
By the time she was 19, ‘Brooksie’, as she was known to friends, had married British-born playboy and director Eddie Sutherland. They rarely saw each other and neither bothered to be faithful.
Their relationship was so fraught that when Hollywood was shaken by a small earthquake one night, Brooks thought the tremor was her husband making a move on her as she slept. She walloped him on the jaw, vowing that if he did it again, she’d move into a hotel.
When, a year into their marriage, Brooks returned to visit New York, she renewed her dalliance with Peggy Fears and Alfred Blumenthal. This time, the fourth member of their menage was Brooks’s new lover, laundry millionaire George Preston Marshall. In 1928, less than two years after their wedding, she divorced Sutherland after falling ‘terribly in love’ with Marshall. Sutherland claimed Brooks’s insatiable sexual demands drove him to impotence and to seek psychiatric help. The actress, who resented being branded a nymphomaniac, said she had affairs simply to stave off boredom and ‘ pass the time waiting for the studio to call’. englishmen made the best lovers and Irishmen the worst, she said.
Yet Brooks didn’t say ‘yes’ to everyone. She turned down a director who pursued her for 15 years when ‘hundreds of less attractive men succeeded in the hay’ with her. The reason? He had bright pink rims around his blue eyes.
She encouraged her reputation as a lesbian, saying women had pursued her since she was 15. This was simply another outlet for her endless sexual curiosity.
She claimed she had one night of passion with Greta Garbo, her screen idol, when they were both in their early 20s. She described Garbo as masculine but a ‘charming and tender lover’.
Always perverse, Brooks would later insist she was strictly heterosexual and that her Sapphic dalliances ‘did nothing for me’.
Short- changed in Hollywood contract renegotiations and fed up with being cast as a ‘ pretty flibbertigibbet’, Brooks flounced off to Berlin in 1928. There, she wallowed in the city’s notorious debauchery and made some of the best films of her career.
In Pandora’s Box, she played Lulu, a sexually- uninhibited showgirl whose thoughtless behaviour leads to prostitution and ruin. The role could have been written for her.
She also made a film in Paris, where the director said she would have been the ‘ultimate actress’ were it not for her industrial alcohol consumption. She was almost continually drunk on cognac and champagne, he said, and had to be carried to the set each morning because she was asleep.
She even had her make-up put on while she was sleeping and was woken ‘only to shoot a scene, after which she returned to drinking’.
Her method of overcoming a hangover was to take three big swigs of gin.
Returning broke to Hollywood in 1930, still just 24, she’d left behind a host of enemies after haughtily refusing to dub dialogue on an earlier picture which had been shot as a silent.
COLUMBIA
promised her a contract but its boss, Harry Cohn, made it clear he expected her to sleep with him, appearing shirtless at all their meetings.
When she refused, he ensured her career sank in a succession of B-movie roles.
Brooks sealed her fate when she rejected the female lead alongside James Cagney in the 1931 gangster film The Public Enemy because she wanted to visit a boyfriend in New York. It was one of the decade’s most successful films.
Her second marriage to industrial heir Deering Davis lasted five months. As with her first rich husband, Brooks was too apathetic towards money to seek a penny from him when they divorced.
As her career disintegrated, she continued to play the field in Hollywood. One of her numerous onenight stands was with Humphry Bogart. They were so different, she said: he could only love a woman he had known a long time while, for her, ‘love was an adventure into the unknown’.
Brooksie left Hollywood for good in 1938. She ended up in New York where she got a job as a salesgirl in a department store.
She still indulged her prodigious sexual appetites, sometimes joining the actress Tallulah Bankhead at sex parties to which Bankhead invited boat-loads of sailors.
As she descended into alcoholism, Brooks became, at 36, a call-girl for three rich Manhattan clients for almost a decade.
‘It was very discreet and, all things considered, infrequent,’ said a friend. ‘ She did what she had to do.’
From 1960, she became a recluse, living in a spartan flat in the New York town of Rochester. She was ‘rediscovered’ by film buffs and had a second act as an acerbic writer, astutely critiquing actors and Hollywood. She converted to Catholicism and died of a heart attack, aged 78.
Though recklessly blunt and freespirited, even she could be embarrassed by her own outrageous behaviour. She wrote a tellall autobiography, Naked On My Goat, but was so appalled that she threw it into an incinerator.