Loos - A Girl Like I: An Autobiography

The name Anita Loos is legend to us all, but there are some who may wonder about the woman behind the legend. To begin with, she is the author of over two hundred screen plays including the classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . In Hollywood, she wrote scenarios for D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Constance Talmadge. In fact, Anitas first attempt at screen writing, called The New York Hat , became one of Griffiths early films and starred Lionel Barrymore, Mary Pickford, and the Gish sisters. Anita Loos practically invented the movies.

But more than that, she helped to create an era. The friend of Clark Gable and Elsa Maxwell, of Sherwood Anderson and Joe Frisco, she knew everyone there was to know. Today she can tell a new story about H. L. Mencken, or Alice B. Toklas, or Aldous Huxley, and it will be the best story you have ever heard. From New York to London, she was everywhere there was to be. Her name appeared daily in the columns. Her opinion was sought on all mattersand it was heeded, too. When she whacked off her hair, the world did the same, and thus the windblown bob was born. Anita was the original flapper. She was the social and literary handmaiden to an age. This book is her autobiography.

When she was a schoolgirl in California, Anita made a resolution never to be bored. Years later, to offset the tedium of a train trip in the company of a witless blonde, she scribbled a sketch about a gold-haired girl from Little Rock named Lorelei Lee. The sketch grew into the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes which became so prodigious a best seller it was even serialized in Chinese. Lorelei Lee is the immortal mouthpiece of such wisdom as Kissing your hand can make a girl feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever. Fate, as Lorelei said, has always kept on happening to Anita. It was inevitable that Hollywood in its infancy should grab her talent; it was equally inevitable that she would escape the place whenever possible in favor of less idiotic surroundings. In New York she enjoyed the bibulous era of Prohibition because she had no taste for liquor but a great deal for laughter. Her abhorrence for boredom and her highly individual point of view shine through this autobiography. It is a privilege to meet, at long last, the unhelpless brunette with brains who made a historic institution out of a dumb blonde.

ALSO BY ANITA LOOS

Novels

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

But They Marry Brunettes

A Mouse Is Bom

No Mother to Guide Her

Screen Plays

The New York Hat

Nellie the Female Villain

American Aristocracy

The Redheaded Woman ( from the novel by Katharine Brush )

San Francisco ( in collaboration with Robert Hopkins )

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

and 200 others

Plays

Happy Birthday

The Kings Mare ( adapted from the French by Carolle )

Gigi ( from the novel by Colette )

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Copyright 1966 by Anita Loos

All rights reserved

The lines on page 134 from Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress are Copyright 1917, The Macmillan Company, renewed 1945 by Elizabeth C. Lindsay; What Her Best Young Man Should Say To That Golden Haired Girl Over There If He Has Any Nerve on pages 142-43 is Copyright, under title To A Golden Haired Girl In a Louisiana Town, 1923, The Macmillan Company, renewed 1951 by Elizabeth C. Lindsay. Both from Collected Poems by Vachel Lindsay and used by permission of The Macmillan Company.

The excerpts from letters of Vachel Lindsay are used with the permission of Nicholas C. Lindsay.

Rsume (page 150) is from The Portable Dorothy Parker . Copyright 1926, 1954 by Dorothy Parker. By permission of The Viking Press, Inc.

Jacket art by Doug Davis

FOR GLADYS

( Following Chapter 7 )

• A drawing of Anita Loos by Ralph Barton, illustrator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• Anita Loos, at the time Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was published
• Cleopatra and George Smith, grandparents
• Minnie Smith Loos, mother
• R. Beers Loos, father
• Pop, singing Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay
• Smoothy, the laundress, daughter of a Klamath chief
• Anitas birthplace in Etna Mills, California
• Anita, aged three
• Sister Gladys
• Brother Clifford
• Great-Aunt Ella
• Aunt Nina
• Uncle Horace Robinson
• Gladys and Anita in Quo Vadis ?
• Anita as Little Lord Fauntleroy
• Fay Tincher
• Fay Tincher in Nellie, the Female Villain
• The New York Hat
• D. W. Griffith on the set
• Lillian Gish and an extra in Birth of a Nation
• The main set for D. W. Griffiths Intolerance
• A scene from Intolerance . Seena Owen as Princess Beloved, Alfred Paget as King Belshazzar
• Mabel Normand
• Anita Loos and John Emerson in the cutting room
• Mae Marsh

( Following chapter 13 )

• Douglas Fairbanks in American Aristocracy
• Anita and John Emerson
• Wallace Reid, with Tully Marshall, in Sick Abed
• Erich von Stroheim
• Von Stroheim in Foolish Wives
• Anita and the fashions
• John Emerson, Anita Loos, Natalie Talmadge, and Buster Keaton
• D. W. Griffith and Joseph M. Schenck
• Anita before and after the haircut
• Vachel Lindsay
• Sherwood Anderson
• Constance Talmadge
• Constance Talmadge in The Goldfish
• Constance Talmadge with Johnny Kane in The Virtuous Vamp
• Norma Talmadge
• H. L. Mencken as priest
• Joe Frisco
• Wilson Mizner as monk
• Chester Conklin as Lorelei Lee

Sometime in mid-1850, at a church in Hartford, Connecticut, a girl with the incredible name of Cleopatra Fairbrother was married to a certain prosperous and respectable George Smith. The newlyweds, who were my grandparents, had met when Cleopatra was sixteen and living on the Vermont farm where she was born. Why the child of a New England farmer came to be called after the Serpent of the Nile has never been explained. The family name of Fairbrother sounds proper enough, and no doubt the Fairbrothers were people of moral rectitude, for they were Shakers; moreover, they must have been industrious or they would never have taken root in so grim a territory as Vermont. Whoever named that baby must have had visions of exotic luxury or at any rate been fed up with the meager life of a frontier farm.

In addition to this, one of our forebears was reputed to have been the historic firebrand Ethan Allen, hero of Crown Point and Ticonderoga and the French and Indian War. Seeing that Allen never married and that he preferred native American girls to the white-skinned settlers, Cleopatra must have had Indian blood in her veins, along with bastardy and a hankering for excitement.

On the other hand, George Smith had been a worthy citizen from the days of his boyhood on a farm in Bedfordshire, England, where he was born in 1825. An early daguerreotype shows him rugged and humorless, with the stem expression of a young George Washington. When only seventeen he already had the ambition, initiative, and price of a ticket to get to America on a clipper ship. After a voyage that took forty-two days, George Smith landed in New York and immediately proceeded by horseback to Wisconsin, where he had heard there was a shortage of farm labor and hoped he might quickly earn enough money to buy a farm of his own. But before he achieved his stake, news of the discovery of gold in California electrified the world, and Grandpa determined to join the stream of argonauts heading for the Far West. In company with several other young men he fitted out an ox team and started across the plains. For seven months they hacked their way through virgin country, beset by Indians, buffaloes, personal bickering, food shortages, and scurvy until, at long last, they came upon the site of the Great Discovery itself at Sutters Fort in the Sacramento Valley.