Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”

Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" T. E. BLOM In January, 1926, Edith Wharton wrote Frank Crowninshield that she was "just reading the Great American novel (at last!) 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,' & I want to know if there are - or will be - others, & if you knew the funny woman, who must be a genius -." Crowninshield did indeed know Anita Loos; he sent Wharton's postcard to her, and when Loos suggested to Wharton that she had overpraised the book, Wharton responded: "I meant every word I wrote about 'Blondes.'" 1 In February of the same year, William Faulkner wrote Loos, Ihave just read the Blonde book. ... Please accept my envious congratulations on Dorothythe way you did her through the (intelligence?) of that elegant moron of a cornflower Only you have played a rotten trick on your admiring public. How many of them, do you think, will ever know that Dorothy has something, that the dancing man, le gigolo, was really somebody? My God, it's charming- best hoax since Witter Binner' s Spectral School in verse - most of them will be completely unmoved- even your rather clumsy gags won't get themand the others will only find it slight and humorous. The [Sherwood] Andersons even mentioned Ring Lardner in talking to me about it. But perhaps that was what you were after, and you have builded better than you knew: I am still rather Victorian in my prejudices regarding the intelligence of women, despite Elinor Wylie and Willa Cather and allthe balance of them. But I wish I had thought of Dorothyfirst. 2 Although Wharton's and Faulkner's responses may in part be no more than the expression of passing enthusiasm for an amusing bestseller, both comments also suggest their authors' awareness that Anita Loos' brief book was a significant contribution to American letters. Yet to this day, serious consideration of the precise nature of that contribution has, if anything, been inhibited by the durable appeal of Blondes.3 Frederick Hoffman, for example, finds that the continued popularity of Blondes helps perpetuate the false myth of the twenties as" a grotesque world, remembered for sophomoric behavior." 4 If it is true that popularity is no index to critical worth, it is no less true that popularity may hinder accurate assessment of critical worth. Perhaps fifty years after its first appearance in print, we should look at Blondes seriously. I suggest that a close reading of the text reveals the many-faceted brilliance of Loos' satiric and prophetic vision: satiric, because like all satire, her book plays off the fads and follies it ridicules, yet cuts deeper to expose the human inadequacy concealed behind the flamboyant mask; prophetic, because an America that seemTHE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 1, SPRING 1976 ingly could not or would not see the point of Loos' satire nevertheless mined her book for a number of the aphorisms and attitudes that in turn became the bywords and guidelines of popular American culture. Nowhere is this phenomenon more clearly seen than in Loos' heroine, Lorelei Lee, the ineluctably fascinating, amoral, and seemingly witless beauty who became America's first dumb blonde, that peculiarly American Venus who spawned squads of daughters in literature (Kanin's Billie Dawn, Inge's Cherie, Williams' Baby Doll, Welty's Bonnie Dee) and in life (Jean Harlow, Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe, and Goldie Hawn). In 1953, Loos commented on her heroine's popularity: "Lorelei, the immoral gold digger, [became] the sweetheart of the world. Almost everyone seemed to have missed the point of the story. Lorelei [became] a kind of Cinderella." 5 Yet Loos' surprise that Lorelei should become the world's sweetheart is in some ways ingenuous, for Lorelei was created out of her embittered author's personal knowledge of the compelling attractiveness of such a woman in a society which, terrified by the sexual titillation it craves, delights in women who are beautiful fools. In her late twenties, talented, famous, and successful, Loos fell in love with H. L.Mencken, who, though he accepted her as a witty friend, became infatuated with one Mae Davis, an aspiring blonde actress with a "naive, stupid viewpoint on everything." Loos' response...