Gentlemen Prefer Loos L-R: Jean Harlow and Anita Loos promoting Red-Headed Woman, 1932 by Elyse Graham When James Joyce was nearly blind and working on the first draft of Finnegans Wake, the book he permitted himself during his daily reading window was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a best-selling satire by Anita Loos. [1] The book has the interest of biographical color rather than any usefulness for explaining the Wake. But Loos uses language in an interesting way; her book is a prime example of modernist techniques seeping into popular use. And the dialect humor is close to what Joyce worked for in certain chapters of his earlier books. (In fact, although Loos works against the background of modernism and name-checks Conrad, there is an important sense in which her book is a reminder of how much high modernism borrowed from popular culture. Emphasis on the material of language had characterized the main stream of American literary humor throughout the nineteenth century.) Loos grew up in California in a small family that ran a nickelodeon. She spent her spare hours at the library poring over magazines that arrived from back East.

For extra income, her father enrolled his children as players in various stock troupes and touring companies, but Loos apparently didn’t care for acting. At six years old, she had won a children’s poetry contest, which left her intent, she later said, to become a famous writer (Carey, 15-20).[2] She struck the right kind of writing for her historical moment in 1916. That year she sketched out a film treatment—it was a short story laid out visually, since she didn’t know scriptwriting technique—and mailed it to Biograph, the production company that made reels for her family’s theater. An envelope returned bearing a check and a release form. She was twenty-three years old. Over the next several years, Loos wrote a number of scripts for Biograph and eventually moved to New York City– where, she recalled later, she would be “breathing the same air as Henry Mencken” (Carey, 21-28). Loos befriended Mencken, and later claimed to have had a flirtatious relationship with him—not a distinction; he tried to charm most of the women he met.

One day in 1924, while riding a train across the Midwest, Loos noticed that the men in her car ignored her but leaped to hoist luggage for the blonde beside her. She simmered and thought about a blonde who then had Mencken’s arm, undeservedly in Loos’s opinion. “There was some mystifying difference between us,” she later wrote of the train passenger. “Why did she so far outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?” [3] Loos took out a yellow pad and began to write. Cover of the Popular Library edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1948. Illustrated by Earle K. Bergey Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became the American best-seller of 1925 . When it first appeared in serial in the women’s magazine “Harper’s Bazaar,” the story made circulation fly—and so increased male readership that makers of cigars, menswear, and sporting goods started to run ads (Loos, 80).

Edith Wharton, tongue only a little in cheek, hailed it as “the great American novel.” “Apparently,” wrote a theater critic in 1926, “every present day musical show is compelled by law to include a song called ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.'”[4] Gentlemen Prefer Blondes masquerades as the diary of one Lorelei Lee, a flapper from Little Rock who lives well on the bounty of older men. With a brunette friend who, in the capacity of chaperone, eggs her on, Lorelei has various adventures in gold-digging and finally marries a Philadelphia millionaire, whom she convinces to move to Hollywood so she can be in pictures. The book had nothing new to say about sexual politics. Even ten years earlier, chorus girls and blondes were worn gags on the magazine circuit.[5] The richness of Blondes lies in its mastery—and it is mastery—of dialect and irony. Loos always said that she finished the manuscript on the train and forgot it in her suitcase for six months, but six months is just enough time to groom prose and leave a cover of indifference. If comedy is a rhetorical device, so is talent.

Lorelei writes not dictates, but her prose follows the mannerisms of colloquial speech, with lots of fragmented sentences, verbal tics (“I was intreeged,” “It was devine”), and verbal filler surrounding repeating key phrases. The idea is that not much mental organizing intervenes between brain signal and written word. March 16th: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, d. c., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it. [6] Free association doesn’t entail candidness.

Lorelei euphemizes as she goes. “So of course if a gentleman is educating a girl,” she says, “he likes to stay and talk about topics of the day until quite late, so I am quite fatigued the next day and I do not really get up until it is time to dress for dinner at the Colony” (Blondes, 13). What talk means is anyone’s guess. As Susan Hegeman observes, the effect of the novel’s doublespeak is to leave open to the imagination any number of possible levels of scandal. On one hand, Lorelei’s sexual magnetism is apparent from the way men act around her; but on the other, she comes across as oddly sexless. She even gives men childish nicknames like “Daddy” and “Piggy.” She withholds the mention of sex for so long that it becomes a preoccupation for the reader, just as it is for her male followers.[7] Jane Russell as Dorothy Shaw and Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 20th Century Fox, 1953 The irony of Blondes, in short, refuses to reveal its bottom.

