Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: A Critical Edition

Blondes in Harper’s Bazar

Overview of Early History

Despite being one of the longest-running women’s fashion magazines in the United States, Harper’s Bazar (not Harper’s Bazaar until 1929) has not had an in-depth historical investigation. Eugene Exman gives some very early history in his book on the founding publishers, Harper and Brothers.1 Later retrospective collections and exhibit publications, even when they provide a historical overview, quickly skim past more than 50 years to focus more on the magazine’s reinvention and revitalization at the hands of editor Carmel Snow beginning in 1934.2

Harper’s Bazar first appeared in November 1867 as an attempt to create a women’s fashion and household life magazine based on a German publication. Developed by J. & J. Harper, Printers, the magazine joined their book publishing operation and two existing serials, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Harper’s Weekly. For the first decades, Bazar was edited by Mary L. Booth, an accomplished translator of French into English. While the magazine was in principle not political, Booth brought her inclinations to the magazine to provide a clear viewpoint in favor of issues such as women’s suffrage.3

Booth, whose time as editor ended well before the twentieth century, shaped the longer-term aesthetic sensibilities of the magazine, which leaned heavily on Art Nouveau well after her time.4 The style began to change in 1913, when William Randolph Hearst bought Bazar. Under his ownership, the style shifted heavily towards orientalism and art deco, led by the colorful monthly covers created by Russian-born artist Erté (Romain de Tirtoff) beginning in 1915 and lasting until 1936.5 Hearst would later add the second “a” to the name of the magazine, making it Harper’s Bazaar in 1929.

Henry Sell at Harper's Bazar

With the magazine facing financial challenges, Hearst brought Henry Sell in as editor beginning in January 1920. Sell, born in 1889, grew up in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute. His journalism career had included Billboard Magazine and newspapers such as the Indianapolis Star and the Chicago Daily News, where he worked when hired by Hearst. He had created a decorating magazine, Fashions of the Hour, providing grounding in content related to Bazar’s scope. His biographer, Janet Leckie, notes several innovations during his time at the Daily News, including starting features on Chicago ethnic groups and adding a weekly book page on Chicago writers to give them equal footing.6 She also claims he pioneered the practice of the “multiple review”—that is, allowing multiple different reviews of the same book in the same periodical in order to provide different perspectives instead of one official evaluation.7 She also notes his interest in literary experimentation: he ran several installments of Ulysses at the same time as The Little Review, but was not named in the lawsuit that led to censorship of the novel.8  When he joined Bazar, one of his most significant innovations was to phase out posed portraits in favor of informal snapshots in order to promote the latest fashions. He remained at the magazine until 1926.

Blondes in Bazar

It is now a well-worn story that Anita Loos first took the opening chapter of Blondes to Bazar at the suggestion of H.L. Mencken, her mentor, who joked the novel would be “lost among the ads” and avoid offending anyone with its sexual humor. Most sources credit Henry Sell with asking Loos to continue the story with additional chapters although in an August 1926 gossip column, the Bookman credits Bazar editor Ray Long with this encouragement.9 Leckie’s biography of Sell suggests that Mencken’s advice was perhaps off the mark in regard to the story’s safety “among the ads”: she claims both William Randolph Hearst and Millicent Hearst (his wife) at separate times almost forced Sell to cancel further installments of Blondes after the first due to feeling it violated good taste, but recanted.10

When Sell reviewed the submission, he sent the first chapter to illustrator and friend Ralph Barton, who he had brought on under a regular contract to the magazine and needed material to work with. Loos and Barton traveled to Europe in the summer of that year as she was writing the final chapters and he was illustrating them, then sending things back to appear in the monthly issues. In addition to Barton’s illustrations for the novel, he included in the fourth chapter (set in Paris), an illustration of himself at work on a boat in rough waters, creating the illustrations for that chapter. The caption for the illustration, left out of the book edition, read, “Excited by memories roused while reading this manuscript Ralph Barton rushed on board the first steamer for Paris. The sketch shows Ralph at sea, and rough too, putting the finishing touches on this set of drawings.” While the caricature and caption play up more humor than truth, they gesture to the labor and positioning of the illustrator in magazine serial work.

When Loos returned from Europe in late summer 1925, her serialized adventures of Lorelei Lee had renewed and dramatically expanded her celebrity. The novel, by most accounts, was also so popular it revitalized the magazine by bringing in a new male readership, and in its wake a flood of new advertisers for men’s products. These claims have never been clearly verified or quantified, and it could make for an additional investigation to review the 1925 issues of Bazar in greater detail to analyze whether this shift in advertising did in fact occur. However, any improvement in the magazine’s fortunes was relatively temporary, as it continued to face financial difficulties leading to Sell’s departure in 1926 and several further managerial changes until Carmel Snow’s assumption of control of the magazine in 1934.

Footnotes

  1. Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).↵
  2. See, for example, Marianne Le Galliard et al., Harper’s Bazaar: First in Fashion (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2020); Glenda Bailey and Elizabeth Hummer, eds., Harper’s Bazaar 150 Years: The Greatest Moments (New York: Abrams, 2017).↵
  3. Galliard et al., First in Fashion, 12-13; Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines (London: Greenwood press, 1995), 138.↵
  4. Galliard et al., First in Fashion, 24.↵
  5. Galliard et al., First in Fashion, 30.↵
  6. Janet T. Leckie, A Talent for Living: The Story of Henry Sell, an American Original (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970), 32-33.↵
  7. Leckie, A Talent for Living, 38.↵
  8. Leckie, A Talent for Living, 42.↵
  9. “The Gossip Shop,” The Bookman 63.6 (August 1926), 728-736, 733.↵
  10. Leckie, A Talent for Living, 77.↵

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