Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (Warbler Classics)

By Anita Loos

Lorelei Lee, a blonde flapper who narrates Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the form of a diary, complete with spelling and grammatical errors, is one of the most irresistible and memorable characters in American fiction. Acquitted of crimes by an all-male jury in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, Lorelei moves to Hollywood and works in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbler Classics
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954525443

Anita Loos

Anita Loos was an American screenwriter, playwright, and author. In 1912, she became the first-ever female staff scriptwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation.

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady

ANITA LOOS

First Warbler Press Edition 2021

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes first published by Boni and Liveright, New York, 1925

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher, which may be requested at [e-mail].

isbn

978-1-954525-43-6 (paperback)

isbn

978-1-954525-44-3 (e-book)

warblerpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

to john emerson

Contents

The Biography of a Book by Anita Loos ix

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1

Fate Keeps on Happening 15

London Is Really Nothing 26

Paris Is Devine 40

The Central of Europe 59

Brains Are Really Everything 82

Publication History of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 106

Selected Original Reviews 110

The Biography of a Book

by Anita Loos

T

here was a time a number of years ago when i found

myself

on a train, the de luxe, Santa Fé Chief, traveling from New York to Los Angeles. We were a party of co-workers in the movies, en route back to our studio after a cherished holiday in New York, for we belonged to the elite of the cinema which has never been fond of Hollywood. There were Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., then at the beginning of his career in films but already a nation’s idol, my husband, John Emerson, who directed the scenarios I wrote for Doug and a number of others, such as our publicity man, an assistant director, Doug’s valet and Doug’s trainer. In those carefree days of the silent movies, we traveled in large and exuberant groups.

Also among us was a blonde who was being imported to Hollywood to be Doug’s leading lady in his forthcoming picture. Now this girl, although she towered above me (I weighed about ninety pounds) and was of rather a hearty type, was being waited on, catered to and cajoled by the entire male assemblage. If she happened to drop the novel she was reading, several men jumped to retrieve it; whereas I was allowed to lug heavy suitcases from their racks while men sat about and failed to note my efforts.

Obviously there was some radical difference between that girl and me. But what was it? We were both in the pristine years of early youth; we were of about the same degree of comeliness; as to our mental acumen, there was nothing to discuss; I was the smarter. Then why did that girl so far outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her strength possibly be rooted (like that of Samson) in her hair? She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette.

In view of the reception which was to greet Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a couple of years later, it appears I had stumbled onto an important scientific fact which had never before been pinpointed.

The light that dawned on me with that first revelation, began to illuminate an entire phase of my youthful experiences. I proceeded to go over the various blondes I knew. They were a very special group, for my lot had fallen in with the beauties of the films and the girls of the Ziegfeld Follies from which movie starlets were constantly recruited. And, in going over the list, I presently singled out the dumbest blonde of all, a girl who had bewitched one of the keenest minds of our era—H. L. Mencken.

Menck was my idol and a good friend too. He often took me to Luchow’s for dinner; I was even included among his inner circle of beer lovers when they trekked over to Jersey City in those Prohibition days to drink a brew that was uncontaminated by ether. Menck liked me very much indeed; but in the matter of sentiment, he preferred a witless blonde.

The situation was palpably unjust. I thought it over as our train raced across the plains of the Midwest, until finally I was prompted to reach for one of the large yellow pads on which I composed Doug’s scenarios, and I began to write down my thoughts; not bitterly, as I might have done had I been a real novelist, but with an amusement which was, on the whole, rather childish. I have always considered grown-ups to be figures of fun, as children generally do, and have never been deceived by their hypocrisies. In those days I had a friend, Rayne Adams, who used to say that my slant on life was that of a child of ten, chortling with excitement over a disaster.

In fact, if one examines the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it is almost as gloomy as a novel by Dostoievski. When the book reached Russia, this was recognized, and it was embraced by Soviet authorities as evidence of the exploitation of helpless female blondes by predatory magnates of the Capitalistic System. The Russians, with their native love of grief, stripped Gentlemen Prefer Blondes of all its fun and the plot which they uncovered was dire. It concerns early rape of its idiot heroine, an attempt by her to commit murder (only unsuccessful because she is clumsy with a gun), the heroine’s being cast adrift in the gangster-infested New York of Prohibition days, her relentless pursuit by predatory males (the foremost of whom constantly tries to pay her off at bargain rates) her renunciation of the only man who ever stirred her inner soul of a woman, her nauseous connection with a male who is repulsive to her physically, mentally and emotionally and her final engulfment in the grim monotony of suburban Philadelphia.

Given the above material, any real novelist such as Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Faulkner or Hemingway probably would have curdled his readers’ blood with massive indignation. Scott Fitzgerald would have, and indeed he did make his readers shed bittersweet tears over such sad eventualities. But I, with my infantile cruelty, have never been able to view even the most impressive human behavior as anything but foolish. When, for instance, Albert Einstein evolved his world-shaking Theory and then admonished fellow scientists not to use it for the elimination of the species, it seemed to me the same joke as when a certain character in Little Women told a group of children not to stuff beans up their noses; with the consequence they could not wait to find some beans and stuff them up their noses.

