Sophie Kipner

Louise Brooks

September 30, 1934

Dear Ms. Louise Brooks,

I think you’ll appreciate my honesty if I admit, right up front, that this is a love letter. A Diary of a Lost Girl, perhaps. My father told me once that if I wanted to master the art of glamour, I would have to study you. So I opened Pandora’s Box and learned the Prix de Beauté, but to look at you was to be entranced by you, and an entranced me could not learn from you. I needed distance.

I loved you even though I never heard your voice, and I wondered what the rhythms of your intonations were, the sounds of your highs and lows. I imagined how those sounds would change the way I saw your face, how I would hear the whispers of your risqué behavior among the iron-belted housewives. Emulating your acclaimed naturalism was as difficult as turning the wind into snow. Made well aware of the spaces between you and me, between black and white and color, I chose to love you from afar. And so, I only took a pinch of you, and that was all I needed. So I must say thank you, Ms. Louise Brooks, for teaching me how to speak without your ever saying a word.