1929

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“Do you want a room for sleeping or jumping?”

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February 14: The actress Leila Hyams reminds everyone what holiday it is:

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“Sensationally modern.” 

Louise Brooks, whose acting career began four years earlier, stars in Pandora’s Box, a film made in Germany, playing the lead as Lulu. As Kenneth Tynan describes it, Lulu is “a young hedonist, who, meaning no harm, rewards her loves – and eventually herself – with the prize of violent death.” 

Or, as Wikipedia explains: “The film follows Lulu, a seductive, thoughtless young woman whose raw sexuality and uninhibited nature bring ruin to herself and those who love her.” 

The film flopped at the box office, and, due to subject matter, it was edited for release in several countries. 

Wikipedia notes, however:

 

By the mid-20th century, Pandora’s Box was rediscovered by film scholars and began to earn a reputation as an unsung classic of Weimar German cinema. The Criterion Collection, one of the great collectors of classic film[,] says of the picture, “Sensationally modern...daring and stylish, Pandora’s Box is one of silent cinema’s great masterworks and is a testament to Brooks’ dazzling individuality.”

 

(Brooks followed up with The Diary of a Lost Girl, soon after, taking the film industry by storm.)

Brooks: The "bob" which became popular in the 20s.

 

“Sensationally modern,” might be the perfect phrase to describe Brooks, who, in many ways, both on screen and off, epitomized the “Flapper Girl” ethos of the 20s. Her clothes were too revealing for old-fashioned tastes, she wore makeup without apology, and cut her hair short in a “bob.” Even more shockingly, Brooks displayed an understanding of sex, and an appetite for enjoyment, that shocked older generations. She married – and divorced – and never seemed ashamed. And in the era of Prohibition  she drank with abandon. 

“Once a week,”  she once laughed, “I would drink a pint of gin, and would become what Dickens called ‘gincoherent.’” 

In 1925, Louise, then only 18, worked with film star Charlie Chaplin and had an affair for “two happy summer months” with the married Englishman. She wed Edward Sutherland, a bright young film director, the following year, “an error,” Tynan explains, “that was rectified inside two years by divorce.” She fled next to Washington D.C. with her current lover – George Marshall, a divorced laundry magnate, who would go on to found the team that became the Washington Redskins – and lend his special brand of racism to professional sports. Brooks later married a second time, to Deering Davis, a rich Chicagoan, but walked out after only six months. In fact, married couples in her era were often just as unhappily married as many married couples are today. Marshall divorced twice, and Chaplin divorced thrice. 

As for Louise, she later admitted, she had tried to watch Pandora’s Box, the film which made her famous. Both times she was drunk and fell asleep. “By that I mean I was navigating but not seeing.”

 

Certainly, Pandora, and a The Diary of a Lost Girl, which she also completed in 1929, delved into sex in ways that stunned and/or delighted moviegoers of the era. 

Tynan says of Pandora’s Box, that the film

 

assumes neither the existence of sin nor the necessity for retribution. It presents a series of events in which all the participants are seeking happiness, and it suggests that Lulu, whose notion of happiness is momentary fulfillment through sex, is not less admirable than those whose quest is for wealth or social advancement.

 

The plot “thickens,” as they say, but for simplicity we should merely note that Lulu has affairs both with a character known as Dr. Schön, a successful newspaper publisher, and Alwa, his son. The doctor later becomes engaged to another woman – but when he shows up with his fiancée at a theater where Lulu is set to dance in a review, she refuses to go on with the show. “I’ll dance for the whole world, but not in front of that woman,” Lulu cries. She retreats to her dressing room, Schön follows, and Lulu and the doctor are soon “laughing, caressing,” and, as Tynan describes it in 1978, “wholeheartedly making love.” Dr. Schön’s fiancée catches them. “Unperturbed, Lulu rises in triumph, gathers up her costume, and sweeps past them to go onstage.” 

The doctor soon proposes to Lulu, and they marry. In another scene we see Lulu in a snow-white bridal gown. This time she is dancing “cheek to cheek” with a young woman, who is clearly in love with her. Tynan calls it “the first explicit lesbian [scene] in movie history.” 

Brooks later said that she played the scene with a friend of hers in mind. “She liked boys when she was sober and girls when she was drunk,” Louise explained.

