Trading In A Name

Except it’s not any more. I hadn’t looked in on the Louise Brooks Society website, pandorasbox.com, for ages, and when I did a couple of days ago found it had been taken down. And this sad fate had befallen not just the website, but the LBS presence on a variety of social media platforms too. Back in 2019, it seems, a gentleman in Florida managed to get the words ‘Louise Brooks’ registered as a trademark and since then has been increasingly active in making sure that nobody else makes any sort of money out of the use of the name of the actress, who died all the way back in 1985. The LBS took subscriptions for its fan club, in operation, as the banner suggests, for quite some time, and that counts, of course, as commercial activity, so down it came.

The story of how the trademark was registered is quite strange. At first the US Patent & Trademark Office apparently turned the application down, as the applicant’s mark ‘shows a false suggestion of a connection with the famous actress, Louise Brooks’, but reversed its decision after the applicant argued that Brooks had not left an estate to assert rights to her name. It obviously wasn’t in the interests of the applicant to mention that, whatever might be the situation with the actual words ‘Louise Brooks’, a company called Louise Brooks Estate did exist at the time in Kansas, founded in 1998 and since 2014 overlapping with Louise Brooks Heirs, which is still going; both entities were run by Brooks’s nephew Daniel, who is 76 and still lives in Wichita. Louise Brooks Heirs has a supportive relationship with the LBS, but unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to Daniel Brooks to do something as weird as copyrighting his aunt’s name.

Craftslaw.com uses this case as a way of talking about how trademarks work generally, especially in the online world. Most of the crafters who might use Brooks’s image, and even her name, aren’t claiming that their goods emanate from any kind of official source, only that a ‘Louise Brooks t-shirt’, for instance, is a t-shirt with Brooks’s face on it. That’s not a trademark, just a descriptor, and the law deems that ‘fair use’; but as Craftslaw points out, most online platforms such as Etsy or eBay (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) will just play safe and take down any contributor complained against, leaving it to the parties concerned to sort it out through the law. Who’s got the money for that?

The founder and organiser of the LBS is Thomas Gladysz. A couple of years ago I bought his book Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star, a compilation of many of his LBS blog posts. Like a lot of fans of a lot of celebrities, shows, or activities, Mr Gladysz comes across as amiably obsessive and the book is a work of delightfully loopy scholarship. I really don’t know how he manages to find out the things he does. My favourite example was this post, concerning billboard adverts on various suburban streets in Kansas City for the 1926 comedy A Social Celebrity, in which Louise Brooks took a prestigious second billing to the then major star Adolphe Menjou. This is, of course, nuts, and yet it does tell you interesting things about the way movies were marketed in 1920s America. A lot of the blog is like that: it explores times, places and manners through the medium of this one actor, and she becomes a prism for an entire world. It’s niche, but it’s genuine and even useful work.

This makes it all the more galling that the entity attacking the LBS is embodied in a slick-looking but horrible website whose articles are either weird, general stuff lifted from easily accessible online resources mentioning Louise Brooks from time to time, or personal attacks on Thomas Gladysz; and a ‘shop’ consisting of t-shirts or ‘art prints’ emblazoned with public-domain pictures of the actress run through a Photoshop filter. If you want to spend your money on that, think of it as charity. There is no sign that it will contribute much to what we know about Brooks and her times – to put it as mildly as I can. I'm not going to link to it.

I hope that, if the trademark holder had an intention to remove the LBS blog as well, he would have done so by now. It’s there that the most valuable aspect of the LBS survives, the astonishing corpus of work Mr Gladysz has amassed over the course of 28 years of study, and for that to disappear would be a tragedy indeed. 

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Laura Moriarty, 'The Chaperone' (2012)

Louise Brooks appears on the cover of this novel, albeit without her instantly recognisable haircut, but she's the catalyst of the action, not the protagonist. After all, the title's The Chaperone, not The Problematic Teenage Star-to-Be, and that is Cora Carlisle, respectable Wichita mother and wife, corset-clad and cliché-armoured, who nevertheless bears uncomfortable secrets from Kansas to New York as she accompanies Brooks to her audition with the Denishawn dance company in the summer of 1922. Mrs Carlisle discovers her charge has no virtue to defend, and instead finds herself being changed by the encounter, a change she carries with her into a better, more open, honest and loving life.

My mum is a great fan of Catherine Cookson (or the artist formerly known as Catherine Cookson, as books were brought out under her name for some years after her death, such was the power of the brand), and The Chaperone is not all that far away from Cookson's world of doughty Geordie orphan girls who by sheer determination make good and eventually run their own sock factory. Although it is very, very far from bad, it's not going to tax you much. Ms Moriarty achieves two great things. First, she very deftly builds a narrative which isn't essentially to do with Louise Brooks around what we know about her life, and fans can smile whenever they recognise something from Barry Paris's 1989 biography (even Myra Brooks's 'fattest and richest friend' Zana Henderson appears, transformed from Brooks's acerbic account of her in the Paris book into someone Cora likes); and, second, she makes the reader happy. This is a story in which everyone is flawed and everyone is basically good, and even their flaws become the raw material of growth into kindness and understanding. You need a bit of that every now and again.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: 'Prix de Beauté' (1930)

According to the film’s director Augusto Genina, star Louise Brooks mostly spent the time making Prix de Beauté drunk. If so, it doesn’t show, and even at the time (he maintained) the crew marvelled at the fact that she could look so good given that her cure for a hangover was three swigs of gin. Brooks moves luminously through an awkward, neither flesh-nor-fowl movie: her character’s name is Lucienne, but the first time she’s addressed she’s called Lulu, the sacrificial victim she played in Pandora’s Box the year before. Genina was enspelled by her smile, and in the finished result we can see why. 

In so far as what we get is the finished result. It’s a strange, transitional film, made in 1930 as the new sound technology was stamping and smashing its way through the movie industry, and was intended to be shown in both a silent and a sound version depending on what equipment any particular theatre had available. I saw the latter, which is – I think it’s not unfair to use the word – disfigured not only by the badly post-synchronised sound but also by a score which is so mismatched to the action it feels as though composer Wilhelm Zeller must have written it without actually watching the movie. In the early 2000s a silent version was reconstructed using an Italian silent print and a French sound one, and that – apparently, it’s only ever been seen at festivals – rearranges the scenes as well as introducing some elements which aren’t there in the relatively accessible sound version. That suggests that perhaps what I saw has been mucked about with a bit.

What remains is intermittently beautiful, and not just because of Brooks’ preternatural loveliness, but because of the use of light, the naturalism, and the still-silent-style supremacy of the visual image. It concludes, famously, with Lucienne dying in a screening room, her profile filling the bottom of the frame while her recorded self carries on singing above, an unforgettable and justly renowned image. But while Brooks fans try to rave about Prix de Beauté, the jealous-husband-kills-runaway-beauty-queen story is quite silly, even if the treatment, however mangled from what it might have been, raises it above the level the narrative warrants. And even then it doesn’t always succeed: close to the beginning Lucienne sings ‘Je n’ai qu’un amour, c’est toi’ on the beach to sullen beau André in a most unlikely fashion, a weird intrusion into a naturalistic scene (there was a tale that Edith Piaf did the voice-over, and one reviewer on imdb.com states ‘I recognised the unmistakable voice of Josephine Baker’; in fact it belonged to a barely-known singer called Hélène Caron, who recorded the song).

But I find the power of the film is something that Brooks’s beauty only heightens. When André murders Lucienne, it’s just the culmination of the misogyny and male violence that swirls around her from the film’s start: as she’s lusted over by André’s colleague Antonin and their friends on the beach; as she parades around at the beauty contest; as her image is passed along a row of newspaper editors; as she’s jostled and manhandled at a fair while men stuff their faces and test their strength, and Antonin wanders off to molest a girl in a skimpy costume advertising a peepshow, who knows she can’t move and whose look of suppressed disgust is perhaps the best performance in the film; as she dies watching herself on a screen, surrounded by rich men who have bought her. Her look of rapture at her own image becomes pitiful, and not just because she doesn't know her murderer is watching too: her only choice in life, it seems, lies between the domestic drudgery and imprisonment André offers her, and the more glamorous captivity, the furs and jewellery paid for by the moguls and aristocrats who, you know full well, will discard her one day. I don’t know how much of this was really in the minds of the movie-makers in 1930, but here in 2021, Prix de Beauté seems to be not only a film for our time, but even for our week.