My Afternoon With Louise Brooks, copyright © 2011 by Tom Graves. Blonde Shadow: The Brief Career and Mysterious Disappearance of Actress Linda Haynes, copyright © 2011 by Tom Graves. Meat Eaters, Killers, and Suckers of Blood: Mano a Mano With Harry Crews was first published in that form in the anthology Getting Naked With Harry Crews, copyright © 1999 by Tom Graves. Natural Born Elvis: The Story of Bill Haney, the First Elvis Impersonator was originally published in The Oxford American magazine in 1998, copyright © 1998 by Tom Graves. The Back Door Frontman was originally published in The Oxford American magazine in 1999, copyright © 1999 by Tom Graves. In the Midnight Aisle: The Story of the Blackwood Brothers Quartet, copyright © 2011 by Tom Graves. The Men With the Golden Ears, copyright © 2011 by Tom Graves. Steve Hoffman: The First Genius of CD was originally published in the Oct. 1987 issue of Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1987 by Tom Graves. Bill Inglot: An Analog Heart In A Digital Domain was originally published in the Aug. 1991 issue of Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1991 by Tom Graves. In Pursuit of Pure Sound: The Story of the Audiophile Record Label, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs was originally published in the May 1, 1993 issue of American Way magazine, copyright © 1993 by Tom Graves. Sympathy for the Devil: A Kind Word for Albert Goldman, copyright © 2009 by Tom Graves. Ten LPs You Probably Don’t Have (But Should), copyright © 2009 by Tom Graves. When the Sex Pistols Came to Memphis, copyright © 2010 by Tom Graves. Guilty Pleasures: Tennessee Ernie Ford was originally published in 1991 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1991 by Tom Graves. Woodstock Revisited was originally published in American History magazine, copyright © 1996 by Tom Graves. Interview: Frank Zappa was originally published in 1987 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1987 by Tom Graves. Interview: Mick Taylor was originally published in 1988 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1988 by Tom Graves. Have Mersey: An Interview with the La’s Driving Force and Angriest Member, Lee Mavers was originally published in 1991 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1991 by Tom Graves. Take Me Seriously!: An Interview with Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders was originally published in 1991 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1991 by Tom Graves. Interview: Dave Marsh was originally published in 1988 in Rock & Roll Disc magazine, copyright © 1988 by Tom Graves.
Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers, copyright © 2015 byThe Devault-Graves Agency. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher.
Print Edition ISBN: 978-1-942531-08-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-942531-07-4
Cover design: Martina Voriskova
Title page design: Martina Voriskova
DEVAULT-GRAVES DIGITAL EDITIONS
Devault-Graves Digital Editions is an imprint of The Devault-Graves Agency, Memphis, Tennessee.
The names Devault-Graves Digital Editions, Lasso Books, and Chalk Line Books are all imprints and trademarks of The Devault-Graves Agency.
www.devault-gravesagency.com
Table of Contents
Author’s Preface
Film
My Afternoon With Louise Brooks
Chapter One – Lulu
Chapter Two – Naked On My Goat
Chapter Three – Kansas
Chapter Four – Rochester
Chapter Five – Secrets
Chapter Six – Finis
Fallen Angel (aborted biography of Louise Brooks)
Author’s Denial
Chapter One – Kansas
Blonde Shadow: The Brief Career and Mysterious Disappearance of Actress Linda Haynes
Literature
Meat Eaters, Killers, and Suckers of Blood: Mano a Mano with Harry Crews
Music
Natural Born Elvis: The Story of Bill Haney, the First Elvis Impersonator
The Back Door Frontman: D.L. Menard
In the Midnight Aisle: The Story of the Blackwood Brothers Quartet
Prologue
Chapter One – Ring of Fire
Chapter Two – Alpha and Omega
Chapter Three – Aftermath
Chapter Four – Daddy (Sumner) Sang Bass
Chapter Five – Gospel Music Into Praise Music
Afterword
The Men With the Golden Ears
Introduction
Steve Hoffman: The First Genius of CD
Bill Inglot: An Analog Heart in a Digital Domain
In Pursuit of Pure Sound: The Story of the Audiophile Record Label, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs
Sympathy for the Devil: A Kind Word For Albert Goldman
Ten LPs You Probably Don’t Have (But Should)
When the Sex Pistols Came to Memphis
Guilty Pleasures: Tennessee Ernie Ford
Woodstock Revisited
Interview: Frank Zappa
Interview: Mick Taylor
Have Mersey: An Interview with the La’s Driving Force and Angriest Member, Lee Mavers
Take Me Seriously! An Interview with Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders
Interview: Critic Dave Marsh
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Graves received his first recognition as a journalist in 1976 when he won a Sigma Delta Chi (the journalism student organization) regional award for best feature article for a profile of a local eccentric, Prince Mongo, for Memphis Magazine. At graduation that same year he received the National Observer Award for journalism graduate of the year from Memphis State University. He began to publish reviews and articles for national periodicals while still in his early twenties and became the editor and publisher of the critically-acclaimed small circulation magazine Rock & Roll Disc from 1987 until the magazine ceased publication in 1992.
