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Anita Loos Biography & Facts

Corinne Anita Loos (April 26, 1888 – August 18, 1981) was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi. Early life Loos was born in Sisson (now Mount Shasta), California, to Richard Beers Loos and Minerva Ellen "Minnie" (Smith) Loos. She had one sister, Gladys Loos, and one brother, Dr. Harry Clifford Loos, a physician and a co-founder of the Ross-Loos Medical Group. About pronouncing her name, Loos said, "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation which is lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them." Her father founded Sisson Mascot, a tabloid newspaper, for which her mother did most of the work of a publisher. In 1892, when Anita was three years old, the family moved to San Francisco, where her father bought the newspaper Music and Drama, with money that her mother "wheedled" from her maternal grandfather, dropped the subject of music, in which he had no interest, and retitled the weekly to The Dramatic Review, filled with the photographs of pretty girls, that copied the format of the British Police Gazette, and lead to her father's romance with the opera singer Alice Nielsen. By age six, Anita Loos wanted to be a writer. While living in San Francisco, she accompanied her father, an alcoholic, on exciting fishing trips to the pier, exploring the city's underbelly (the Tenderloin and the Barbary Coast) and making friends with the locals. This fed her lifelong fascination with lowlifes and loose women. Early career In 1897, at their father's urging, Loos and her sister performed in a San Francisco stock company production of Quo Vadis? Gladys died at age eight of appendicitis, while their father was away on business. Anita continued appearing on stage, being the family's breadwinner. Her father's spendthrift ways caught up with them, and in 1903 he took an offer to manage a theater company in San Diego. Anita performed simultaneously in her father's company, and under another name with a more legitimate stock company. After graduating from San Diego High School, Loos devised a method of cobbling together published reports of Manhattan social life and mailing them to a friend in New York, who would submit them under the friend's name for publication in San Diego. Her father had written some one-act plays for the stock company, and he encouraged Anita to write plays; she wrote The Ink Well, a successful piece, for which she received periodic royalties. In 1911, the theater was running one-reel films after each night's performances; Anita would take a perfunctory bow and run to the back of the theater to watch them. She sent her first attempt at a screenplay, He Was a College Boy, to the Biograph Company, for which she received $25. The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore and directed by D. W. Griffith, was her third screenplay and the first to be produced. Loos dredged real life, including her own, for scenarios: she dished up her father's cronies and brother's friends, also using the rich vacationers from the San Diego resorts; eventually every experience became grist for her script mill. By 1912, Loos had sold scripts to both the Biograph and Lubin studios. Between 1912 and 1915, she wrote 105 scripts, all but four of which were produced. She wrote 200 scenarios before she ever visited a film studio. 1915, Hollywood In 1915, trying to escape her mother's influence and objections to a career in Hollywood, Loos married Frank Pallma, Jr., the son of the band conductor. But Frank proved to be penniless and dull – after six months, Anita sent him out for hair pins, and while he was gone she packed her bags and went home to her mother. After that, Minnie rethought her position on a Hollywood career. Accompanied by her mother, Anita joined the film colony in Hollywood where Griffith put Loos on the payroll for Triangle Film Corporation at $75 a week with a bonus for every produced script. Many of the scripts she turned out for Griffith went unproduced. Some he considered unfilmable because the "laughs were all in the lines, there was no way to get them onto the screen", but he encouraged her to continue, because reading them amused him. Her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing came right after Shakespeare's. When Griffith asked her to assist him and Frank E. Woods in writing the intertitles for his epic Intolerance (1916), she traveled to New York City for the first time to attend its premiere. Instead of returning to Hollywood, Loos spent the fall of 1916 in New York and met with Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair. They had an instant rapport and Loos remained a Vanity Fair contributor for several decades. Loos returned to California as Griffith was leaving Triangle to make longer films, and she joined director and future husband John Emerson for a string of successful Douglas Fairbanks movies. Loos and company realized that Douglas Fairbanks' acrobatics were an extension of his effervescent personality and parlayed his natural athletic ability into swashbuckling adventure roles. His Picture in the Papers (1916) was noted for its wry style of discursive and witty subtitles: "My most popular subtitle introduced the name of a new character. The name was something like this: 'Count Xxerkzsxxv.' Then there was a note, 'To those of you who read titles aloud, you can't pronounce the Count's name. You can only think it.' " The five films Loos wrote for Fairbanks helped make him a star. When Fairbanks was offered a sweetheart deal with Famous Players–Lasky, he took the team of Emerson-Loos with him at the high income of $500 a week. During this time Loos, Fairbanks, and Emerson collaborated well together, and Loos was getting as much publicity as either Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Photoplay magazine labeled her "The Soubrette of Satire". 1918, New York In 1918, Famous Players–Lasky offered the couple a four-picture deal in New York for more money than they had been making with the Fairbanks unit. Loos, Emerson and fellow writer Frances Marion migrated to New York as a group, with Loos and Emerson sharing a leased mansion in Great Neck, Long Island. Loos wanted Marion as chaperone, as she found herself attracted to Emerson, a man 15 years her senior that she would refer to as "Mr. E". He would readily admit that he "had never been, nor could be, faithful to any one female." Loos convinced herself he would see that she was different from all his other girls, and that behind his outwardly dull exterior was a great mind. She would later consider herself misled on both counts, writing: "I had set my s.... Discover the Anita Loos popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Anita Loos books.