Read-along – Anita Loos
1888-1981
Dear Gentlemen Prefer Blondes readers,
I’m looking forward to our March read-along of the book Edith Wharton called ‘the great American novel’. We’ll read it over a fortnight, starting next Friday 7 March. All the details are here.
Here is a little about Anita Loos’s life before we begin.
Corinne Anita Loos was born in northern California. She began acting at the age of nine and writing movie scripts at twelve. In 1912 she became the first female staff scriptwriter in Hollywood, at the age of just 24, and over the next three years she wrote 105 scripts, all but four of which were produced. She became celebrated as the ‘Soubrette of Satire’.
In 1915 she began writing scripts for D. W. Griffith, co-writing the intertitles for his epic Intolerance. She wrote five Douglas Fairbanks movies, which made him a star, collaborating with director John Emerson, whom she married in 1919.
Loos began publishing ‘Lorelei’ stories in Harper’s Bazaar in March 1925. The magazine’s circulation quadrupled overnight and in November 1925 the stories were collected and published as a book, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Boni & Liveright. The first printing sold out instantly and there were three more printings before the end of the year.
As Loos’s career and fame soared, her husband’s deteriorated: John Emerson became a hypochondriac. His psychologist identified Loos’s success as the problem and advised her to give up her career. She spent most of the next five years looking after Emerson, until 1931, when she found a love letter to him from another woman. They separated — and her career took off again.
Loos moved to Hollywood, where she joined MGM as a screenwriter, replacing F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her first project was the 1932 Jean Harlow film Red-Headed Woman, which was a huge hit. Another box-office smash was the 1939 film The Women starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell. During the Second World War, Aldous and Maria Huxley stayed with Loos in her house in Beverley Hills.
After the war, Loos adapted Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a Broadway musical and wrote stage adaptations of Colette’s novellas Gigi (1951) and Chéri (1959). Gigi was already in production when Colette telegrammed from France, saying that she’d found their leading actress: she had spotted Audrey Hepburn in the foyer of a Monte Carlo hotel. The production transformed Hepburn from an unknown newcomer to an A-list Hollywood star.
Loos wrote two volumes of memoirs, A Girl Like I (1966) and Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974), and died in New York a week before her 94th birthday.
I look forward to reading her remarkable Gentlemen Prefer Blondes next week.
Also, thank you to everyone who joined me last Wednesday for our second classic film watch-along. We watched Brazil (1985) by Terry Gilliam – an Orwellian romp, alternately hilarious and chilling, that is both a darkly satirical story about the isolation, dysfunction and callousness of the modern world and a spectacular sequence of gonzo visual effects that could only have sprung from the mind of the Monty Python animator. You can read our live comments here.
Next month we’ll be watching The Mirror (1975) by Andrei Tarkovsky on Wednesday 12 March – at 8pm UK time. The film premiered exactly fifty years ago in April 1975 in Moscow. I look forward to watching along with you!
And finally — if you’re not planning to read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with us, remember you can choose to opt out of our conversation. Just follow this link to your settings and, under Notifications, slide the toggle next to ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’. A grey toggle means you will not receive emails relating to this title.
So excited! Thanks for the background information.
My book arrived! Looking forward to reading this one along Anna Karenina 😊