Graves wrote for Rolling Stone, Musician, American History, The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other magazines and newspapers before his first novel, Pullers, was published in 1998. The novel received glowing reviews, but it was nine years before Graves’s next book, Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. This meticulously-researched biography received praise from a wide variety of sources and won the author the Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Literature in 2010.
Beginning in 2010 Graves travelled with filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville to interview the subjects for the documentary film Best of Enemies (released in 2015) about the 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., a subject he had been working with since his freshman year in college. Graves was credited as the Consulting Producer for the film, which continues to play in theaters and is predicted to win future awards.
In 2012 Graves and his friend Darrin Devault formed a book publishing company, The Devault-Graves Agency, that specializes in re-publishing promising books that have gone out of print. The company made world news in 2014 when it published Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger, the first legitimate J.D. Salinger book in over 50 years. They also published three Jack Kerouac novels, the celebrity profile collections of Rex Reed, Weegee’s autobiography, and crime fiction by Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, and David Goodis.
In 2015 Devault and Graves published a book of their photography, Graceland Too Revisited, about the infamous Elvis-themed roadside attraction in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Graves has lived his entire life in Memphis, Tennessee and is a professor at LeMoyne-Owen College where he teaches English, Humanities, and Journalism.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
I WAS BOTH BLESSED AND CURSED to have been born and raised in the South. In fact, I’ve lived the whole of my sixty years in Memphis and it’s highly possible that I will run out my string here in the Bluff City. My parents, however, were both from the backwoods of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, just outside the town of Pine Bluff. They both lived in poverty and struggled through, first, the Great Depression, and second, World War II. My father and four of his brothers fought in the war and all of them returned home, more or less, in one piece. Dad thought this was a miracle and it cemented his certainty that a higher power was behind the survival of this notoriously roughhouse gang of Graves.
My mother’s side of the family, the Rogers, were the master storytellers. Out in the country, where television reception was a rumor, Saturday night entertainment consisted of sitting around and swapping stories, many of which had been heard several times. I have never understood the rudeness of people who will stop you when telling a story and say, “Yeah, you’ve told that one before.” Knowing the quirks, the punch lines, and the build-ups to these classic family yarns made them screamingly funny. I have never laughed so hard in my life as at the repeat stories of my Granddaddy, Uncle Joe, Uncle Glenn, Uncle Benard (correct spelling), and Aunt Katy.
Not all the stories were funny. I’ll never forget how my Granddad’s stories of panthers roaming the woods of Arkansas would keep me wide awake at night, listening for the sound of a woman screaming, which is how my Granddad described the yowl of a panther. In the front yard, when the women were away telling their own stories, the men would relate some of their war experiences, careful to watch their language with a boy (me) hanging on every word.
I was fortunate enough to inherit this gift for storytelling, although I’m nowhere as good as my family, all of whom now are slapping their knees in the Great Beyond. When I decided to become a writer, my relatives never could quite get a handle on it. Why not use my gift of gab for something that could earn me a good living? They universally thought I should be a lawyer. They had a point. But I had learned -- slowly, very slowly – to transfer that wonderful oral tradition onto paper, where other people might read my stories.
I graduated from Memphis State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism. I not only wanted to tell my stories, I wanted to tell other people’s stories too. I was particularly taken with people who courted both fame and obscurity. Those who had tasted fame and celebrity and ran the other way drew me as a moth to flame – and just like that moth I often got my wings singed.
It took me the better part of 30 years to come to grips with Louise Brooks, the legendary silent film beauty who had a second career as a writer and recluse. I had such mixed feelings about my dealings with her that every time I tried to write the story I found myself bogged in the same mental Rubik’s Cube. Age and distance finally allowed me to tell the story. And here it is in this collection.
This book collects what I think is my best journalism, and when I look back over the decades I have been working as a writer I am somewhat surprised with the widescreen lens of my muse. This also has been a bit of a problem. There is a lust for categorization in the world of arts and letters and exactly how can you categorize a book on Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, Harry Crews, and the Sex Pistols? Well, you can’t, but they were all passions of mine at one time or another.
As a Journalism undergraduate I saw right away that the work of the New Journalists – Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and even Rex Reed (who was the best celebrity profile writer of them all) – would serve as major inspirations. My first book, a novel, which surprised everyone who thought I only wrote nonfiction, was compared to Hunter S. Thompson. This pleased me to no end. My next book, Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, had a prose style intentionally very different from anything I had previously written. Hemingway’s iceberg technique of saying less and implying more I felt was totally suited to the mystery of the largely unknowable Robert Johnson, and it worked well, enough to earn me the Keeping the Blues Alive Award in 2010 (formerly known as the Handy Awards) for Literature.
When one of my students occasionally asks me the biggest thing I’ve ever done (I’m a professor at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis) I don’t have to think but a split second: my publication of the first J.D. Salinger book in 50 years, Three Early Stories. That eclipses anything else I have done or will ever likely do in the future. As a co-owner of what one industry insider has called “the most gonzo indie publisher in the U.S.,” The Devault-Graves Agency, my life has taken yet another curious turn.