As I began to put Lorelei’s story down on my yellow pad, it became a mixture of fact and fiction. My heroine’s real name was Mabel Minnow. Her birthplace, however, was invented and H. L. Mencken himself had a hand in the procedure. For I wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation, and Menck had written an essay on American culture in which he branded the State of Arkansas as the Sahara of the Beaux Arts (which he spelled Bozarts). Therefore, I chose Little Rock for my heroine’s early years; Little Rock which even today lives up to Mencken’s choice as the nadir in shortsighted human stupidity.

I finished the few pages of what I considered to be merely a short sketch as our train was nearing Pasadena; it was time to pack up and get back to the frantic chores of the studio. I stuck the manuscript into the flap of a suitcase and forgot all about it for six months or more.

I might never have thought of Lorelei again, for I was a movie writer and wouldn’t have dreamed that my heroine had any place on celluloid. But back in New York one day, I ran across the rumpled and smudged pages of my little critique and, in order to give Menck a laugh at his own expense (this being several blondes later than the one who had first inspired me) I mailed it to him.

Menck enjoyed my sketch, saw the point of it and, although it hit close to home and was an intrusion on his sentimental life, he suggested that the manuscript be published.

The story of its publication can best be told by quoting from the biography of Carmel Snow.

"When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes burst on a delighted world, wrote Carmel, I took Anita Loos under my wing. She was literally under the wing of her tall, thin husband, John Emerson (she reached barely to his chest) and she claims that she held onto his coat tails when I took her around to parties, but our click was immediate and it extended even to our clothes. We were both dressed by Chanel, later by Mainbocher and most recently by Balenciaga.

"When I met her, her Lorelei Lee was appearing serially in the magazine that was to become the impersonal love of my life. How we waited for each new installment in Harper’s Bazaar! We didn’t realize how nearly there were no further installments to follow the first one. Anita wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a short story and sent it to H. L. Mencken, that other great editor of the twenties. He had just left Smart Set, where he would gladly have published it, but he didn’t think it was right for The American Mercury which he now edited. ‘Little girl,’ he now warned Anita, ‘you’re making fun of sex and that’s never been done before in the U.S.A. I suggest you send it to Harper’s Bazaar, where it’ll be lost among the ads and won’t offend anybody.’

"Henry Sell was the editor in charge and fortunately saw the story first. ‘Why do you stop?’ he asked Anita. ‘You’ve started this girl on a trip, go on.’ So, as Lorelei appeared one month in Harper’s Bazaar, Anita was frantically writing the next month’s installment. By the third month, ads for men’s apparel, cars, and sporting goods began pouring into the magazine. This was the first time men had ever read the Bazaar—the newsstand sales doubled, then tripled. James Joyce, who had begun to lose his eyesight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee. And George Santayana, when asked what was the best book of philosophy written by an American, answered, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."

After Lorelei’s story ended in Harper’s Bazaar, a friend of mine, Tom Smith, who was on the staff of the Liveright Publishing Company, asked if I would like to have a few copies of my story in book form to give my friends as Christmas presents. I thought it an excellent idea and Tom thereupon had his firm print a sort of vanity edition of a mere fifteen hundred copies (which accounts for the fact that those first few copies became collectors’ items).

The first edition was sold out on the day it reached the bookshops and, although the second edition was of sixty thousand copies, it was exhausted almost as quickly. I believe the book ran into forty-five editions before the early demand had ceased. Naturally, there have been a number of soft-cover editions through the years. But I feel that Lorelei’s accomplishments reached a peak when she became one of the few contemporary authors to be represented in the Oxford Book of Quotations.

Following its American publication, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became a bestseller in thirteen languages. (Note to Khrushchev: Where are my royalties, Tovarich?) In China the story ran as a serial in the newspaper edited by Lin Yutang, who assured me that Lorelei’s prose went quite normally into the vernacular of the Sing Song girls.

The world and its ways have changed a great deal since Lorelei Lee made her first appearance on the scene. Recently during a television interview in London, the question was put to me: Miss Loos, your book was based on an economic situation, the unparalleled prosperity of the Twenties. If you were to write such a book today, what would be your theme? And without hesitation, I was forced to answer, Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen (a statement which brought the session abruptly to a close). But if that fact is true, as it very well seems to be, it, too, is based soundly on economics, the criminally senseless population explosion which a beneficent Nature is trying to curb by more pleasant means than war.

So now my little book passes on as a period piece to the grandchildren of its first readers. And, if their spirits should need bolstering, as they cower in the bomb shelters of the Sixties, may they be diverted by the adventures of Lorelei Lee and take courage in the words of her favorite philosopher: Smile, smile, smile.

Chapter One

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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