“I always drink it in a tooth glass, with milk on the side,” she explained with relish.

We had been told by a local film buff that we should take half a pint of gin as an offering, and Louise was thrilled. I was accompanied by Murray Grigor, then galvanizing the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It had been arranged without Card’s involvement and proved a near disaster, as I may recall in a future flashback, but the highlight of the week was a pilgrimage to Louise’s modest apartment on North Goodman Street. Six years later, I was invited to “consult” on a new festival in Rochester, an event purportedly supported by the Xerox Corporation.

True friends were thin on the ground, although Kevin Brownlow was about to become one, after he tracked her down for an interview for his book The Parade’s Gone By. I have received five copies from all over and could have had ten more from admiring friends.” These remarks disguised the fact that Louise was by then a loner. It was a great honor to be your cover girl. Soon afterward, after reading in Cahiers du cinéma that she had been rediscovered by James Card, the film curator at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, I plucked up my courage and sent her a copy of the little book.Īlmost instantly, she typed a letter to me: “Becoming a star thirty-five years after I was pronounced nothing is very heady stuff. When my friend Peter Graham suggested that we use her image for the front cover of his A Dictionary of the Cinema, which I published at Tantivy Press in 1964, I grew intrigued.

That iconic face staring out of posters for Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl seemed, like some fly in amber, a prisoner of the vanished 1920s. For years, I had assumed Louise Brooks to be dead.

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