Anita Loos

Loos was a tiny, dark-haired Californian who began selling scenarios to the movies while still a schoolgirl. D.W. Griffith's Biograph company bought her work sight unseen, assuming the author was a grown man, and by her teens she was one of the busiest writers in the young industry. Her early triumph was The New York Hat, filmed with Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore.

Her particular art was the intertitle, the printed card that carried dialogue and comment in the silent film. Loos elevated it from clumsy exposition to a form of wit, and audiences began coming to pictures to read her jokes. Paired with the director John Emerson, whom she married, she wrote a string of sophisticated comedies built around Douglas Fairbanks, turning the acrobat into a laughing satirist of modern American manners.

In 1925 she published a slim comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the mock diary of the gold-digging flapper Lorelei Lee. It became an international sensation, admired by everyone from ordinary readers to the literary heavyweights of the day, and it fixed forever the archetype of the shrewd woman playing dumb. It would live on through a stage musical and the 1953 film with Marilyn Monroe.

When sound arrived, Loos moved smoothly into dialogue. At MGM she wrote the notorious Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman, injected zing into the disaster epic San Francisco, and adapted, with Jane Murfin, the all-female claws-out comedy The Women. She wrote plays, more novels, and several sparkling volumes of memoir that mythologized old Hollywood with a knowing wink. She kept working and holding court in New York almost to the end, a bright, birdlike survivor of the very beginnings of the movies. She died in 1981, past ninety, one of the last living links to the Biograph days.