Background
Loos, Anita was born on April 26, 1893 in Sisson, California, United States. Daughter of Richard Beers and Minnie Ella (Smith) Loos.
playwright screenwriter author
Loos, Anita was born on April 26, 1893 in Sisson, California, United States. Daughter of Richard Beers and Minnie Ella (Smith) Loos.
Educated at high school in San Diego. Her parents were in the theatrical business, and Anita was clearly pretty enough to think of an acting career. But writing appealed to her more. She began with plays, but found success when she started offering photoplays to the new movie business.
An early success was The New York Hat (12, D. W. Griffith), which starred Marv Piekford and Lionel Barrymore. In time she wrote hundreds of scripts for silent movies—for Grif fith and then for Douglas Fairbanks and various Talmadges. She did some of the titles on Intolerance (16, Griffith)—not really a testament to wit—and she wrote, among others, Wild and Wooly (17, Emerson), with Fairbanks; Come On In (18, Emerson); The Virtuous Vamp (19, David Kirkland), with Constance Talmadge; The Branded Woman (20, Albert Parker), with Norma Talmadge; Woman’s Place (21, Victor Fleming); Polly of the Follies (22, Emerson).
It was in 1923 that Emerson—a bit of a Willy to her Colette—told her to try plays: The Whole Town’s Talking was a debut hit. Next year, at his orders again, she used coast-to-coast train journeys to write Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It sold out overnight, and it became a stage hit (with June Walker) and then a movie, scripted by Loos (28, Malcolm St. Clair), with Ruth Taylor (Buck Henry’s mother).
It was around this time that she discovered Emerson’s philandering and elected not to take his advice on retirement. Instead, she took np a Metro offer to write for $1,000 a week, and found herself fashioning the screen image of jean Harlow: Red-Headed Woman (32, Jack Conway); Hold Your Man (33, Sam Wood); and Riffraff (35, J. Walter Ruben).
She kept working with San Francisco (36, W. S. Van Dyke); Mama Steps Out (37, George Seitz); Saratoga (37, Conway); The Women (39, George Cukor); Susan and Cod (40, Cukor); Blossoms in the Dust (41, Mervyn LeRov); They Met in Bombay (41, Clarence Brown); When Ladies Meet (41, Robert Z. Leonard); I Married an Angel (42, Van Dyke).
She moved to New York in 1947 and she would have Broadway hits with Happy Birthday, the musical of Blondes (it starred Carol Channing), and aversion ofGigi (with Audrey Hepburn). She also wrote two books of memoirs, A Girl Like I and Kiss Hollywood Goodby.
“There was a time a number of years ago,” wrote Anita Loos in the introduction to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), when she and a number of Hollywood cronies were on the Santa Fe, headed west. They had just had a holiday in New York, “for we belonged to the elite of the cinema which has never been fond of Hollywood. There’s the first sign that this inside voice has it in her to tell you something fresh about the movies—the truth. There was a girl with them, Doug Fairbanks’s new costar, and everyone was waiting for her to drop something—handkerchiefs, handbags, org’s—and she was blond. The “situation”—the way gentlemen preferred blondes—“was palpably unfair,” but it is the beginning of smart social commentary on movies. After all, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is a phrase that warns us how education, civilization, and justice are all at an end.
Ms. Loos had a case. She was gamin, but very pretty and delicately smart, and years later she had to find out that her husband—silent director John Emerson, who had lived off her—was himself inclined to pursue witless blondes. So it was all the more generous that Anita Loos the writer did not kill blondes—she celebrated them, she showed the poor lambs their way home, and then she helped teach Jean Harlow how to be a bombshell and gave Marilyn Monroe one of her few serene roles. Nevertheless, Ms. Loos has let us all know, for the foreseeable future, that we are idiots over a pretty girl—to such an extent that that girl can come out of Little Somewhere, without an education, and wait for the rocks to find her.
Married John Emerson, 1919.