Biography of Anita Loos (1888-1981)
Early Life
Corinne Anita Loos (1888-1981) spent the first years of her life in Sissons (now Mount Shasta), California, where her father R. Beers Loos ran the local newspaper, The Mascot. R. Beers was not shy about capitalizing on his children as a promotional strategy and alternate form of income, and he featured a four-year-old Anita Loos on postcard promotions for his newspaper showing her head stuck through the front page.The family moved south to San Francisco in 1893 for R. Beers to take over a weekly paper, Music and Drama. He also recruited Anita and her younger sister Gladys as actresses in a production of Quo Vadis?, which led to further work in what Anita claimed was the first American production of A Doll’s House. Her career as a child actress was one she did not enjoy but wound up bound to as an essential part of her family’s income: as R. Beers’s newspaper career in San Francisco floundered, young Anita’s performances in touring productions provided the family’s primary income. When the family moved again for her father to take over management of the Cineograph theater in San Diego, Anita’s acting career continued, and for a time she acted both at her father’s theater and at another owned by her uncle (under her grandmother’s name, Cleopatra Fairbrother).
While she was enduring her unwanted career as a child actress, Anita found her real vocation. She credited winning a newspaper limerick contest at age six as the origin of her desire to become a writer, and as she grew older found herself publishing anecdotes for the New York Morning Telegraph’s ‘Talk of the Town’ section. She had an early ambition to make it to New York, and for another writing gig was happy to pretend she had already been there: she managed to get published as a New York correspondent in local newspapers by sending her accounts of the big city to the east coast friend of an acquaintance. The friend then mailed the accounts of New York life back to the San Diego papers with the appropriate postmark. She also wrote her first play to be produced for the stage.
Early Film Career and Celebrity
Loos’s turn to writing scripts for silent film was inspired when her father began showing short films at his theater in 1911 and she thought they must need story writers. She found the address for American Biography Company (or, Biograph) on the cannister for one of the movie reels and began sending them ideas, which Biograph wrote back to purchase. Her third script, The New York Hat (1912), was the first produced, with direction by D.W. Griffith and starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore. Over 1912-13, Loos sent off scripts at an increasing pace, mostly but not exclusively for Biograph. She submitted her early work under the name “A. Loos,” keenly aware that as a woman she might not be taken seriously, although sometime after she began regularly submitting work she revealed her full name.Her steady contributions led to an invitation to the studio to meet Griffith, now at Triangle Studios, in person on the set of Intolerance in January 1914. Loos was always petite as an adult and the meeting with Griffith appears to have set the stage for a lifetime of misleading the industry and the public about her age. She traveled to Biograph’s studios in Los Angeles with her mother Minnie, and wore a sailor suit with her hair in pigtails and oversized bows to the interview, leading to a business manager assuming that Minnie was the writer and Anita the tag-along daughter. Griffith was similarly astounded to find the writer of the scripts he had been buying to be (on appearance) a young girl. In her later autobiography A Girl Like I (1966), Loos gleefully recounts their miscalculation of her age assuming she was a child, but even in that book she still insinuates she was a teenager at the time: she was really a few months shy of 26. Her youthful appearance would remain tied into her celebrity through the 1920s, when images of Loos as a flapper in the press accompanied the success of Blondes.
By the end of 1916 she would begin to establish herself as a national icon, and as one of the first (possibly the first, as claimed by Loos) salaried staff writer at a film studio. Her first on-screen credit came for an adaptation of MacBeth, which was also the first of her scripts directed by her future husband John Emerson and the first of her films where she sat on the set during production. Griffith was not a fan of the use of title cards in silent film, but he let Loos use them, and when he had to turn to their use in Intolerance, he asked her for help reworking his. As a consequence, he invited Loos to accompany a select group to go to New York City on a publicity tour, her first long-desired trip to that city. On that trip she would meet a number of important figures including Frank Crowninshield (editor of Vanity Fair), poet Vachel Lindsey, and Max Ernst, who made her the cover girl of an issue of his leftist magazine, The Masses. Lindsey would propose marriage to her, and later cite her as the only artistic talent in the field of “title writing” for movies in his 1922 revision of his 1915 book The Art of the Moving Picture.
