Earle K. Bergey’s cover painting for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Before I read Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1953 Howard Hawks film had already influenced my existence as a young girl in the form of a Marilyn Monroe VHS box set. It wasn’t the glitz and glamour that attracted me (though it helped) but the gleeful mischief of two women putting one over on a world of men. A femme fatale without anything too fatal. At its core, there was an idea of using one’s feminine wiles for good, if not for society then at least for oneself— and maybe a girlfriend or two. By twenty, reading the novel helped contextualize my own mischief within a lineage of women. Perhaps getting a man to buy you gifts wasn’t feminist vigilantism, but it was indeed fun. At that age, there are so few opportunities to test one’s power and charm. It taught me the valuable lesson that laughter at the expense of powerful men was not so expensive after all.
Anita Loos began writing Gentleman Prefer Blondes as a joke on her unrequited paramour, the editor and Algonquin Table alum H. L. Mencken. Out of spite for the genius’s “palpably unjust” penchant for blondes, Lorelei Lee—perhaps the blonde all blondes are unconsciously measured up to—was born. The novel is often remembered as an artifact of the Jazz Age full of prohibition liquor and loose morals, and, stylistically, it displays the kind of lighthearted play that more writers could experiment with only if they took themselves less seriously. Loos, in her “Biography of the Book,” states that as she began to write the beginnings of the novel on a train, she approached writing it “not bitterly, as I might have done had I been a real novelist, but with an amusement which was, on the whole, rather childish.” Two gold-digging flappers taking Europe by storm sounds like the perfect twenties romp, but for those with sharp minds, there was more than meets the eye. At the time of publication, Edith Wharton and William Faulkner were gushing fans, with Wharton calling it “the great American novel.” It is unfortunate that Blondes was published the same year as The Great Gatsby and is now greatly overshadowed by the latter’s legacy. There’s an argument to be made that, if Loos and her characters were slightly less glamorous (and less feminine), perhaps the novel would have been remembered as a prominent example of a modernist text.
Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen around her.
When one of Lorelei’s suitors sends a letter asking for her hand in marriage, Lorelei takes photographs of it with the excuse that if she lost it, “she would not have anything left to remember him by.” However underplayed, this is an astute move to protect herself under a breach of promise law. If he was to change his mind, she could sue him for walking back on the engagement. For Loos’s flappers, a girl’s own survival is always top of mind.
Lorelei’s counterpart, Dorothy Shaw, acts as the rough-talking brunette foil to Lorelei’s purposely sanitized account of their misadventures. Dorothy can stay up all night, drink as much as men, and lacks what Lorelei calls “reverence.” Her rugged vernacular, street smarts, and devil-may-care attitude Lorelei teasingly disapproves of: “And, after all, why should I listen to the advice of a girl like Dorothy who travelled all over Europe and all she came home with was a bangle!” Regina Barreca writes in her introduction of the 1998 reissue of the novel that Dorothy works as a “mouthpiece for Loos’s own wisecracks,” Loos herself being a gaminesque brunette.
In the lesser read sequel Gentleman Marry Brunettes, Loos writes, “He really does not mind what a girl has been through, as long as she does not enjoy herself at the finish. But Henry said that when girls like Dorothy do not pay, and pay, how are all the moral people going to get their satisfaction out of watching them suffer.” Loos pokes fun at the idea that a woman having too much of a good time should be punished. In her autobiography, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, she writes of her screenplay for the film Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow, “Our heroine, the bad girl of whom all good husbands dream, ended her career as many such scalawags do, rich, happy, and respected, without ever having paid for her sins.” There’s virtuosity in women who pursue their needs, wants, and diamonds in spite of it all. Their enterprising nature finds a crack in men’s egos, easily slipping through without catching their dress.
Anita Loos has somehow been forgotten despite being a seminal figure in Hollywood. Her repertoire spans from writing scenarios and title cards early in the silent film era and extends well into the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her impact on cinema, and in fact, how we tell stories about women, has been influential, though rarely mentioned. Loos’s name lingers somewhere in the movie credits, often the one studios called to take a screenplay off the hands of a “serious” novelist (as was the case of Red-Headed Woman from F. Scott Fitzgerald). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is full of malapropisms and charming innuendo delivered like a wink from a screen siren.
A Loos heroine has style, wit, and often comes away unscathed—what the protagonist of the Loos-penned 1935 film Biography of a Bachelor Girl calls “A woman who dared sort of thing.” This was not only important for my own practice of developing women characters, but also for my own life. A pithy one-liner is best served in the moment, not only on the page. Her work bolstered my belief that fun and glamour could be a worthy intellectual pursuit. It’s not like the kind of women Loos wrote about disappeared; they just became less commonly depicted. Walk into the bar of any swanky hotel and you will see variations of a modern flapper, getting what she wants. To be a woman who dared, while also writing her back into existence, was always my aim.
Humor is often misunderstood as froth that cannot be sustained in the canon. This is unimaginative. Loos understood this. In a tragic world full of hypocrisy, the laughs become all the more earned. Comedy that doesn’t outright pronounce what should be laughed at gives the reader something to parse between the lines. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, laughing at the wrong thing can often make you the subject of its very skewering. Those who have been in the heady proximity of a girl in command of her charms can understand the text’s ingenuity. The novel plays on the feminine as a device against low expectations. You only find them unintelligent if you are similarly so. The humor relies on Lorelei being a character who is seemingly passive, but “acts in response to her own desires rather than in response to the desires of men.” A woman is free to do what she wants as long as everyone thinks she does it without shrewdness. She can’t help it, how was she to know? As Lorelei says, “when a girl’s life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there is nothing else to do about it.” The poet William Empson wrote a rather tragic villanelle titled “Reflection from Anita Loos” that ends with the line “a girl can’t go on laughing all the time.” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dares to ask, Why not?
An adapted excerpt from the introduction to the one-hundredth-anniversary edition of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, to be published by Random House this August.
Marlowe Granados is the author of the novel Happy Hour.
Leave a Reply