At the verbal level, Lorelei’s solecisms undermine her pretensions about herself and the gentlemen who furnish her education. At another level, Lorelei is an ignoramus pretending even greater ignorance. She perpetually undercuts her scatterbrained prose with shrewd mercenary conduct, which she undercuts again by giving fifty-centime tips in France because the coin is so small. Lorelei’s true intelligence and her true actions are questions that never resolve. Nothing puts what the heroine is trading for gifts, but our knowledge of the sexual economy urges us to fill in the gaps (Hegeman, 536). This is the source of the novel’s cynicism. Blondes shows its readers to match Lorelei in worldly knowledge, but they likely stop short of her worldly behavior. Because the novel mocks just such bourgeois morality– Lorelei vouches for her father’s respectability by citing his Elk membership; a censor board excises naughty bits from films, then watches the cuts obsessively– the reader emerges not as a moral hero but as another fool. Loos’s genius was to recognize this. Lorelei’s narration burlesques, in excoriating detail, the vernacular of the American middle class.

Lorelei uses “you” as an indefinite pronoun, swallows complicated concepts in vague nouns, and rounds out sentences with mindless verbal filler. Apparently to sound sophisticated, she upgrades “me” to “I” in such phrases as “a sweet girl like I.” Her cramped vocabulary prompts her to recycle adjectives: “quite” and “quite a lot” to mean everything from somewhat to vehemently to often to incessantly, and “nice” for all manner of moral euphemisms (“a nice girl”). (The latter substitution is especially barbed, since it questions the difference between innocence and stupidity.) Compounding this effect is the tendency of her sentences to wander around repeated key words and phrases. The repetitive phrasing, combined with a dearth of punctuation– she can spell, but she punctuates sloppily– forces upward interesting structural variations, sometimes creating odd poetry: So Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time looking at things that spoil peoples morals. So Mr. Spoffard really must have very strong morals or else all the things that spoil other peoples morals would spoil his morals. But they do not seem to spoil Mr. Spoffards morals and I really think it is wonderful to have such strong morals.

(Blondes, 138) The patterning forces the reader to look close—to consider anew, as verbal artifacts, familiar items of American slang: “an old fashioned girl,” “having a good time.” At the same time, the repeating phrases become tonal variations on middle-class banality. Loos probably owes something to Ring Lardner and something to Gertrude Stein.[8] Lorelei’s idiomatic basis in the bourgeoisie raises the novel’s satirical stakes. By its lights, Lorelei’s semiliteracy is mass ignorance, her sexual doublespeak is social hypocrisy, and her mercenary instinct is the grubby soul of capitalism. Loos liked to joke that the Russian authorities endorsed her book as a capitalist tragedy– a reading, as she knew, that is perfectly respectable. In Susan Hegeman’s entertaining gloss, Lorelei’s diamonds are credible shorthand for the way wealth covers its dubious origins. The gifts of jewelry she receives improve (we may suppose) her looks– which attracts more gifts– which make her yet more attractive– a process that mimics the circulation of capital attracting capital.

As her “capital of attractiveness” builds, the suspect labor behind it slides in importance– so that by the book’s end, Lorelei is so cleansed that she is fit to marry a prominent bluenose (Hegeman, 543). Lorelei rises through conspicuous consumption, and she is herself a display of men’s pecuniary strength. She is the endpoint of commodification, the consumer who is also a consumer good. The novel gets its moral center from Lorelei’s brunette friend, Dorothy. Dorothy approves of Lorelei’s dealings; what distinguish her are brains and a lack of taste for hypocrisy. (Told that a candidate for district attorney has poured $1,000 of liquor down his sink and is petitioning all to do likewise, Dorothy asks, “If he poured 1,000 dollars worth down his sink to get himself one million dollars worth of publicity and a good job—when we pour it down our sink, what do we get?”) (Blondes, 142-43) Dorothy doesn’t draw suitors as Lorelei does, but she seems to interest a few worthy men.

Lorelei moans when Dorothy turns down lunch with a studio magnate in favor of “a gentleman called Mr. Mencken from Baltimore who really only prints a green magazine which has not even got any pictures in it.” “But,” Lorelei adds philosophically, “Mr. Eisman is always saying that every girl does not want to get ahead and get educated like me” (Blondes, 40). Piece originally posted at The Modernism Lab | References: [1] Richard Ellman, James Joyce: 582; James Joyce, Letters I: 246; Gary Carey, Anita Loos: A Biography: 98, 108. Hereafter cited as Carey, with page number. [2] Quoted in Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Oxford University Press, 2005): 245. [3] Anita Loos, Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977): 85. Hereafter cited as Loos, with page number. [4] The Bookman 64, 3 (Nov. 1926): 341.

[5] See, for example, Puck 61, 1571 (Apr. 10, 1907): 2; The National Police Gazette LXXIX, 1265 (Nov. 16, 1901): 3. [6] Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York: Liveright, 1973): 11-12. Hereafter cited as Blondes, with page number. [7] Susan Hegeman, “Taking Blondes Seriously.” American Literary History 7, 3 (Autumn 1995): 525-554. Hereafter cited as Hegeman, with page number. [8] See Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Modernism Lab Essays Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Elyse Graham When James Joyce was nearly blind and working on the first draft of Finnegans Wake , the book he permitted himself during his daily reading window was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a best-selling satire by Anita Loos .

