The story goes that in March 1924, the screenwriter Anita Loos was on a train from New York to Hollywood. A blond woman named Mae Davis or Mae Clarke—Loos used each at different times—boarded and immediately captured the attention of all the men. According to Loos’s autobiography A Girl Like I, the blonde “was waited on, catered to, and cajoled by every male we encountered.” Loos, 35 years old but passing for younger, was striking and stylish. At 4 foot 11, she was tiny, with a tousled bob of brown hair, a straight nose, bow-like lips, and large, intelligent eyes. She was far more accomplished than Mae, having spent more than a decade writing screenplays for movies. On top of that, being ignored for this particular girl was galling because Mae had captured the amorous attention of the critic H.L. Mencken, Loos’s friend and sometime crush.
“Obviously there was some radical difference between that girl and me, but what was it?” Loos wrote. “She was not outstanding as a beauty; we were, in fact, of about the same degree of comeliness; as to our mental acumen, there was nothing to discuss: I was smarter.… Possibly the girl’s strength was rooted (like that of Samson) in her hair.” Reaching for a notepad, Loos scrawled a few paragraphs that would become the beginning of her comedic masterpiece Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Published a century ago, in November 1925, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a bestseller that spawned a play, a song by Irving Berlin, a silent film (now lost), a comic strip, wallpaper, a textile, a sequel, a Broadway musical, and a 1953 movie starring Marilyn Monroe. Loos didn’t know she was writing a book when she scribbled a scene featuring her character Lorelei Lee. When she shared it with Mencken as a joke—and to skewer the blonde he admired—he urged her to publish it. “Do you realize, young woman, that you’ve made fun of sex, which has never before been done?” he said. The story first appeared as a serial in Harper’s Bazaar. By the time Loos died in 1981, it had gone through 85 editions and been translated into 14 languages.
In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Lorelei records her daily gold digging in a diary, complete with misspellings. At a time when women had limited job options, Lorelei puts her looks to work to get money and jewelry from men. The book veers from one wealthy suitor to another as Lorelei collects her gifts, all the while scolding her brunette pal Dorothy for prioritizing laughs above her chance to build a bowerbird’s nest of treasure while she’s young and desirable. Lorelei explains, “So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.”
Loos was prolific, writing more than a hundred screenplays, not to mention Broadway plays, two novels, and several memoirs. Her films include Red-Headed Woman (1932), San Francisco (1936), and The Women (1939). She fixed scripts for F. Scott Fitzgerald and wrote roles for Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, and Douglas Fairbanks. In New York, she hung out at the Algonquin Round Table, and in Paris, she visited Gertrude Stein’s salon and became friends with Alice B. Toklas. As Cari Beauchamp writes in Anita Loos Rediscovered, “Loos knew all the Hollywood greats and worked with most of them. Her first script was directed by D.W. Griffith in 1912 and starred Mary Pickford; forty years later Anita was collaborating with Colette on Gigi and discovering Audrey Hepburn to play the role on the New York stage.”
Today, Lorelei Lee remains Loos’s most beloved character. Lorelei displays an ironic subversiveness that I hesitate to call feminism, as Loos was no feminist. Throughout her life, she was torn between the Victorian mores of her mother, who urged her to marry, and the freewheeling world of her theatrical father. Loos played within the patriarchal structure she grew up in, never attempting to change the rules, although she might sometimes cheat. As such, she had more in common with her blond gold digger than she might have admitted.
In fact, when Loos was a young woman, she acted out her own version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The plan was to catapult herself into a luxurious lifestyle by capturing the heart of a millionaire. And for this, Loos knew where to look: Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego, a beachfront resort that was a winter getaway for the East Coast elite.
So on an overcast day in May, I went to San Diego to learn the real story behind Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
First, I decided to visit Loos’s home, which still stands in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Pulling into downtown, I was surprised by a tent city by the freeway. As I drove through the streets, I passed people nodding out on sidewalks or dragging around plastic sacks of belongings. It’s a familiar sight in American cities, but San Diego has retained some of the charm that 15-year-old Loos experienced when her family moved here in 1903. Many of the historic buildings remain, and something about this layering of the past and present made the homelessness seem more visceral.
