This year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of my favorite comic novels, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos.
For Alta, I wrote about Loos’s journey from child actor in San Diego to one of the first and funniest female screenwriters—but not before Loos tried out a little gold digging herself. Yes it turns out the novel is inspired by more than a little real life experience.
Excerpt:
The story goes that in March 1924, the screenwriter Anita Loos was on a train from New York to Hollywood. A blond woman named Mae Davis or Mae Clarke—Loos used each at different times—boarded and immediately captured the attention of all the men. According to Loos’s autobiography A Girl Like I, the blonde “was waited on, catered to, and cajoled by every male we encountered.” Loos, 35 years old but passing for younger, was striking and stylish. At 4 foot 11, she was tiny, with a tousled bob of brown hair, a straight nose, bow-like lips, and large, intelligent eyes. She was far more accomplished than Mae, having spent more than a decade writing screenplays for movies. On top of that, being ignored for this particular girl was galling because Mae had captured the amorous attention of the critic H.L. Mencken, Loos’s friend and sometime crush.
“Obviously there was some radical difference between that girl and me, but what was it?” Loos wrote. “She was not outstanding as a beauty; we were, in fact, of about the same degree of comeliness; as to our mental acumen, there was nothing to discuss: I was smarter.… Possibly the girl’s strength was rooted (like that of Samson) in her hair.” Reaching for a notepad, Loos scrawled a few paragraphs that would become the beginning of her comedic masterpiece Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.