1 The book has the interest of biographical color rather than any usefulness for explaining the Wake. But Loos uses language in an interesting way; her book is a prime example of modernist techniques seeping into popular use. And the dialect humor is close to what Joyce worked for in certain chapters of his earlier books. (In fact, although Loos works against the background of modernism and name-checks Conrad, there is an important sense in which her book is a reminder of how much high modernism borrowed from popular culture. Emphasis on the material of language had characterized the main stream of American literary humor throughout the nineteenth century.) Loos grew up in California in a small family that ran a nickelodeon. She spent her spare hours at the library poring over magazines that arrived from back East. For extra income, her father enrolled his children as players in various stock troupes and touring companies, but Loos apparently didn’t care for acting. At six years old, she had won a children’s poetry contest, which left her intent, she later said, to become a famous writer (Carey, 15-20). 2 She struck the right kind of writing for her historical moment in 1916.

That year she sketched out a film treatment—it was a short story laid out visually, since she didn’t know scriptwriting technique—and mailed it to Biograph, the production company that made reels for her family’s theater. An envelope returned bearing a check and a release form. She was twenty-three years old. Over the next several years, Loos wrote a number of scripts for Biograph and eventually moved to New York City-- where, she recalled later, she would be "breathing the same air as Henry Mencken" (Carey, 21-28). Loos befriended Mencken, and later claimed to have had a flirtatious relationship with him—not a distinction; he tried to charm most of the women he met. One day in 1924, while riding a train across the Midwest, Loos noticed that the men in her car ignored her but leaped to hoist luggage for the blonde beside her. She simmered and thought about a blonde who then had Mencken’s arm, undeservedly in Loos’s opinion. "There was some mystifying difference between us,” she later wrote of the train passenger. “Why did she so far outdistance me in feminine allure?

Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?" 3 Loos took out a yellow pad and began to write. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became the American best-seller of 1925 . When it first appeared in serial in the women's magazine "Harper's Bazaar," the story made circulation fly—and so increased male readership that makers of cigars, menswear, and sporting goods started to run ads (Loos, 80). Edith Wharton, tongue only a little in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel." "Apparently," wrote a theater critic in 1926, "every present day musical show is compelled by law to include a song called 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.'" 4 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes masquerades as the diary of one Lorelei Lee, a flapper from Little Rock who lives well on the bounty of older men. With a brunette friend who, in the capacity of chaperone, eggs her on, Lorelei has various adventures in gold-digging and finally marries a Philadelphia millionaire, whom she convinces to move to Hollywood so she can be in pictures.

The book had nothing new to say about sexual politics. Even ten years earlier, chorus girls and blondes were worn gags on the magazine circuit. 5 The richness of Blondes lies in its mastery—and it is mastery—of dialect and irony. Loos always said that she finished the manuscript on the train and forgot it in her suitcase for six months, but six months is just enough time to groom prose and leave a cover of indifference. If comedy is a rhetorical device, so is talent. Lorelei writes not dictates, but her prose follows the mannerisms of colloquial speech, with lots of fragmented sentences, verbal tics ("I was intreeged," "It was devine"), and verbal filler surrounding repeating key phrases. The idea is that not much mental organizing intervenes between brain signal and written word. March 16th: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time.

I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, d. c., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it. 6 Free association doesn’t entail candidness. Lorelei euphemizes as she goes. "So of course if a gentleman is educating a girl," she says, "he likes to stay and talk about topics of the day until quite late, so I am quite fatigued the next day and I do not really get up until it is time to dress for dinner at the Colony" (Blondes, 13). What talk means is anyone's guess. As Susan Hegeman observes, the effect of the novel's doublespeak is to leave open to the imagination any number of possible levels of scandal. On one hand, Lorelei's sexual magnetism is apparent from the way men act around her; but on the other, she comes across as oddly sexless.

She even gives men childish nicknames like "Daddy" and "Piggy." She withholds the mention of sex for so long that it becomes a preoccupation for the reader, just as it is for her male followers. 7 The irony of Blondes, in short, refuses to reveal its bottom. At the verbal level, Lorelei’s solecisms undermine her pretensions about herself and the gentlemen who furnish her education. At another level, Lorelei is an ignoramus pretending even greater ignorance. She perpetually undercuts her scatterbrained prose with shrewd mercenary conduct, which she undercuts again by giving fifty-centime tips in France because the coin is so small. Lorelei's true intelligence and her true actions are questions that never resolve. Nothing puts what the heroine is trading for gifts, but our knowledge of the sexual economy urges us to fill in the gaps (Hegeman, 536). This is the source of the novel's cynicism. Blondes shows its readers to match Lorelei in worldly knowledge, but they likely stop short of her worldly behavior.