 

A shocked Catholic priest once asked Brooks how she felt playing a sinner like Lulu. “Feel!” she said gaily. “I felt fine! It all seemed perfectly normal to me.” She explained to him that although she herself was not a lesbian, she had many chums of that persuasion in Ziegfeld’s chorus line [where she had worked before going into film], and added, “I knew two millionaire publishers, much like Schön in the film, who backed shows to keep themselves well supplied with Lulus.”

 

Next, we see Lulu in a bedroom – with two other men, who are scattering roses on what is to be her nuptial bed. “Lulu joins them, and something between a romp and an orgy seems imminent.” The bridegroom enters! He grabs a gun from a nearby desk and chases the two out of his house.” Shocked and aghast, the wedding guests depart. “When Schön returns to the bedroom, he finds Alwa with his head in Lulu’s lap, urging her to run away with him.” 

The father orders his son out, advances on Lulu, “presses the gun into her hand, and begs her to commit suicide.” When she hesitates, he threatens to shoot her like a dog. Lulu, says Tynan, “seems almost hypnotized by the desperation of his grief. You would think them locked in an embrace until Lulu suddenly stiffens, a puff of smoke rises between them, and Schön slumps to the floor.” 

Alwa bursts in and rushes to his father. He warns that Alwa will be Lulu’s next victim. The sight of the blood of her husband shocks Lulu, and she appears to the viewer, not as a murderess, but a “petrified child.” 

In a third critical scene, Lulu is sentenced to five years in prison – but friends set off a fire alarm at the trial, and she escapes.

 

With perfect fidelity to her own willful character, Lulu, in defiance of movie cliché, comes straight back to Schön’s house, where she acts like a débutante relaxing after a ball – lighting a cigarette, idly thumbing through a fashion magazine, trying out a few dance steps, opening a wardrobe and stroking a new fur coat, running a bath and immersing herself in it.

 

Lulu’s life spirals downward from there. Alwa arrives and he and Lulu flee to Paris. They board a ship, but blackmail, cheating at cards, and a second murder – one Lulu and Alwa do not commit – result. 

The final scenes play out in London, on a cold, foggy Christmas Eve. By this time, Lulu and Alwa, along with a friend named Schigolch (the first man Lulu ever seduced), are living together in poverty, and close to starvation. Lulu has been reduced to prostitution.

 

The Salvation Army is out in force, playing carols and distributing food to the poor. A sallow, mournfully handsome young man moves aimlessly through the crowds. He gives cash for the needy to an attractive Army girl, and gets in return a candle and a sprig of mistletoe. Posters on the walls warn the women of London against going out unescorted at night: there is a mass murderer at large.

 

Lulu, desperate for money, “ventures down into the street, where she accosts the young wanderer.” He follows her up the stairs to her room but stops halfway. Behind his back, he is holding “a switchblade knife, open.” Lulu leans toward him and smiles. He admits he has no money. She tells him it doesn’t matter. She likes him. He lets the knife drop, unseen by Lulu, and she leads him into the attic, which Alwa and Schigolch  have vacated. 

Tynan explains:

 

The cold climax, when it comes, is necessary and inevitable. Ripper and victim relax like familiar lovers. He leans back in the armchair and stretches out his hand; she leaps onto his lap, landing with both knees bent, as weightless as a chamois. Her beauty has never looked more ripe. While they happily flirt, he allows her to pry into his pockets, from which she extracts the gifts he received from the Salvation Army. She lights the candle and places it ceremonially on the table, with the mistletoe beside it. In a deep and peaceful embrace, they survey the tableau. The Ripper then raises the mistletoe over Lulu’s head and requests the traditional kiss. As she shuts her eyes and presents her lips, the candle flares up. Its gleam reflected in the bread knife on the table holds the Ripper’s gaze. He can look at nothing but the shining blade. Long seconds pass as he wrestles, motionless, with his obsession. Finally, leaning forward to consummate the kiss, he grasps the handle of the knife. In the culminating shot, he is facing away from the camera. All we see of Lulu is her right hand, open on his shoulder, pressing him toward her. Suddenly, it clenches hard, then falls, limply dangling, behind his back.

 

In much the same way, The Diary of a Lost Girl, takes viewers in directions that previous generations would have refused to follow or watch. “The theme of ‘Lost Girl’ is the corruption of a minor – not by sexuality but by an authoritarian society that condemns sexuality.” 

This time, Brooks, as the character Thymian, is the daughter of a successful businessman.

