Lulu-Louise at 100

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Her movie image was part but not all of the Brooks legend. As a lovely young thing on Broadway, she was evicted from the Algonquin Hotel for promiscuous behavior. With her come-hither, go-thither allure, she was a magnet for famous men, and she frequently returned the favor, bedding Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, dozens more. "I was always a kept woman," she told Tynan. "Even when I was making a thousand dollars a week, I would always be paid for by George Marshall [owner of the Washington Redskins football team] or someone like that." In her last years in Hollywood, 1938-40, she recalled, "the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me."

And even those stopped coming. A tart with a tart tongue (she once said, "If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife"), Brooks burned personal and career bridges like a child playing with matches. By her mid-40s she was broke, and without employers, friends or sugar daddies. She slept around until she was pretty much slept out. She contemplated suicide, then joined the Roman Catholic Church — although the young priest who instructed her in matters of the faith fell in love with her and was transferred to another parish.

In her last 30 years in Rochester, unrecognizable as the siren of yore — her hair gray, her face thin — Brooks attracted a coterie of film historians, to whom she recounted her screen and sexual adventures. A smart, once-beautiful showgirl talking about her affairs with the rich and famous — why wouldn't she entrance star-struck film critics and historians? They had to have been shocked and thrilled by her R-rated confessions. In the 1998 documentary Looking for Lulu, one friend, Bill Kuein says that Brooks "felt masturbation was the highest art form in the sexual area."

LULUBRICIOUS

A bright beauty with a bawdy mouth: that's something. But what did Brooks show on the screen that elevated a not very prominent actress into the empyrean?

Answer: One of the great expressive faces. It was of course beautiful, with black hair and wide unblinking eyes, but her gift was in the way she used those features. Or rather, didn't use them; there's no sense of manipulation when her character's mood shifts from gay to glum. She always found responses that were as subtle as they were powerful. She respected, or just assumed, the intelligence of her audience — to intuitively infer the thoughts and emotions running across that gorgeous face, percolating in that active mind. She gives the impressive of thinking without semaphoring the message: "Now I'm thinking."

In many of her American films as well as in Pandora's Box, Brooks played the sort of woman a respectable man both desires and fears, sees as his liberation and his doom. This can't have been far from the impact the actress had on the men she met. From outside and in, she encapsulated the tyranny and burden of beauty: its hold over those seized by it, its erosion of the person blessed or cursed by it.

On screen, Garbo could represent this with an acuity no one could match; but she, and we, knew it was acting. Brooks trumps Garbo without editorializing; she makes the process look natural. That's why, as Lulu, she is less the perpetrator of sexual chaos than its victim — a perfectly healthy young woman around whom men turn into beasts. As David Thomson writes of Pandora's Box: "Brooks in close-up gives a sense of vivacious, fatal intimacy that enormously enriches Lulu's tragedy."

From the journalists, and later the film critics, who wrote about her, Brooks summoned raptures. What, when drunk, they saw in Garbo, they saw in Brooks sober. A 1926 profile in Photoplay was hardly less rhapsodic than Tynan's, 53 years later: "She is so very Manhattan. Very young. Exquisitely hard-boiled. Her black hair and black eyes are as brilliant as Chinese lacquer. Her skin is white as a camellia. Her legs are lyric."