Can you believe him? He almost stood me up for his wife! A man being rich is like a girl being pretty. You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help? Nobody chaperones the chaperone, that’s why I’m so right for this job! It’s just as easy to hook a rich man as it is to get hooked by a poor one…
It’s hard to talk about Anita Loos (1889-1981), without falling into a reverie of quotations. As one of the best known screenwriters during the peak years of the Hollywood studio system, Loos was a legendary wit whose brilliant lines found their way into the mouths of the era’s biggest stars. Watching an iconic actor deliver Loos’ words is an invitation to revel in a particular kind of movie magic, an exquisite cocktail of class, charisma, silliness and smarts. Many of the most indelible images of the Golden Age - Joan Crawford glowering behind her furs, Clark Gable slicked back and suave with a pencil moustache, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in matching red sequins - are thoroughly Loos-ian. Anita Loos did not invent the dream factory, but she played a crucial role within it, helping to create the heightened visions of reality that would become emblematic of classic Hollywood. And although Loos’ style was larger than life - smarter, wittier, more glamorous - her writing also reflected, in its own champagne-soaked, lipstick-stained, funhouse mirror kind of way, the shifting social currents of twentieth century US society.
While narrative details and character nuances vary, ultimately all of Loos’ best work is preoccupied with the same eternal concerns: money, class and sex. These themes fascinated Loos, because they reflected her reality. Loos had no scruples about drawing on her life for her art, converting juicy anecdotes and canny observations into cold hard cash. Her most famous work, the bestselling 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes about the ditzy, diamond hungry showgirl Lorelei Lee, was a thinly veiled, semi-autobiographical tale based on Loos’ own adventures in Europe. The bestseller was a huge hit and made Loos herself rich. She would go on to adapt the story twice, once for the screen, in a now lost 1928 silent version, and once for the hit Broadway musical. Lorelei Lee would later be immortalised by Marilyn Monroe in the Howard Hawk’s directed 1953 movie musical. Ironically Loos was not directly involved with this most famous take on her signature heroine, but without question her fingerprints remain all over it. Even in the hands of other skilled artists, Lorelei remains fundamentally a Loo-sian creation.
The success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes sealed Loos’ status as a celebrity writer and girl about town, an image she capitalised on with glee. Red Headed Woman (1932) opens with Jean Harlow proclaiming, in a wry meta reference, “so gentlemen prefer blondes do they? Yes they do!" Meanwhile, in publicity shots taken on the film’s promotional trail Loos and Harlow are pictured reading together, the title of their book scratched out to read Gentlemen Prefer Redheads. This association between the writer and her most famous character is impossible to sever, although in fact Loos herself bore a far closer resemblance to Dorothy - the whip smart, savvy best friend memorably played by Jane Russell on screen - than to the dizzy Lorelei. Make no mistake though, Loos was a pragmatist as skilled at leaning into a profitable persona as her most famous heroine. She also wrote a series of dishy, gleefully misleading memoirs, full of entertaining inaccuracies. Wading through the self mythologising can be tricky, although it's not clear why Loos felt the need to exaggerate so much of her biography; her real life story is interesting enough.
Corinne Anita Loos was born in Sisson, California in 1888. Her father was a journalist who ran the local tabloid. Her mother was effectively the newspaper's publisher, although she did not receive acknowledgement for her work (later in Hollywood, Loos’ would find herself caught in a similar dynamic, working uncredited behind the name of a man - some things never change). Already at the age of six Loos knew she wanted to be a writer. She spent her early years hanging around with her alcoholic father and his dubious friends, picking up a fair few useful anecdotes on the way. She was undeniably precocious, selling her first screenplay in 1911 aged 22, but not quite as precocious as she would have liked you to believe (Loos liked to claim that she had made her movie writing debut as a 12 year old). Between 1912-1915 Loos wrote and sold over a 100 screenplays. Her first produced film was The New York Hat (1912), directed by DW Griffith and starring Mary Pickford. Griffith was impressed enough to offer Loos $75 a week to join his production company, making her one of the first women to be employed as a staff writer in the studio system. Later, the director would bring Loos in to write intertitles for his silent epic Intolerance (1916), a pretty spectacular job for a young woman at the start of her career.