Because the novel mocks just such bourgeois morality-- Lorelei vouches for her father’s respectability by citing his Elk membership; a censor board excises naughty bits from films, then watches the cuts obsessively-- the reader emerges not as a moral hero but as another fool. Loos’s genius was to recognize this. Lorelei's narration burlesques, in excoriating detail, the vernacular of the American middle class. Lorelei uses "you" as an indefinite pronoun, swallows complicated concepts in vague nouns, and rounds out sentences with mindless verbal filler. Apparently to sound sophisticated, she upgrades "me" to "I" in such phrases as "a sweet girl like I." Her cramped vocabulary prompts her to recycle adjectives: "quite" and "quite a lot" to mean everything from somewhat to vehemently to often to incessantly, and "nice" for all manner of moral euphemisms ("a nice girl"). (The latter substitution is especially barbed, since it questions the difference between innocence and stupidity.) Compounding this effect is the tendency of her sentences to wander around repeated key words and phrases.

The repetitive phrasing, combined with a dearth of punctuation-- she can spell, but she punctuates sloppily-- forces upward interesting structural variations, sometimes creating odd poetry: So Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time looking at things that spoil peoples morals. So Mr. Spoffard really must have very strong morals or else all the things that spoil other peoples morals would spoil his morals. But they do not seem to spoil Mr. Spoffards morals and I really think it is wonderful to have such strong morals. (Blondes, 138) The patterning forces the reader to look close—to consider anew, as verbal artifacts, familiar items of American slang: "an old fashioned girl," "having a good time." At the same time, the repeating phrases become tonal variations on middle-class banality. Loos probably owes something to Ring Lardner and something to Gertrude Stein. 8 Lorelei’s idiomatic basis in the bourgeoisie raises the novel's satirical stakes. By its lights, Lorelei’s semiliteracy is mass ignorance, her sexual doublespeak is social hypocrisy, and her mercenary instinct is the grubby soul of capitalism.

Loos liked to joke that the Russian authorities endorsed her book as a capitalist tragedy-- a reading, as she knew, that is perfectly respectable. In Susan Hegeman's entertaining gloss, Lorelei's diamonds are credible shorthand for the way wealth covers its dubious origins. The gifts of jewelry she receives improve (we may suppose) her looks-- which attracts more gifts-- which make her yet more attractive-- a process that mimics the circulation of capital attracting capital. As her "capital of attractiveness" builds, the suspect labor behind it slides in importance-- so that by the book's end, Lorelei is so cleansed that she is fit to marry a prominent bluenose (Hegeman, 543). Lorelei rises through conspicuous consumption, and she is herself a display of men's pecuniary strength. She is the endpoint of commodification, the consumer who is also a consumer good. The novel gets its moral center from Lorelei’s brunette friend, Dorothy. Dorothy approves of Lorelei's dealings; what distinguish her are brains and a lack of taste for hypocrisy.

(Told that a candidate for district attorney has poured $1,000 of liquor down his sink and is petitioning all to do likewise, Dorothy asks, "If he poured 1,000 dollars worth down his sink to get himself one million dollars worth of publicity and a good job—when we pour it down our sink, what do we get?") (Blondes, 142-43) Dorothy doesn’t draw suitors as Lorelei does, but she seems to interest a few worthy men. Lorelei moans when Dorothy turns down lunch with a studio magnate in favor of “a gentleman called Mr. Mencken from Baltimore who really only prints a green magazine which has not even got any pictures in it." "But," Lorelei adds philosophically, "Mr. Eisman is always saying that every girl does not want to get ahead and get educated like me" (Blondes, 40). 1 Richard Ellman, James Joyce: 582; James Joyce, Letters I: 246; Gary Carey, Anita Loos: A Biography: 98, 108. Hereafter cited as Carey, with page number.

2 Quoted in Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Oxford University Press, 2005): 245. 3 Anita Loos, Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977): 85. Hereafter cited as Loos, with page number. 4 The Bookman 64, 3 (Nov. 1926): 341. 5 See, for example, Puck 61, 1571 (Apr. 10, 1907): 2; The National Police Gazette LXXIX, 1265 (Nov. 16, 1901): 3. 6 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York: Liveright, 1973): 11-12. Hereafter cited as Blondes, with page number. 7 Susan Hegeman, "Taking Blondes Seriously." American Literary History 7, 3 (Autumn 1995): 525-554. Hereafter cited as Hegeman, with page number.

8 See Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) Book club brings the Roaring '20s to Stanford with Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Stanford Report, May 1, 2013 'Another Look' book club brings the Roaring '20s to Stanford with Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Once Marilyn Monroe vamped "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," the 1925 bestselling novel was all but forgotten. Stanford hopes to restore the balance with its seasonal book club event. By Cynthia Haven Edith Wharton called Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes "the great American novel" and declared its author a genius. Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, George Santayana and Benito Mussolini read it – so did James Joyce, whose failing eyesight led him to select his reading carefully. The 1925 bestseller sold out the day it hit the stores and earned Loos more than a million dollars in royalties.

