A century ago, a slender novel captivated casual readers and literary giants alike with its insightful skewering of Jazz Age consumerism and the American lust for class, wealth, sex, social acceptance, and, above all, a piece of the American Dream.
Edith Wharton praised the book to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield as “the great American novel (at last)”; James Joyce told a friend he couldn’t put it down; Aldous Huxley wrote to its author that he was “enraptured” by it; William Faulkner offered his “envious congratulations.” In The New York Times, Herman Mankiewicz, the future movie mogul who would later write the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, held that the novel was “a gorgeously smart and intelligent piece of work … civilized, human, [and] ironic.”
Such, one might assume, was the reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when it was published in April 1925, the start of an inexorable glide path to a permanent spot on high-school curricula and near-universal acknowledgment of its purely American genius. But in an alternate reality—that is to say, actual reality—The Great Gatsby was, in the year of its birth and for many years thereafter, completely crushed by a contemporaneous novel. That book, also celebrating its centennial this year, was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the picaresque “diary” of a gold-digging naïf, Lorelei Lee, and her cynical, sharp-tongued friend Dorothy, written by Anita Loos.
Now almost entirely identified with the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film it inspired, the book was a powerhouse in its time, first taking the country by storm in the summer of 1925 as a monthly serial in Harper’s Bazaar (where it doubled, then tripled, the magazine’s circulation). Published as a book in November of that year, it sold out on its first day; the second printing, of 60,000, was quickly snapped up as well, and it was the No. 2 best-selling novel in 1926. (By contrast, The Great Gatsby had already been remaindered by late 1925, with sales peaking at 20,000.)
Loos’s story, told in the unsophisticated voice of its protagonist, is a flapper-era take on the male-fortune-seeking tradition that goes back to 18th-century English satirist Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones and William Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon a century later. Lorelei’s diary takes her and Dorothy on a madcap tour of Europe, funded by Lorelei’s much older “gentleman friend,” otherwise known as “the Button King.” His stated aim is to “educate” Lorelei, as he can tell she has “brains”; her secret aim is to secure her future.
The diary chronicles the two strivers’ social and romantic adventures, from London (“not so educational after all”) to Paris (“devine,” in part because it has “all of the famous historical names, like Coty and Cartier”) to “the central of Europe,” where Lorelei meets with “Dr. Froyd” (“He seemed very very intreeged at a girl who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do”). What Lorelei wants to do is receive expensive gifts (“Kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever”) and achieve a lucrative marriage.
The story is replete with Lorelei’s constant misspellings, self-conscious attempts at grammar (“a girl like I”), and frank acknowledgments of her avariciousness, which never occurs to her as a fault but rather as a necessity. The reader is not sure whether to laugh at Lorelei or with her—or both.
To its author, the laughing itself was the point. As Loos confessed in an introduction to a later edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “I, with my infantile cruelty, have never been able to view even the most impressive human behavior as anything but foolish.... My slant on life [is] that of a child of ten, chortling with excitement over a disaster.”
A tiny brunette who topped out at under five feet and around 90 pounds, Loos, who was born in Northern California in 1889, used her rapier wit and finely tuned sense of the absurd to punch above her weight throughout a long career as a screenwriter, playwright, and novelist.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes brought her fame that included breathless news stories about her every Atlantic crossing, raves from the English royal family (the Prince of Wales reportedly bought 19 copies), and introductions to leading lights in literature, journalism, Hollywood, and the European aristocracy.
When in New York, Loos socialized with members of the Algonquin Round Table—and was not impressed. (“Although self-styled intellectuals, they were concerned with nothing more weighty than the personal items about themselves that were dished up in gossip columns,” she later wrote.) She counted among her friends George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Cecil Beaton, Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, Colette, Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Harlow, Douglas Fairbanks, and Clark Gable.
Loos was first published at the age of eight, winning a magazine competition for a floor-wax ad, which she wrote in rhyming verse. By her early 20s she had burst into the fledgling world of silent-era Hollywood with an over-the-transom film scenario addressed to the soon-to-be-legendary director D. W. Griffith. He became a mentor and directed her first produced screenplay (“The New York Hat”), in 1912, starring rising actors Lionel Barrymore, Mary Pickford, and Lillian Gish.
Loos went on to become one of Hollywood’s first staff writers in 1915, producing around 140 screenplays in the silent era alone. Later Loos films include Red-Headed Woman and The Women (both of them after F. Scott Fitzgerald had failed at writing the film adaptations), and, on Broadway, the theatrical version of Colette’s Gigi.
Loos’s way with language posed a challenge in the silent-film era, for obvious reasons. (Griffith, she revealed, once said in exasperation, “People don’t go to the movies to read!”) Loos soon proved him wrong, elevating screen captions—or “intertitles,” as they were called—to the realm of irony, puns, double entendres, and one-liners. After one of her wordy silent films, “The New York Times published a review which said, in effect, that motion pictures had grown out of their infancy, satire had invaded the screen,” she wrote in her 1966 memoir, A Girl Like I. Around that time, Photoplay magazine dubbed her “the Soubrette of Satire.”
Nothing if not consistent, Loos applied that ironic voice to her own life and behavior, most pointedly in describing her “tragic and comic” marriage to the actor and director John Emerson—a perennially unfaithful, profoundly narcissistic, deeply insecure, and hypochondriacal embezzler (of Loos’s own earnings), who ended his tortured days in a psychiatric institution. Loos nursed him, financially supported him, put up with his stealing credit for her work, and tolerated his “many sweethearts,” all while ruefully laughing at herself as a “spineless pushover” and a “masochistic bride.” (At the same time, it should be noted, Loos managed to conduct a very active extra-curricular love life.)
Why did she stay with him? The answer is complicated. Yes, he amused and entertained her (a big plus in Loos’s estimation), but she also seemed to harbor deep ambivalence about being clever and ambitious while also being female. “I had no pride in authorship because I never thought that anything produced by females was, or even should be, important,” she wrote in 1966. On the other hand, a decade later she said, “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.”
In the end, one could say that Loos had the last laugh, in the form of a long, glitzy, highly entertaining life, much of it spent wearing Mainbocher and Balenciaga. She died in 1981 at age 93; in addition to listing her many accomplishments in letters, her New York Times obituary described her as “an assiduous party-goer and diner-out” and a “New York social institution.”
It was in many ways the life Fitzgerald had ached for. Instead, he died an alcoholic at age 44, his Great Gatsby masterpiece forgotten; he couldn’t even find a copy in a bookstore to give to his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham. (Its posthumous revival seems to have been due largely to its wartime resurrection by the Armed Services Editions, which issued 155,000 copies to G.I.’s, the timing of which coincided with a critical re-appraisal.)
Fitzgerald’s lens on the Roaring 20s was tragedy; Loos’s was comedy, a historically under-appreciated genre. She was onto all this, writing in 1974 that, “with such material” as Lorelei’s story, “Scott Fitzgerald would have shed bittersweet tears over such eventualities.” Tears, it seems, can leave a more lasting impression than laughter. But all things considered, Loos may ultimately have agreed with Lorelei Lee’s Panglossian assessment: “Everything always works out for the best.”
Michelle Stacey is a Hudson Valley-based journalist and the author of The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery