Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began, she claimed, as a brief sketch on a train in response to the inordinate attention a blonde sitting nearby was given by a male passenger while Loos was all but ignored. From that fleeting scene came the quintessential gold digger's bible. As Loos's heroine, Lorelei Lee of Little Rock, advises, "Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever." The story has enjoyed many incarnations, chief among them the 1953 movie starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei and Jane Russell as her sidekick, Dorothy Shaw. First published by Liveright in 1925--and now brought back into print by the same house--the novel will find a new audience to delight, amaze and amuse.
Lorelei and Dorothy, lounge singers, are in pursuit of "education," to be provided by Daddy #1, Gus Eisman, king of the button business. He puts the girls on a ship, crossing the Atlantic for Paris, London and the "Central of Europe." The men they meet aboard and ashore are all dazzled and can't wait to be taken advantage of. Lorelei, always one to hedge her bets, extorts jewelry and furs where she can, believing that having only one provider would be a mistake.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the book is Loos's language. In her diary, Lorelei refers to herself as "A girl like I," mangles her spelling and grammar, makes incorrect multilingual puns and, in general, creates a language all her own. Her take on what she sees is unusual: "The Eyefull Tower is devine!"
One of Lorelei's serious suitors is Mr. Spoffard, a "Prespyterian" who took Dorothy and Lorelei to see all the kunst in Munich. As he tells her, "I seemed to remind him quite a lot of a girl who got quite a write-up in the Bible who was called Magdellen. So then he said that he used to be a member of the choir himself, so who was he to cast the first rock." Lorelei's eventual meeting with Mr. Spoffard's mother is a classic scene--one among many.
Lorelei is a combination of insouciance, innocence and street savvy that is irresistible. She has Piggie, one of her suitors, send her a dozen orchids every day, reasoning thus: "I always think that spending money is only just a habit and if you get a gentleman started on buying one dozen orchids at a time he really gets very good habits." Pure Lorelei. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: A thoroughgoing romp through the Jazz Age led by Lorelei Lee, a little girl from Little Rock with a voice all her own.