In 1916 she and Emerson also began working as a writing and directing team for films starring Douglas Fairbanks. Fairbanks had struggled to break through and was approaching cancellation of his contract, and they realized he needed comedy to support the actor’s penchant for acrobatics. Their first feature with Fairbanks, His Picture in the Papers (1916) did not meet the approval of Griffith, who shelved it. The film only appeared when a booking mistake led to its unplanned showing at a New York theater, where it became an overnight sensation, launching Fairbanks’s career. Loos and Emerson would continue making a series of movies with Fairbanks first at Triangle, then in Fairbanks’s own production group when he left Triangle due to his increasing fame.
They broke with Fairbanks in early 1918 just as the actor transitioned to his work on swashbuckling epics. Loos claimed the break was caused by Fairbanks’s frustration that Loos was receiving the credit for his career when he saw an article crediting her with his success in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Whether or not that article specifically instigated that shift, the article indeed elaborately credits Loos with his fame and ends by noting the actor’s “meekness” in her presence. Other coverage in the film media and national press likewise credited Loos for his success, even more loudly after they parted ways, when review after review panned the style of his new films as a loss of direction due to Loos’s absence. The split did not hurt Loos, who went on to write the break-through roles for at least two more celebrities in the late 1910s: Constance Talmadge, one of her great friends of the period, and Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. In these cases as with Fairbanks, one of Loos’s talents seemed to be realizing that flailing actors were being miscast in dramatic roles when their real flair was for comedy, and making them stars by giving them material that suited them.
If Fairbanks was motivated by jealousy of Loos in their split, he would not be the only man in Loos’s life who could not handle her name outshining his. For the first Fairbanks picture, Emerson had asked Loos to allow him co-writing credit despite not having a writing role, and then to put his name first because it was too embarrassing for a man to have second billing to a woman. This set the pattern for their future collaborations: Emerson getting shared or superior credit while making very few if any contributions. Emerson was staunchly against marriage, and Loos speculated he finally proposed to her in 1919 because, having gone and directed a Mary Pickford movie that flopped without Loos’s involvement, he realized his career would basically be over without her. After their wedding, Emerson and Loos would co-write two books on moviemaking, including arguments in defense of intertitles as essential to the art form of silent film. Loos again did much of the work, in part while Emerson was hospitalized, although a review of photographs of the two “at work” on set for the books reveal careful staging that shows him as a man of action while she looks on. In a newspaper interview about their success working together that centers on her contributions, Loos slyly hinted at their dynamic when she said, “He furnishes the imagination….And I do the work.” When she finally wrote of their relationship extensively in Kiss Hollywood Goodbye she was more frank about Emerson’s lack of involvement in their “collaborations” but still claimed she didn’t mind. Indeed, she sometimes later cast Emerson as exemplary of a pattern of her love for swindlers.
Loos typically dismissed feminism in her writing, but by the early twenties she had an established celebrity as a top film writer, and that celebrity was tied to her gender and debates over gender roles of the time. Newspapers held her up as one example among others of women with significant incomes (Loos was one of two women identified as having a salary of over $100,000 per year in 1921, the other being Frances Marion, also in the film business as a director) and for retaining their maiden names rather than taking that of their husbands. On the other hand, a newspaper featured an interview with her saying that women were better with emotion whereas men were smarter—comforting more traditional views, although readers might note that she upends the usual association of women with emotion by specifying that laughter was her emotional specialization. News coverage of films typically mentioned Loos and Emerson directly alongside and equal in interest to the lead actors.
During this time Loos also began developing celebrity and a self-conceptualization as a fashion icon interwoven with her film celebrity. In her memoirs Loos emphasizes her flair for being ahead of trends. For example, she claims to have had one of the first bobbed hairstyles at approximately the same time as Irene Castle (who made them famous wither her “page-boy” bob), which she claims she self-applied in revolt against her mother during her first trip to New York immediately upon arriving. Loos particularly took credit for the “wind-blown bob” taking off in Paris after her visit to the clothing designer Lanvin, who started putting them on his manikins. In a very similar story to that of cutting her hair, she claimed that upon arriving in Paris for the first time and seeing the popular knee-revealing skirts of Chanel, she immediately asked her hotel valet to take two inches off of all of her skirts. As Carey notes, it isn’t always clear she was as influential as she claims (her longer hairstyle appears in publicity photos well after the date she claims chopping it off), but by the mid-twenties she was an icon of the flapper look. The publicity surrounding Blondes and Barton’s illustrations played up Loos, as well as her novel’s heroines, as stylish flappers. Carmel Snow, who became the editor of Harper’s Bazar several years after the publication of Blondes, describes Loos’s heroine Lorelei Lee as “a Chanel model” and describes befriending Loos around the time of the novel’s publication and introducing her to fashionable circles and designers who would dress Loos for much of her life including Chanel, Mainbocher, and Balenciaga.
