Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:19:52.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Authoring Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Mass-Market Beauty Culture and the Makeup of Writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Jean Marie Lutes
Get access

Extract

Lorelei Lee, the “professional lady” who narrates her own adventures in the 1925 international bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is not a likely alter ego for an aspiring writer. Indifferent to most books and unlikely to indulge in introspection, Lorelei makes writing far less a priority than managing social invitations and sexual conquests. Accordingly, Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, went to considerable lengths to distance herself from her blonde-bombshell narrator. As if to acknowledge and enforce such distance, Loos has Lorelei remark offhandedly in the opening pages of the book, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.” The novel's first edition highlights the incongruity of Lorelei's status as author, illustrating this remark with a drawing of a wide-eyed young woman clutching a pen and bending over a ruffle-skirted vanity table. She is dressed for writing in a pair of highheeled slippers, a sheer, rose-trimmed negligee, and a frilly bed cap tied under her chin. Years later, a publicity still for the musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continued to emphasize the distinction by juxtaposing a seated, conservatively clad Loos with the standing figure of Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee, elaborately gowned and dripping with diamonds. As the photograph suggests, Loos carefully positioned herself in opposition to the glamour girl whose appearance has since been labeled “the most significant event in the evolution of the dumb blonde” (Everett, 254).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 23 , October 1998 , pp. 431 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Banner, Lois W.American Beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Bauer, Dale M.Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bledstein, Burton J.The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.Google Scholar
Blom, T. E. “Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Canadian Review of American Studies 7:1 (Spring 1976): 39–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Nice, Richard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.Google Scholar
Cooper, Wendy. Hair: Sex Society Symbolism. London: Aldus, 1971.Google Scholar
Damon-Moore, Helen. Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.Google Scholar
Emerson, John, and Loos, Anita. How to Write Photoplays: With a Complete Scenario as Written by Them of ‘The Love Expert’. New York: James A. McCann, 1920.Google Scholar
Everett, Barbara. “The New Style of Sweeney Agonistes.” English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Ed. Rawson, Claude. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984: 243–63.Google Scholar
Fishbein, Morris. The New Medical Follies. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.Google Scholar
Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators. New York: William Morrow, 1984.Google Scholar
“Gentlemen Prefer Blues.” New Yorker 2, no. 39 (11 13, 1926): 40.Google Scholar
GilbertSandra, M. Sandra, M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Glaspell, Susan. Suppressed Desires: A Freudian Comedy in One Act. New York: Frank Shay, 1917.Google Scholar
Haiken, Elizabeth. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Hegeman, Susan. “Taking Blondes Seriously.” American Literary History 7 (Fall 1995): 525–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollinger, David A. “Inquiry and Uplift: Late Nineteeth-Century American Academics and the Moral Efficacy of Scientific Practice.” The Authority of Experts. Ed. Haskell, Thomas J.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984: 142–56.Google Scholar
“Investigation of Injuries from Hair Dyes, Dyed Furs, and Cosmetics.” American Physical Education Review 32, no. 9 (11 1927): 689.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. 1939; rept. New York: Teachers College Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Larson, Magali Sarfatti. “The Production of Expertise and the Constitution of Expert Power.” The Authority of Experts. Ed. Haskell, Thomas J.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984: 28–80.Google Scholar
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993.Google Scholar
Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic, 1994.Google Scholar
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Jethro K.The Tyranny of Experts: How Professionals Are Closing the Open Society. New York: Walker, 1970.Google Scholar
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. 1922; rept. New York: Macmillan, 1957.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Cast of Thousands. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. 1925, 1928; rept. New York: Penguin, 1989.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. “Literary at Last.” Harper's Bazar 60, no. 5 (05 1926): 64–70.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. “Why Girls Go South.” Fate Keeps on Happening: Adventures of Lorelei Lee and Other Writings. Ed. Ray Pierre Corsini. 1926; rept. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984: 253–93.Google Scholar
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mellow, James R.Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company. New York: Praeger, 1974.Google Scholar
Mencken, H. L.“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” American Mercury 7, no. 25 (01 1926): 127.Google Scholar
Paramore, Edward E. Jr. “The Child Wonder.” New Yorker 2, no. 38 (11 6, 1926): 25–28.Google Scholar
Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan, 1998.Google Scholar
“Poisonous Hair Dyes.” Literary Digest 89, no. 6 (05 8, 1926): 25.Google Scholar
Raub, Patricia. Yesterday's Stories: Popular Women Novelists of the Twenties and Thirties. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994.Google Scholar
Rooks, Noliwe M.Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Schrader, Richard J. “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: Anita Loos and H. L. Mencken.” Menckeniana: A Quarterly Review 98 (Summer 1986): 1–7.Google Scholar
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Salme Harju. Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward Bok and the Ladies' Home Journal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Stenn, David. Bombshell: The Life and Death and Jean Harlow. New York: Doubleday, 1993.Google Scholar
Walker, Nancy A.A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. New York: Viking, 1979.Google Scholar
Weibel, Kathryn. Mirror, Mirror: Images of Women Reflected in Popular Culture. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977.Google Scholar
Wykes-Joyce, Max. Cosmetics and Adornment: Ancient and Contemporary Usage. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.Google Scholar