LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 35

BOOKS Diary of a Lost Woman Louise Brooks documented with passion and other smart stars. Paris does and doesnt subscribe to this romance of the bright, beautiful rebel. He never seriously questions Brooks so-called truth-telling. (How, you might wonder, does somebody who confesses not to know anything about herself, or why she does anything, know the truth about other people?) Shes happy to talk about a friends cocaine habit, for example, but she never wrote an essay entitled Why I Guzzle Gin. Shes bold enough to label Garbo a very masculine dyke, Shirley Temple a tough little slut and Hemingway a homo, but never satisfactorily explains her own sexual behavior, the fact that she never loved any man.

And Paris accepts rather than analyzes the rapturous effect Brooks had on men and, more recently, male film historians. Brooks in life and on screen seems to be the living embodiment of Lulu, the protagonist of Pandora 's Box, a force of nature, the sexually available, thoughtless, childlike, unknowable free spirit. As Tynan put it, shes the only star casion for ridicule). In the end he leaves her life open, offering multiple answers to the questions What did Louise want?" and What did Louise want sexually? and finally allowing Brooks to write her own corrosive bottom line: I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita in 1922 at the age of 15 to become a dancer How I have existed fills me with horror. For I failed in everything Ai I iography, the way it is usually practiced, is pre-doomed by the assumption that the truth of a human life can be known from its documented facts.

If biographers treated biography more like a novel, an act of imagination and interpretation, instead of a science textbook if biographers werent afraid to lack objectivity they might be better equipped to honor her mother on piano. At 14 she first began writing her diaries' and later described herself at that age as a hating, hateful, envious, vengeful, sex-loaded little vixen." At 1 5 she left her family in Wichita for the avant-garde Denishawn Dancers in New York, with whom Martha Graham also worked. Her abrupt dismissal from the troupe several years later on moral grounds marked the end of what Brooks considered her serious" career; her committed artistic life was over in 1924 to be revived only in the late 1940s, when she began writing in earnest. To her, stage and screen work wasnt serious, wasnt even work. From Denishawn she went to the Ziegfeld Follies, living the New York showgirl life rich admirers, constant exposure.

Her indifference toward Follies dancing carried over into motion pictures when she was signed by Paramount in 1925 and did a string of films which cast her as bathing beauty, pretty extra and jazz baby, culminating in two still-respected movies, Howard Hawks fiercely homoerotic 1928 A Girl in Every Port and William Wellmans 1928 Beggars of Life. On the very brink of Hollywood stardom. Brooks tossed it all away when Paramount tried to chisel her out of a raise. She quit flat and accepted an offer from G.W. Pabst in Germany to make Pandora's Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl, both panned at the time but judged now as silent-film classics.

Although she came back to Hollywood and made some more films, the last in 1938 with John Wayne, her real career ended in 1930. Her life went downhill from there heavy drinking, prostitution, conversion to Catholicism until a film curator persuaded her to move to Rochester in 1956 and write about silent films. That is where she died in 1985. sfiii LEGEND HAS to handle for man cant know what its like to be a woman, especially a woman searching for her creativity. If Louise Brooks has a flaw, its that Paris doesnt assign enough weight to two facts of Brooks life: that she was molested at an early age and that she was beautiful.

This biography could be dismantled entirely and reorganized around these two central realities. Brooks was a classic victim of sexual abuse as a child: her life and letters show extremely low self-esteem (disguised sometimes by an obnoxious superiority complex), chronic alcoholism, an inability to commit to work or relationships, bad depressions, generalized anger, and a view of herself as a common sex tool. The phrase Actresses are whores sticks out in her memoirs; Pabst called her one. On the other hand, were probably lucky Paris didnt lean on a clinical interpretation of Louise Brooks; the clinical isnt as fascinating as the other major aspect of her existence, her beauty. Brooks may have spent her life trying to salvage some selfhood from the alien ruin created by her appearance; she certainly spent it rescuing her insides from her outsides.

Molested at 9 by a middle-aged house-painter, told it was her own fault by her mother, Louise learned she was attractive to men years before under the best of circumstances she would have learned who Louise was. Made into a sex object early, Louise spent many decades trading on that status, cynically and boisterously. She seemed independent but was profoundly dependent on men; this, I think, is a huge part of Lulus rapturous appeal. At the same time. Brooks whole being revolted against this dependence.

Intelligent, literate (at 18, she wrote a theater review for The New York Times under I Ier-man Mankiewiczs byline) she had a strong will. Brooks wanted to be a subject not an object, but she couldnt quite negotiate the transition. So she confesses, heartbreak-ingly, to a fan: And now at 69 I have given up hope of ever finding myself. My life has been nothing." JJ the intense, often inconsistent and intractable subjectivity of the people theyre writing about. As Louise Brooks said to film historian Kevin Brownlow in 1966: It is only in fiction that people are all of a piece.

Biography and autobiography are the greatest fictions In reality I do not know anything about myself or why I do anything. In Barry Paris excellent biography of the forgotten starlet who died a film legend, objectivity and a total lack of it coexist simultaneously. The authors objectivity takes the form of a consuming passion for documented facts, stretching back into the 19th century for Louise Brooks origins and encompassing (what seems like) all subsequent details small and large: from what Louise said in 1928 at a San Simeon dinnerparty to what happened when Hollywood converted to sound and what playwright Frank Wedekind meant to German history and literature. In a less enthusiastic, less sensitive writer, this superabundance of conversations, dates, addictions, historical contexts, peccadilloes and everything else would be intolerable pure academic hell. But Paris strict adherence to written evidence (of which Brooks left volumes) and his broad interpretation of what constitutes a pertinent fact, lead Louise Brooks into fascinating, ambiguous biographical territoiy.

By paying so much close attention to Brooks life, Paris personalizes it in the extreme, reproducing its complexities and tortured topography without enforcing any one overall interpretation of her actions. He docs have a viewpoint, of course: that of the die-hard Louise Brooks fan. But his admiration hardly differs in its specifics from other Brooks admirers such as Kenneth Tynan, who capped her resurrection with a 1979 New Yorker profile, and Henri Lang-lois, founder of the French Cinematheque, yvho launched the Brooks revival cult with a 1955 retrospective and the exclamation, There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks! She was born in 1906 in minuscule Cherryvale, Kansas, the oldest girl-child of a lawyer father and a mother devoted to music and books but not her family. Brooks began dancing at a precocious age, soon turning professional and performing all over Kansas and Missouri accompanied by IT that Louise Brooks was just too much Hollywood or the world, for she told too much truth. Legend has it that Louise Brooks was just too much to handle for Hollywood or the world, for that matter; she told too much truth.

This is a fiction Brooks herself cultivated, climaxing in her 1982 memoirs Lulu in Hollywood, in which she wrote: And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them. Her admirers repeatedly echo the same fiction. In Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star, Roland Jaccard called her too clear-headed and intelligent to play the game without considering what that says about Davis, Crawford, Hepburn, Stanwyck that matter; actress I can imagine either being enslaved by or wanting to enslave. Paris diligence, his solicitude for all the facts, diverts this book away from conventional star worship. He may subscribe to the legend, but he shows a much more complicated, confused, self- destructive person not a free spirit at all.

Written by anyone less compassionate, Louise Brooks could easily have been the most squalid, sensational, bathetic biography of this publishing season: She slept with Chaplinl Broken, forgotten, fat, she became a salesgirl at Saks! But it isnt because Paris respects Brooks and her struggle (unlike Albert Goldman, say, who finds pain an oc- NOVEMBER 17 NOVEMBER 23, 1989 LAWEKLY 35.