Bright Lights Film Journal - Louise Brooks

In the long last years of her life, Louise Brooks, isolated in Rochester, New York and utterly tired of living, would end telephone conversations with the order, "Bring a gun." Her friends were shocked by this macabre request, which must have delighted her. Even as an elderly woman, Brooks toyed with sensuality, boasting to Kenneth Tynan that she could still ejaculate clear across a room,1 but annihilation was her real passion. She connected sex and death better than any other screen actress. At her centenary this year, her image remains as biting, sensual, and provoking as ever.