Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Rare footage of Louise Brooks

Speaking of comic art.... There is a big exhibit in Rome devoted to the graphic art of Guido Crepax, the Italian cartoonist whose  Valentina comix were inspired by Louise Brooks. "Valentina Movie" runs through September 30 at the Palazzo Incontro in Rome.

Italian LBS member Gianluca Chiovelli sent an email pointing out this recently posted related YouTube clip, which excerpts material from an Italian documentary dating from when I am not quite sure. It also contains footage I don't think I have ever seen before.


For more about this fantastic exhibit, be sure and check out this fantastic blog by Anna Battista.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Louise Brooks in Manga

Speaking of Brooks and books, actress Louise Brooks appears on the cover of this Japanese manga. Titled Happy Days, it is authored by Yoshino Sakumi. I don't know much about it, though there may be at least three works in the series. THis one mayb ebe number one. Here is the amazon Japan page which lists it. This manga artist was born in Oosaka and started working in 1980, so I would assume this manga dates from more recent decades, perhaps the 1990s. If you know anything about it, please post what you know in the comments field or email the Louise Brooks Society.



Sunday, June 10, 2012

Kansas coverage of Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone

Three articles about Laura Moriarty's superb new novel, The Chaperone, showed up in today's Kansas newspapers. The novel tells the story of the woman who accompanied 15 year old Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the changes both experienced in each others company. It is a great read, and highly recommended.

The Lawrence Journal-World ran a piece titled "A cut above: Local author’s novel generates national buzz," by Terry Rombeck. And the Wichita Eagle ran a story titled "Author Laura Moriarty takes a step back in time," by Lisa McLendon. The Eagle also ran a book review of The Chaperone in today's paper, "Laura Moriarty’s ‘The Chaperone’ brings 1920s Wichita to life."

Image courtesy of Riverhead books
Additionally, today's New York Times also ran a review, "City of Dreams," which features a cartoon illustration of the future actress by Pete Gamlen. All of the above articles are worth checking out.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Laura Moriarty in Chicago, Illinois

Laura Moriarty, author of The Chaperone, will be speaking about her new book in and near Chicago on June 9, 10 and 11. This should be a neat event, as Louise Brooks visited and once lived in Chicago. She also danced there (as a member of Denishawn) in the mid-1920s, and then again as a ballroom dancer in the early 1930s. Here are a couple of her events. Check the websites for details.

Saturday, June 9 and Sunday, June 10
Printer’s Row Lit Fest
Talk location & times TBD
Moriarty will be a panelist on "Her Story," with Claire McMillan, Margot Livesey and Francesca Segal, moderated by Gioia Diliberto, 11:15 a.m. Saturday, Wyndham Blake / Burnham Room.

Monday, June 11
Women Writers Series
sponsored by The Book Stall at Chestnut Court
12:00 pm at Avli Restaurant
566 Chestnut Street, Winnetka

Want to learn more about The Chaperone and its connection with Louise Brooks? Be sure and read this interview with Laura Moriarty on examiner.com. And check out this related piece on the Huffington Post.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Don't forget to vote

Don't forget to vote for your favorite images in the slideshow embedded in "Louise Brooks - Cover Girl and Secret Muse of the 20th Century" on Huffington Post. Here is another of my favorite book covers which I just couldn't include in the article.


Thursday, June 7, 2012

Louise Brooks - Cover Girl and Secret Muse of the 20th Century

Yesterday, I published a long article on the Huffington Post titled "Louise Brooks - Cover Girl and Secret Muse of the 20th Century." The article, along with its accompanying slideshow, explores Brooks' enduring cultural impact, especially in literature and publishing. Various works of fiction are surveyed which features the actress as a character (minor or major), or which were inspired by her, were based on her, or which reference or allude or give Brooks a literary shout-out. Prominant among them is Laura Moriarty's just released novel, The Chaperone (Riverhead), as well as Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1940 novella, The Invention of Morel (NYRB Classics), which is pictured below.


And pictured above is a screen grab of Saywer, the character from the TV show Lost, reading that very edition of The Invention of Morel with Brooks on the cover in an episode of the hit show.The connection between the novella, Louise Brooks, and Lost is further explained in the slideshow caption.

The slideshow which accompanies the article includes nearly three dozen images of Brooks on books. I titled the article "secret muse" because the actress' literary and cultural imapact is little known. Though ongoing. Indictitive of such is an image taken at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, France in 2011. Pictured below on the left holding my "Louise Brooks edition" of The Diary of a Lost Girl is the French translator of the Barry Paris biography (whose name escapes me at present, my apologies), myself in the middle, and on the right holding his Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star is the French journalist and critic Roland Jaccard. Actually, that was my copy of Jaccard's book which, along with others, I carried to France so Jaccard could autograph it.