Courtesy of the Anita Loos estate Anita Loos, whose novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes will be the topic of Stanford's Another Look book club's gathering on May 28. Everyone, of course, has heard of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the short novel's fame was eclipsed by the 1953 movie of the same name, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Once the bombshell blonde vamped "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," the effervescent Jazz Age novel became a shard of forgotten history. Who has taken the send-up novel seriously since? Stanford's " Another Look " book club would like to restore the balance. The book club launched by the English/Creative Writing Department is taking on the comic masterpiece at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, in the Stanford Humanities Center's Levinthal Hall. "Another Look" is a gift to the community – the event is free, open to the public, with no reservations required.

The evening will be moderated by the English department's Hilton Obenzinger , well known for his "How I Write" series of conversations with authors (available on iTunes here ); he will be joined by English Professor Mark McGurl and Assistant Professor of English Claire Jarvis . Clearly, this spring will make the 1920s roar again. Beginning May 1, Gavin Jones , chair of the English Department, will discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a cautionary tale of the American Dream, at the Stanford Alumni Association's Book Salon . Also, a major motion picture of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opens in theaters on May 10. But while Gatsby, published the same year as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, takes a grander, tragic look at the era, Loos revels in the pure nuttiness of two gold-diggers taking on New York City and Europe. Its story is told in a flapper's diary, with spelling and grammatical errors and verbal tics intact: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book.

This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, d. c., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it. Thus begins Loos' story of two upbeat, fly-by-night con artists, Lorelei and her sidekick Dorothy. "Lorelei and Dorothy create a carnival wherever they go. They create moral havoc," writes Regina Barreca in the introduction to the Penguin edition, comparing Loos' creation to Shelley's Frankenstein. "They are powerful for the same reason Shelley's monster is powerful: They have nothing to lose." Obenzinger said the sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes takes on a darker tone – drugs, prostitution, exploitation and organized crime make their appearance.

But Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes nothing seriously, putting the stereotypic ditzy blonde on the map and immortalizing the era's new woman, able to vote, smoke, dance and drink. "Lorelei is the female Huck Finn of the flapper era," said Obenzinger. "She is naive, shrewd and seemingly unaware as she exposes the absurdities and pretensions of boom-time capitalism," he said. "It's a hilarious send-up of new social dynamics, particularly the idea that women could get rich too through sexual manipulation." Loos was no Lorelei, however. She said she would "always pass up a diamond for a laugh." She was born in Sisson, now Mount Shasta City, and grew up in San Francisco and San Diego. Much of her life story is to be taken with a grain of salt: trusted sources place her birth in 1888, 1893 or 1889. Each time she recalled receiving her first paycheck, she was younger, eventually claiming she started her professional writing career at 12. She was, in fact, 24. She also claimed to have written Gentlemen Prefer Blondes while still in her 20s.

Not so; she was in her late 30s. More reliably, she had five decades as a New York playwright, a novelist, a short story writer and one of Hollywood's most respected and prolific screenwriters. But nothing captured the zeitgeist like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. H.L. Mencken, with whom she had a flirtatious relationship, triggered her most famous novel after he briefly turned his attentions to an undistinguished blonde. "Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?" Loos asked. "I wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation," she wrote of the book that was first published serially in Harper's Bazaar. Mencken became a fan: "This gay book has filled me with uproarious and salubrious mirth," he wrote in a review.

"It is farce – but farce full of shrewd observation and devastating irony." Lorelei scribbles in her diary, "I mean champagne always makes me feel philosophical because it makes me realize that when a girl's life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there's nothing else to do about it." But is Lorelei really as dumb as she sometimes seems? She is in control of her destiny. She gets her guy, she gets good times, she gets the diamond tiara she craves, she even dances with the Prince of Wales – and there's plenty of champagne along the way. The "Another Look" book club focuses on short masterpieces that have been forgotten, neglected or overlooked – or may simply not have received the attention they merit. The selected works are short to encourage the involvement of Bay Area readers whose time may be limited. Registration at the website anotherlook.stanford.edu is encouraged for regular updates and details on the selected books and events. Cynthia Haven writes for the Stanford Department of English.

Megan Hilty in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ and ‘Smash’ - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |An Actor’s Best Friend: A Gem of a Role (or 2) Search Continue reading the main story The pressure of expectations and performers past loom large as Megan Hilty, a star of NBC’s Broadway-themed series “Smash,” tries out a breezy comic line on the City Center stage during a recent rehearsal for “ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ,” the final show in this year’s Encores! series of musical revivals. The golden-haired Ms. Hilty — killer heels accentuating her natural curvaceousness — is playing a role made famous on Broadway by Carol Channing and immortalized on film by Marilyn Monroe , the very actress that Ms. Hilty’s TV character, Ivy, is hoping to play in the make-believe musical dramatized on “Smash.” Ms. Hilty and Encores! are capitalizing on the moment; with “Smash” concluding its much-buzzed-about first season on Monday, Ms. Hilty steps back onto a live stage with fresh hopes and the clout that comes with finding TV success after a career on Broadway.

