Anita Loos,
Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos. Ed. and annotated by Cari Beauchamp & Mary Anita Loos.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0 520 22894 4.
322pp
US$27.50 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Another lovely book resulting from Cari Beauchamp’s passion for the history of women’s early involvement in US cinema, Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos is a bit different from Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood(California, 1998), Beauchamp’s earlier work. As the subtitle indicates, the primary author of this new volume is actually Anita Loos. If that name rings no bells, think Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (US, 1953) – which was written, according to Beauchamp, as Loos’ “response to [H. L.] Mencken’s melting in the presence of a ditsy blonde” (4). In addition, she wrote many screenplays, plays, short stories, and other items. Loos not only “could have written the history of writing for the screen” (xi) because she helped to invent it; she “became a star maker” and, through Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, an international celebrity (xi). She was internationally renowned for most of her long life. She also had a wicked wit. As Beauchamp writes:

Anita’s popularity and celebrity were still such that when she died of heart failure on August 17, 1981, her obituary occupied a full page in the New York Times and in many papers throughout the country. She had been fibbing for so long and so often about her age, many newspapers didn’t know what to do, and she was dubbed every age from seventy-nine to ninety-one. In reality she was ninety-three. (208)

The other party to this publication of a selection of Loos’ previously unpublished work is her niece, Mary Anita Loos, who was a successful novelist in her own right and who also worked in the Hollywood movie industry. Between them Mary Anita Loos and Cari Beauchamp create a warm picture of Anita Loos as a writer in her time. Mary Anita provides personal insights – Loos was obsessed with maintaining her weight and wearing beautiful clothes – and anecdotes – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had difficulties getting published, but when Harper’s Bazaar serialized it as a “diary-style story,” the magazine’s circulation doubled (116). Beauchamp provides an appropriate context for Loos’ professional life, generally in the form of more or less short remarks before and after sections of Loos’ work. The sections are themselves organized chronologically, and the decision to focus on unpublished work was a deliberate choice, motivated by the fact that Mary Anita had a treasure trove of her aunt’s writing available to be explored.

Loos was born in 1888; she sold her first film story to D. W. Griffith in 1912. It was The New York Hat, which featured Mary Pickford in her last performance for Griffith, and Lionel Barrymore in “his first starring role in pictures”; the Gish sisters were extras (11). Griffith was pleased, and Loos kept sending stories from San Diego to New York, until the movies came to her – or at least nearer to her, there in California. Eventually, when she and the movies had grown apart, she moved to New York City and began a new career as a theatre playwright, initially writing for her friend, the great stage star Helen Hayes.

Anita Loos Rediscovered begins with a selection of seven stories “that were turned into films between 1912 and 1915,” stories Beauchamp characterizes as having a “succinct arc, often with a satiric spin” (15). They range from 2-4 pages, with only the last one, “A ride with Billy,” remotely resembling what we now think of as a film script. (It has a synopsis before a cast list, with numbered shots indicating locations and characters as well as their actions. “Leaders” (intertitles) appear in between shots a handful of times.) These are “cute” stories, usually touched by sentimentality, but rescued by what’s often called “a wry wit.”

Loos’ most important work as star-maker probably was her script for Douglas Fairbanks. That Griffith wasn’t enthusiastic about directing Fairbanks is a story that appears in various sources; that he sometimes bought Loos’ stories because they amused him even though he thought they wouldn’t make good films is not a generally known fact. According to Beauchamp, “he failed to see how the laughs could be translated to the screen,” especially since he “believed audiences didn’t come to the movies to read” – and much of Loos’ humor occurred in the title cards (41). But she and director John Emerson (who eventually became her husband – and was notorious for claiming her work and her earning power as his own while constantly cheating on her) made Fairbanks’ film His Picture in the Papers (US, 1916) “such a huge hit that Emerson, Loos, and Fairbanks became a team” (41).

In addition, Loos contributed significantly to advancing the careers of Audrey Hepburn, Jean Harlow, and Carol Channing. “Irving Thalberg knew he could count on Anita for unique dialogue laced with double entendres, Clark Gable depended on her for advice on roles, and director George Cukor insisted she be by his side on the set” (2). One could gather from this that following Loos’ career in Hollywood is something like following a history of Hollywood itself. She always tried to give the impression that she simply dashed pieces off but, according to Carol Channing, “She worked long and hard at her writing. I still have a silver pen that has her chew marks on it” (3).

The one-act play All men are equal (written some time between 1915 and 1930) deals with gender issues and national identity. Most of Loos’ work, however, deals with her explorations of romantic relations. Many of her scripts are associated with thinly veiled sexual innuendoes, for her talent at avoiding Hays Office vetoes meant that producers sought her out to protect their more risqué products. For example, in The Women (US, 1939), she replaced the unacceptable “virgin” with “a frozen asset” (136). But Loos wasn’t interested in exploiting sexual attractions so much as in understanding the psychology of inappropriate love (some of the unsentimental stories from the period 1944-1981 best illustrate this interest). One of Mary Anita’s most useful musings describes her aunt’s reaction to women such as Elsa Maxwell and the Gabor sisters. These were women used to exploiting anyone with whom they came into contact; as Loos saw it, they got away with it because of their “over abundance” of vitality, which led others to attach themselves in hopes of having that vitality rub off (193).

Given her ability at riposte and her love for New York City, along with her friendship with H. L. Mencken, one might have expected her to belong to the Algonquin Round Table. Beauchamp, though, tells us that “she had little tolerance” for the participants at the Table nor for Mary Pickford “because she thought they believed their own press clippings” (3). Friends meant a great deal to her, and how much she meant to them comes through in the various eulogies that appear in the last section of Rediscovering Anita Loos. As Helen Hayes said, in a line that Loos herself might have come up with, “I just hope that when she gets to heaven, where she’s bound to be, that she finds that heaven is chic. If it isn’t chic, it will be hell to Anita” (269).

Harriet Margolis.
Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 6-Dec-04