Free pens in the mail

Because the Louise Brooks Society is considered an organization (of sorts), I am on various mailing lists and occassionally receive free sample pens in the mail. The nifty red pen pictured top is a LBS "10th anniversary" pen.

NYPL Digital Gallery

From today's New York Times . . . "Let the browser beware. The New York Public Library's collection of prints, maps, posters, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sheet-music covers, dust jackets, menus and cigarette cards is now online (www.nypl.org/digital/digitalgallery.htm). If you dive in today without knowing why, you might not surface for a long, long time. The Public Library's digital gallery is lovely, dark and deep. Quite eccentric, too. So far, about 275,000 items are online, and you can browse by subject, by collection, by name or by keyword. The images first appear in thumbnail pictures, a dozen to a page. Some include verso views. You can collect 'em, enlarge 'em, download 'em, print 'em and hang 'em on your wall at home."

A search under "Louise Brooks" brought up eight results, including two cigarette card images of the actress and six images from her days with Denishawn. Oddly enough, the NYPL has especially strong holdings in these two areas - cigarette cards and Denishawn. Scans of some 21,206 cards are online now. While a search under "Denishawn" brought up 78 pages of results. I did a few other random searchs. "Clara Bow" brought up seven results. "Rudolph Valentino" two results. "Charlie Chaplin" three results. "Buster Keaton" four results. If you are looking for something, it seems best to search under different keywords. A search under "Ziegfeld Follies" brought no results. While "Ziegfeld" brought four results.

The database seemed slow to respond (and display), but I am sure it is being overrun with search queries. Also, I wasn't sure if more than thumbnail images were displayed for any given entry. I couldn't get larger scans of the Louise Brooks thumbnail images to show. Here is a link to the New York Times story on the debut of the collection. Happy hunting.

2 x 2 x 2

My last two trips to the library (over the course of the last two weeks) left me empty handed. No new microfilm had arrived. . . . This week, however, two loans were waiting for me. I looked at February, 1923 issues of the two newspapers from Vicksburg, Mississippi - the Vicksburg Herald and the Vicksburg Evening Post. And in each I found articles and advertisements related to the Denishawn performance at the Walnut St. Theater.

In his review, George W. Crock of the Vicksburg Evening Post reported that "The audience was not as large as such a super-attraction deserved but the heavy sleet fall and bitter winter weather is largely responsible for that. The extreme cold also prevented the theatre heating plant from doing it's full duty, too and it was somewhat uncomfortable for the dancers in their diaphanous draperies." Nevertheless, by all accounts, the Denishawn dancers went over quite well. TheVicksburg Herald wrote, "The dancing of Miss St. Denis is too wonderful for words. It is the poetry of motion, the art of arts. Ted Shawn is also a wonderful dancer, and is superior to any of the men whom Russo has sent here." The article went on to state in somewhat purple prose, "The young ladies of the company - Martha Graham, Betty May, May Bennett, May Lynn, Lenore Schaeffer, Mary Brooks, are truly exquisite, beautiful fairies, light as thistle-down, living and breathing the dance they interpret." [It's curious that the author of this article refers to Brooks by her given name. Or perhaps they got it wrong. I can't think of another instance when a reviewer referred to "Mary Louise Brooks" throughout her various careers as a dancer, showgirl and actress.]

I also looked at two months of the St. Louis Star, one of the lesser newspapers from the midwestern metropolis. I was hoping to find something on the Denishawn performances in that Missouri city in late 1922 and early 1924. However, all I came up with was brief article and a tiny advert. The St. Louis Stargave extensive coverage to the movies and local theater - but didn't seem concerned about dance. (The Globe Democrat and Post-Dispatch are the "papers of record" for St. Louis - and were far superior in their coverage of the arts. I have already gone through each.)

I did notice, however, that the December 2nd Denishawn performance at the Odeon Theater in St. Louis quite nearly overlapped with a December 3rd engagement by Rudolph Valentino at the Delmonte Theater (see advertisement below). Despite legal threats against him, "The Shiek" did appear onstage, where he spoke for six minutes "before a worshipping throng" and denounced Brooks' future employers, the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The members of the Denishawn Dance Company most likely missed the event, as they had a December 4th engagement in Indianapolis. (See Emily Leider's fantastic biography of Valentino, Dark Lover, for the story behind this incident.)

A Woman of Affairs

Just returned from seeing A Woman of Affairs (1928), with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. (This is the third Garbo film I've seen at the Garbo Festival here in San Francisco.) Also in the cast were Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Sebastian, Lewis Stone and Johnny Mack Brown. I thought the film started slow, but it steadily picked up and finished with a bang. Garbo was lovely once again - a pleasure to watch. Fairbanks Jr. was also good - and his death scene was extraordinary in the way it was shot. William Daniels camera work was quite fine. The film was based on Michael Arlen's once controversial novel, The Green Hat. Local film critic Mick LaSalle - who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and authored Complicated Women (a study of pre-code film) - gave some interesting opening remarks.

