Anita Loos

Screenwriter

• Born: April 26, 1888
• Birthplace: Sissons, California
• Died: August 18, 1981
• Place of death: New York, New York

American scriptwriter and novelist

A pioneering scriptwriter who developed the use of intertitles during the silent film era, Loos also wrote the famous Jazz Age novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Areas of achievement Theater and entertainment, literature

Early Life

Anita Loos (lews) was born to Minerva Loos and R. Beers Loos. “Minnie” Loos was a proper, patient wife who socially abided the flamboyant, philandering ways of her husband, an itinerant journalist whose wanderlust led him to one small-town California newspaper after another. The wayward father also loved everything theatrical. A self-proclaimed “Edwin Booth of amateur theatre,” he opened (and closed) as many drama societies as he did newspapers.

When a San Francisco weekly, Music and Drama, went on the market, Anita’s father bought it and moved the family once again. San Francisco’s frontier spirit and Barbary Coast pleasures fascinated him as he prowled the city’s bustling waterfront, often with the diminutive Anita. He introduced Anita and her younger sister Gladys to theater when the youngsters made their dramatic debut in the Alcazar Stock Company’s production of Quo Vadis? (1894).

The close bond between Anita and her father survived a family tragedy when eight-year-old Gladys Loos died after an emergency appendectomy performed on the family’s kitchen table while R. Beers Loos was out on the town. The family’s fortunes dipped again when Anita’s father’s paper failed because of lax supervision. R. Beers Loos next managed the Cineograph in San Francisco’s Mexican district, where short one-reel films alternated with vaudeville acts. When that venture failed, the family moved to San Diego, where R. Beers managed the Lyceum, a theater featuring pirated Broadway plays that often starred Anita, who by now was a versatile teenage actress and an increasingly important source of the family’s income.

In spite of the promise of a successful theatrical career, Anita Loos concluded that acting was a profession for numbskulls and narcissists and turned her attention to writing. In 1912, after penning gossip items for the local paper, Loos tried the “galloping tintypes.” Her target was New York’s Biograph Company, the nation’s top studio thanks to innovative director D. W. Griffith. Biograph responded to Loos’s unsolicited script for The Road to Plaindale with a check for twenty-five dollars and a release form. Within months, at age twenty-four, Loos had sold three scripts to Biograph and a fourth to the Lubin Company. One of these, The New York Hat (1912), was directed by Griffith as a swan song for Mary Pickford, who was making her final appearance for Biograph. The film was a barometer prefiguring Loos’s penchant for satirizing provincialism and busybody moralists.

Life’s Work

During the first phase of Anita Loos’s career with Griffith at Biograph and then at Triangle, the attractive four-foot eleven-inch comedic dynamo churned out more than one hundred scenarios. In the process, she revolutionized the “art” of writing intertitles, the printed snippets of dialogue and expositional narrative that helped audiences follow the melodramatic unfolding of a film’s plot and the development of its characters. Typical of her approach was an early film for Lubin in which she identified the antagonist, Proteus Prindle, as “a self-made man who adored his maker.” The wittily turned intertitle soon would become her stock-in-trade.

Although Loos had met Griffith briefly in 1914 on one of the director’s winter sojourns to shoot under Southern California’s sunny skies, their professional relationship did not move from correspondence to direct collaboration until 1915. Griffith, who along with Mack Sennett and Thomas Ince headed one of Triangle’s three production units, hired Loos to help the ambitious tripartite studio keep pace with an urgent need for fresh material. At the time, with Europe consumed by World War I, the American film industry was growing at a rapid rate to meet growing domestic and international demands for new films. Loos could not have been at a better place (Hollywood) at a better time (1915).

Griffith, keenly aware of his need for smart writing talent, tendered Loos a contract for seventy-five dollars a week plus a bonus whenever one of her scripts was produced. Fresh from his triumph with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and preoccupied with his independent production of Intolerance, Griffith turned Loos over to Frank Woods, head of Triangle’s script department. The paternal Woods, affectionately known on the Triangle lot as “Daddy,” at first kept Loos busy with wise-cracking titles for Sennett’s Keystone Kops and rewrites for the progressively longer melodramas, which by 1920 would become standardized at a feature length of one to two hours. Her first major assignment was an adaptation of Macbeth (1915) for renowned English actor Sir Beerbohm Tree. It was a “prestige production” for which, thanks to Daddy Woods, she received her first screen credit: “Macbeth by William Shakespeare and Anita Loos.” She later wrote, “if I had asked, Daddy Woods would have given me top billing.”

Loos was soon assigned to one of Triangle’s secondary directors, John Emerson, who had been charged with trying to find some way of using former Broadway leading man Douglas Fairbanks. Loos penned His Picture in the Papers (1916) for Fairbanks, a project that poked fun at America’s love of publicity and instant celebrity. Loos had a field day with the titles, which horrified Griffith, who ordered the picture shelved on the assumption that if audiences wanted to read, they would stay home with a book. A shortage of product prompted the film’s release. To Griffith’s surprise, His Picture in the Papers was a huge hit that made Fairbanks a film star and the intertitle a basic part of film technique. For his part, the savvy Griffith, recognizing Loos’s unique talents, hired her to work, uncredited, on the titles for his mammoth production of Intolerance (1916).

