“I’ve had my best times trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor. I’ve always loved high style in low company.” — Anita Loos

Anita Loos’ screenwriting credits are so extensive it’s impossible to absorb them. She’s most well-known for writing the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was made into a successful movie a couple of times – first in 1928 and then again in 1953. The 1953 version, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, is the one everyone knows.

According to IMDB her earliest credit was in 1912. Born in 1889, she started out writing treatments and scenarios with the Biograph when she was just a teenager. Many people wrote treatments and scenarios for films that weren’t ever even made, but Loos’ WERE turned into films. She had a knack for the gig. She also wrote titles for silent films (including, famously, the interstitial titles for DW Griffith’s Intolerance).

With the advent of sound, moving into the pre-Code era, she continued churning out scripts, logging multiple credits a year. She wrote the screenplay to the shocking (still) Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow and directed by Jack Conway. I love this jokey pic of Loos and Harlow:

Loos also wrote the hard-hitting Midnight Mary, directed by William Wellmann and starring Loretta Young as a young woman who emerges from a destitute childhood and descends into the criminal underworld.

Loos was a finger-on-the-pulse writer, and this was one of the reasons she was so valued by studios. She grew up in and around show business and from her earliest memory she was surrounded by shady rakish barely-socially-acceptable humans, from the lower rungs of society’s ladder. The outlaws, the actors, the reprobates. Her familiarity with the denizens of that world infuses her writing. Middle-class aspirations were not her thing. She SAW all of it around her and lampooned it.

She wrote original works and also adapted popular works for the screen too, like The Women, a legit classic almost 81 years later. Think about that. Claire Boothe Luce’s hit play was in good hands.

Loos wrote Babes in Arms, a film dealing with a situation she had lived it: the transformative journey from vaudeville to silent films to talkies, all happening in one generation. Babes in Arms predates Singin’ in the Rain by 20 years.

Her marriage to Jack Emerson was not easy. She was, by far, the bigger name, and he had a problem with that. Little did he know just how much bigger her name would get. She wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes almost on a whim, in 1926, piecing together a bunch of different scenarios into one uproarious farce, with acute observations about men, women, money, sex. It didn’t take her long to write it or to find a publisher. She had a deep friendship with “the sage of Baltimore,” H.L. Mencken, at the height of his fame. That such a staid guy, living at home with his mother, would become an emblem of the Jazz Age is one of American culture’s little mysteries, but that’s what happened. Mencken got a kick out of Loos, and they exchanged many letters. Mencken loved Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, saying to to her in a letter “You’re the first American writer to ever poke fun at sex.” And of COURSE a woman would be the first in that arena. Women have much more of a sense of humor about the absurdities of sex (obligatory and tiresome #notallmen) and they are less sentimental about the whole thing. They can’t afford to be sentimental, not with the specter of childbirth/rape looming over everything, even the most casual of encounters. Mencken helped usher Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to publication and reviewed it favorably in his column. His column was read by millions. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a bestseller.

This article in The Missouri Review has a lot of great information about Loos.

Here’s a really interesting interview with Anita Loos in a 1972 issue of Interview magazine.

Anita Loos – a real role model – died in 1981.

 
 
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