I haven't done much blogging or writing lately as I have been spending a lot of my time pouring through five archives (one of them new to me), acquiring hundreds of pages of valuable new material related to Louise Brooks' life and career. It is a laborious, sometimes slow-moving, time consuming, though rewarding process. I had shared a few intriguing snippets from recent finds in August - see this post / this post / and this post, and plan on posting more in September and October, so stay tuned.
Some of this material, or notations gained from it, has already made its way onto the Louise Brooks Society website -- notably the Day by Day Chronology. Other of it will be published in forthcoming books. Here is another, an intriguing "near miss" or what might have been ....
While researching Brooks pre-Denishawn dance work, I came across this Wichita newspaper advertisement for the Wichita theatre. It dates from September, 1921.
At the bottom of the ad for a three-day showing of the Mary Pickford film, Through the Back Door, is notice of the few other shorts on the program, including a Snub Pollard film, The Jail Bird, and two "Wichita Pictorials," one of a local Children's Home, and another of Alice Campbell's dancing class. (Pictorials were, generally speaking, short non-fiction works -- sometimes called "actualities" -- that recorded real people, places, or events. They were usually local in nature.)
I came across the ad because, in the course of my research, I had been tracking down information on Alice Campbell, one of Louise Brooks' dance teachers in the years before she joined Denishawn. Other of Brooks' teachers included Alice Mills ("The Chaperone"), Edna L. Shaw, and May Argue Buckpitt. Campbell is a lesser known figure in the course of Brooks' life, but a still interesting figure on a couple of accounts.
Campbell was an instructor at the Wichita College of Music and Dramatic Art. She started at the College in the Spring of 1916, and was advertised as a "post graduate of one of the best known schools of expression in America, expert in fancy dancing, with five years' college teaching experience." (The "best known school" was the Morse School of Oratory and Expression, an early 20th-century institution dedicated to elocution, oratory, dramatic art, and physical culture based in St. Louis, Missouri.) She was also a leading figure in Wichita cultural affairs, and had a hand in teaching dance to the teenage Louise Brooks. Campbell, for instance, supervised or choreographed Brooks' public performance on at least two or three occasions, including, significantly, her role in the "Dance of Wheat" (alongside featured soloist Domina Marini) at the International Wheat Show in Wichita in October, 1920. The "Dance of Wheat" was performed twice a day and ran for 13 days!
Campbell also had something in common with Ruth St. Denis. Three years before St. Denis dismissed Brooks from Denishawn, Campbell dismissed Brooks from her own dancing class. Why? We don't know for sure, but it likely had to do with the same sort of reason St. Denis dismissed Brooks. Campbell's dismissal of Brooks occurred in early February, 1921.
When I first came across the Mary Pickford advertisement, I thought "could this short film include Louise Brooks?" I was intrigued to find out.
According to the Louise Brooks Society Day by Day Chronology, Brooks was dismissed from Alice Campbell's class in February of 1921 ... while the "Wichita Pictorial" in question was shown locally in theaters in August and September of 1921. So the question arises, when was this particular pictorial shot? The answer is likely July of 1921 -- as that was when the first Wichita pictorials were shot -- which would in-all-likelihood preclude Brooks from appearing in the Alice Campbell dance class film.
The above Wichita Eagle article tells us the "Wichita Pictorial" shorts were shot by M. B. Faidley, a prominent Wichita cameraman, beginning in July 1921. As the local Wichita theatre sponsored these films, I assume they were shown locally in that theatre as an added attraction. I also came across an August article in the Wichita Beacon which notes that the Alice Campbell dancing class short was the third installment in the pictorial series and that it was shot on "one of the beautiful Circle Drive lawns" as well as other unrelated activities.
I found another newspaper bit which suggests a "Wichita Pictorial" was also shot in October 1921 at the International Wheat Showa, but its description does not reference the "Dance of Wheat," the Alice Campbell directed performance which included Brooks. I wonder whatever became of these various pictorials? Even though they seemingly don't include Brooks, I would still like to see them, as they depict the immediate locale and times in which Brooks lived. The above article notes that they would be donated to posterity as a record of life in the mid-western metropolis.
To close, here is another newspaper ad for the Mary Pickford film, a variant ad which includes notice of the "Wichita Pictorial." It too is a variant on what might have been....
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