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Forget Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird or A Farewell to Arms. The great Edith Wharton once cheekily crowned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “The Great American Novel.” The slim, 176-page satire by Anita Loos also won admirers like James Joyce and George Santayana, and went on to spawn a comic strip, a Broadway musical, a 1928 silent film, and, most famously, the 1953 Marilyn Monroe classic. As a Golden Age of Hollywood enthusiast, I’d seen Monroe purr that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” But I wanted to read the book that started it all and see if really meets Wharton’s appellation as the Great American Novel. Here’s my review.
Anita Loos Commits to the Bit
When I turned the first page, I had to contain my reflexive eye-roll at the spelling- and grammar- riddled prose. Instead of a traditional novel, Loos structures the entire story as a string of diary entries. The narrator, like the 1953 musical, is Lorelai Lee, a society girl from Little Rock, Arkansas. Unlike the movie, Lorelai is not a showgirl engaged to a millionaire but rather a society girl and aspiring actress, bouncing from wealthy male patron to wealthy male patron in the hedonistic heyday of Jazz Age New York. While my writer heart had a hard time with all the “dumb blonde” flubs, the voice was spot on, and eventually the mistakes grew on me as an embellishment of the character.
It Cheekily Redeems the “Dumb Blonde” Trope
While I loved the Monroe musical, Loos’s original work gave the seemingly brainless Lorelai a little more credibility (albeit sarcastically). The book was never meant to be a serious thing, either. Loos had the idea for it while struggling with her luggage on a train, while noticing that instead of offering her aid, all the men were fawning over a vapid natural blonde. However, the novella does deserve some credit in a way that the movie robbed Monroe of the same chance to redeem the trope.
Don’t get me wrong—in the film, Lorelai delivers plenty of witty aphorisms about the tribulations of womanhood. Notably, if you listen to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in its entirety, you’ll hear the zingers. The particular gut punch: “Men grow cold / As girls grow old / And we all lose our charms in the end.” However, the plot sets it up so that Lorelai is portrayed as an engaged woman always scheming to find a better match, tripping in her own foibles in pursuit of the biggest possible diamond.
In the book, Lorelai isn’t engaged, and actually shows, beneath the ditzy veneer, a good modicum of intelligence as she juggles a string of interested, wealthy patrons and a diamond tiara heist, all while managing to bag the country’s most eligible bachelor and turn him into a vehicle to fund her Hollywood pursuits.
Sure, she’s chasing the superficial, but Lorelai is on a mission and orchestrates everything so that in the end, she gets exactly what she wants. And you don’t get exactly what you want solely riding on the basis of being pretty. Might it be easier? Sure. But you need to give your goal momentum, and Lorelai is running a steam engine pulling ten first-class rail cars.
In Short, a Hidden Gem
The satire was a smash hit when it was published in 1925—the same year as The Great Gatsby. Ultimately, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes printed an astonishing 85 editions and translations in 14 languages. While incredibly tongue-in-cheek and poking fun, it does, ultimately, give Lorelai some credit. She’s working the system in which she must exist as a woman, in a time period with limited opportunities. Can you fault her? Because as Monroe so aptly said in character: “I can be smart when it’s important. But most men don’t like it.”
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