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A somewhat reworked Louise Brooks Society homepage is now on-line. Mainly, the page has been redesigned so as to accomodate higher screen resolutions used by the majority of visitors. (Nearly 58% of all visitors use settings of 1024 x 768 or higher. That wasn't the case a year or two ago, when the majority of viewers used 800 x 600.) The HTML on the homepage has also been cleaned-up, some images changed, and other things neatened and straightened. A "this day in history" javascript has also been added (thanx to Christy), which will change ever day. I hope to rework the rest of the site in the coming months. Comments? Questions?

Torrent

Just returned from today's Garbo Festival, where I saw Torrent (1926), which was Garbo's first American film. It co-starred Ricardo Cortez, and also featured Gertrude Olmstead and Lucien Littlefield, who would later be seen in It Pays to Advertise (1931) with Louise Brooks. Torrent was just ok, and I think is largely of interest today as a Garbo film. To me, Garbo still seemed more like the European actress seen in The Saga of Gosta Berling or G.W. Pabst's Joyless Street rather than the American actress she would become in Flesh and the Devil.

Exploring a Library of Congress collection

             

The Library of Congress has an extraordinary collection of images available on-line through its Prints and Photographs division. This database is searchable by keyword, and some of the images are available in high-resolution scans. A search for "Louise Brooks" only turned up one (rather unusual) result. Nevertheless, fans of silent film, theater, dance, etc.... will certainly find other fascinating and seldom seen images. There are thousands of scans available from more than four dozen collections. Try searching under keywords or names such as "actress," "Ziegfeld," "Ruth St. Denis," "Rudolph Valentino," "Charlie Chaplin," etc....

                                  

Garbo Festival

Just back from the opening night of the Garbo Festival at San Francisco's Balboa Theater. I saw Queen Christina, which I enjoyed a great deal. It was a satisfying film on so many levels. Garbo was terrific - and lovely throughout. John Gilbert was good. Lewis Stone was good. The cinematography / art direction was good. And Adrian's costumes were fabulous. Also in the film, in a small role, was Gustav von Seyffertitz - who acted in The Canary Murder Case. (As well as Akim Tamiroff in an uncredited role - he acted in King of Gamblers.) Film critic David Thomson gave a short, insightful introduction -recounting the time when he was teaching film history at Dartmouth and one of his students discretely revealed that his great aunt was the reclusive actress! (My wife has convinced me that we should attend the Sunday afternoon screening of Torrent, which coincides with the Balboa's 79th anniversary celebration. So, I will be there !)

Maria Tatar - myth, mayhem, and murder

A professor of German at Harvard University, Maria Tatar is also a scholar and writer whose unusual books include Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature and Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. (This later book discusses Wedekind's Pandora's Box and the films of Fritz Lang, but curiously, not Pabst's Pandora's Box.)  Tatar is also the editor of two recent volumes, The Annotated Brothers Grimm and The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.

I spotted the author's name again in another recently released title, A New History of German Literature, edited by David E. Wellbery. In this new book, Tatar authored a very interesting essay on Frank Wedekind entitled "Eroticism and the Femme Fatale." What caught my eye was Tatar's discussion of Louise Brooks, her role as Lulu, and the "powerful afterlife" of Wedekind's play. Tatar comments, "Though Pabst's film was not a commercial success, it came to occupy a central position in the iconography of feminine evil and fed into discourses on sexual cynicism in Weimar Germany. . . . In crafting a tragedy of monsters and a monster tragedy, Wedekind was able to disclose phobic anxieties and desires that would lead to a broader understanding of what was at stake in cultural conflicts, large and small." Tatar's five page essay makes for interesting reading. Anyone interested in its subject matters might want to check it out.

Lulu a Hollywood

Today, a book I had purchased over the internet arrived in the mail . . . . I received a copy of Lulu a Hollywood, by Louise Brooks. This is the Italian edition ofLulu in Hollywood. This book was first published in Italy in 1984. My copy was issued by the publishing company Ubulibri in 2003. The book was translated from English to Italian by Marcello Flores d'Arcais.

This edition is pretty similar to the three American editions with which most fans are familiar. Except for a one-page "Scritti di Louise Brooks" (or "Writings by Louise Brooks") added to the end of the book, this Italian edition features the same content as the English-language editions. Interestingly, the portraits of Garbo and Gish included at the beginning of Brooks' essay in the English-language edition have been substituted with different images of the actresses. Otherwise, all of the images included in the English-language editions are included in this Italian edition, though this copy also includes additional images from Capitan Barbablu (A Girl in Every Port) and Lulu (Pandora's Box). The book - which sells for 16 Euros - also has a different cover. The black-and-white front cover is the Eugene Richee portrait of Brooks wearing pearls. The rear cover is its mirror image.