At 31, she is facing, for the first time and in new ways, the kinds of questions about celebrity and dues paying that fuel the rehearsal room fireworks on “Smash,” which has been picked up for a second year. “What I love about the show is that it constantly questions what does being a star mean?” Ms. Hilty said of “Smash.” “Is it something somebody bestows upon you? Are you born with this quality? Is it something you develop? And who makes that decision?” Continue reading the main story In the case of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” which begins performances on Wednesday night, it was John Rando, the director, who helped pick her for the part. Ms. Hilty, he said, comes “very close” to channeling Lorelei Lee, the woman Anita Loos wrote about in her 1925 novel on which the musical is based. Photo Megan Hilty toggles between screen and stage, with Marilyn Monroe at her shoulder. Credit Joao Canziani for The New York Times Lorelei, a blonde from Little Rock, Ark., travels with her friend Dorothy Shaw to Paris, where romance blossoms. In the 1920s, Mr.

Rando said, Lorelei was a revolutionary figure who used her smarts and sexuality to get ahead in a world dominated by men. “Megan has a wonderful sexuality about her that seems so delightfully innocent,” he said. “There’s a wonderful satire that’s going on about the young, gold-digging gal from the South who puts on an innocence and naïveté that’s actually very smart. Having Megan in the part is like having somebody who makes delicious candy.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story That, and she can sing the score, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Leo Robin. (Loos and Joseph Fields wrote the book.) “What sets her apart from Lorelei Lees of the past is her singing voice, which is truly glorious,” Mr. Rando said. One question surrounding Ms. Hilty’s return to musical theater, specifically in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” is how she will avoid the pitfalls of imitation. She has already faced this issue in her two Broadway roles. In 2005 she took over as Glinda in “Wicked,” replacing Jennifer Laura Thompson (the replacement for Kristin Chenoweth in the original cast).

In the short-lived 2009 musical “9 to 5” she played Doralee, the character made famous by Dolly Parton in the 1980 film on which the show was based. As in those two productions, Ms. Hilty said audience expectations of what she would bring to “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” — will there be Marilyn in her Lorelei? will Ivy peek through somewhere? — were not worth worrying about. Video embed “I’m not going to please everybody,” she said during a rehearsal break at City Center. “People are going to walk through these doors and they’re going to have a lot of expectations, and some of them I’ll meet, and some of them I really won’t. But at the end of the day I can’t waste my energy worrying about that.” Ms. Hilty said she had long been “obsessed” with the “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” score.

Her stand-alone cabaret act includes a medley of songs from that show, including Lorelei’s signature song, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” which she said was “darker than you think.” “Each verse is about a man and how she’s figured out a way to get something from them and move on before they ditch her,” Ms. Hilty said. “It’s the same melody throughout, so that you’re already accustomed to it, and you’re forced to listen to the lyrics.” Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy After the run of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” ends on Sunday, Ms. Hilty is set to record original material for an album, her first, on Sony’s Masterworks imprint. She lends her voice to several new animated projects, including the film “Dorothy of Oz” and the Nickelodeon show “Robot and Monster.” This summer she is to begin shooting the second season of “Smash,” a job she describes as “15 dreams coming true at the same time.” That includes no longer being able to walk down the street unrecognized.

“I love it,” she said. “I do. But nobody knows my name. They just go, ‘Smash’!” Which is more likely to come to Broadway: “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” or “Bombshell,” the fictional musical from “Smash”? Advertisement Continue reading the main story “This one’s all ready to go,” Ms. Hilty said, pointing toward the City Center stage. “ ‘Bombshell’ would take years and years and years to put together.” A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2012, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: An Actor’s Best Friend: A Gem of a Role (or 2). Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Carol Channing - Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend (from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") - YouTube Carol Channing - Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend (from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Published on Dec 10, 2014 Notes written by Dieder C. Deutsch: "Anita Loos' irreverent novel about the boisterous misadventures of the delightful Lorelei Lee in Paris served as the basis for this exuberant musical ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") which opened on December 8, 1949 at the Ziegfeld Theater, where it enjoyed a run of 740 performances. A zany symbol of the 1920s, Lorelei Lee was born in the novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and made her first stage appearance in the 1926 comedy Ms. Loos and her husband, John Emerson, wrote after the book. When they created the musical, lyricist Leo Robin and composer Jule Styne fashioned an infectious score, well in keeping with the rich atmosphere of the original, and replete with show stopping numbers like "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend", "Bye Bye Baby", and "A Little Girl From Little Rock". The show's other major asset was Carol Channing, hilarious as Lorelei Lee; her expressive persona and distinctive delivery captivated audiences and critics alike.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" received a London production in 1962, but it is primarily remembered today for the excellent film version made by 20th Century Fox in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei, and Jane Russell as Dorothy, her friend and chaperone." Orchestra under the direction of Milton Rosenstock. Category Anita Loos - IMDb IMDb Writer | Producer | Actress While she is now best known for her book "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," Anita Loos was one of Hollywood's foremost early screenwriters. She began writing screen scenarios for the 'Biograph Company' at an early age (though not 12, as she later claimed), and the first to be produced, The New York Hat (1912), was not only directed by the legendary D.W. ... See full bio » Born: Anita Loos | American author | Britannica.com American author William Saroyan Anita Loos, (born April 26, 1893?, Sissons [now Mount Shasta], Calif., U.S.—died Aug.

