She became her brother's first model and muse when he took up photography.

Louise began showing signs of mental illness in adolescence, prompting her parents to seek psychiatric care for her. By her mid-twenties, she'd been diagnosed as schizophrenic and became increasingly silent and withdrawn as she got older, eventually ceasing to speak altogether. For a brief time, her brother employed her in his photo studio as a Kodachrome re-toucher, but the disease's progress soon reduced her to a near-catatonic state.

In January 1955, her parents, unable to cope with her condition, committed her to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, NY where she remained the last 13 years of her life. She died at age 41 in 1968 from a heart attack brought on by arteriosclerotic heart disease. Her remains were cremated.