Corinne Anita Loos (April 26, 1888 – August 18, 1981) was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her screenplay of the 1939 adaptation of The Women, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.
Early life Loos was born in Sisson (now Mount Shasta), California, to newspaper publisher Richard Beers Loos and Minerva Ellen "Minnie" Loos (). She had one sister, Gladys Loos, and one brother, Harry Clifford Loos, a physician and a co-founder of the Ross-Loos Medical Group.
About pronouncing her name, Loos said, "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation which is lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them."Funk. 1936.
Her father founded Sisson Mascot, a tabloid newspaper, for which her mother did most of the work of a publisher.Loos. 1966. In 1892, when Anita was three years old, the family moved to San Francisco, where her father bought the newspaper Music and Drama, with money that her mother "wheedled" from her maternal grandfather, dropped the subject of music, in which he had no interest, and retitled the weekly to The Dramatic Review, filled with the photographs of pretty girls, that copied the format of the British Police Gazette, and led to her father's romance with the opera singer Alice Nielsen.
By age six, Anita Loos wanted to be a writer. While living in San Francisco, she accompanied her father, an alcoholic, on exciting fishing trips to the pier, exploring the city's underbelly (the Tenderloin and the Barbary Coast) and making friends with the locals. This fed her lifelong fascination with lowlifes and loose women.Carey. 1988
Career
1897–1915: Early career In 1897, at their father's urging, Loos and her sister performed in a San Francisco stock company production of Quo Vadis? Gladys died at age eight of appendicitis, while their father was away on business.
Anita continued appearing on stage, being the family's breadwinner. Her father's spendthrift ways caught up with them, and in 1903 he took an offer to manage a theater company in San Diego. Anita performed simultaneously in her father's company, and under another name with a more legitimate stock company.
After graduating from San Diego High School, Loos devised a method of cobbling together published reports of Manhattan social life and mailing them to a friend in New York, who would submit them under the friend's name for publication in San Diego. Her father had written some one-act plays for the stock company, and he encouraged Anita to write plays; she wrote The Ink Well, a successful piece, for which she received periodic royalties.
In 1911, the theater was running one-reel films after each night's performances; Anita would take a perfunctory bow and run to the back of the theater to watch them. She sent her first attempt at a screenplay, He Was a College Boy, to the Biograph Company, for which she received $25.Loos. 1974 The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore and directed by D. W. Griffith, was her third screenplay and the first to be produced. Loos dredged real life, including her own, for scenarios: she dished up her father's cronies and brother's friends, also using the rich vacationers from the San Diego resorts; eventually every experience became grist for her script mill.
By 1912, Loos had sold scripts to both the Biograph and Lubin studios. Between 1912 and 1915, she wrote 105 scripts, all but four of which were produced.Norman. 2007. She wrote 200 scenarios before she ever visited a film studio.Schmidt. 1917
1915–1917: Hollywood
In 1915, trying to escape her mother's influence and objections to a career in Hollywood, Loos married Frank Pallma, Jr., the son of the band conductor.Scribners.1998. But Frank proved to be penniless and dull – after six months, she sent him out for hair pins, and while he was gone she packed her bags and went home to her mother. After that, Minnie rethought her position on a Hollywood career. Accompanied by her mother, Anita joined the film colony in Hollywood where Griffith put Loos on the payroll for Triangle Film Corporation at $75 a week with a bonus for every produced script.
Many of the scripts she turned out for Griffith went unproduced. Some he considered unfilmable because the "laughs were all in the lines, there was no way to get them onto the screen", but he encouraged her to continue, because reading them amused him. Her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing came right after Shakespeare's. When Griffith asked her to assist him and Frank E. Woods in writing the intertitles for his epic Intolerance (1916), she traveled to New York City for the first time to attend its premiere. Instead of returning to Hollywood, Loos spent the fall of 1916 in New York and met with Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair. They had an instant rapport and Loos remained a Vanity Fair contributor for several decades.
Loos returned to California as Griffith was leaving Triangle to make longer films, and she joined director and future husband John Emerson for a string of successful Douglas Fairbanks movies. Loos and company realized that Douglas Fairbanks's acrobatics were an extension of his effervescent personality and parlayed his natural athletic ability into swashbuckling adventure roles. His Picture in the Papers (1916) was noted for its wry style of discursive and witty subtitles: "My most popular subtitle introduced the name of a new character. The name was something like this: 'Count Xxerkzsxxv.' Then there was a note, 'To those of you who read titles aloud, you can't pronounce the Count's name. You can only think it.' "
The five films Loos wrote for Fairbanks helped make him a star. When Fairbanks was offered a sweetheart deal with Famous Players–Lasky, he took the team of Emerson-Loos with him at the high income of $500 a week. During this time Loos, Fairbanks, and Emerson collaborated well together, and Loos was getting as much publicity as either Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Photoplay magazine labeled her "The Soubrette of Satire".
