Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became the American best-seller of 1925. “Why did she so far outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?” Loos took out a yellow pad and began to write.Ĭover of the Popular Library edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1948. “There was some mystifying difference between us,” she later wrote of the train passenger. She simmered and thought about a blonde who then had Mencken’s arm, undeservedly in Loos’s opinion. One day in 1924, while riding a train across the Midwest, Loos noticed that the men in her car ignored her but leaped to hoist luggage for the blonde beside her. Loos befriended Mencken, and later claimed to have had a flirtatious relationship with him-not a distinction he tried to charm most of the women he met. Over the next several years, Loos wrote a number of scripts for Biograph and eventually moved to New York City– where, she recalled later, she would be “breathing the same air as Henry Mencken” (Carey, 21-28). An envelope returned bearing a check and a release form. That year she sketched out a film treatment-it was a short story laid out visually, since she didn’t know scriptwriting technique-and mailed it to Biograph, the production company that made reels for her family’s theater. She struck the right kind of writing for her historical moment in 1916. At six years old, she had won a children’s poetry contest, which left her intent, she later said, to become a famous writer (Carey, 15-20). For extra income, her father enrolled his children as players in various stock troupes and touring companies, but Loos apparently didn’t care for acting. She spent her spare hours at the library poring over magazines that arrived from back East. Loos grew up in California in a small family that ran a nickelodeon. Emphasis on the material of language had characterized the main stream of American literary humor throughout the nineteenth century.) (In fact, although Loos works against the background of modernism and name-checks Conrad, there is an important sense in which her book is a reminder of how much high modernism borrowed from popular culture.
And the dialect humor is close to what Joyce worked for in certain chapters of his earlier books. But Loos uses language in an interesting way her book is a prime example of modernist techniques seeping into popular use. The book has the interest of biographical color rather than any usefulness for explaining the Wake. When James Joyce was nearly blind and working on the first draft of Finnegans Wake, the book he permitted himself during his daily reading window was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a best-selling satire by Anita Loos. L-R: Jean Harlow and Anita Loos promoting Red-Headed Woman, 1932 by Elyse Graham
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