Lulu

Celebrating the Roaring Twenties in a Special Series 

Louise Brooks in Now We're In the AirThe quintessence of 1920s glamour for me must be the iconic silent film actress Louise Brooks. Cute as a button with her little helmet of black hair, she was best known for the Austrian Expressionist G. W. Pabst’s films Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Prix de Beauté (1930).

Born in America in 1906, at 19 she was a featured dancer for the Ziegfield Follies on Broadway; she signed a 5-year contract with Paramount in 1929. She starred in over 20 films, although many of them are sadly lost, and made her final film appearance in 1938. She hated Hollywood, and was a headstrong and difficult actress to work with, eventually leading her to be placed on an unofficial blacklist. This cut short her film career, but she had no regrets. She switched careers and began writing about film, also authoring a memoir Lulu in Hollywood.

Louise Brooks as a Ziegfield Follies dancerBrooks also helped popularise the notion of the independent, fast-living, sexually liberated flapper girl, socialising with the rich and famous (including William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies) and collecting many lovers along the way. She was notorious for her ‘salty language’ and, amusingly, for vowing to never smile on stage or film ‘unless she felt compelled to’ (although she had a dazzling smile). Possibly it is her image and black bob that is most iconic however, the latter much copied still today.

It almost seems as though her life – albeit long – petered out. Married twice, childless, depressed, as an unsuccessful actress at 36 she felt that the only well-paying career for her was that of a call-girl. She dabbled in operating a dance studio, working briefly as a radio actor and a gossip columnist, and was for a few years a salesgirl in Saks Fifth Avenue. After that she was reduced to eking out a living as a courtesan. She died in 1985.

Still, she has inspired countless many creatives – writers, actors, musicians, artists – and continues to do so to this day. Once seen, who can forget that coy glance cast from under darkened lashes, those lush curves – and of course the indefinable air of doomed glamour? Not me. 

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Louise Brooks in The Canary Murder Case