1918–1924: New York In 1918, Famous Players–Lasky offered the couple a four-picture deal in New York for more money than they had been making with the Fairbanks unit.
Loos, Emerson and fellow writer Frances Marion migrated to New York as a group, with Loos and Emerson sharing a leased mansion in Great Neck, Long Island. Loos wanted Marion as chaperone, as she found herself attracted to Emerson, a man 15 years her senior that she would refer to as "Mr. E". He would readily admit that he "had never been, nor could be, faithful to any one female." Loos convinced herself he would see that she was different from all his other girls, and that behind his outwardly dull exterior was a great mind. She would later consider herself misled on both counts, writing: "I had set my sights on a man of brains, to whom I could look up", she lamented, "but what a terrible let down it would be to find out that I was smarter than he was."Loos. 1977.
The pictures for Famous Players–Lasky were not as successful as their previous films, partly because they starred Broadway headliners not adept at screen acting and their contract was not renewed. The scripts carried both names but were mostly products of Loos alone. Later Loos would claim that Emerson took all the money and most of the credit, though his contribution usually consisted of observing from bed as she worked.Gale Group. 2001 Much to the chagrin of her friends, her adoration of Emerson had manifested as subservience. When William Randolph Hearst offered Loos a contract to write a picture for his mistress, Marion Davies,Beauchamp. 1997 Loos included the unnecessary Emerson in the deal. Hearst liked the picture and Getting Mary Married (1919) was one of the first Marion Davies pictures that didn't lose money. In addition to their films, the couple wrote two books: How to Write Photoplays, published in 1920, followed by Breaking Into the Movies in 1921.
Loos and Emerson turned down another picture with Davies, preferring to write for their old friend Constance Talmadge, whose brother-in-law Joseph Schenck (husband of Norma Talmadge) was an independent producer. Both A Temperamental Wife (1919) and A Virtuous Vamp (1919) were great hits for Talmadge. The couple joined the Talmadges and the Schencks at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, with Constance filling the void left by the loss of her sister. When Anita and Constance weren't working, they went shopping. The Talmadge-Schencks convinced Anita to summer with them in Paris without Emerson. Much of this adventure would end up as fodder for Loos's book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Upon returning, they produced five more films in 16 months. During this time, Loos had filed for divorce from her estranged first husband. Emerson proposed marriage and they were married at the Schenck estate on June 15, 1919. Loos was among the first to join Ruth Hale's Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage as she continued with hers.
The couple moved into a modest Murray Hill apartment and cut back to two films a year in order to travel. They spent the summer in Paris. Loos and her new assistant, John Ashmore Creeland, visited many of the Paris-based writers Loos had met in America, as well as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie De Wolfe.
After one more film for Schenck and Talmadge, The Perfect Woman (1920), Emerson refused another contract. After working with Actors Equity during their 1919 strike, he decided that the Loos-Emerson team should make the move to the theater. Their first play, The Whole Town's Talking, which opened at the Bijou Theatre on August 29, 1923, received good reviews and was a moderate box-office success. Soon afterward the couple moved to a small house in Gramercy Park.
Emerson had convinced a devastated Loos that he needed to take a break from the marriage once a week. It was on these days he would date younger women, while Loos consoled herself by entertaining her friends: the Talmadge sisters, "Mama" Peg Talmadge, Marion Davies, Marilyn Miller, Adele Astaire and an assortment of chorus girls kept by prominent men. These "Tuesday Widows" soireés would influence her later writings, and it was with the "Tuesday Widows" that she visited one of her favorite hangouts, Harlem, where she developed a deep and lifelong appreciation for African-American culture. "Sometimes I get enquiries concerning my marriage to a man who treated me with complete lack of consideration, tried to take credit for my work and appropriated all my earnings", Loos wrote in Cast of Thousands. "The main reason is that my husband liberated me; granted me full freedom to choose my own companions."
1925–1926: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Loos had become a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken, a literary critic and intellect. When he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken, but gradually realized disappointingly, "High-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood with Mencken, she became keenly aware of this fact when he solicited the attention of a blonde in the dining car. Loos then began to write a sketch of Mencken and his vacant lady friends that would later become Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.