I located Loos’s home in the Nesmith-Greely Building. Constructed in 1888, it’s a Romanesque revival brick structure with slender stone turrets pointing to the sky. Loos had the four-room apartment painted “white, red, and gold” and enjoyed looking out the “big octagonal window” onto Fifth Street. At the time, nearby businesses included a mercantile, a hardware store, and a shop that sold Parisian gowns—no doubt of interest, as Loos loved fashion.
Today, the block is home to nightclubs and bars with names like Onyx and Trailer Park After Dark. Some buildings were painted coal black; in others, empty windows yawned to dusty stillness. On the corner was a comedy club, which might have been appropriate given Loos’s father’s love of humor and alcohol, if not for the seediness of the area.
Born in 1888 in Sisson (now Mount Shasta), California, and raised in San Francisco, Loos experienced a childhood full of poverty and instability. Her father, R. Beers Loos, moved a lot, starting and abandoning newspapers and running vaudeville theaters. A “good looking devil,” as Loos described him, he openly cheated on his wife, Minnie, a rancher’s daughter he’d met at a dance. Despite this, she stayed with him until her death.
Loos adored her “scamp” of a father, who was charismatic and affectionate. He took her fishing on the San Francisco docks, where they ran into a young Jack London, or to saloons to socialize with theater people, including his friend Harry Houdini. “I was always happiest in San Francisco with my Pop,” Loos wrote.
But R. Beers was a functioning alcoholic who periodically deserted his wife, two daughters, and son. In 1898, his neglect came to a crisis when eight-year-old Gladys developed a sudden infection of the abdomen while he was away. Although the doctor performed an emergency operation on the kitchen table, the girl died in the hospital that night. She was buried before her father came home. Minnie ordered him never to say Gladys’s name again, and he never did.
This tragedy did little to change his behavior, however. A few years later, after he squandered Minnie’s inheritance on a failed business, the family moved to San Diego. R. Beers was hired to manage the Rudwin Theatre, where Loos was employed as an actor for $15 a week (about $545 today).
The Rudwin was in a renovated stable a block from Loos’s apartment. Today, it’s a parking garage. Across the street was the Golden Lion Tavern, now another comedy club, with a shrine to Phyllis Diller in the window.
Like many women, Loos lied about her age. This may have started at San Diego High School, where she was older than her classmates, graduating at age 19. In the afternoons, she worked as an actor. At one point, she performed for two theaters, wearing a blond wig at one so the audience wouldn’t recognize her. She spent her free time at the San Diego Library, developing a crush on Baruch Spinoza and dreaming of living in New York. “I was that type the French call a cérébrale,” she wrote. “My interest in sex stemmed directly from the brain.”
Around this time, R. Beers started playing one-reel silent movies between the live acts, which Loos adored. She wrote, “I would hurry with my costume changes to get down to the dark stage, where I could see them from the reverse side of the screen, with the light of the projector casting a bright splotch in the middle.” In a moment of inspiration, she realized that pictures needed scripts and decided to write one.
Loos had first been published at age eight, when she won a $5 prize for a floor wax advertisement. (R. Beers “borrowed” the money and never paid her back.) Now, 15 years later, she wrote a screenplay and signed it “A. Loos,” prudently keeping her gender ambiguous. Climbing into the projection booth, she searched the film canisters for an address, and she mailed her script to the Biograph Company in New York.
Soon, a letter with the salutation “Dear Sir” came, with a check for $25 enclosed. Biograph was purchasing her script. Her first produced film was 1912’s The New York Hat, about a girl who causes a scandal by accepting a fashionable gift. It starred Pickford and Lionel Barrymore and was directed by Griffith. According to Loos, over three years, she submitted 105 scripts and sold 101 of them. Her payments went from $25 to $300.
