Louise Bryant

From Philosopedia

Bryant, Louise (1885—1936)

Emma Goldman once wrote, “I do wish sometimes I were as shallow as a Louise Bryant; everything would be so simple.”

Bryant, a Greenwich Village radical and bohemian who had moved from Reno, Nevada, and Portland, Oregon, was a friend of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and one of his protégés, John Reed. She joined Reed in 1916, married him after leaving a Portland dentist, Paul Trullinger, became involved in New York City with the Provincetown Players, had affairs with Eugene O’Neill and others, hid Reed’s manuscripts during the crackdown on Bolshevik sympathizers after World War I at their 1 Patchin Place address in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and figured as one of the characters in Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, later becoming known as a character in the movie Reds.

Although only in Russia for four months, she wrote Six Red Months in Russia (1918), which critic Dorothy Gallagher and others have described as not being a serious work of reference.

Mary V. Dearborn’s Queen of Bohemia (1996) describes Bryant’s life as a freethinker and social climber, mentioning that when Bryant returned alone from Russia, ahead of Reed, she began an unsuccessful attempt to renew her affair with O’Neill. She was with Reed in Moscow when he died in 1920 of typhus. Marrying a rich and social William Bullitt, telling him she was twenty-nine although she was thirty-eight, Bryant then lived the life of a rich man’s wife, complete with clothes, servants, houses. When she began an affair with Gwen Le Gallienne, a sculptor, the marriage ended in divorce.

Reds, a 1981 film that starred Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson (as playwright Eugene O'Neill, a sometime lover of Louise's), was based on her life with John Reed.

After developing a rare and disfiguring Dercum’s disease, she lost custody of her daughter as well as control of Jack Reed’s papers.

At the age of fifty, Bryant died in a $2-a-night hotel. Those who knew her said that, although she made speaking tours on behalf of the Revolution and was a strong fighter for woman suffrage, Bryant was a martini-drinking and ether-sniffing individual who spoke and wrote with hyperbole.