Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos

Here are Haydn's Paris Symphonies.

See the pretty little pink bits?  I managed to occupy Hercule the Destroyer with an eraser while I typed.  Like to see what I'm typing on? I'd like to ring my little Ringneck's neck.  Unfortunately parrots are like three year olds holding scissors that you can never discipline.

And I got to type with Percy on my head.  I wish you could hear him whistling along with Haydn.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is the story, first person diary form, of a little blonde girl from Little Rock, Arkansas who is apparently so mesmerizingly pretty that every man who comes into contact with her wants her for himself and finds himself, not always willingly, spending oodles of money on her, in New York and abroad. This little blonde is able to swindle any man, married or single. She is the ultimate gold digger.

The writing is fluid and funny in that the protagonist, Lorelei Lee, writes like she is some wide-eyed air head, yet she knows what she wants. Stuff. Expensive stuff and lots of it. Men are her means of getting it. One wonders if she knows this is a young woman's profession and she might want to get a nursing degree or something before she ages out of her career.

While initially I enjoyed the book, it got a little monotonous and, frankly, I didn't like Lorelei very much. She gives a bad name to women, although I know the author, Loos, was parodying a type, I found myself rooting for the stupid men she came across.

The book is much better than the movie. Unless you like watching Marilyn Monroe and Rosalind Russell pose around, singing inane songs.



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 But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady by Anita Loos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes is the follow up to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Both are tongue in cheek satire on the expected inter relationship between men and women as portrayed in Hollywood movies. Rich man falls in love with poor, sweet, innocent girl from nowhere.

Except though Loos' women may be innocent, they're not stupid. Men seem to helplessly fall in love, or at least have wolfish objectives, yet the women somehow come out on top. Often this seems to be due to dumb luck, more than anything.

In this book, Lorelei is still writing in her diary, but this time instead of writing about herself and her love life, she writes about her friend Dorothy, whom we met in the first book as a sidekick of Lorelei's.

We learn Dorothy grew up in a carnival, but was "rescued" by a sheriff who had "noble intentions" to make her an honest woman. It turns out the sheriff is not able to carry out his heroic plan due to a blonde secretary that apparently has enough information on him to keep him away from Dorothy.

So Dorothy ends up eventually in New York where she joins Zigfeld Follies and is discovered by a rich man who wants to marry her, however, his mother does not think she is quite their kind. All sorts of shenanigans follow, a la Buster Keaton and Dorothy ends up marrying a sax player who ends up being a lout, so the rich guy pays for her to travel to Paris to get a divorce, only the mother pays for a lawyer to make it so Dorothy has no grounds for divorce.

It's all very silly, but written with such fluid grace and wit that it is easy to zoom through the whole book, rather like riding a toboggan down a snowy hill.

I don't know if I'll read more of Loos. The two books I've read were all fun and games, however, I think I'm satiated with her brand of social satire. But who knows?



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