Note: I corrected my error regarding John Wayne and Louise Brooks.
Louise Brooks may have been the first post-modern woman.
She lived in an age where things were becoming undone and at a rapid pace. When she was a child, a paper shortage helped usher in the phonograph. Around the same time, the film projector, movie camera, and the idea of movie theaters were perfected and popularized.
Before and during World War I there was no radio, no widespread use of the telephone, no wristwatches, no Kleenex, no stainless steel, and no zippers.
By 1925, when Brooks was filming her first movie, all were widespread. In the space of less than three years, Los Angeles had three radio stations. Telephones were common and movie theaters and mass-market magazines dominated American popular culture. The United States population was 115 million. Look magazine had 400,000 subscribers.
Availability of work, open cigarette and alcohol use, and lax moral codes had created the New Woman, who could vote, swear, and travel alone (at least white metropolitan women).
Brooks took this a step further, much to her detriment. Fitzgerald could have been writing of her when he said about young America “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...”
When Paramount refused to give her a raise equal to other major stars in 1927, she walked out. When she and her first husband, Eddie Sutherland (a wealthy Hollywood director) divorced she did not ask him for a penny. When offered a thousand dollars a week by GW Pabst to star in a risky - and risque - movie called Pandora’s Box in Weimar Berlin, she was on the next boat over.
Of course, this left her destitute when she lost her movie contract and could not hack the new era of sound. Her last movie was in 1937 with John Wayne’s.
She moved back to New York, sold herself as an escort, wrote a terrific biography, was rediscovered by film aficionados, and finished her life alone, bitter and broke, which was the ultimate fate of many free-living early post-modern women.
The post- post- post-modern woman of today lives a lot more smartly. Even Courtney Love seems to have managed to survive the nuttiness of the tomorrow-we-die method of living and dying.
For Journey, American, my original idea for Brooks was for her and the main character, Journey Seeger, to have a long off/on love affair. Reading and writing about Louise, I have realized it is impossible and unfair to who Louise Brooks really was.
Unlike so many of her partying partners of the Twenties, Louise Brooks lived into old age, unkind as it may have been.
Perhaps she managed a chuckle when the credits started rolling over her last title card: THE END.