But in this book I wanted to bring back the jewels of my writing life, which have been floating in the ether of the internet to be stumbled across on occasion by intrepid readers and fellow writers. Yes, I was the last journalist admitted to Louise Brooks’s bedside. I talked with Frank Zappa shortly after he appeared before Congress. I was in the audience and sober as a Utah judge when the Sex Pistols played Memphis. I found the first Elvis impersonator completely by accident. Quentin Tarantino provided me the phone number for one of the best and most obscure actresses ever to flee Hollywood, Linda Haynes.
So, if you have this book in your hands, kick back and let me tell you a few of my stories.
OTHER BOOKS BY TOM GRAVES
FICTION
Pullers
NONFICTION
Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of
Blues Legend Robert Johnson
(winner of the Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Literature, 2010)
PHOTOGRAPHY
Graceland Too Revisited
(with Darrin Devault)
OTHER BOOKS YOU MIGHT ENJOY FROM
DEVAULT-GRAVES DIGITAL EDITIONS
Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac
Do You Sleep in the Nude? by Rex Reed
Conversations in the Raw by Rex Reed
People Are Crazy Here by Rex Reed
Valentines & Vitriol by Rex Reed
Weegee: The Autobiography
Black Man in the White House by E. Frederic Morrow
PHOTO CREDITS
Louise Brooks circa 1928 courtesy of Margaret Brooks; signed copy of Lulu in Hollywood by Tom Graves; Linda Haynes in film Rolling Thunder courtesy of Paramount Pictures; Linda Haynes in Bonita Springs, Florida circa 2010 by Tom Graves; Harry Crews in Gainesville, Florida, 1979, by Tom Graves; Elvis mosaic on Memphis street by Tom Graves; D.L. Menard courtesy of Rounder Records; Blackwood Brothers Quartet courtesy of James Blackwood; Albert Goldman, public domain courtesy of Wikipedia; Johnny Rotten in Memphis, 1977, by Ward Archer; Tennessee Ernie Ford outside Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles, courtesy of Capitol Records; Woodstock picturing Country Joe McDonald is public domain courtesy of Wikipedia; Frank Zappa courtesy of Rykodisc; Mick Taylor, public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia; the La’s courtesy of Polygram; Paul Revere and the Raiders, public domain, credited to Associated Press, courtesy of Wikipedia; Dave Marsh courtesy of Dave Marsh.
Chapter One – Lulu
[A scene from the 1928 silent film classic, Pandora’s Box]
Dr. Ludwig Schoen, a German newspaper magnate, takes a key from his immaculately tailored trousers and opens the door to the love nest that has become the scandal of Berlin. Inside, waiting for him, is his lover, Lulu. She is wearing a clinging white chiffon dress and her hair, black as an arctic night, is worn in the latest fashion, a dutch bob cropped close to the face revealing the full curvature of her long, splendid neck.
Schoen does not embrace her. Instead he paces towards the fireplace mantel and sits dejectedly on the arm of a chair. After removing a cigarette from a silver case and lighting it, he finally looks Lulu in the eye and says, “I’m going to be married.”
She does not register the hurt he expects. Instead she laughs gaily and asks, “And because you’re going to be married you won’t kiss me?”
“The whole city is talking about us,” he answers. “It is ruining my career.”
She walks to her day bed and lies upon it, her arms outstretched to him. He sits next to her, still consumed by his sullen mood. Lulu tilts her head back in a repose of seduction, her white neck an open invitation.
“Don’t you realize it’s got to be finished between us?” he pleads.
Lulu entwines her arms around Schoen’s neck and pulls herself to him.
“You’ll have to kill me if you want to get away from me,” she whispers as she presses her lips to his.
Chapter Two – Naked On My Goat
THE MOMENT I first clapped eyes on Louise Brooks in her portrayal of Lulu, I too would have sold my soul for a moment of such intimacy with her. It was 1980, five years before her death, and I sat by myself at the first ever Memphis screening of the silent classic Pandora’s Box, the film that cemented Louise Brooks’s cult status as the most beautiful and ruinous femme fatale ever to leave scorch marks on a silver screen. When I watched her, the glistening raven hair, luminous, deceitful eyes, and thin ever-so-parted lips that smirked over every life she wrecked, I was reminded of those Saturday mornings of childhood visions watching cartoons on television and the evil, seductive black widow spider who lured the good little cartoon flies into her web of death. A sleek and shimmering dominatrix in black leather, she made my breath short and pulse quicken on those chilly mornings in my pajamas and slippers.
Two decades later, as I leaned forward in my auditorium seat transfixed by Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora’s Box, I saw once again that black widow, a breathtaking, mesmerizing chanteuse who spread her poison without remorse and utterly destroyed every man she pleasured. Louise Brooks’s portrayal of Lulu wasn’t merely a performance, it was a possession. After seeing the film in Paris decades ago, Henri Langlois, founding director of the Cinemateque Francaise, declared to the world, “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!” Louise Brooks as Lulu was an exquisite, haunting apparition, a vision in black and white as ethereal and disturbing as a deeply erotic dream.
In that final moment, when the last frame of film had slipped past the lens and the projector was silenced, I knew…I had to meet her.