New York and Abroad in the 1920s
Upon breaking with Fairbanks in late 1918, Loos and Emerson moved to New York and based their career there, although by the early twenties the couple made a decision to “retire” (partially) from film-making to shift their focus toward theater and Emerson’s increasing interest in politics. Emerson had a theater background and had a renewed passion after becoming a leader in the 1919 Actor’s Equity Strike, a major achievement in a strike that upended the Broadway establishment. Loos dissuaded him from running for public office, although he would become President of Actors' Equity Association for eight years. She wrote six plays during the decade in support of their foray in the theater. In their early days in New York, they lived at the Algonquin Hotel, but after their initial play opened they moved to Gramercy Park.While Emerson was busy with Actors' Equity, Loos was getting to know her long-time professional idol, H.L. Mencken, a satirist and critic of American life, and his circle. She much preferred Mencken’s group to the Algonquin “Round Table”, which she found frivolous, with the exception of Dorothy Parker whom she felt was too good for them. But in New York and in her travels to Europe with Emerson, Loos would extend and deepen her friendships in literary culture. In France she met Gertrude Stein and befriended Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas (although Stein, jealous, intervened to keep their contact at a minimum for years after). Emerson had been childhood friends with Sherwood Anderson, and through her husband she developed a close friendship with the writer. This emerging network of writers and their adjacent contacts in the publishing industry gave her strong connections when she eventually published Blondes. Boni & Liveright was Anderson’s publisher, and Emerson sat on a committee for a dinner celebrating Horace Liveright for his contributions toward the defeat of the New York pro-censorship “Clean Books Bill” in 1923.
The publication and subsequent success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would reshape Loos’s celebrity but also hasten the fracturing of her relationship with Emerson. Loos wrote the first chapter on a train to the West coast in spring 1924 for a film job, using her time to develop her satire of women who seemed to distract Mencken and other male friends. The manuscript remained in the pocket of a travel bag until she found it and sent it to Mencken after the turn of the year. Mencken thought it should be published but had recently sold out his share of the Smart Set and felt it wasn’t right for his newer venture, The American Mercury, so he suggested taking it to Harper’s Bazar where he joked it would be “lost among the ads” so as not to offend anyone with its satire of sex. However, the book gained quick attention in the magazine in its six installments between March-August 1925, and in its subsequent book edition published by Boni & Liveright published in November of the same year. A best seller that was quickly translated into over a dozen languages across the globe, Blondes provoked a sequel (But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, likewise published in installments by Harper’s Bazar in 1927 followed by a book in 1928 from Boni & Liveright), a quickly adapted stage play (debuting in spring 1926), syndicated comic strip (also in 1926, with word bubbles by Loos, often directly from the book), and a silent film (in 1928), as well as later adaptations. (Read more about the book’s production, reception, and adaptations.)
The success of Blondes provoked a dark turn in Loos’s relationship with Emerson, bringing out his jealousy of her success and related medical issues. The relationship had already been loosening: upon the couple’s move to Gramercy Park, Emerson introduced a tradition of spending one night a week separately, which he claimed would help the relationship but he primarily used to go on dates with various other women. Having not thought Loos’s serial novel important, he ignored it until it had begun to take off and establish Loos an even bigger name than she already was, which drove him to ridiculous requests and medical illness. When the Boni & Liveright edition was in final proofs, Emerson begged Loos to put in an elaborate acknowledgement dedicating the work to him and implying he had mentored her through the writing of it. Loos had intended to dedicate the book to Mencken but gave in, deciding it was a way to help Emerson’s pride. Loos’s editor cut it down to “To John Emerson.” Emerson did, however, work himself into his typical co-writing status for the stage play and screenplay. As Loos’s international celebrity heightened, Emerson developed a throat condition leaving him unable to speak. Several doctors diagnosed it as a purely psychological phenomenon driven by his jealousy, and in a trip to Europe Loos conspired with a doctor to put Emerson under for a fake “surgery” where the doctor supposedly removed “polyps” from his throat. When Emerson awoke, thinking he had really been operated on, they declared him cured, which resolved the symptom but not the underlying psychological issues.