One of the other books I brought to France was one that I mentioned at the end of my Huffington Post piece. It is also one of my favorite Brooks' covers. It is Jaccards' Portrait d'une Flapper. The book was published in France, but has not been translated and published in the United States. Here is a scan of the cover.


I have gotten some really nice feed back about this article. Please do read it. AND, if you know of other literary references to Louise Brooks, please let me know. Either post something in the comments section below of email the Louise Brooks Society.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Laura Moriarty talks about Louise Brooks and The Chaperone

Today marks the publication of Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone (Riverhead). Copies are just hitting stores across the country! Moriarty's new book is the USA Today #1 Hot Fiction Pick for the summer and an Indie Next List pick, as well as the #1 selection for "Best Book Coming Out This June" in O Magazine. Moriarty, who lives and teaches in Kansas, will be touring the country in the coming weeks. Want a signed copy? Order one here.

The Chaperone is a terrific, quietly powerful and captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both.

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon of a generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise left Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. 

Cora has no idea what she’s in for: teenage Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change both of their lives.

For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the question at the center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s,1930s, and beyond – from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women – Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and values to hemlines and attitudes were changing, and what a profound difference it made for the real life Louise Brooks, the fictional Cora Carlisle, and others like them.

Recently, Moriarty answered a few questions about her new book for the Louise Brooks Society.

* * * *

How did you come to write The Chaperone? How did you come to discover the story of 15 year old Louise Brooks heading off to NY in 1922 with an older chaperone?

I was browsing in a bookstore, and I came across the book Flapper by Joshua Zeist. He has a chapter devoted to Louise, and I’d always thought she was compelling. I started reading about her early life, and right there in the bookstore, I learned about the trip with the chaperone. Given what I already knew about Louise – that she was smart, self-directed, and temperamental – I knew this chaperone must have had her work cut out for her.

What is it about their story that interests you?

I’m always interested in inter-generational tension, and 1922 strikes me as a time when just a twenty-year gap in ages could make such a difference between two people. If the chaperone was 36 in 1922, she would have come of age during a time of corsets and covered ankles. The flappers with their bared knees – and all the changing social mores that fashion represents – would have been hard to get used to. So the chaperone might have been challenged by any forward-thinking adolescent, let alone the already sophisticated Louise Brooks.

I was also intrigued by Louise’s complicated personality and story.  She was both smart and self-destructive, and I wondered about her sudden disappearance from Hollywood. One thing that impresses me about Louise is how authentic she was – she acted as she felt and she said what she thought. Hollywood wasn’t the right place for her.

Did writing The Chaperone involve much research? What were the challenges of writing about two historical figures - one of which we know a good deal about, the other obscure?

I did a great deal of research for this book. Researching Louise was actually the easy part – I read her biographies and her autobiography, and I watched her films. I even looked at her old letters to see her handwriting. But I actually had to do more research for the chaperone, Cora, because even though she was invented, I wanted to make her a woman of her time, to make her someone who could have been thirty-six in 1922. But I really liked weaving Cora’s imagined life into the real facts of Louise’s.

Were you a fan of Louise Brooks? 

I knew who she was and I thought she was striking, but I wasn’t a fan until I started reading about her. I’m certainly a fan now.

When did you first encounter her? Is there anything you learned about Louise Brooks that surprised you?

I don’t remember when I first learned who she was. I know I tried to copy her haircut back in my twenties, and it completely didn’t work on me! But it wasn’t until that day in the bookstore that I started learning about her life.

As for surprises, there was an answer Louise gave to a question in her old age that I found really moving. LB fans will know, I think, what I’m alluding to, and I don’t want to ruin it for people who haven’t yet read her biography. But late in life, someone asked the hard and worn-down Louise if she’d ever really loved anyone, and her answer was pretty touching. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when she was interacting with this person, the one person she could admit she loved.

The Chaperone has been described as "the best kind of historical fiction, transporting you to another time and place, but even more importantly delivering a poignant story about people so real, you'll miss and remember them long after you close the book." That is a wow. What's next?


Thanks! I really have liked writing historical fiction, and my next novel will be historical as well. I’m just starting the research now . . .
* * * *

Fans of Downton Abbey will be thrilled to learn that actress Elizabeth McGovern reads the audio version of The Chaperone, which is due out in July. McGovern has also optioned the movie rights - and yes, Cora (her character in Downton Abbey) could end up playing Cora in any possible film. Who might play Louise Brooks is anyone's guess. Want to find out more about this fantastic novel? Check out this video interview with Laura Moriarty from USA Today.

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