Loos’s timing was perfect. Film wasn’t yet seen as an important industry, which allowed women to enter the profession. Beauchamp writes, “Copyrighting of films also began in 1912, [which is how] we know that women wrote almost half of all films made over the next ten years.” By contrast, a study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that between 2007 and 2017, only 10 percent of movies were written by women.
And yet, Loos hid her screenwriting, especially from men. They thought she was lying or, worse, it made them dislike her: “My beau didn’t want to believe I was an authoress; it turned me into some sort of monster; I no longer seemed to be a girl.”
By her mid-20s, Loos was caught between traditional feminine roles and a career that no one understood. She decided that the quickest way out of “grimy downtown San Diego” was by a “standard trick which antiquates Cinderella: marry a millionaire.”
With that, Loos turned her attention to Hotel del Coronado, and so did I.
Coronado is a peninsula five miles from downtown San Diego. When Loos lived nearby, it was accessible only by ferry, but now a bridge swoops over the water. Hotel del Coronado perches by the ocean like an antique birdcage. Built the year Loos was born, in 1888, it was the largest beach resort in the world. It’s still an impressive building, a sprawling white pile of towers and arched balconies under steeply pitched red roofs. A historic landmark, it conjures seasides of yesteryear, with women in snowy gowns and men in straw hats and suspenders.
The hotel recently underwent a $550 million renovation. As I walked into the lobby, my impression was of wood. The floor, ceiling, balconies, pillars, and reception desk were all different stained types of timber. A man passing by muttered, “It’s dark in here.” Wallpaper with palm fronds mirrored the exterior landscaping and somehow didn’t clash with the stained-glass windows. A crystal chandelier hung over a round settee the color of a tree frog.
It was nice, but disappointing after reading Loos’s breathless account of the lobby, which “appeared to be endless; it was dazzlingly white with panels outlined in gold, and the carpet was bright red, a color scheme which still remains in my mind’s eye as the peak of luxury.” The problem, I thought, was that this hotel was meant to have space around it, with lawns, tennis courts, and gardens spreading languidly to the sea. Instead, skyscrapers and traffic press in on the historic building. My room had a view of a chain-link fence and a port-a-potty.
On her first trip to the hotel as a teenager around 1906, Loos experienced the class awakening that set the rest of her life in motion. For the occasion, she wore a black velvet gown with brown fur on the hem, a hand-me-down from her aunt. Donning a peach-basket hat and escorted by her Pop, she was unprepared for the splendor of the hotel—and for the guests, who were arrayed in cool, crisp linen. By comparison, Loos felt overdressed and provincial.
She and her father ordered drinks at the “glistening mahogany bar” with a vista of the ocean and the scent of Le Parfum Idéal by Houbigant in the air. Loos squirmed, suffering “the qualms of a trespasser.” It wasn’t just her gown; it was her Pop, whom she suddenly saw with new eyes. He was loud and unrefined, cracking jokes and smoking a cheap cigar.
Loos promised herself she would enter this world of opulence and privilege. “Right then and there,” she wrote, “was born a desire to get away from the raffish milieu of our home.”
Naturally, I had to see the famed Babcock & Story Bar, where this epiphany had taken place. The original mahogany bar is still there, with a carved cupola on one end and a mirrored wall of bottles. I purchased the Aviation, a $20 cocktail with a purple flower floating on the surface like a drowned butterfly. The room had an incongruous atmosphere. Aside from the antique bar, it felt like an airport lounge, with round tables, vinyl chairs, and giant TVs playing basketball. The floor was covered in round tiles I’ve seen at Home Depot. I tasted my drink. It had one flavor: sour.
I sat facing the beach, which I could see beyond an expanse of plastic grass where children were playing soccer. No one was wearing crisp linen. Before me, a woman in skintight leggings and a crop top smiled up at three older men in polo shirts. She had mothlike eyelashes, long hair, and a prominent butt implant. There was no mistaking this last part. I wondered whether, like Loos, she had determined that “a girl who couldn’t hook a millionaire in such an environment would have had to be a gargoyle.” I want to think that since women can now work in every profession, we’ve moved beyond catching a rich husband, but butt implants in certain contexts suggest differently.