 

She is seduced and impregnated by her father’s libidinous young assistant. As soon as her condition is discovered, the double standard swings into action. The assistant retains his job; but, to save the family from dishonor, Thymian’s baby is farmed out to a wet nurse, and she herself is consigned to a home for delinquent girls, run by a bald and ghoulish superintendent and his sadistic wife.

 

Life in the reformatory is strictly regimented: the inmates exercise to the beat of a drum and eat to the tapping of a metronome. At length, Thymian escapes from this archetypal hellhole…and goes to reclaim her baby, only to find that the child has died. Broke and homeless, she meets a street vender who guides her to an address where food and shelter will be hers for the asking.

 

“Predictably,” Tynan writes, “it turns out to be a brothel; far less predictably, even shockingly…Thymian is not degraded but liberated.” 

The film, he explains, is a protest against “the debilitating wisdom imposed on society by the Church, the Fatherland, and the Family.” In fact, Thymian “lives for the moment, with radiant physical abandon. Present love, even for sale, hath present laughter, and what’s to come is not only unsure but irrelevant.” In post-war Germany, in an era when the Nazis were rising, that message must have resonated.

 

One of her more outré clients can achieve orgasm only by watching her beat a drum. This ironic echo of life in the reform school is used by Pabst [the director] to imply that sexual prohibition breeds sexual aberration. (Even more ironically, the sequence has been censored out of most of the existing prints of the movie.) Brooks is at her best – a happy animal in skintight satin – in a party scene at a night club, where she offers herself as first prize in a raffle.

 

The director “wanted realism, so we all had to drink real drinks,” Brooks once admitted, and she “played the whole scene stewed on hot, sweet German champagne.”

 

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“Her legs are lyric.” 

Born in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise was the second of four children. Her parents were Leonard Brooks, “a hardworking lawyer of kindly disposition” and his wife Myra Rude Brooks. Myra had been the eldest of nine children, and warned her husband before marrying, that “she had spent her entire life thus far looking after kid brothers and sisters,” and their children would have to fend for themselves. She was “a woman of high spirits. … Insistent on liberty for herself, she passed on a love of liberty to her offspring.”  

As a young girl, Louise learned to dance, eventually moved to New York City, and landed a job with Ziegfield’s Follies. In a popular comic strip, in 1926, the heroine Dixie Dugan – who was based on Brooks – explains how she got a job at the “Zigfold Follies.” 

“All there is to this Follies racket is to be cool and look hot,” Dixie explains in one installment. 

A journalist who interviewed Brooks, while she was still living in Manhattan around the same time, said: “She is so very Manhattan. Very young. Exquisitely hard-boiled. Her black eyes and sleek black hair are as brilliant as Chinese lacquer. Her skin is white as a camellia. Her legs are lyric.” 

In the Victorian Age, women of an earlier generation were not expected even to mention their “legs” (one would politely talk of one’s “limbs,” instead), let alone reveal them.

  

Certainly, in the age of the #MeToo Movement, Brooks’ experiences can sound horrifying. Once she shifted to Hollywood, as did the movie industry, she had to deal with Harry Cohn, the studio head at Columbia Pictures, who had offered her a contract.

 

[Cohn] summoned her to his office for a series of meetings, at each of which he appeared naked from the waist up. Always a plain speaker, he left her in no doubt that good parts would come her way if she responded to his advances. She rebuffed them, and the proffered contract was withdrawn.

 

Another Hollywood studio, Louise remembered, “was run by B. P. Schulberg, a coarse exploiter who propositioned every actress” who came to him hoping to land any real work.

 

Brooks also provided interesting takes on other stars of that era. Of W.C. Fields, she wrote:

 

He was an isolated person. As a young man he stretched out his hand to Beauty and Love and they thrust it away. Gradually he reduced reality to exclude all but his work, filling the gaps with alcohol whose dim eyes transformed the world into a distant view of harmless shadows. He was also a solitary person. Years of travelling alone around the world with his juggling act taught him the value of solitude and the release it gave his mind. . . . Most of his life will remain unknown. But the history of no life is a jest.

 

On another movie set, she worked with Fatty Arbuckle, whose career had gone into the toilet in 1921, after he was arrested on a charge of murder – only to be found innocent later. 

She recalled:

 

He sat in his chair like a man dead. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. … Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer – a wonderful ballroom dancer in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut.

 

Eventually, Brooks’ career went into decline. She did a movie with John Wayne in 1938, but after that, she said, “the only people who wanted to see me [about parts] were men who wanted to sleep with me.” 