Nonetheless, Emerson’s extensive grieving over Loos’s increased reputation and the toll this took on his health fed a sense of guilt in Loos, leading her to give up fiction writing after the publication of Brunettes. The couple publicly announced their (second) retirement after Emerson’s medical treatment and work on the adaptations. Indeed, for the last years of the 1920s Loos was nearly isolated. Emerson managed Loos’s money and largely lived off of her income—at least until the stock market crash, when he like most people lost a great deal of what they had. Emerson suggested Loos return to work in 1930 to support their financial situation. Finally, in 1931, Loos found a love letter from one of Emerson’s girlfriends, and the two began living separately and Emerson giving her an “allowance” out of her own money.
Later Career: Back to Hollywood
Loos and Emerson’s financial situation finally led her to accept a contract at MGM and move back to Hollywood in late 1931—but with Emerson staying behind in New York City to continue living separately (and off Loos’s wages). Her first script, also her first sound film, was Red-Headed Woman (1932), a Gene Harlow comedy about a woman who seduces her way into wealth. F. Scott Fitzgerald had been working on the script up to Loos’s arrival but had not been able to make it work; Loos was able to grab the comedy in the story. The pre-Hays Code film featured extramarital affairs, heavy drinking, and other activities to shock the censors, even after some scenes were cut. Loos described rewriting the beginning to make it clear to audiences the movie was a comedy to audiences who were not sure how to react to a test screening of a movie with so much scandalous activity. It’s new opening featured a series of three quick scenes with obvious laugh lines; the first is a nod to Loos’s Blondes, featuring Harlow (a blonde) wrapping up a dye job, looking into a mirror at her newly red hair approvingly, and declaring, “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they? Yes they do.” Loos claimed this film included in the only scene she ever directed, and it seems likely to have been this revised opening. After the rewrite, the movie was a hit and, renewing Loos’s streak of star-making, launched Harlow’s career. Loos claimed the film was a key provocation that brought the Code into place in 1934 (there is not clear evidence of a direct link in other accounts), but Carey notes that it made Loos the go-to MGM writer to write around the censors whenever so-called “Shady Lady” scripts went into production (150).Emerson did not stay behind in New York for long, joining Loos in Hollywood in early 1932 and, when her contract was up for renewal, talking his way into it as her writing “partner” once again. Through much of their second Hollywood career, Loos was increasingly hamstrung by Emerson’s insecurity and declining mental health. The film studios saw little worth in Emerson except as a favor to Loos, and at one point Loos had to talk Irving Thalberg into keeping him at MGM, offering to let the studio pay Emerson out of her salary. Emerson would finally be put in a sanitorium for the last 18 years of his life due to his mental health; while Emerson had long controlled the money Loos made, it was at this point that Loos found he had been outright stealing from her and moving money into a hidden account. When Emerson passed in 1956, Loos refused to visit his deathbed.
Loos worked for MGM for the better part of 18 years, returning to work from New York City in 1943. Much of Loos’s life beginning in the late forties returned to Blondes, fiction-writing, and writing various memoirs. When the idea for a musical play of Blondes arose in 1948, she was heavily involved and pushed for Carol Channing as the lead, which turned into another star-making role. She was less involved in the subsequent film adaptation of the musical with Marilyn Monroe, but approved of the changes made and of Monroe’s performance. During this time she was also revisiting Lorelei’s voice on the page with occasional guest pieces “authored” by Lorelei Lee in the New York Times. In 1951 returned to book-length fiction and published A Mouse Is Born, a Hollywood novel written in the form of a pregnant star’s letter to her unborn child. She also returned to writing for the stage, including an adaptation of Colette’s Gigi that would be Loos’s final star-maker: this time, Audrey Hepburn. As her film and stage-writing career declined, Loos was contracted to write her autobiography, A Girl Like I (a phrase of Lorelei’s), which focused on her life leading up to the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and appeared in 1966. The book renewed Loos’s celebrity and led to a sequel autobiography, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974), focused on her return to Hollywood and her relationship with Emerson, and two more memoirs: A Cast of Thousands (1977), really a coffee-table book with text excerpts from Kiss Hollywood Goodbye alongside a trove of Loos’s personal photos of various celebrities she had known, and The Talmadge Girls (1978), an in-depth reflection on the silent film actresses the Talmadge sisters and their mother, who Loos cited as the source for many of Dorothy’s jokes in Blondes. Anita Loos died in 1981.