Loos’s gold-digging opportunity lay in Tent City, a very different version of what I had passed while exiting the freeway. From 1900 to 1938, it was a low-cost summer retreat where locals could rent semipermanent striped tents for $1 to $2 a day. They came with solid floors and furniture, including beds, a basic kitchen, and a table. A streetcar ran through Tent City, past restaurants, shops, various pools, a dance pavilion, and a bandstand. In 1912, R. Beers was hired to edit the Tent City News in exchange for free accommodations for his family, including his daughter.
Outside the hotel by the marina is Imagine Tent City, an installation by artist Todd Stands. Historical photographs have been transferred onto glazed tiles and arranged in a mosaic, making it easy to imagine the boisterous summer camp. In the pictures, some people are water-skiing and others are standing waist-deep in swimming pools, grinning at the camera. Everyone looks like they’re having a great time.
To start her husband hunt, Loos designated a man named Hughie as a “makeshift beau” and convinced him to take her to the hotel’s heated pool. Spotting a man in a monogrammed bathing suit, she animatedly flirted with Hughie, who was unaware he was “being used as a device to lure his future rival.” Her plot worked. The next day, the wealthy fellow approached her while she was lounging outside her tent, pretending to read. He was the son of a Detroit automaker.
But Loos wasn’t done. She met a second man, the “son of a Western Senator” who owned a silver mine in Elko, Nevada. He was smitten, but alas, Loos’s heart wasn’t in gold digging. Why should it be when her screenwriting career was going so well? When the Detroit fellow got into a fistfight with another girl’s brother over his attachment to Loos, she was unimpressed: “I had already written it as a slapstick farce. It featured a cross-eyed comic named Chester Conklin and was called His Hated Rival.” Evidently, the film, now lost, depicted the fight before it happened.
Soon, the senator’s son proposed, but Loos couldn’t fathom living in Elko and turned him down. The next day, he drove up in a red Stutz roadster intended as a gift, but Loos’s mother wouldn’t allow her to accept the car. Thus came the “loss of a reward which might have inspired me to be a gold-digger.”
The truth may have been sadder. Not long after, the senator’s son killed himself by driving off Point Loma into the San Diego Bay. Loos unconvincingly insisted it had nothing to do with her, claiming he was depressed about a limp and feared being called a cripple. But she may have learned that playing with people’s emotions can have tragic consequences.
In 1914, Biograph was eager to meet the mysterious A. Loos. By then, they knew she was a woman, but not that she was a diminutive 26-year-old who looked like a teenager. When Loos and her mother arrived at the studio in Los Angeles, L.E. Dougherty, head of the story department, assumed that Minnie was A. Loos. Learning the truth, he stared in shock. “Do you mean it’s you who wrote those stories we’ve been buying?” he said to Loos. The director Griffith was equally surprised. Both men gaped for so long that Minnie grew offended and swept out of the room, ordering Loos to “come along.” Griffith called them back, apologized, and gave them a tour of the studio. The slave girl scene in Judith of Bethulia was being filmed, and the scantily dressed actors shocked Minnie. Griffith took them to lunch, where Loos told him about her love of Spinoza and Voltaire.
Griffith would soon make The Birth of a Nation, a racist propaganda film that was also the first blockbuster movie. It both reignited the Ku Klux Klan and established filmmaking as a serious endeavor. While history frowns on Griffith—for good reason—at the time, he was the hottest director around. When he invited Loos back in the morning to be a slave girl in Judith of Bethulia, she was thrilled.
But as they left the studio, Minnie said, “If we hurry, we can catch the evening train to San Diego,” according to Loos’s autobiography. Her mother wanted to leave town without telling Griffith that Loos wouldn’t be returning the next day. When pressed, Minnie burst out that she hated theater people and didn’t want her daughter to be a half-naked slave in a movie. She was worried about Loos’s respectability and believed that the only thing that could save her would be to marry a nice man.
