An Ironic Life
Louise Brooks has grown to occupy a strange place in Hollywood lore. She was never really famous enough to be a legend, but far too idiosyncratic to be a forgotten shadow. Fortunately, she provides a metaphorical boiling down of her essential status herself that strongly indicates the stimulus behind robustly ironic tone which the author adopts throughout, informing the reader that she was:
“a born loner, who was temporarily deflected from the hermit’s path by a career in the theatre and film.”
Sharp, Biting, Corrosive, Dark Irony
The story that the author tells about that temporary deflection from a hermit’s path is one that could really only serve to deepen her own natural sense of ironic reflection. Not to suggest that only someone from Hollywood would be capable of writing the following about fellow actress Barbara Bennett—almost certainly the single most darkly ironic observation to be found in the text—but it probably didn’t hurt:
"Only her death in 1958, achieved in her fifth suicide attempt, could be termed a success.”
Life Imitates Art
By far, the most famous movie with which Louise Brooks was or ever will be associated is Pandora’s Box in which she plays a character named, of course, Lulu. The story is a particularly dark story about a character not terribly unlike Brooks herself; both were free spirits who seem peculiarly out of sync with the their age yet inexplicably an iconic representation of it as well. The story closes with Lulu become a victim of Jack the Ripper. Which only serves to make intensify the peculiarity of Brooks’ admission—fifteen years after the fact—that the director of the film was ironically close to the mark when he had—ironically—predicted that the fate of the actress would be “exactly like Lulu’s and you will end the same way.” In the case of the real life, of course, Jack the Ripper was entirely symbolic, thank god.
Humphrey and "Bogey"
Brooks reveals an ironic truth about screen legend Humphrey Bogart. Among the words she quotes to describe the public image of Bogey are “loner” and “self-determination” as essential qualities to ascribing to the actor those qualities most often found in his most famous character. With a much, much lighter sense of irony than she shows toward Barbara Bennett, Brooks observes about this image that is a portrait of a Bogart:
“in whom I can scarcely of the Humphrey I first knew in 1942 or last saw in 1943.”
Oh, Those French!
Long after she left Hollywood behind and thirty-five years after Pandora’s Box was first released, Brooks discovers an ironic secret behind the film’s sustained popularity among French audiences. It turns out that many French audiences were especially captivated by Lulu’s relationship with Countess Geschwitz for a reason not dissimilar to the irony associated with Bogart. They, took had confused the actor with the role; it was widely accepted that Brooks—like Lulu—was homosexual. The irony, of course, is that she insistently and consistently denied ever being either homosexual or bisexual. Nevertheless, the film did not appear to suffer any lasting damage in popularity following this disclosure.