The events that led up to my spending an afternoon with the most reclusive, perplexing star in the history of cinema actually began a year earlier than my epiphany watching Pandora’s Box, on one of those routine weeknights when television beckons. Kenneth Tynan, the esteemed British drama critic and playwright, was the guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Tynan was discussing his New Yorker profile of a silent film actress, Louise Brooks, singling out for lavish praise Brooks’s appearance in the German silent film Pandora’s Box. It was a title that echoed in the memory. I also vaguely recalled something about a Louise Brooks cult in Europe.
It was not long after that night that I saw Lulu for myself at the Memphis screening of Pandora’s Box. From Tynan’s New Yorker profile, I was aware that Brooks was living in an efficiency apartment in Rochester, New York, where she was in declining health, confined to her bed with arthritic hips. Although she had for years been an almost total recluse, turning away all strangers and answering no fan mail, she had met with Kenneth Tynan and they had developed an intimate, perhaps even sexual, relationship. She had admitted few others to her bedside.
It was more than beauty that made Louise Brooks so appealing. In one of film history’s more curious twists, Brooks, who had been stereotyped by Hollywood as a scheming jazz baby, had become a writer and wit of some renown in her later years, penning brilliant, idiosyncratic essays on film for respected journals such as England’s Sight and Sound and France’s Positif.
In 1982, I was an advertising writer for a large medical firm in Memphis, working after hours as a freelancer. I was 28, happily married, a mortgage holder, and the proud father of a six-month-old daughter. Yet, somehow it all just didn’t seem to add up to enough. The walls of my office cubicle -— a depressing shade of corporate orange -— grew more suffocating by the day. A satisfying paycheck in no way equaled a satisfying life, and I was determined to restore some semblance of meaning from a regimented, barnacled career. Louise Brooks was a way out.
I had decided that Louise Brooks was worthy of a full-length biography and I wanted to be the one to write it. The notion loomed larger at the approach of every ad deadline and the demand of every blank page. When the company WATS line was open and available I used it, ferreting out obscure magazine articles in far-flung libraries, chatting with a few of the sage New York film critics who had written admiring pieces on Miss Brooks, and finally seeking out those hallowed places where one could actually see an archival print of Louise Brooks films other than Pandora’s Box. (Keep in mind that the videotape revolution was barely underway in 1982 and obscure films were virtually impossible to screen unless you were in the business.)
My inquiries to those in charge of the George Eastman House film archives in Rochester, New York, who reportedly had convinced Brooks to move to Rochester to be near the world’s largest collection of her films, were met with yawns and polite refusals. No, they could not help me get in touch with Louise Brooks, and yes, they would be happy to screen all the Louise Brooks films for me — at a fee that roughly equaled a year’s salary.
I next turned to James Card, the retired film curator of the Eastman House, the man credited with discovering Louise Brooks’s whereabouts in New York City in the 1950s, where she had lived for well over a decade in isolation and near-destitution, surviving by means that are even today the grist of gossip and speculation. Brooks would speak of those years only in the most circumspect fashion, expertly dodging the issue of exactly how she was able to afford a Manhattan apartment.
Card, an imperious and imposing man -— at least that’s the image he conveyed in telephone conversation -— was initially polite but aloof.
“Yes, Miss Brooks and I are very close friends, but I’m afraid I can’t help you at all in regards to a biography,” Card said in his thunderhead of a voice. “She doesn’t approve at all, you know.”
“You mean she knows about me and my efforts to begin this biography?”
“But of course. She wishes for you to stop at once. Did you know,” he added conspiratorially, “that I have in my possession the only copy of her autobiography?”
“Do you mean those articles she published that are going into this new book, Lulu In Hollywood?”
“Oh no. I mean her autobiography, Naked On My Goat. The one she supposedly threw into an incinerator. I am in possession of the only copy and it’s under lock and key,” he said conjuring for me a mental image of Vincent Price with a mad gleam in his eye.
“And,” he added, “we plan on publishing it.”
I soon discovered that Naked On My Goat was a book as elusive as J.D. Salinger’s rumored unpublished novels. I began to suspect that James Card might have personal reasons for keeping me away from his prairie blossom.
Chapter Three – Kansas
I WAS NOT TO BE deterred. It seemed logical to me when laying out the plans for the biography to begin at Louise’s beginning in Kansas. I began to solicit and collect information on Louise Brooks’s family background in Cherryvale and Independence, Kansas. A great deal of impressive research already had been completed by Charles Cagle at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, and two ambitious high school students from Topeka who had made Louise Brooks the subject of their senior project.
I traveled by automobile from Memphis to the flatlands of Kansas to meet and interview all the townspeople who recalled anything about the former silent screen beauty and her family. The portrait of the Brookses that began to emerge from the long conversations with these unpretentious, no-bull folk often was at odds with the glowing tributes from the cult of admirers.
Brooks’s maternal grandfather, a country doctor named Doc Tom Rude, had a hatchet buried in his face during a drunken brawl. His father, Havilas Rude, also a country doctor, was deeply addicted to morphine. Madness and eccentricity twined like malignant vines through the family tree. Tales of strange, erratic behavior by Louise began to surface also. As a child she had severe fits of temper that went far beyond the machinations of a spoiled child. She took up dance at an early age, but was considered unmanageable by most instructors.
