Louise Brooks Part II: Jerry Vermilye

George Marshall: did he control Louise too much and sabotage her movie career...OR preserve her dignity in from of tyrannical studio heads?

Perhaps George Marshall was the real instigator behind Louise's career suicide in the U.S., but whatever triumph she may have experienced from telling Schulberg where to go could only eventually end in regret. As her later friend and champion, James Card, has written: "By the time The Canary Murder Case was made, her rapidly growing number of ardent, letter-writing fans indicated that she was about to become one of the major stars of the late Twenties."

Marshall then arranged an interview for Louise at the newly organized RKO studios, where they offered her $500 a week to star in a literary project called Bad Girl. She turned them down flat, incurring Marshall's violent wrath-and his temporary departure.

In April 1929, when Louise's financial woes were close to desperate, she received a wire from Pabst advising her that she was wanted in Paris by director Rene Clair for a picture called Prix de Beaute. Her faith in Pabst's advice was unquestioned; Louise immediately sailed on the Ile de France. She was shocked, upon her arrival, to be told by Clair that he wasn't making the proposed film, after all, due to lack of funding. Unwilling to return to the U.S., Louise cooled her heels in France and enjoyed the artistic social whirl, until in June, Pabst ordered her back to Berlin with the promise of another great role, this time as the unfortunate heroine of Diary of a Lost Girl. And, fo course, she went, arriving with her (platonic) man-of-the-moment, a Swedish-English blond chap named Karl von Bleck, who Louise dubbed "The Eskimo".