Monday, August 25, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 49 / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 49

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

by Anita Loos (1925)

A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age

Robert McCrum

Monday 25 August 2014

nita Loos, a screenwriting Hollywood wunderkind, says she began to draft Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a jazz age classic, on the American railroad, as she crossed from New York to LA in the early 1920s. Travelling on the celebrated Santa Fe Chief with the movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his brainless leading lady, the young Loos became exasperated that a woman so stupid could "so far outdistance me in feminine allure". Could this girl's secret, Loos wondered, possibly be rooted in her hair? "She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette."

Lorelei Lee (aka Mabel Minnow from Little Rock, Arkansas) was born in that nano-second of female rivalry. Whipping out her yellow pad, Loos began drafting The Illuminating (originally Intimate) Diary of a Professional Lady, teasing fact and fantasy into an intoxicating depiction of "the lowest possible mentality" in prohibition America, a gold-digging blonde who is not – surprise, surprise – quite as dumb as she looks. No wonder that the part burst into life when Marilyn Monroe starred in the 1953 film version.

Later, Loos joked that the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was "almost as gloomy" as a Dostoevsky novel. Indeed, without Lorelei's faux-naif interior monologue, her tale is replete with hints of rape, actual murder, seduction, gangsterism, and courtesanship, spun into airy nothing. When her diary begins, Lorelei is "under the protection" of the millionaire Gus Eisman, a Chicago button manufacturer, but in danger of falling in love with an impecunious British writer who wants to divorce his wife and marry the woman he believes to be his true love.

When Eisman gets wind of this, he sends his mistress on a European tour with her hard-boiled friend Dorothy. Quickly bored with London, despite a dance with the Prince of Wales, they head for Paris ("devine") and its romantic attractions, especially "the Eyeful Tower". Yet the longer Lorelei's sentimental education continues, the more she recognises the truth: continental men are no match for Americans. "I really think," she writes, "that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good but a diamond-and-safire [sic] bracelet lasts for ever."

Marilyn Monroe

This novella (it is barely 150 pages in my battered Penguin edition) falls into the category of "guilty pleasure", but I think it earns its place on this list, if only for the roll call of its distinguished contemporary fans, its lasting influence, and intensely quotable lines. Long before Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, Loos hit on a young woman's diary as the perfect medium for satirical romance. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, serialised in Harper's Bazaar, became cult reading. Edith Wharton, probably tongue in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel". Loos, an unreliable witness, claimed that James Joyce, who was losing his sight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee. Who knows? It's a little book with a broad smile, and a deceptively big heart.

A note on the text

In her prime, in the 1920s, Anita Loos was "the Soubrette of Satire"and also boasted that her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing followed immediately after Shakespeare's.

The roaring success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes owes an important debt to the celebrated critic and columnist, HL Mencken, a friend of Loos's. "Menck", as she called him, had just left the editorship of The Smart Set for The American Mercury, and correctly saw that "making fun of sex" was the kind of risque novelty that would work better in a popular middlebrow publication like Harper's Bazaar. So Loos took her Lorelei material to the Harper's editor, Henry Sell, who encouraged Loos to extract maximum advantage from Lorelei's European trip. In just a few months, Gentleman Prefer Blondes became a magazine sensation. Newsstand sales of Harper's doubled, tripled and quadrupled.

Then the publishers Boni and Liveright came calling, and made a contract for a slim hardback, illustrated by Ralph Barton. Blondes sold out at once as a runaway bestseller, becoming the second highest-selling book of 1926, and helping to define the jazz age for ever. A second edition of 60,000 copies was exhausted almost as quickly. Some 45 editions later (in the end, 80-plus), the book had passed into classic status. It would be translated into 14 languages, including Chinese. Eventually, Lorelei's most memorable obiter dicta found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The idea that "diamonds are a girl's best friend" passed into popular culture, and is now repeated without irony too often to be diverting. Loos herself lived long enough (she died in 1981) to describe her book as a "period piece" for the grandchildren of its first fans. "May they be diverted by the adventures of Lorelei Lee", she wrote, "and take courage from the words of her favourite philosopher: 'Smile, smile, smile.'"