In a side trip to Wichita, I interviewed a dance partner of Louise’s, Hal McCoy, who had worked with her after her film career came to its bitter end in the mid-1930s. She had returned to her home state of Kansas for a brief, miserable period in which she attempted to start a school of dance. She had formed a partnership with McCoy and they performed as a dance duo at numerous local society gatherings.
“I wasn’t a trained dancer like Louise,” said the genial McCoy at his home. “I was just a better than average hoofer who was introduced to Louise through her sister, June. Louise was very precise in choreographing our dance steps. She had been one of the Denishawn Dancers at one time, which was a dance troupe famous throughout the country. Later she was a chorus girl for the Ziegfeld Follies. I was nowhere near her equal, and I would occasionally miss a step and try to cover it with something ad-libbed. This would send her into an absolute frenzy; she would explode if the least little thing went wrong.
“The last time I saw Louise Brooks was after a performance of ours. I had flubbed a few steps again and in the cab ride afterwards she literally screamed at me the whole time. I made up my mind on the spot that I would never work with this woman again. She was acting positively insane with rage. Then she totally threw me off-balance when we pulled up to her door. She said, ‘I know what it is you’ve been wanting all this time. Come on in and I’ll give it to you.’ Then and there I knew she was crazy. I was engaged to my future wife and wanted no part of Louise Brooks.”
I also contacted Louise’s relatives. Most of them refused to talk to me. One who didn’t was Louise’s nephew, Robert Brooks. Louise had doted on him when he was a child, reading to him and preparing him, in his words, “big, awful meals.” When talking about his aunt, Robert was frequently overcome with emotion. He finally said to me, “You know you should talk to her yourself.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have her phone number,” I replied honestly.
“Well, let me give it to you,” Robert replied to my astonishment.
I held my breath and dialed. After two rings a woman’s voice answered “Hel-lo” in a voice as musical as a violin’s.
“May I speak to Miss Brooks?” I asked.
“Who’s calling?” she demanded emphatically.
I explained who I was and why I was calling. She was wary and obviously caught off-guard. She suggested that I write down any questions I had and send them to her. I knew, of course, that she never responded to any such written requests.
I decided to tell her about my travels to Cherryvale, Kansas and the childhood friends of hers I had met and spoken to. As hoped, this changed the tenor of the conversation. She began to ask me questions.
She recalled one of the girls she had gone to school with, a Morna Wagstaff, and laughed like a delighted child when I told her I had only recently spoken with the lady.
As we continued to talk, her voice began to weaken. She told me she had emphysema and said that she would be recording an acceptance speech in her apartment the next day for the prestigious George Eastman Award from the Eastman House Museum. She said she was afraid to talk anymore for fear she would ruin her voice and wouldn’t be able to make the recording.
I later learned that she could make her voice hoarse at will. It was a ruse she used frequently to get off the phone. The acceptance speech she recorded the next day for the George Eastman Award, which was played for the audience at the awards ceremony, was clear as crystal.
The awards presentation was only weeks away. Myrna Loy, Maureen O’Sullivan, Luise Rainer, Sylvia Sidney, and Louise Brooks were all to be honored at the black tie ceremony, which was to be followed by a gala reception. I couldn’t help but wonder if the sound of all that applause wouldn’t seduce Louise out of her tiny apartment. Even if she refused to attend due to her health, I felt sure she would be receiving, at the very least, a few visitors. The timing seemed right for my visit.
Chapter Four -- Rochester
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK was stark, gray, and whipped by bitter cold that November day. The taxi cab windows were tinged with frost. I asked the cab driver to stop at a liquor store and went inside to buy a gift bottle of wine. When I told the clerk on duty the wine was to be a gift he slapped on a tiny red bow.
Set and on the way, we drove by several bruised automobiles parked on the street that seemed to have the same dead pallor as the row upon row of apartment buildings we passed. The city was disturbingly quiet. The cab stopped at a grim, slate-colored apartment building barely distinguishable from the others. I could see no movement behind the rows of small, begrimed windows that stared out like so many clouded eyes.
After paying my fare, I stood for a moment taking stock of myself. I could see the faint reflection of myself in the apartment building’s outer glass door. I thought I looked like one of the explorers in Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. At six feet four inches and 250 pounds, covered thigh to jowl in a screaming blue down coat, I wondered if I might look a little, well, intimidating to a 75-year-old recluse.
Nah, I thought to myself, Louise Brooks has handled a lot worse than me.
I entered the cramped vestibule and found the address tag that said L. BROOKS. With a ball of snakes twisting in my stomach I found the buzzer and pressed twice.
There was a moment’s hesitation, then I heard the unmistakable voice. “Yes? Who’s there?”
In one rush the words came spilling out. “Miss Brooks, it’s Tom Graves from Memphis. I’m on my way to the George Eastman Awards tonight and I brought you a gift bottle of wine. I also have some photographs of your childhood friends. I thought you might like to take a look.”
For the longest few seconds of my life I heard only dry, dead, cold air.
“Well, come on up then,” she finally answered in a surprisingly loud and clear voice.
