df_f_dancers_2_para: 49

This data as json

rowid	first_name	last_name	gender	career_sec	personal_sec	info	seed_first_name	seed_last_name	occupation
49	Zaidee	Cullerton	f	Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. At the time, Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone. Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him. Despite his advice, she decided to accept Paramount's offer. During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her." A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery). Brooks' disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies. The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be a difficult ordeal for Brooks. During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who—the next day—spread a malicious false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted a venereal disease during a previous weekend stay with a producer, ostensibly Jack Pickford. Concurrently, Brooks' interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated as Arlen was a close friend of Brooks' then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Brooks, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members. Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with director William Wellman whose risk-taking directing style nearly caused her death in a scene where she hazardously climbs aboard a moving train. Soon after the production of Beggars Of Life was completed, Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time in her life, she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies' lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer. While partying with Lederer, Brooks had a brief sexual liaison with her. At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction. Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer—Brooks' closest friend and companion—committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window. This event traumatized Brooks and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast. Brooks, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G.W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director. As such, on the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case, Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. While her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her later refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures, and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Brooks' voice for the film. Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by her paramour George Preston Marshall and his English valet. After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora), and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian. Brooks' performance in Pandora's Box made her into a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old" and too obvious." In choosing Brooks, a relative unknown who had only appeared—not to very great effect—in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him. Brooks recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street." Brooks claimed her experience shooting Pandora's Box in Germany was a pleasant one: After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Brooks had a brief one-night stand with Pabst, and the director cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme. On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to her continue her career as a serious actress. Pabst expressed concern that Brooks' carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's". He further cautioned Brooks that her then-paramour George Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled. When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks' German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theater vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to theatre-style stage acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Yet Brooks' acting style was deliberately subtle as she knew the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. When explaining her acting method, Brooks posited that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used today by film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all. Film critic Roger Ebert later noted that, by employing this acting method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling." The result of her appearances in the two films by Pabst was that Brooks' became an international star. According to the film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "expos her animal sensuality and turn her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen—the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in Diary of a Lost Girl and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in Pandora's Box." Near the end of 1929, English film critic and journalist Cedric Belfrage interviewed Pabst for an article about Brooks' film work in Europe, one that was published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture. The Austrian director, according to Belfrage, attributed Brooks' acting success outside of the United States to her seemingly inherent or instinctive "European" sensibilities: Belfarge goes on in his article to elaborate on Brooks' opinion of Hollywood, and he refers to Pabst's firsthand knowledge of that opinion. "The very mention of the place," he states, "gives her a sensation of nausea. He continues, "The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity—no, no, that is no place for Louise Brooks." After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film entitled Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina. Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929. When Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances in these films were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting". As the sole member of the cast who had refused to return to make the talkie version of The Canary Murder Case, Brooks became convinced that "no major studio would hire to make a film." Purportedly, director William Wellman—despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life—offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City, and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Although Brooks later claimed she declined the role because she "hated Hollywood," film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, stated that Brooks "just wasn't interested.... She was more interested in Marshall". In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career". She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 per week salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn. She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich". Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932, and she began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. In 1937, Brooks managed to obtain a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses." Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks' scenes were deleted. Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she plays the romantic lead, opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that renders her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. In contemporary reviews of that Western in newspapers and trade publications, Brooks received little attention from critics for her role. The review by The Film Daily in September 1938 provides one example of that general disregard. The New York-based paper barely mentions her, stating only that "Louise Brooks makes an appearance as a female attraction." Variety, the nation's leading entertainment publication at the time, also devotes very little ink to her in its review. "Louise Brooks is the femme appeal with nothing much to do", it reports, "except look glamorous in a shoulder-length straight-bang coiffure."	In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928. Sutherland was purportedly extremely distraught when Brooks divorced him and, on the first night after their separation, he attempted to take his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall which she later described as abusive. Marshall was purportedly "her frequent bedfellow and constant adviser between 1927 and 1933." Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him but, after learning that she had had many affairs while they were together and believing her to be incapable of fidelity, he married film actress Corinne Griffith instead. In 1925, Brooks sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risque studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious. In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis, Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938. In her later years, Brooks insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime: "As a matter of fact, I've never been in love. And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him? Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it." Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks." Her many paramours from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. Sometime in September 1953, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964. Following Brooks' death, writer Kenneth Tynan asserted that "she was the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid. She's the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known." By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, even posing nude for art photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation. Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover". Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:	Cullerton made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. At the time, Cullerton had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone. Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him. Despite his advice, she decided to accept Paramount's offer. During this time, Cullerton gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Cullerton plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her." A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Cullerton to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery). Cullerton' disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies. The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be a difficult ordeal for Cullerton. During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who—the next day—spread a malicious false rumor on the set that Cullerton had contracted a venereal disease during a previous weekend stay with a producer, ostensibly Jack Pickford. Concurrently, Cullerton' interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated as Arlen was a close friend of Cullerton' then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Cullerton, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members. Amid these tensions, Cullerton repeatedly clashed with director William Wellman whose risk-taking directing style nearly caused her death in a scene where she hazardously climbs aboard a moving train. Soon after the production of Beggars Of Life was completed, Cullerton began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time in her life, she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies' lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer. While partying with Lederer, Cullerton had a brief sexual liaison with her. At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction. Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer—Cullerton' closest friend and companion—committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window. This event traumatized Cullerton and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast. Cullerton, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G.W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director. As such, on the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case, Cullerton departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. While her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her later refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Cullerton' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures, and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Cullerton' voice for the film. Cullerton traveled to Europe accompanied by her paramour George Preston Marshall and his English valet. After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora), and Cullerton plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian. Cullerton' performance in Pandora's Box made her into a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old" and too obvious." In choosing Cullerton, a relative unknown who had only appeared—not to very great effect—in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him. Cullerton recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street." Cullerton claimed her experience shooting Pandora's Box in Germany was a pleasant one: After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Cullerton had a brief one-night stand with Pabst, and the director cast Cullerton again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme. On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Cullerton not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to her continue her career as a serious actress. Pabst expressed concern that Cullerton' carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's". He further cautioned Cullerton that her then-paramour George Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled. When audiences and critics first viewed Cullerton' German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theater vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to theatre-style stage acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Yet Cullerton' acting style was deliberately subtle as she knew the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. When explaining her acting method, Cullerton posited that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used today by film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all. Film critic Roger Ebert later noted that, by employing this acting method, "Cullerton became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling." The result of her appearances in the two films by Pabst was that Cullerton' became an international star. According to the film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "expos her animal sensuality and turn her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen—the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in Diary of a Lost Girl and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in Pandora's Box." Near the end of 1929, English film critic and journalist Cedric Belfrage interviewed Pabst for an article about Cullerton' film work in Europe, one that was published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture. The Austrian director, according to Belfrage, attributed Cullerton' acting success outside of the United States to her seemingly inherent or instinctive "European" sensibilities: Belfarge goes on in his article to elaborate on Cullerton' opinion of Hollywood, and he refers to Pabst's firsthand knowledge of that opinion. "The very mention of the place," he states, "gives her a sensation of nausea. He continues, "The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity—no, no, that is no place for Zaidee Cullerton." After the success of her German films, Cullerton appeared in one more European film entitled Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina. Dissatisfied with Europe, Cullerton returned to New York in December 1929. When Cullerton returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances in these films were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting". As the sole member of the cast who had refused to return to make the talkie version of The Canary Murder Case, Cullerton became convinced that "no major studio would hire to make a film." Purportedly, director William Wellman—despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life—offered Cullerton the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Cullerton turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City, and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Although Cullerton later claimed she declined the role because she "hated Hollywood," film historian James Card, who came to know Cullerton intimately later in her life, stated that Cullerton "just wasn't interested.... She was more interested in Marshall". In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Zaidee Cullerton's film career". She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 per week salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn. She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich". Cullerton declared bankruptcy in 1932, and she began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. In 1937, Cullerton managed to obtain a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses." Unfortunately, after filming, Cullerton' scenes were deleted. Cullerton made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she plays the romantic lead, opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that renders her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. In contemporary reviews of that Western in newspapers and trade publications, Cullerton received little attention from critics for her role. The review by The Film Daily in September 1938 provides one example of that general disregard. The New York-based paper barely mentions her, stating only that "Zaidee Cullerton makes an appearance as a female attraction." Variety, the nation's leading entertainment publication at the time, also devotes very little ink to her in its review. "Zaidee Cullerton is the femme appeal with nothing much to do", it reports, "except look glamorous in a shoulder-length straight-bang coiffure."In the summer of 1926, Cullerton married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928. Sutherland was purportedly extremely distraught when Cullerton divorced him and, on the first night after their separation, he attempted to take his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cullerton continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall which she later described as abusive. Marshall was purportedly "her frequent bedfellow and constant adviser between 1927 and 1933." Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him but, after learning that she had had many affairs while they were together and believing her to be incapable of fidelity, he married film actress Corinne Griffith instead. In 1925, Cullerton sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risque studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious. In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis, Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938. In her later years, Cullerton insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime: "As a matter of fact, I've never been in love. And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him? Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it." Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Cullerton." Her many paramours from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Cullerton for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. Sometime in September 1953, Cullerton converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964. Following Cullerton' death, writer Kenneth Tynan asserted that "she was the most seductive, sexual image of Woman ever committed to celluloid. She's the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker, I think I've ever known." By her own admission, Cullerton was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, even posing nude for art photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation. Cullerton enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover". Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:	Louise	Brooks	dancers