Transcription of The Boston Transcript Review, November 25, 1925
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. By Anita Loos
New York: Boni & Liveright.
Of course for many this is the season's funniest book. It is rarely and side-splittingly delightful; it is the kind of sly, sophisticated, spontaneity that will make any man and most women roar with laughter not once but fifty times. The little blonde heroine whom we meet in New York city, being educated by a rich, middle-aged gentleman named Eisman, has quite a career in Europe. She cannot spell; she fails to know the difference between adverbs and adjectives. She does know sole marguery from corned beef hash, and Pol Roger from cocoa shells. Anita Loos has done some highly original work in the character study she has made of her little "gold digger," who hands out a very successful “line” to the many “gentlemen” she encounters on her journeyings from one Ritz Hotel to another on the Continent.
This engaging tale is written in the form of a diary. It is the only diary we have ever whole-heartedly enjoyed. Without restraint yet in a sufficiently genteel manner our blonde friend tells us more than enough of her aims and her methods and her successes. Of course in the beginning this naïve blonde from the American metropolis of Little Rock was satisfied with elegance and financial support. When we see her in Vienna she has decided that wealth plus a wedding ring would give an added zest to life. Her techniques with Mr. Spoffard who she picks up on the Oriental Express is a credit to the female sex. Her friend Dorothy, “very unreformed” says a few unkind things about our little blonde to New York reporters, when the engagement is finally announced in the U.S.A. The Social Register does not pay a great deal of attention to Henry Spoffard's fiancée: but at her début party The Racquet Club, the Silver Spray Social Club and The Knights of Pythias are all represented! This “début” is prominent in the headlines of one or two papers. For it lasted three days, even four, and the guests at the finale were not the ones who arrived at the beginning. “Lorelei's Debut a Wow” was the comment of one newspaper on the gay occasion.
However, despite a few setbacks of a social nature our little girl marches up the aisle to the strains of Wagner's favorite melody. Her dear friend Dorothy makes this comment on the ceremony. Dorothy says that she had to concentrate her mind on the massacre of the Armenians to keep herself from laughing right out loud in everybody's face. So say we all.