Wednesday, April 8, 2020

New Find 2 - a Rare Paparazzi Picture of Louise Brooks

There is still a lot of interesting Louise Brooks & silent film material yet to discover. This post is the second in an ongoing series highlighting some of the newly found material I have just recently come across while stuck at home due to the coronavirus. With time on my hands, I have turned to picking through some of the many online databases and archives - some of which are newly accessible (due to the physical restrictions put on researchers because of the coronavirus), and some of which I am returning to in order to more thoroughly explore their holdings. As I am always finding out, it pays to not only have more than one set of key words to search under, but to look in the most unlikely places. You never know what you will find. Be sure and follow this blog for more discoveries in the coming weeks. 

I have seen a lot of images of Louise Brooks, in fact hundreds if not thousands. Thus, I am always a bit gobsmacked when I see a picture of Louise Brooks which I have never seen before. Here is one such image, which I uncovered just days ago. It dates from 1933.


In th picture, Louise Brooks is shown standing on an Atlantic Ocean beach while walking her dog, a terrier. The women she is talking with, also shown in profile to the left, is Lois Long (aka "Lipstick"), the well known New Yorker writer who was once married to the famous New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. (When this picture was taken, Long and Arno were divorced.) It is interesting to note that as late as 1933, Brooks was still wearing her hair in a bob and rather short.

This image, which has been cropped and had been captioned, was published in a society magazine, and in the days to come and as part of the "New Find" series, I will run another previously unknown image of Brooks from the same source from around the same time. Stay tuned.

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