He holds him with his skinny hand,
I finished Louise Brooks yesterday morning. It was a very long and dense book, but I enjoyed it a lot.
The authors takes us through Brooks’ entire life, from her early life in rural Kansas with her overbearing mother through to her lonely death in Rochester at the age of 80. It’s very comprehensive and well-researched, and really does a great job telling her story. I was going to try to summarize it here, but Brooks was really far too complex to summarize in just a few paragraphs. When people see the book, the story they most remember is the one about how her acting career was ended when she refused to sleep with a producer — this is a true story, but it’s far from the whole truth. Brooks was hugely talented and very capricious — she was arguably one of the world’s best modern dancers by the time she was 18, and then decided to quit. She was a rising star in Hollywood and then decided, based on what was probably a misconstrued attempt at salary bargaining, to leave and go make films in Germany. The sex episode in question happened after she returned from Germany and a number of poorly-received films. She was already hesitant about getting back into film making after what she perceived as failures, and the idea of sleeping with someone whom she didn’t really like didn’t appeal to her at all. Those German films are now widely recognized to be among the best silent films ever made, but the simple fact is that Brooks was a perfectionist and when she perceived herself as having produced less than perfection, she more or less gave up.
I’d very much recommend this book.
Now I’m reading The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy which is pretty cool.