A rainy day is the perfect time to finish a novel then investigate the movie by the same name. The movie was adapted from the Broadway musical screenplay that Anita Loos co-authored. It was released in 1953 starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.
The book was published in 1925.
That’s almost one hundred years ago! The characters are similar. I mean their names are the same – Lorelei and Dorothy. One is a blonde and the other a brunette. The title of the novel is actually Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: two stories. One is told in diary form as Lorelei navigates her journey to marriage and the other is mostly exposition, as Lorelei recounts the actions taken by Dorothy, including her back story of hardship, on her path to marrying her wealthy guy.
Yes – that marriage plot point is the same. The whole thing started when Anita Loos, already a successful screenwriter for Hollywood silent films and a member of the Round table gang (literary types who gathered to exchange witticisms – most people my age and older know this reference), noticed that young starlets were accepting casting couch invites even back then.
I think she was amused by their behavior and maybe didn’t think highly of them. She began penning this story to indulge that amusement while on a train from New York to California or the reverse.
The story had been released as a serial, each chapter in the monthly Harper’s Bazaar magazine and women loved it. It was considered really risque to show bold unmarried women as sexual beings, getting what they wanted – wealth, diamonds, etc. from wealthy men just because they were beautiful.
Specifically Lorelei. She is clearly a kept woman and even though it isn’t mentioned, she is most definitely having sex with Eisman and other men. And she is a teenager.
Yes, they called them flappers back then. Young and single women who wanted to have fun. They partied all night long with all sorts of men – meaning married and single. Mostly wealthy men who traveled to New York City on business trips.
Lorelei states that she had been an actress but the very married Mr. Eisman who wants to “educate her”, who pays for her trip to Paris, as well as her many shopping trips, her apartment in Manhattan and a maid, does not want her working. She says he thinks she aught to write her thoughts down because she is so smart – and this we as readers think is laugh-out-loud funny because the author deliberately misspells words and we think that the stereotypical (dumb) blonde has arrived.
But we are in for a surprise because what Lorelei lacks in book smarts, she makes up for in manipulative-sexy shrew smarts.
I think in 1925, women readers secretly wished they could be Lorelei more than mocking her foolish antics. There’s this one bit when she is in France and she comments that it is nice to have platonic friendships with men – this innocuous comment slides in the deeper meaning – that she is sleeping with all the rest of them – in a way that seems more provocative than I expected for a one-hundred-year-old novel.
How great would it be to have been a party girl in the 1920s with men clammoring to buy you dinner and showing their affection via diamonds and pearls and tiaras and whatnot?
I would love to see a film made about this book that is more accurate to its correct time period. not as a musical, not with twenty-year-old women who look thirty-five, IDK. When I imagined the characters as I was reading, I did not see Monroe. In fact, her characterization of Lorelei was a bit overacted. Jane Russell’s Dorothy was much better. When Dorothy gets wet in the movie (oh, btw, that scene with the men in swimwear is AMAZING), she looks like a modern girl. She’s so pretty without all the technicolor make-up and 1950s hairdo.
The book and the movie are really two different incarnations of the machinations of Anita Loos’ wry wit, style and overall talent for creating such memorable characters.
Read the book then let me know what you think. It’s so FUN!