18, 1981, New York , N.Y.), American novelist and Hollywood screenwriter celebrated for her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which became the basis of a popular play , two musicals, and two films. By the time of her death it had run through 85 editions and translations into 14 languages. Anita Loos. Eileen Darby—Time Life Pictures/Getty Images Loos was a child actress, playing on the stage in San Francisco , Los Angeles , and San Diego , California , as well as in early films. At an early age she also began contributing sketches and articles to various periodicals. The film of her first scenario, The New York Hat, was produced in 1912 by D.W. Griffith and starred Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore . By the age of 20 Loos was a professional screenwriter, and she eventually worked on more than 60 silent films. His Picture in the Paper (1916), a Douglas Fairbanks film, signaled a new departure in its use of discursive and witty titles, and its success convinced Griffith to let Loos write titles for his epic Intolerance (1916) and many others.

In 1919 Loos married writer-director John Emerson, a frequent collaborator, and in New York City they began writing and producing their own films, notably A Virtuous Vamp (1919), The Perfect Woman (1920), Dangerous Business (1920), Polly of the Follies (1922), and Learning to Love (1925). They also wrote two books, Breaking Into the Movies (1919) and How to Write Photoplays (1921), and on her own Loos wrote two plays for Broadway, The Whole Town’s Talking (filmed 1926) and The Fall of Eve (filmed 1929). In 1926, a year after its serialization in Harper’s Bazaar, Loos’s first novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was published. Its success was immediate and astonishing. The tale of Lorelei Lee, the archetypal “dumb blonde” gold digger from Arkansas, made Loos an international celebrity. Her stage version of the story opened in New York in September 1926 and later toured successfully.

More than two decades later she wrote with Joseph Fields the book for a successful musical version, and in 1953 Marilyn Monroe starred in a movie version of the musical. Her next book, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), was also successful. Among Loos’s later scripts were San Francisco (1936), The Women (1939, adapted from Clare Boothe Luce ’s play), and I Married an Angel (1942). Her dramatization of Colette’s Gigi was produced in 1951, and she subsequently produced a number of other adaptations from French sources. She wrote Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now (1972), in collaboration with Helen Hayes . A Girl Like I (1966) and Kiss Hollywood Good-By (1974) were volumes of reminiscences.

Learn More in these related articles: Anita Loos Rediscovered - Anita Loos, Cari Beauchamp, Mary Anita Loos - Hardcover - University of California Press Reviews Anita Loos (1888-1981) was one of Hollywood's most respected and prolific screenwriters, as well as an acclaimed novelist and playwright. This unique collection of previously unpublished film treatments, short stories, and one-act plays spans fifty years of her creative writing and showcases the breadth and depth of her talent. Beginning in 1912 with the stories she submitted from her San Diego home (some made into films by D. W. Griffith), through her collaboration with Colette on the play Gigi, Anita Loos wrote almost every day for the screen, stage, books, or magazines. Film scripts include San Francisco, The Women, and Red-Headed Woman. The list of stars for whom she created unforgettable roles includes Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, and Carol Channing. This collection has been selected by Anita's niece and close friend, the best-selling author Mary Anita Loos, together with the acclaimed film historian Cari Beauchamp.

Their essays are laced throughout the volume, introducing each section and giving previously untold insights and behind-the-scenes stories about Anita—her life, her friendships, and her times. Plates follow page Anita Loos’s Memorial Service, August 27, 1981 Notes Acknowledgments Index Cari Beauchamp is the author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (California, 1998) and Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival (1992). Mary Anita Loos is the author of A Pride of Lovers (1981), The Barstow Legend (1978), Belinda (1976), and The Beggars Are Coming (1974). “Long before Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones became the prototype for the hapless-career-girl heroin, Anita Loos regaled readers with her fabulous, far more entertaining, and unselfconscious cosmopolitan dames.

