Her life was as harrowing as Frances Farmer's, but it had a happier ending. After the early fame (she danced with Martha Graham at 16), the Hollywood stardom, the German films, and the slow decline (she lusted after John Wayne in that B western they made together), there came the lost years of drinking and “escorting,” and then--well, it happened that her New York apartment was across the hall from John Springer's, and he was a publicist. When James Card, then the film curator at Eastman House, asked Springer where Brooks could be found, Springer knocked on her door.

Brooks visited Rochester to look at her old films, and was invited to stay. Card fell in love with her, although the nature of their relationship is unclear. He took her to Paris for a retrospective at the Cinematheque Francais, where rumpled old Henri Langlois declared, “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!” Brooks must have smiled to hear her name linked with two of her reputed lovers.

In Rochester, she wrote memoirs that were eventually collected into Lulu in Hollywood, one of the few film books that can be called indispensable. She remembered Bogart as a kid starting out on the New York stage, and the private lovability of her old friend, W.C. Fields. And she was frank about her rise and especially her fall. Many silent stars become boring relics, repeating the same memorized anecdotes. Louise Brooks was saved by the astringent power of her wit.

The other night I looked again at “Pandora's Box,” which was offered to her by Pabst just as Hollywood dumped her. Would it be a great film without her presence and her closeups? Maybe not. The plot, which could be remade today, involves a young woman named Lulu who says she is not a prostitute, while we notice that she behaves an awfully lot like one. She's entertaining the meter-reader as the film begins, and then welcomes Schigolch (Carl Goetz), a seedy old man who may be her father, her pimp, or both. He wants her to meet an acrobat who wants her for a trapeze act, but first she gets a visit from her lover and patron, Schon (Fritz Kortner), a newspaper publisher.

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