Louise Brooks and Black entertainers of the 1920s

To celebrate Black History Month, I've put together this piece noting some of the African American entertainers Louise Brooks encountered in the 1920s and 1930s, or those whose careers intersected with Brooks' career in some way. These celebrated Black actors, singers, and musicians include such notables as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Alberta Hunter and others.

Josephine Baker

One of the most famous African American entertainers of the inter-war period was Josephine Baker (1906 - 1975). She was a remarkable singer, recording artist, dancer, and actress. In Lulu in Hollywood, Brooks reminiscences about her time in Berlin and her role as Lulu in Pandora's Box, writing, "Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: 'They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage'." 

Josephine Baker

Here, seemingly, Brooks implies she saw Baker perform in Chocolate Kiddies. But did she? She doesn't actually say so. Brooks only makes a comparison.  It is known that Baker and the Chocolate Kiddies revue performed in Berlin in 1925, and Baker herself returned there without the revue in 1928 or 1929. (I haven't been able to pin down the exact dates to see if they overlap with the time Brooks was living and working in Berlin.) And of course, Baker performed, most famously, in Paris, another city where Brooks lived for a short time. But still, we don't know for sure whether Brooks actually saw Baker perform and conflated that performance with Baker's best known stage show, or whether Brooks was simply making a comparison based on something she had read about or been told about. 

I think it likely that Brooks saw Baker perform as some time, perhaps even in her banana girdle. In his biography of his step-mother, Jean-Claude Baker writes about Baker's time in Berlin in 1928, and even references Brooks and the quotation above. However, he does not state that Brooks and Baker encountered one another. 

A few years ago,  I was looking through a database of African American newspapers when I came across a unlikely mention of Brooks! The mention occurred in the Inter-State Tattler, an African American newspaper based in Harlem. In the June 14, 1929 issue, columnist Lady Nicotine penned a piece titled "Alberta Hunter Returns" in which she states that the famed African-American jazz and blues singer Alberta Hunter (1895 - 1984) had met a number of celebrities while in Europe, including Alice Terry, Ramon Novarro, Cole Porter, and Louise Brooks. Beyond this fleeting reference, we know nothing else. 

If I were to guess, I would guess that their meeting took place in Paris, where Brooks spent most of the month of May, 1929. Are there any Alberta Hunter experts who could weigh in on this question?

A bobbed Alberta Hunter

Brooks' name has popped up in other African American newspapers in the 1920s, though usually in relation to one of her films showing in a particular city or town. For instance, in Baltimore in February of 1927, the Royal Theater was screening Love Em and Leave Em, and performing at that same theater was the great Clara Smith (c. 1894 – 1935), an African America blues singer billed as the "Queen of the Moaners."

The Royal Theater was one of Baltimore's finest theaters, and one of a circuit of five such theaters which featured Black entertainment. (Its sister theaters were the Apollo in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and the Earl Theater in Philadelphia.) Over the years, the biggest stars in jazz and blues performed at the Royal. 

Another instance of a Brooks film showing along with a performance by a significant African American singer was when Valaida Snow (1904 - 1956) was on the bill along with A Social Celebrity. (Snow's name is misspelled in the advertisement.) The occasion was a showing at the famed Carlton Theatre in Shanghai, China in September, 1928. In what was billed as an "extraordinary attraction," Snow and "5 Red Hot Masters of Syncopation" performed live on stage, followed by A Social Celebrity on the screen. Snow, a female jazz trumpeter, became so famous that she was nicknamed "Little Louis" after Louis Armstrong, who called her the world's second best jazz trumpet player. Snow, who was performed with Josephine Baker, played concerts throughout the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. From 1926 to 1929, she toured with Jack Carter's Serenaders, performing not only in Shanghai but also in Singapore, Calcutta, and Jakarta.

Another personal encounter between Louise Brooks and a famous Black entertainer was when Brooks met the acclaimed concert artist and stage and film actor Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976).  

Brooks and Robeson encountered one another sometime on or about April 21, 1925, when the two met at a party at the home of Walter White, the longtime head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). At the time, Brooks was just a Ziegfeld showgirl drawn to the intelligentsia of the Jazz Age (including the various members of the Algonquin Round Table), while Robeson was an emerging star who had famously appeared in a revival of The Emperor Jones, by play-write Eugene O'Neil. Brooks never mentioned meeting Robeson, though the famed African American actor mentioned having met Brooks. Robeson's wife Essie kept a diary, and in it she noted incidents in both her and her husband's life. 

Paul Robeson portrait by Carl van Vechten

According to Martin B. Duberman's 1988 biography of Robeson, "Essie carefully noted in her diary the star-studded lists of guests she and Paul now met regularly on their round of parties. At the Van Vechtens’, Theodore Dreiser told Paul he had seen The Emperor Jones six times, and took him aside for a long talk. At the Whites’, the panoply of glamour included Sherwood Anderson, Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, Prince Kojo Touvalou Houenou of Dahomey (nephew of the deposed King and a graduate in law and medicine from the Sorbonne, active in publicizing French colonial injustices — Essie found him “a typical African in appearance, but charming and cultured and interesting”), Roland Hayes, the novelist Jessie Fauset, Rene Maran (the French West Indian author of Batouala who had won the Goncourt Prize in 1921), the poet Witter Bynner (“tall and clumsy and very friendly. I never saw anything quite so funny and froglike as he attempts to do the tango with Gladys [White], and his attempts at the ‘Charleston’ “), Louise Brooks she “was very late and I couldn’t wait for her, but . . . Paul said she was very conceited and impossible”), and the red-haired singer Nora Holt (Ray), half Scottish, half Negro, known for her dalliances."

I find it interesting that Brooks was invited to a party at the home of the head of the NAACP. And, I find it fascinating that Essie Robeson mentioned Louise Brooks by name. She really wasn't famous in the Spring of 1925, though she had gotten her name in various New York City newspaper papers more than a few times. And, to be mentioned in the same company as luminaries such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, etc.... is noteworthy. 

On occasion, Brooks name showed up in African American newspapers -- usually in reference to the showing of one of her American films at a theater patronized by Black Americans. However, on one occasion, she was mentioned in the nationally syndicated column, "Harlem Night by Night," which ran in African American newspapers.

According to a March, 1932 column, Brooks and Robeson may have encountered one another again. On the 19th of the month, syndicated columnist Maurice Dancer noted Brooks was among the celebrities who visited the Yeah Man club in Harlem. (The Yeah Man was a jazz venue at 2350 Seventh Avenue, between 137th and 137th Street in Harlem.) Besides Brooks, Libby Holman, and Lilyan Tashman, some of other celebrities mentioned by Dancer were famed jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, as well as Paul Robeson.

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