Transcription of Chicago Daily Tribune Review, December 20, 1925
Less because she is a theater-person than because I had read that her book has been or is begin dramatized, I've gone through Miss Anita Loos' “Gentleman Prefer Blondes”; and I'm not sorry. It carries two hours of flip fun that is pungent in its flavor of that especial social overflow of the American stage which finds its best expression in the midnight activities of the stretch of Broadway and other arteries that go north from the Fevered Forties to the Sickly Sixties. It is the pagan diary of a pretty Schützenschwester who, acquitted by an Arkansas jury, takes the name of Lorelei, tries the films, and then decides that the better way is to devote her life to making cosmopolitan gentlemen loosen up. She does well at it, and in the end is the wife of Pennsylvania's most celebrated movie-censor, of whom, registering surprise that he has refused to meet Mrs. Peggy Hopkins Joyce, she sets down in the diary: “I mean it is unusual to see a gentleman who is such a young gentleman as Mr. Spoffard be so Prespyterian, because when most gentlemen are 35 years of age their minds nearly always seem to be on something else.” ...I have read nothing else in kind so amusing since Mr. E. D. Price, now in Chicago as the precursor of the Ziegfeld Follies, published his Letters of Mildred to Her Mother. I don't discern a play in Miss Loos' little book; and I have taken from it more laughs than I usually get from ten plays.
However, Miss Loos is, away from the theater, Mrs. John Emerson; and Mr. Emerson is the head of the actors' union, working without pay for the sheer delight of teaching actors how to keep managers from making money; and, having been a manager and not made money, it doesn't seem right that I should be so kind to Mrs. Emerson's book. So, I even things up by saying (a) that she sometimes spells the wrong word right, and (b) that Ralph Barton's illustrations are not so good:—and there goes another Broadway reputation!