She activated the buzzer to the security door and I went through it to the elevator. I heard her shout into the intercom again, “I said come on up! Did you hear me? COME ON UP!”
When I stepped off the balky elevator at the third floor, I noticed a door directly across the hall cracked open about six inches with two hard, round eyes staring needles through me.
“Miss Brooks?” I said.
“Tom?” she said.
She smiled the thinnest of Mona Lisa smiles. “Well, don’t just stand there.”
The door slowly opened and a reed, a mere quill of an old woman, a woman who looked well into her nineties but in fact was twenty years younger, ushered me in. Her skin wasn’t merely white, it was translucent, and a roadmap of tiny blue veins sketched her face like fine marble. She could not have weighed over eighty pounds.
The room we entered, a combination kitchen and living room, was as simple and orderly as an army foot locker. There wasn’t an errant dish, spoon, or sponge in sight. She had me take off my coat and lay it across one of the matching chairs of her aluminum dinette. I noticed a couple of bookshelves filled mostly with film books (no Proust) such as Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia, David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film, and a European edition of Hollywood Babylon. Paperclips marked each book, at the precise spots where I estimated there were references to Louise Brooks. On the wall was a gaily-colored painting of a tropical bird which reminded me of the crushed velvet paintings found in Mexican border towns. The painting was signed Luisa. I asked, “By any chance did you paint this?”
“Uh-huh, I used to paint, but I don’t anymore now that I’m old. I’ll have to show you the painting I did of St. Therese. It’s in the bedroom.”
“Oh, before I forget, I brought a gift for you.” I held out the bottle of wine.
“I don’t drink!” Louise’s eyebrows clamped together and her pupils narrowed to two pencil leads.
“Well, what kind of wine is it?” she asked irritably.
I looked at the gift bottle I held in my hands and stammered, “It’s a red wine, actually.”
“No!” she snapped. “What kind of wine is it?”
“Oh, a Bordeaux,” I answered flushing, and read a few lines from the label.
Louise’s scowl softened. “A Bordeaux…hmmm.” The words floated, carrying her to some other time, some other place.
I wasn’t by any means the first young man to bring the former screen siren a bottle of wine. What I couldn’t know at the time, in 1982, was that I would be the last.
“I can’t drink anymore,” she said abruptly. “My doctors won’t let me touch a drop. Take the bottle back home with you and enjoy it yourself. I can’t smoke anymore either, you know. Emphysema. I’m dying from it. Sylvia Sidney was in here the other day with that agent, John Springer, and they both smoked like chimneys. I thought I was going to choke to death. I almost had to throw the two of them out.
“Well, I can’t stand here all day. My hip’s killing me. We can talk in the bedroom.”
She slowly felt her way towards the bedroom with the help of a heavy four-pronged orthopedic cane. Stopping at a closet, she motioned me to help her remove her bed jacket. As I placed the bed jacket on a hanger in her closet, I could not help but notice her nakedness beneath the thin veneer of a nightgown she kept on. Here was the naked flesh for which, half a century before, men had fought, swooned, and paid dearly. Where I come from, a man, if he has any manners, doesn’t stare, and so I averted my eyes. What I had seen out of the corner of my eye was enough.
Once she had settled into bed, it became even more apparent she was highly suspicious of my visit. Her fixed stare further unnerved me. No one ever stared down an unwelcome man harder than Louise Brooks.
To break the ice I asked her about the awards ceremony that night and if she had reconsidered attending.
“Hell no!” she fired back, her long, gray ponytail doing a crazy jig around her pipe cleaner of a neck. She pulled a tattered electric blanket tighter around her waist. “I hated all that Hollywood bullshit. I see no reason to get mixed up with that mob again. That’s why I left Hollywood, you know. It was all so stupid and phony, and most of what they were turning out was such crap. I still can’t stand to see myself in those Hollywood movies. When I went to Europe and worked under G.W. Pabst, it was so different. He was an artist. I never knew anyone in Hollywood who ever read a book. The whole town was stupid.”
I asked her if, by chance, she knew the actor Brian Aherne, who was to be master of ceremonies at the awards presentation.
“I know of him,” she said. “Remind me what he has done.”
I ran down a list of films that I remembered. “I hope to meet him tonight,” I said. “I just bought a book he wrote about his friend, the actor George Sanders, and it’s actually quite well-written.”
“Isn’t George Sanders dead?” she asked.
“Yes, he killed himself a few years back.”
“How?” she asked.
“Pills, I believe.”
“What kind?”
I took Aherne’s book from my briefcase and found the passage. Louise sat poised with a pen and writing pad.
“Five bottle of Nembutal,” I read.
“Spell that.”
“N-e-m-b-u-t-a-l.”
She wrote it down in a jagged scrawl.
“How many bottles?”
“Five,” I answered as the hairs on my neck began to stand.
“What kind of drug is Nembutal anyway?”
“A barbiturate, I’m pretty sure. A heavy downer.”
“I wonder if it’s a painless way to kill yourself. For your information, Tom, I plan to kill myself and I’m trying to figure out the best way to do it.