More than once, she thought about writing her memoirs. She was well-read and intellectually inclined, and once came close.

 

To earn a little money, I sat down and wrote the usual autobiography. I called it ‘Naked on My Goat,’ which is a quote from Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ In one of the Walpurgisnacht scenes, a young witch is bragging about her looks to an old one. ‘I sit here naked on my goat,’ she says, ‘and show my fine young body.’ But the old one advises her to wait awhile: ‘Though young and tender now, you’ll rot, we know, you’ll rot.’ Then, when I read what I’d written, I threw the whole thing down the incinerator. ”

 

In 1977, in an article for Focus on Film, she summed up her Midwestern upbringing. She had been “born in the Bible Belt of Anglo-Saxon farmers, who prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn.” Although her sexual education had been conducted mostly in New York, Hollywood, and Europe, her pleasure was, she wrote, “restricted by the inbred shackles of sin and guilt.”

 

She concluded:

 

In writing the history of a life I believe absolutely that the reader cannot understand the character and deeds of the subject unless he is given a basic understanding of that person’s sexual loves and hates and conflicts. It is the only way the reader can make sense out of innumerable apparently senseless actions. . . . We flatter ourselves when we assume that we have restored the sexual integrity which was expurgated by the Victorians. It is true that many exposés are written to shock, to excite, to make money. But in serious books characters remain as baffling, as unknowable as ever. . . . I too am unwilling to write the sexual truth that would make my life worth reading. I cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt.

 

Tynan interviewed Brooks when she was 71, by which time the film star had been living as almost a recluse for many years.

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September: The average price of a share of stock in June, three years previous, had been $96.90. Now the average is $216.10. When the market plunges, Union Cigar is selling at $113.50. 

In one day it drops to $4 a share.

 

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“A step fraught with infinite danger to our white civilization.” 

September 29: In The Crisis, W.E.B. DuBois addressed the uproar over a black woman being invited to the White House. The article was titled, “Mrs. DePriest Drinks Tea.” 

Mrs. Hoover invited the wife of Congressman Oscar DePriest to visit. Present were the wives of several members of Congress, as well as the wives of the Secretary of War and Attorney General. 

“I met a group of charming ladies,” Mrs. DePriest later said. “It was a most delightful afternoon.” 

Southerners were horrified. DuBois cites examples:

 

The Tampa, Florida, Life declares that Mrs. DePriest “was never invited.” That the affair was “informal and on the lawn,” and that Mrs. DePriest “remained at the outer edge of the gathering where Negro servants were present. ... She was not recognized by Mrs. Hoover or any of the ladies present on a social plane with the guests.” This is, of course, a lie out of whole cloth similar to the apocryphal stories of Booker T. Washington’s dinner [with Teddy Roosevelt in 1906], and done for Southern consumption.

 

…Pat Harrison called the incident “as deplorable as it is astounding!” Senator Sheppard of Texas regarded the tea as “a step fraught with infinite danger to our white civilization.” Congressman Green of Florida declared that “the social consciousness” of Americans was outraged, and promised not to attend any social functions at the White House or dine at the Congressional restaurant. Senator Simmons of North Carolina, who supported Hoover, regarded the affair as “exceedingly unfortunate,” while Senator Overman, his colleague, said it was “a great blow to the social stability of the South.”

 

The Florida House of Representatives declared the entertaining of Mrs. Depriest “both shameful and disgraceful, and if persisted in, will destroy the prestige of the Anglo-Saxon race.”

 

The Mississippi legislature condemned “unreservedly the tea as tending to destroy… racial integrity.”

 

The Winona, Mississippi, Times declared “this unfortunate incident will lose the Republican Party hundreds of thousands of votes that it had corralled during the last Presidential campaign.”

 

An Alabama newspaper added,

 

The social venture of the First Lady of the nation having a Negro woman as her guest in the White House, looks ugly enough to we Southern people but if the mere social feature was all there was to it the matter wouldn’t be half as grave as it is. Other and graver matters are sure to follow, however, for it is difficult enough at best to keep feelings between the races good here in the South. With such example as the recent White House tea, the problem becomes far more serious and approaches an impossibility.

 

The Providence Tribune said of Southern reaction,  “It is enough to make decent, intelligent, fair-minded and honorable people hang their heads in shame for their fellow countrymen.” 