This collection of Loos’s film treatments and stories, as well as biographical pieces, is an insightful chronicle of her career.”—Film Comment “Editors Beauchamp and Loos have done tremendous work, both in making their selections and in conducting the numerous interviews that have filled out their understanding of Anita Loos and her time. Beauchamp’s comments are enlightening but never intrusive, useful for helping readers to develop their own conclusions about Loos’s life and work. Mary Anita Loos’s memoirs about her aunt are loving but honest. She provides a picture of Anita Loos that helps related the writer’s life to her work.”—Journal Of Film & Video “An intriguing selection of previously unpublished film treatments, one-act plays, and short stories written over the course of [Anita Loos’s] career. . . . The material is colorful and well-integrated.”—Merle Rubin New York Sun “Collection of film treatments, short stories and one-act plays by the Hollywood screenwriter.”—The Bookseller "I adored Anita, as did the entire fashion and literary world.

She was four feet nine inches of lithe, slender, dramatic chic."—Carol Channing "This book celebrates a character as memorable as any Anita Loos created in her writing. She was an indomitable, wise-cracking prodigy who not only helped create Hollywood, but managed to survive it."—John Sayles "If we can't have the wonderful Anita Loos-smart, witty, literate and fun- writing today's Hollywood movies, at least we can get reacquainted with her and her work through this delightful book. Filled with previously unpublished material, it shows that while gentlemen may have preferred blondes, everyone else in town wisely preferred the irresistible Ms. Loos."—Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times "This is a wonderful book about a talented, fascinating, and groundbreaking woman. Her life epitomizes a certain era in show business and describes a Hollywood in which few women were allowed to rise to the top. Anita Loos did and we were all the beneficiaries.

I loved the book!"—Peter Duchin "Not only is it valuable to have these delightful Anita Loos pieces, but the biographical chapters are fascinating too."—Kevin Brownlow, author of David Lean: A Biography Related Titles Anita Loos - Biography - IMDb Anita Loos Biography Showing all 25 items Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (2) | Trivia (6) | Personal Quotes (7) | Salary (5) Overview (4) 4' 11" (1.5 m) Mini Bio (1) While she is now best known for her book "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," Anita Loos was one of Hollywood's foremost early screenwriters. She began writing screen scenarios for the 'Biograph Company' at an early age (though not 12, as she later claimed), and the first to be produced, The New York Hat (1912), was not only directed by the legendary D.W. Griffith but starred another of Hollywood's future heavyweights: Mary Pickford .

After working for some years with Griffith (including writing the surtitles for his epic Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), she began to work for Douglas Fairbanks , whom she had championed in his early days in Hollywood. Her husband and collaborator John Emerson convinced her to quit screenwriting for the sake of his own pride -- nevertheless, fate intervened in the form of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," an unassuming book she had compiled from a series of magazine stories she had based on the predilection of then-famous intellectual H.L. Mencken to be dazzled by gold-digging ditzes. The book was a surprise smash all over the world, later spawning a sequel ("But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes"), which became a not particularly successful silent movie but later a hugely successful film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell , and a hit Broadway musical. This success, and the on-again, off-again nature of her marriage to Emerson allowed her to re-enter the film industry, where she worked on such classics as San Francisco (1936), The Women (1939), and Jean Harlow 's Red-Headed Woman (1932).

In her later years, she also wrote several pieces for the theater, eventually regaining fame via a number of movie memoirs, including "A Girl Like I" and "Kiss Hollywood Goodbye." These are today as well known for their colorful treatment of the truth as for their witty observations on the early days of Hollywood. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Camille Scaysbrook Spouse (2) Trivia (6) Her brother founded the Blue Cross health insurance company. Was notoriously sketchy on the topic of her age, famously claiming that she began working as a Hollywood writer at the age of 12. She was at least twice this age. Aunt of Mary Loos . Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 511-512. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998. Started as a writer for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. her first full film screenplay was The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) starring Lillian Gish .

Interviewed in "Talking to the Piano Player: Silent Film Stars, Writers and Directors Remember" by Stuart Oderman (BearManor Media). Personal Quotes (7) [commenting on the young deaths of many of the Mack Sennett bathing beauties, in "A Girl Like I"] ...beauty combined with lack of brains is extremely deleterious to the health. [From her 1977 book "Cast of Thousands"[ I can never take for granted the euphoria produced by a cup of coffee. I'm grateful every day that it isn't banned as a drug, that I don't have to buy it from a pusher, that its cost is minimal and there's no need to increase the intake. I can count on its stimulation 365 mornings every year. And thanks to the magic in a cup of coffee, I'm able to plunge into a whole day's cheerful thinking. It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman, sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race. Memory is more indelible than ink.

[My brother] Clifford would painstakingly correct anyone who mispronounced our name. I never cared what people called me. So I became Miss "Loose," while my brother was always Dr. "Lohse." [on Hollywood in the 1920s] To place in the limelight a great number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, and give them unlimited power and wealth, is bound to produce lively results. I'm furious about the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket. Salary (5)

Question: What was the first name of the Ms. Loos who wrote ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’?
Answer: ANITA