August 29, 2022 Issue

Kenneth Tynan is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. What’s amazing is that he achieved this status on the strength of just five pieces, all published in the late 1970s: “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man” (on Mel Brooks); “Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos” (on Tom Stoppard); “At Three Minutes Past Eight You Must Dream” (on Ralph Richardson); “Louise Brooks Tells All” (on Louise Brooks); and “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (on Johnny Carson). One of those pieces – “Louise Brooks Tells All” – appears in this week’s issue (an “archival issue”) under the new title “The Girl in the Black Helmet.” What a splendid piece! I’d forgotten how good it is.

It’s a profile of the silent screen actress Louise Brooks. The first sentence is a beauty:

None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1 p.m. that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before.

None of what would have happened? It’s almost impossible not to read on. The film on which his fantasies had fed is Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Tynan watches it on TV. He writes,

On Channel 28, I stayed with the film to its end, which is also Lulu’s. Of the climactic sequence, so decorously understated, Louise Brooks once wrote, in Sight & Sound, “It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift which has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac.” When it was over, I switched channels and returned to the real world of game shows and pet-food commercials, relieved to find that the spell she cast was still as powerful as ever. 

The next section of the piece shifts to Rochester, New York, home of the International Museum of Photography. Tynan goes there to see its “hoard of Brooks pictures” – six of them new to him – within a space of two days. On the eve of Day One, he “mentally recaps what I have learned of Brooks’s early years.” What a recap it is, containing several inspired descriptions, including this one:

At fifteen, already a beauty sui generis, as surviving photographs show, with her hair, close-cropped at the nape to expose what Christopher Isherwood has called “that unique imperious neck of hers,” cascading in ebony bangs down the high, intelligent forehead and descending on either side of her eyes in spit curls slicked forward at the cheekbones, like a pair of enamelled parentheses—at fifteen, she left high school and went to New York with her dance teacher. 

In the third and fourth sections of the piece, Tynan is in the Museum’s Dryden Theatre, watching Brooks films. His commentary is brilliant. Sample:

What images do I retain of Brooks in “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em”? Many comedic details; e.g., the scene in which she fakes tears of contrition by furtively dabbling her cheeks with water from a handily placed goldfish bowl, and our last view of her, with all her sins unpunished, merrily sweeping off in a Rolls-Royce with the owner of the department store. And, throughout, every closeup of that blameless, unblemished face.

Section five astonishes. After watching the Brooks films, Tynan leaves the Dryden Theatre, and takes a taxi to an apartment building only a few blocks away. He writes,

I rode up in the elevator to the third floor and pressed a doorbell a few paces along the corridor. After a long pause, there was a loud snapping of locks. The door slowly opened to reveal a petite woman of fragile build, wearing a woollen bed jacket over a pink nightgown, and holding herself defiantly upright by means of a sturdy metal cane with four rubber-tipped prongs. She had salt-and-pepper hair combed back into a ponytail that hung down well below her shoulders, and she was barefoot. One could imagine this gaunt and elderly child as James Tyrone’s wife in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”; or, noting the touch of authority and panache in her bearing, as the capricious heroine of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” I stated my name, adding that I had an appointment. She nodded and beckoned me in. I greeted her with a respectful embrace. This was my first physical contact with Louise Brooks.

Brooks lives! Tynan meets her! For the rest of the piece, we are with them, in Brooks’s austere two-room apartment, as she reminisces about that “halcyon decade” of her life, the twenties, when her career took her to New York, London, Hollywood, Paris, and Berlin, and she hung out with, among others, Herman Mankiewicz, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. 

“The Girl in the Black Helmet” is a classic New Yorker profile – perhaps the best ever to appear in the magazine’s long history. Its only competitors are the other Tynan pieces listed above, especially “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” my favorite of the series.