When Congressman DePriest responded, and called Southerners “cowards and hypocrites,” the outrage reached fresh heights. The Herald, in Double Springs, Alabama, cautioned, of Negroes, that the tea would “tend to create false hopes in their black breasts,” and would serve to revive the Ku Klux Klan. 

The Pembroke, Georgia, Enterprise was even more blunt:

 

If a vicious Negro happens to reason that if a Negro woman is good enough to be entertained by the wife of the President, he is good enough to enter your home and pay court to your white daughters, and you voted for Hoover, the old adage of “chickens coming home to roost” will stand up on its hind legs and look you squarely between the eyes.

 

If the next twelve months were to record a criminal assault on the persons of a hundred white girls, or even one, by Negro brutes, by reason of being emboldened by the unfortunate indiscretion of Mrs. Hoover, the white woman who voted for her husband can shoulder their share of the responsibility.

 

The Carnesville, Georgia, Herald explained: “When a Negro decides that he is on equality with the white man, that he will not only seek the white man’s daughter in marriage, he will seek to supplant him in every conceivable place and time.” 

A newspaper in Monroe, Georgia complained that the tea had done more to disturb race relations “than anything that has occurred during the past twenty-five years.” 

A paper in Durham, North Carolina, insisted that DePriest’s comments had “done more to setback the efforts of the better thinking men and women of both races … than anything else in this generation.” 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might be interesting to mention the Chicago race riots of 1919, or the massacre of blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. 

 

The Tampa Tribune added,

 

The election of DePriest and the recognition according him has done more to destroy friendly relations between the races than all the good work in that direction has accomplished in 50 years. It was bad enough to elect any kind of Negro to Congress; but when the one elected is of the loud-mouthed, braggart type of DePriest, it is intolerable.

 

The Jackson, Florida, Blue Shirt which claimed to speak for the white working class, talked plainly about the threat of the Negro vote:

 

You might as well make up your mind that the niggers are not going to vote in the South and there are more ways than one to stop them and don't worry, we will stop them. When you try to encourage your race by trying to raise $200,000, you are just encouraging bloodshed and if you want to see your race wiped out in the South just keep up your work. The fight is coming in the South and there is no use playing the ostrich by hiding our heads in the sand, as race war is coming sure and I don’t want my people to get caught unprepared and I hereby advise every white man to look up that old musket or that old rifle or even that old rusty revolver, and get it cleaned up.

 

The northern press, Dubois wrote, was either paralyzed into silence or spoke like the Springfield Republican:

 

The Hoovers function in the White House as the official symbols of government and government in this country cannot turn a blind eye on Negroes. Negroes cannot be eliminated, ignored or nullified. They are here to stay. The Hoovers deserve congratulations. They are showing the stuff they are made of. (155/74-80)

 

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October 24: Nerves are shattered as a record 12.9 million shares are sold on what comes to be known as “Black Thursday.” Two men with a joint account jump from a window, hand-in-hand. Hotel clerks supposedly joke, “Do you want a room for sleeping or jumping?” 

At the time of the Great Crash, buying on “time” accounted for 90% of sales of pianos, sewing machines, and washing machines, 80% of vacuums, radios, refrigerators, 70% of all sales, and 60% of automobiles. 

“Advertising and mass production are the twin-cylinders that keep the motor of modern business in motion.” 

 

If you thought your job was safe you might buy a new 1929 Ford Roadster.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: You may need to look up the current credit card debt of all Americans. In 2021, the figure is $787 billion. 

In 1929, once an optimism outlook for the future was destroyed, buying on time dried up. (This would be similar in some ways to the decline in U.S. economic output during the pandemic, which students would probably understand.) 

It might be a good idea to start a discussion by asking students how many of their families have car loans? Home mortgages? Do any of the kids in your class have credit cards – or can they borrow the cards of their parents? Do they expect the next year to be a good one for the U.S. economy? Do they realize teachers are underpaid??? 

Okay, stupid joke, there.

If you were killing it in the stock market, you might have an eye on a 1929 Duesenberg.

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In Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd note that the city’s entire population attended the nine motion picture theaters 2.75 times during July and 4.5 times in the peak season of December; “comedy, heart interest and adventure compose the great bulk of what Middletown enjoys in the movies.” They cite examples of movies playing: “Alimony – brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.”

 

Married Flirts, The Daring Years, Rouged Lips, Sinners in Silk, The Queen of Sin and Name the Man (a story of a woman betrayed) played on local screens.