“I’m sick of living like this. My hip’s killing me all the time and I’m dying of emphysema. I refuse to let them put me on oxygen to prolong the agony. I’m in pain all the time now and can’t do a damn thing anymore. See this pad? I have to write down everything or I’ll forget it. I can’t remember anything anybody tells me. As long as I have this,” she pointed to the pad, “I can get along. But what if I get worse? I’ve begged some of my friends to bring me a gun, but dammit, I guess they love me too much. They won’t do it.”
I excused myself to go to the bathroom and as soon as I closed the bathroom door I heard Louise pick up the phone and peck frantically at the dial pad.
“Tom Graves is here. What am I supposed to do?”
(Pause)
“Well, yes, he seems nice enough I suppose. He’s not trying to interview me or anything and he has been polite. He brought me a bottle of Bordeaux.”
(Pause)
“No, you’re right. I can’t very well just throw him out on the street. Wait, I hear him coming…”
She hung up the phone and smiled coyly as I entered the room.
Hoping to get the visit on a better track, I offered to show her the photos I had brought. As I passed them to her, she studied each one minutely, frowning at some, laughing at others.
At one point she paused long enough to ask, “Tom, just what is it you plan to do with all these photographs and this research on me?”
“I had hoped to write a biography,” I explained.
“Of me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Well, I’m flattered, but I’ve already authorized Jack Garner, the film critic here in Rochester, to do it.”
I had spoken with Jack Garner several times and knew for fact that the project was as good as dead. He believed Louise would be impossible to work with.
“I’ve completed a sample chapter,” I added. “Just out of curiosity, would you like me to read you a few pages of it?”
“I don’t suppose it could hurt.”
I took the manuscript from my briefcase and read the opening scene that led to her grandfather’s barroom brawl and a hatchet buried into his face. When I finished I was met with a long, strained silence. Louise’s eyes fixed upon mine and did not look away.
“That was good. That was damn good,” she said.
She picked up the phone and began dialing.
“I’m calling Jack Garner,” she whispered to me. “Jack, Tom Graves is here and I want to authorize him to write my biography. I don’t want you to do it. Okay? All right then, it’s settled,” she said and hung up.
“I like your writing style,” she added.
Chapter Five – Secrets
AN AUTHORIZED Louise Brooks biography! My mind raced towards book signings, talk shows, articles, interviews, foreign language editions. It took exactly two weeks for the pin to touch the bubble and for Louise to de-authorize me as her biographer. I refused to drop the project and let her know, and her housedogs too, that I intended to go forward with or without her authorization. Her literary agent wrote a caustic letter forbidding me from contacting anyone in Rochester. I wrote him back explicitly telling him that if I received so much as one more nasty word from him I would call everyone in the Rochester phone book. I never heard from him again.
James Card, the retired film curator for the Eastman House and, I soon discovered, one of Louise’s many secret lovers, rattled long sabers. “Let me assure you,” he blustered, “that there are very powerful people who will not allow you to write this book.”
“Oh yeah, who?” I asked as a loud click rattled in my ear.
His threats, however, had an unforeseen consequence. None of the New York gaggle with whom I had to deal understood the Southern character. They didn’t realize that turning up the heat and raising their voices would only make me dig in deeper and scratch all the harder. James Card’s arrogance and condescension in particular galled me. I wondered who was old enough to have been a friend or lover of Louise Brooks’s still powerful and proprietary enough to do me harm? I drew up a very short list and immediately crossed out James Card’s name. Bob Hope was one of the first names I came up with, but I had trouble placing them together in any kind of time frame. They also just seemed too opposite in personality. The name at the top of my list was William S. Paley, long-time head of CBS. I knew Brooks had worked at CBS radio for a time and sensed there might be a connection. By sheer happenstance, I saw an article on Paley in that month’s Esquire magazine which included a mention of the Paleys having a private screening of Pandora’s Box.
It all began to click.
I called one of Louise’s closest confidants and the only person in her inner circle with whom I had a rapport. “What’s the story about Louise and William Paley?” I asked, casting the bait.
“Oh my God! How did you find out?” he answered in a near faint.
So it was that I uncovered Louise Brooks’s Big Secret. She and Paley had briefly been lovers in the 1930s and Louise lived on a confidential 400 dollar-a-month writing stipend she managed to arm-twist out of the Paley Foundation. Paley got his bragging rights of having bedded one of cinema’s most ravishing beauties and she got the hard cash. Her single worst fear, according to my source, was that word of the grant would leak to the press and embarrass Paley, who might or might not cut off the money pipeline.
Although she had received a $30,000 advance for her book Lulu In Hollywood and undoubtedly received some form of Social Security or government assistance, the extra four hundred dollars a month was a sum she regarded as life or death. I became the centerpiece of Louise’s paranoia. My source in Rochester told me she had become so worried about what I would write about her that she could neither eat nor sleep. She made call after call to her Rochester friends begging them to do something about me. My source said that she was not only making all her friends’ lives miserable, but the situation was getting critical enough that they feared for her health. After receiving all manner of threats from Rochester short of broken legs, someone finally wised-up and approached me gentleman-to-gentleman, the way we do things down here in Memphis. I was politely asked if I would please consider dropping the project, at least in Louise Brooks’s lifetime, for the sake of her well-being.
