A short life of the author
Anita Loos (26 April 1893 – 18 August 1981) was an American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist who became one of the wittiest voices in American popular culture. She wrote over two hundred screenplays — beginning at the age of twelve — created one of the most enduring comic characters in American fiction in Lorelei Lee, and moved through Hollywood, Broadway, and European literary society with a sharp eye and a sharper pen. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), her most famous work, was serialised in Harper’s Bazaar, published as a book to enormous success, translated into fourteen languages, and inspired adaptations that culminated in the 1953 Howard Hawks film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
Life
Loos was born in Sisson (now Mount Shasta), California, the daughter of a newspaper editor with a talent for going broke. She began writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Company when she was a teenager — her first scenario was accepted when she was twelve or, by some accounts, fifteen (Loos was a creative autobiographer). By her twenties she was one of the most prolific screenwriters in early Hollywood, writing over two hundred scenarios and intertitles for silent films.
She married twice — unhappily to the director and writer John Emerson, who exploited her financially and took unearned co-credit on her work. She was close friends with Aldous Huxley, Irving Thalberg, and Wilson Mizner. She was tiny — barely five feet tall — and cultivated a girlish persona that concealed a formidable intelligence and a ruthless comic sensibility.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)
The novel takes the form of the diary of Lorelei Lee, a Little Rock girl of spectacular beauty and limited education who uses her charms to extract diamonds, trips to Europe, and proposals of marriage from a succession of wealthy men. The joke — sustained with perfect pitch across the entire novel — is that Lorelei’s cheerfully mercenary worldview is presented in her own malapropism-laden prose, so that the reader simultaneously laughs at her and admires her.
The book originated as a series of sketches for Harper’s Bazaar in 1925, inspired by Loos’s observation that her friend H. L. Mencken — the most intellectually formidable man in America — lost all critical faculty in the presence of a dim blonde. The character of Lorelei was modelled partly on a woman Mencken was pursuing.
Edith Wharton called it “the great American novel (at last!).” James Joyce was reportedly a fan. The sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), follows Lorelei’s friend Dorothy and is sharper and darker but was less successful.
Screenwriting
Loos was a genuine pioneer of American screenwriting. She wrote for D. W. Griffith throughout the 1910s, contributed to Douglas Fairbanks films, and wrote intertitles that were among the wittiest in silent cinema. In the sound era she worked at MGM, where she wrote or contributed to Red-Headed Woman (1932, starring Jean Harlow), The Women (1939, adapted from Clare Boothe Luce’s play), and numerous other films.
Her adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for the stage (1949) ran on Broadway with Carol Channing as Lorelei, launching Channing’s career. The 1953 film, though loosely adapted, produced two of the most iconic scenes in cinema history: Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Memoirs
Loos wrote several volumes of memoirs that are themselves works of art: A Girl Like I (1966), Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974), and Cast of Thousands (1977). These are not reliable autobiography — Loos smoothed, omitted, and embellished freely — but they are brilliantly observed accounts of Hollywood’s golden age and New York literary society, written with the same comic precision that animates Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Critical Standing
Loos has never been given the full critical recognition her work deserves. She was too popular to be taken seriously as a literary figure, too funny to be treated as an important screenwriter, and too associated with Hollywood to be embraced by the New York literary establishment. Feminist critics have begun to reclaim her — the creation of Lorelei Lee, a woman who understands exactly how patriarchal economics works and manipulates it with cheerful competence, was a more radical act than it appeared.
Collecting Loos
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925, Boni & Liveright) in first edition with dust jacket is a major collectible, bringing $2,000–$5,000 in fine condition. The jacket, designed by Ralph Barton, is particularly desirable. But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928) firsts are $200–$500. Her memoirs are modestly priced ($30–$100) and are among the most entertaining Hollywood memoirs ever written.