Loos was entering the industry at an opportune moment. Silent Hollywood was still something of a wild west, which had not fully formalised into the rigid structures and prejudices of the studio system. The industry was not yet the male-dominated closed shop that it would come to be, and women were employed across a wide range of roles and levels. As a screenwriter, Loos was in good company - her peers during this period included June Mathis, Frances Marion, Jeanie Macpherson and Jane Murfin. Despite stiff competition, Loos quickly developed a reputation as a particularly adept writer, with an ability to turn title cards into an artform.
In 1916, Loos began working with the actor, writer and director John Emerson. The duo collaborated on a series of star-making pictures which established Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford as the respective king and queen of the silent era. Soon the professional relationship became romantic, and in 1919 Loos and Emerson married. Unfortunately Emerson was a feckless character, a serial philanderer who requested one day a week off the marriage in order to pursue younger women (Loos was already almost 15 years Emerson’s junior). Loos was devastated by this request, but felt forced to comply. She filled the gap on her own “day off” by cultivating a circle of famous friends who, as a fortunate upside, also provided plenty of gossipy material for her own work. Later, when Loos became even more successful in her own right, Emerson did his best to discourage his wife, trying to block the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and continuing to take joint credit on screenplays which Loos was in fact writing alone. In the late 1920s, Loos even took a few years off as Emerson had begun to blame his fits of psychosomatic illness on her career. She would later effectively separate from Emerson, but the pair remained married until his death in 1956.
Fortunately for Loos - and for us - Emerson didn’t succeed in derailing his wife’s career. Despite his interference, she remained spectacularly successful across the decades, converting her early success in the silent industry into a prolific period working in the talkies, writing a global bestseller and several Broadway hits along the way. Loos’ tongue in cheek humour and skill with a double entendre meant she was well suited both to the arrival of sound - all the better to hear those delightful one liners - and of increasing movie censorship. The Hays Code, which was widely implemented in Hollywood from the early 1930s to the 1960s, only served to increase the demand for the writer’s superb grasp of innuendo and edgy quibs.
Loos’ career was prolific, and she often worked in collaboration - adapting Clare Boothe Luce’s play with Murfin for The Women (1932), co-writing the stage adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) with Joseph Fields, and sharing credit with Robert E. Hopkins for San Francisco (1936). Yet although her co-authors often switched around, there is a certain signature which comes to the surface across all of Loos’ best work. Glamorous, ambitious and pragmatic (anti) heroines stalk through her writing in unsuitable shoes. These are women trying to find their way in a patriarchal world, and not afraid of making some unsavoury choices on the way. This archetype is encapsulated most famously, of course, by Lorelei Lee, the smarter-than-she-looks “dumb” blonde who has the world at her feet. Prototypes for and variations of Lorelei can be found across Loos’ filmography - Joan Crawford’s scheming shop girl Crystal in The Women and Jean Harlow’s resourceful Lil in Red Headed Woman are both striking variations on this role (albeit with different hair colours).
Given the rich, catty and wildly enjoyable characters Loos was known for, it's no surprise that many of the era’s most brilliant female stars were attracted to her scripts. From that early affiliation with Mary Pickford, to the super group who make up the all female ensemble cast of The Women (Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, and on and on), to Carol Channing and Audrey Hepburn, who both made acclaimed appearances on Broadway in Loos penned stage productions, she was a writer who knew how to write women. That doesn’t mean Loos can be read as a straightforward feminist in a present day sense; she was very much a product of her time, with the requisite problematic opinions that generally entails, and her heroines’ stories usually revolve around snaring and/or keeping men, albeit with a sassy gal pal in tow. Nevertheless, the sheer verve and energy of Loos’ writing still feels refreshing for modern viewers. Watching Harlow vamp and scheme her way through screwball noir Red Headed Woman, or Crawford bare her jungle red claws in The Women, is a reminder of how alive the best of classic Hollywood can still feel, even as we watch these films decades later.
Loos’ films reflect her experience, the hard graft and personal sacrifice she put in to carve out a long career as a woman in the film industry. With her elegant clothes, party lifestyle and huge social circle, Loos made being one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters look like a blast, even if the reality was that she spent far more time sitting diligently at her typewriter than being showered with diamonds. Part of the grift - as Lillian, Lorelei, Crystal and many other Loo-sian heroines would confirm - is making all the hard work look effortless.
Cinemasters: Anita Loos runs at Glasgow Film Theatre from 5 - 29 October 2024.
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