“I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you, it will be with a knife.” – Louise Brooks
Try, if you can, to imagine a world in which three of the silver screen’s most iconic ingenues – silent siren Louise Brooks, Forties femme Veronica Lake, and fanboy B-goddess Sandahl Bergman – never existed. A nightmare scenario, right? (And curious, isn’t it, that all three came into existence on the same day – Nov. 14?)
Without Brooks’ Bernice-bobbed bangs and slinky smolder, there would be a whole lot fewer Suicide Girl suffragettes roaming the night and going all turnabout-is-fair-play on bad boys everywhere. Take a gander at either one of her famous films for German director G.W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, and you’ll witness the birth of the iconic, dark, outsider femme template. Both of Brook’s Pabst pairings are sexily dire exercises in feminine wiles and the repercussions they incite on both sides of the gender divide: Men and women come up equally doomed in the long run. It’s an echo of Brooks’ own, self-hewn outsider status at that point in her short cinematic career. Smart as a kitten with a whip and twice as feisty, Brooks was unofficially banished from Tinseltown in 1928 after appearing in William Wellman’s Beggars of Life. Her crime? The lady was too damn intelligent to play by the already-galvanized boys club rules of pre-Depression Hollywood. Brooksie got the last laugh, though. Her 1982 memoir/collection, Lulu in Hollywood, cemented her bad rap as the best rep a girl can have, creating an enduring Brooksian mythos and proving her to be an intellectual bombshell of the first order.
A world minus a Veronica Lake in it is equally, fundamentally wrong and certainly less alluring. Once you get past the velvet snare of Lake’s cascading blond tresses (and good luck to you if you try), the come-hither pout, and the smart-alecky sass that made Preston Sturges, Alan Ladd, future husband André de Toth, and pretty much every guy in the world fall in lust with this first and foremost of all the Brooklyn queens, you find a remarkable actor, calibrated for flawless performance. Offscreen, she was known for being a handful, and her third act, involving booze, IRS woes, and paranoia, was far less pretty than the face in the mirror. But onscreen? She more than held her own, even against Ladd’s vengeful killer, Philip Raven, in the best of all possible noirs, This Gun for Hire. “You tried to kill that girl,” Raven snarls at an oily, protesting Laird Cregar. “That girl’s my friend!” Bang! Right in the kisser.
Which brings us to Sandahl Bergman. She’s never been regarded in quite the same light as Brooks or Lake, but it’s easy to forget that the former pair made their share of less-than-brilliant career moves when you’re blinded by the supernova of their megawatt charisma. Bergman’s the only one of our three birthday shout-outs to still be treading the boards, and her third act is yet to be determined in full. She’s probably best known these days as leggy swordswoman Valeria, Conan the Barbarian‘s main squeeze (and the one who not only steals the barbarian’s heart but saves his life, as well). Detractors might be onto something when they point to her semirigid acting in Milius’ blood-and-thunder magnum opus, sure, but it pays to recall also her showstopping, pulse-quickening performance against Roy Scheider’s equally mesmerizing portrayal as Bob Fosse’s stand-in, Joe Gideon (for which he would be nominated for an Oscar), in 1979’s All That Jazz. And then there’s her turn in Xanadu, as a muse to the beat of ELO. Not exactly a classic, we’ll grant you, but we also dare you to turn away. Not so easy is it? And a damn sight prettier. Happy birthday, one and all.
This article appears in November 14 • 2008.