Gentlemen Prefer Blondes author Anita Loos is born
The novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos is born on this day in Mt.Shasta California in 1888.Loos began writing as a child and by age 13 was already contributing stories and sketches to magazines.Her family moved to San Diego when she was a teenager and she briefly acted in a theater company managed by her father.
She combined her writing and acting experience by writing a short movie sketch and sending it to American Biograph Company in New York in 1912.The company owned by legendary director D.W.Griffith bought her idea for 25.Loos went to work as a screenwriter while still in her teens writing more than 200 movies that showcased such early stars as Douglas Fairbanks.
But her real fame as a writer came in 1925 when she wrote a humorous novel called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes which she started while on a long train ride.She claimed she wrote the book about scatterbrained blond gold-digger Lorelei Lee as a spoof to entertain her friend the writer and intellectual H.L.Mencken who supposedly had a taste for brainless blonds.
The book became an international bestseller was printed in 14 languages and ran through 85 editions.It was also made into a hit Broadway play in 1949 and a movie musical in 1953 starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe who crooned the famous tune Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend.Loos who stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed only about 94 pounds wrote several other plays and a memoir of her days in early Hollywood.She died on August 18 1981.