I took stock. Without her authorization, I doubted I could find a publisher for a biography. I also knew that I would get little to no cooperation from her friends and family. My prayer had been answered – I had met Louise Brooks. As the saying goes though, tears fall harder over answered prayers than the unanswered ones. I learned early enough in my career that movie stars and cult factotums are depressingly human, just like the rest of us. I was tired of the hostility, the accusations, the petty snubs, and finally just tired of Louise Brooks herself. I also didn’t want to be blamed if something bad happened to Louise. I didn’t want her leaving some suicide note with my name underlined in it. I didn’t want my name to be a dirty word to some future biographer.
So I told them I would drop the project.
A few days later I received a handwritten thank you note from Louise, a final gesture.
Chapter Six -- Finis
LOUISE BROOKS died in 1985, not of emphysema, arthritis, or Tom Graves, but of a heart attack as she made her way to the bathroom. No one from Rochester called to tell me. I read it in my local newspaper.
By the time of her death, my memories had turned acidic. It would be years before I could look back on my visit to Rochester without bitterness or regret. All earlier attempts to write about her bogged down in disgust and conflicting emotions. With the comforts and distance of age, however, I can at last remember and laugh. A little.
Back in that apartment that cold day in November the room was warm and the laughter easier as the afternoon lengthened.
“Now, where did you say you were from? The South you say?”
“Yes ma’am. I’m from Memphis, Tennessee. I’m sure you can hear it in my accent.”
“Heavens yes!” she said and rolled her silver screen eyes. “It’s preposterous!” She chuckled and set her mouth in the half-smirk I recognized from the film I had watched in the darkness of that theater auditorium in Memphis. It was at that moment that I could finally see the younger Louise, the raven-haired flapper who had broken a million hearts.
“I had a terrible Midwestern accent, you know. When I first came to New York everyone made such fun of my Kansas accent that I paid someone to help me speak properly. It was the wisest money I probably ever spent.”
The sunlight had softened and there was a knock at the door.
“Oh, I forgot. It’s Jack Garner with that actress, Luise Rainer. He’s bringing her over to meet me. Could you go to the door for me?”
I went to the door and finally met Jack Garner, the film critic who only hours earlier had lost his job as Louise Brooks’s biographer. As we shook hands he shot me a hard, sidelong look and then introduced me to the former screen beauty and double Oscar winner, Luise Rainer. Miss Rainer, a tiny sparrow of a woman, was swallowed-up in an enormous fur coat. Her lipstick, flaming orange, detoured far outside the natural boundaries of her lips. She could have passed for any number of old ladies at an opera soiree.
I thought it best that I take my leave and began to gather my belongings as Garner and Miss Rainer settled themselves into Louise’s cramped bedroom. Louise called out to me, “Tom, you’ll call me tomorrow won’t you? Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
I walked out of Louise Brooks’s apartment building, found a phone booth a couple of blocks away, and called a cab. An hour later the cab arrived. As I climbed into the back seat, I glanced over my shoulder in the vain hope of catching a parting glimpse of a former celebrated beauty. I was the last writer ever admitted, even for one brief afternoon, into her world.
Author’s Disclaimer
Prior to the afternoon I spent with Louise Brooks on November 5, 1982, I had begun the first chapters of what I had hoped would become the definitive biography of this elusive, compelling figure. My plan, at the time, was to research her childhood and write a chapter or two for both potential publishers and to have something to show Louise that might seduce her out of her seclusion to authorize the book. I had traveled to Kansas and retraced the paths of Brooks’s early life, interviewing scores of people who had known the Brookses during those years.
Even at the age of 28, I had been writing and publishing my work for nearly a decade, and my day job since obtaining a journalism degree was as an advertising and public relations writer. None of that, however, had fully prepared me for the arduous task of such a sustained work as a biography of someone who didn’t want her past revealed. I had read Kenneth Tynan’s brilliant New Yorker profile, The Girl in the Black Helmet, and was left wanting more. I thought, why not me?
The more I researched the life of Louise Brooks, the more of a problem I had with Kenneth Tynan’s article, elegantly written though it was. The issue? Lies. Particularly the sin of omission.
Kenneth Tynan is far from being the only master stylist I know of who plays footloose with the facts. (Aside: A music writer of some renown who is in possession of the most musical prose this side of Truman Capote and who has written legendary articles for major publications once sent me an unforgettable review he had written of a book on barbecue. In this review he told the story of a barbecue joint in Memphis so serious about its cuisine that it had 10 levels of hot sauce, the last of which had to be prepared with industrial rubber gloves. He also mentioned that dental floss was placed on every table. Memphis is my hometown and I’m a barbecue fanatic, so I immediately hopped in my car and barreled over to Cozy Corner Bar-B-Q. Not a string of floss was to be found in the place and only two sauces: mild and hot. When I asked about the 10 levels of hot sauce, the owners looked at me as if I had lost my white boy mind.) Tynan left out virtually everything about his own relationship with Louise, which was far more involved than either of them ever let on, her affair with and subsequent monetary support from William Paley, the long-term affair she had with James Card, which was the real reason she moved to Rochester, and her mid-life years of living in Manhattan with no traceable means of support.