Customer Reviews

Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, Creator of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"

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This book is like three books in one but instead of getting three books, you kind of get a third of three different books. It combines Cari Beauchamp's biographical chapters on Anita Loos' life and career, Loos' niece Mary Anita Loo's first-person remninicences of her famous aunt, and finally short stories or excerpts of Anita's screenplays or books, all mixed together throughout the book. It may have seemed like a novel idea but it's a bad format and not a pleasurable read.

The highlights are Ms. Beauchamp's chapters but her work does not reach the greatness of her superb biography of another lady screenwriter, Frances Marion, WITHOUT LYING DOWN. Part of the problem here may be she's not writing a "full" biography and may not have researched Loos as extensively as she did Marion, she's also a little too soft on Loos personally who like Louella Parsons never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Loos is pictured throughout as a sweet, long-suffering lady (this is somewhat of an "offical" biography given her niece's participation) but Loos' own Hollywood histories and even occasionally her novels reveal a more caustic woman not afraid to get a few digs in at those she apparently didn't like (Beauchamp herself mentions off-hand at one point that Loos disliked sweet Mary Pickford!!). The somewhat famous story of how Loos bad-mouthed Lillian Gish repeatedly to H. L. Menken and George Jean Nathan (both of whom were eager to meet her) is usually told in comic tones, as if she were playing with them, but to me it suggests a aggressive woman who did not want another female as competition for the attention of the two literary giants.

Mary Anita Loos' memories of her beloved aunt are quite charming if sugar-coated although she spares Anita's eccentric, neurotic husband John Emerson nothing. He must have had something to keep Anita at his beck and call for so long besides "duty". Mary Anita Loos passed away not long after the book's publication, like her famous aunt she made it into her 90's. Mary Anita had a modest career as a screenwriter herself and later in the 1960's wrote a number of best-selling potboiler novels, she had a good life story of her own and it would have been nice to read more about it.

And finally there's Anita. This outrageously funny and clever gal, part Mae West and part Dorothy Parker, wrote a number of superb screenplays and entertaining if at times dubious Hollywood histories. I'm less impressed with her novels but they are usually fun and entertaining (though at times irritating as well). Hacking up Anita's work into "greatest hits" here doesn't quite work however, especially when some of the essential great hits of her career are not featured. I do wish that instead of this one book we had gotten three different volumes, a straight-out biography from Beauchamp, a full memoir from Mary Anita, and finally a collection of Anita's writing. Anita Loos was one of the most creative women Hollywood ever knew and she was trail-blazing enough to have deserve the three full treatments.

Came in record time. Book is perfect and I have already read it with great pleasure. Would buy again from you should the need arise.

Anita Grinberg