Meanwhile, Loos and Fairbanks collaborated on nine more pictures for Triangle, most of which were directed by Emerson. Almost all of these films deflated current fads and fashions. In The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), Fairbanks’s hyped-up Coke Ennyday, “the scientific detective,” parodies applied empiricism and cocaine. In Reaching for the Moon (1917), Coueism, a then-popular self-help regimen based on an autosuggestive mantra, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better,” was cheerfully sent up and shot down. In Wild and Woolly (1917), Hollywood itself is mocked. In the process, the Loos-Emerson-Fairbanks team capitalized on Fairbanks’s athletic ability, boundless cheer, good humor, and winning smile to fashion one of Hollywood’s greatest icons and embodiments of American optimism.

In 1920, Loos married director John Emerson, a relationship that perplexed her friends, who resented the director for putting his name as coauthor on Loos’s scripts. Loos seemed to have an affection for domineering, unfaithful men. In her autobiography, A Girl Like I (1966), Loos explains that she could not fall in love with an especially ardent suitor because “he gave me full devotion and required nothing in return, while John treated me in an offhand manner, appropriated my earnings, and demanded from me all the services of a hired maid. How could a girl like I resist him?”

In 1925, on sabbatical from Hollywood, Loos wrote the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos was praised by literary lions such as H. L. Mencken for “making fun of sex, which has never before been done in this grand and glorious nation of ours.” The novel’s durable Lorelei Lee, the ditzy gold-digging blond from Little Rock, first appeared on the silver screen in a silent version directed by Mal St. Clair in 1928. (Howard Hawks’s 1953 remake featured the incandescent Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee.)

Loos returned to Hollywood in the late 1920’s to work with Irving Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Like her friend and fellow scenarist Francis Marion, Loos negotiated the switch to “talking” pictures smoothly. In Red-Headed Woman (1932), for example, the combination of Loos’s wise-cracking dialogue and Jean Harlow’s gold-digging glamour and genius for comic timing clicked with precision and panache. Among Loos’s own favorites was the melodramatic San Francisco (1936), set around the earthquake of 1906, starring Clark Gable, Jeannette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy; Gable’s role was based on the great yet unrequited love of Loos’s life, Wilson Mizner, the bon vivant she later traced in her book Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974). Loos also coscripted with veteran MGM writer Jane Murfin a sharp-edged adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce’s venomous comedy The Women (1939), which was directed by George Cukor and featured Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Crawford.

After John Emerson’s attempt on her life in 1937 and his subsequent confinement in a sanitarium as an incurable schizophrenic for the final twenty years of his life, Loos became one of the few Hollywood scriptwriters to move successfully to the writing of plays, novels, and memoirs. She continued to produce various kinds of work for many years. Loos died in New York in 1981 at the age of ninety-three.

Significance

The name Anita Loos promises to live long as the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whether its form be novelistic, cinematic, or theatrical. Indeed, the golden-haired Lorelei Lee whose sexual politics are summed up in Leo Robin’s and Jule Styne’s aphoristic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” from the 1949 Broadway musical adaptation of Loos’s novel remains an entertaining though increasingly problematic representation of women in America, since it trades heavily on the stereotype of the dumb, submissive blond bombshell.

In the history of American film, especially during the silent era, Loos will continue to occupy a prominent place on the strength of her crisp satirizations of American foibles, her innovative exploitation of intertitles, her shaping of Douglas Fairbanks’s exuberant screen persona, and her collaboration with D. W. Griffith on the intertitles for the director’s masterwork, Intolerance.

Critic Marjorie Rosen suggests that although Loos’s tender age may have limited the scope of her early scripts, it may also have accounted for their success. “For it is unlikely,” Rosen concludes, “that in any other era the thoughts of a teen-aged girl granted an exceptional one could have so directly corresponded to the dreams of millions of women who were just beginning to take their moviegoing seriously.”

Bibliography

Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1991. Acker’s invaluable set of profiles places Anita Loos under the category “From the Silents to the Sound Era” in the chapter “Reel Women Writers.”

Bartoni, Doreen. “Anita Loos.” In Writers and Production Artists. Vol. 4 of International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, edited by Nicolas Thomas, et al. 2d ed. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1993. A concise biographical profile supplemented with a useful filmography and bibliography.

Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Based on extensive interviews with Loos and a cadre of her associates, Carey’s lively and meticulous account is the definitive biography of the writer. Illustrated with fascinating photos from the Loos family collection.

Casella, Donna. “Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood, 1896-1930.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23, no. 3 (July/September, 2006), 217-235. Loos is one of the screenwriters whose careers and contributions to the film industry are examined in this article.

Hammill, Faye.“’One of the Few Books That Doesn’t Stink’: The Intellectuals, the Masses, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Critical Survey 17, no. 3 (2005): 27-48. An analysis of the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and of Loos’s literary status.

Loos, Anita. Cast of Thousands. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 1977. This handsomely produced scrapbook of Loos memorabilia is overflowing with revealing photos, posters, newspaper items, and magazine covers that bring readers face-to-face with Fairbanks, Emerson, and the other members of the incredible cast that swirled around the diminutive dynamo Anita Loos.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Girl Like I. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Loos’s autobiography paints a rich picture of Hollywood’s golden age and her exotic associates, who paraded through “a life that was never boring.”

Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973. Rosen’s groundbreaking survey of women’s contributions to the classical Hollywood film includes a concise, penetrating account of Loos’s unique talents.