Now Loos had ghosted the biggest movie director, and afterward, she was too embarrassed to approach him. Her thoughts again turned to marriage, this time as a means of escape. She needed a husband she could control, so she picked Frankie Pallma, the son of a band conductor who performed in Tent City. Handsome and nearly as short as she was, he didn’t mind her screenwriting career and promised to take her to New York.
As the wedding approached, Loos sensed she was making a mistake. It occurred to her that she had plenty of money, so why did she need a husband? She confessed to Minnie that she wanted to call the whole thing off. “But we can’t do that, honeybunch,” her mother said. “I’ve already ordered the cake!”
During the wedding, R. Beers was so visibly disappointed in the union that afterward, Loos whispered, “Don’t worry, Pop! This wasn’t legal; I had my fingers crossed.” She discovered there would be no honeymoon in New York, just a rented bungalow in Coronado. That night, she felt that married life was “a clumsy, much overrated business.”
Loos later claimed she was married for one day, but it was several months. During that time, she sent a new screenplay to Biograph. The response was enthusiastic. “I hailed your script as one would receive advance news of the prodigal,” wrote Dougherty. “What have you been doing?” He added that she was welcome at the studio anytime.
She finally had a path forward. To end her marriage, Loos devised a scheme as silly as one of her movies. She sent Frankie to buy hairpins, packed up, and ran away. Her mother was surprisingly amenable and agreed to accompany her to L.A. “It seemed I was now equipped to combat the sins of Hollywood,” Loos observed, “for I had lost my virtue quite respectably.”
Today, Hotel del Coronado nods further to Tent City through the Cabanas, mini-townhouses with striped awnings out front. When I passed one, a family of four was sitting by a propane fire facing the sea. Each person held an electronic device and was lost in a screen. I walked out onto the soft sand and thought of the happy people in the Tent City photographs. Something has been lost in American life. Loos was poor, but she could support her family as an actor. The cost of living was lower, the wealth spread among more people. She lived in a time when becoming a billionaire was as likely as flying to the moon.
Yet I wouldn’t exchange my freedoms as a woman to go back to Loos’s time. In the late 1970s, the elderly Loos appeared on the TV show Midday with Bill Boggs with Broadway veterans George Abbott, Harold Clurman, and Robert Whitehead. She sports a silver bob under a beige beret and oversize sunglasses. Boggs ignores her for 11 minutes and a commercial break, then asks whether she thinks Abbott’s caricature from Sardi’s restaurant is a good likeness.
“No, he’s prettier than that,” Loos says.
Finally, 35 minutes into the conversation, Boggs asks Loos how she got started in pictures. She attempts to tell him about climbing into the projection booth to get the Biograph address, but he constantly interrupts her.
Loos: I was a stage child, and I played parts when I was seven years old and—
Boggs: Did your father have a theater?
Loos: My father had a theater. And it struck me one day that movies must need a plot before they start shooting, and I wrote one—
Boggs: What year was this about when you produced this?
It’s maddening to watch. However, Loos handles the situation gracefully. In A Girl Like I, she explains that she learned to keep quiet in a room of men. “Very few girls were honored by invitations” into the masculine literary world, she writes. “I was there to listen and, except for casual brief comments, I kept my mouth shut.” Here she is, doing the same thing on TV. And again, she’s the only woman at the table.
Loos was held back by the men in her life—especially her father and her second husband, an actor and director who was jealous of her success and took credit for her work. Despite this, she accomplished a great deal. I can see why she was suspicious of feminism, as misguided as I find this view. As she thought of it, feminists gave the game away.
“The dumbest thing they could have done,” she said once, “was to let men in on the secret that women are smarter than they are.”•
Joy Lanzendorfer’s first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Raritan, the Atlantic, and Ploughshares as well as on NPR and for the Poetry Foundation, among others.
