#1925Club: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady
Reading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

“A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think.”

So begins Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), the “illuminating diary” of Lorelei Lee. Reading the book for the first time at a ripe old age is rather like being handed a chocolate éclair at long last and finding it utterly delicious – then wondering why those who claimed to care for you never gave you one decades ago. It is, quite simply, a delight.

Lorelei is a good-time girl from Little Rock, Arkansas. Given a blank book by a gentleman friend after dinner at the Ritz, she begins recording her adventures in New York, on an Atlantic crossing, and across Europe, before returning to America with her future assured.

Along the way, she and her friend Dorothy meet a parade of gentleman friends – all of whom require managing and practical lessons in the art of giving presents and taking girls shopping. All of them are neatly skewered by Lorelei’s deadpan faux naïveté.

The gentlemen friends are generous fools, miserly fools, hypocritical moralisers, pompous bores, romantic empty suits, and just plain fools. 

The stingy man is “the kind who buys you flowers instead of bracelets”

The moralizer is “the type who gives sermons instead of diamonds”

“Mr. Spoffard is quite alright, only he is a little too full of principle. I always think a little principle is alright until it starts to interfere with a girl’s income.”

All of them need to be managed. For Lorelei, generosity is the baseline of manhood. This is her compass and guide and she frames it as a moral truth and not her own self-interest. 

“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”

Lorelei’s gold-digging is presented not as scandal but as common sense – a form of self-care and self-preservation. Her deadpan delivery turns moral prudery upside down.

“So I really think a girl has to look out for herself or she is not going to have any fun in life.”

She is shallow, but brutally logical. Romantic idealism is punctured at every turn by pragmatic calculation.

“I mean, it is no use for a girl to be young unless she can also be beautiful and popular and have men buy her expensive things.”

Everything in Lorelei’s world is transactional. She doesn’t question the system; she exploits it.

The Button King of Chicago

Chief among Lorelei’s many gentleman friends is Mr. Eisman –  “known practically all over Chicago as Gus Eisman the Button King.”

“And he is the gentleman who is interested in educating me, so of course he is always coming down to New York to see how my brains have improved since the last time.”

“Educating” is Lorelei’s euphemism – and Mr. Eisman’s delusion. He thinks he’s the worldly man shaping an innocent girl, but we know exactly who is in charge.

“I said to Mr. Eisman, who is my gentleman friend from Chicago and who is very, very liberal with money, that I wanted to go to Europe and educate myself.”

For Lorelei, “education” means going to Paris to shop and meet generous gentlemen friends. The contrast between her stated aim and her actual intentions is part of the comic genius of the book.

London is “really nothing”

There are some promising gentlemen on the ship, but the shopping (that is, the presents’ potential) is limited, so Lorelei and Dorothy are delighted to arrive in London – which, however, proves something of a disappointment.

The girls cultivate an “understanding of common interests” with bellhops and hotel staff, who are invaluable allies in arranging their always-so-innocent escapades. Tight-fisted British aristocrats drift in and out, and Lorelei even dances with the Prince of Wales. Dorothy may be less refined (according to Lorelei), but together they make an irresistible double act – sharp, resourceful, and very funny.

The brilliance of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes lies not in its plot but in its voice. Lorelei Lee has a gift for self-delusion and a talent for recording it without a trace of irony. Her diary becomes the perfect vehicle for Loos’ satire. Lorelei is an unreliable narrator not because she deceives but because she simply does not understand the world in any depth. Convinced of her own refinement, judgment, and tact, she constantly gives herself away.

The Comedy of Language

Lorelei’s prose is full of subject–verb disagreement (“I and Dorothy was going to the Ritz”), odd spellings (she learns by ear, not eye), and peculiar turns of phrase. Loos uses these slips with a light hand: they signal Lorelei’s lack of education, her social climbing, and her pretensions, all while giving her voice buoyancy and charm. The grammatical infelicities and malapropisms aren’t random; they are the character. Lorelei speaks with the unshakable confidence of someone who has never doubted her own good taste.

Her exchanges with Dorothy, her more worldly and less pretentious companion, are especially revealing. Dorothy punctures Lorelei’s self-regard in small, barbed ways, which Lorelei records without noticing. These interludes allow Loos to stage a kind of chorus – Lorelei’s romantic fantasies set against Dorothy’s sceptical asides.

Paris is “Devine”

London and its miserly gentlemen are a disappointment. After a necessary quick getaway, Lorelei finds Paris  “devine” . Dorothy is more down to earth. 

“… in only a few blocks we read all of the famous historical names, like Coty and Cartier and I knew we were seeing something educational at last and our whole trip was not a failure. I mean I really try to make Dorothy get educated and have reverance. So when we stood at the corner of a place called the Place Vandome, if you turn your back on a monument they have in the middle and look up, you can see none other than Coty’s sign. So I said to Dorothy, does it not really give you a thrill to realize that that is the historical spot where Mr. Coty makes all the perfume? So then Dorothy said that she supposed Mr. Coty came to Paris and he smelled Paris and he realized that something had to be done.’

But now they need some gentlemen friends.

Dorothy gets to work:

“So Dorothy said she would go down in the lobby and meet some gentleman to show us Paris. So in a couple of minutes she called up on the telephone from the lobby and she said ‘I have got a French bird down here who is a French title nobleman, who is called a veecount so come on down.’ So I said “How did a Frenchman get into the Ritz.’ So Dorothy said ‘He came in to get out of the rain and he has not noticed that it is stopped.” So I said “I suppose you have picked up something without taxi fare as usual. Why did you not get an American gentleman who always have money?’ So Dorothy said she thought a French gentleman had ought to know Paris better. So I said ‘He does not even know it is not raining.’ But I went down.”

The Orient Express

After a delicious episode with two French detectives hired by an outraged British wife seeking the return of a tiara the girls are off again on the Orient Express:

“I really think it is quite unusual for two American girls like I and Dorothy to take an oriental express all alone, because it seems that in the Central of Europe they talk some other kinds of landguages which we do not understand besides French. But I always think that there is nearly always some gentleman who will protect two American girls like I and Dorothy who are all alone and who are traveling in the Central of Europe to get educated”.

And lo and behold! the perfect mark is on the train:

“So when I saw no one else but the famous Mr. Spoffard I really became quite thrilled. Because all of we girls have tried very hard to have an introduction to Henry Spoffard and it was quite unusual to be shut up on a train in the Central of Europe with him.”

The extremely rich Spoffard is a noted censor and moralist and Lorelei sees her chance:

“So I thought it would be quite unusual for a girl like I to have a friendship with a gentleman like Mr. Spoffard, who really does not even look at a girl unless she at least looks like a Prespyterian.”

To see how she manages it  – in spite of the fact that she has Dorothy in tow and he always travels with his mother – you will just have to read the book. 

Munich – for the Kunst, and Delicatessen

Well yesterday Mr. Spoffard and I and Dorothy got off the train at Munich to see all of the kunst in Munich, but you only call it Munich when you are on the train because as soon as you get off of the train they seem to call it Munchen. So you really would know that Munchen was full of kunst because in case you would not know it, they have painted the word “kunst” in large size black letters on everything in Munchen, and you can not even see a boot black’s stand in Munchen that is not full of kunst.

Lorelei discovers that Munich is full of Germans and when Germans go to the theatre they drink beer and eat lots of Bermudian onions and garlick sausage and hard boiled eggs.

“So I really had to ask Mr. Spoffard if he thought we had come to the right theatre because the lobby seemed to smell such a lot. I mean when the smell of beer gets to be anteek it gets to smell quite a lot. But Mr. Spoffard seemed to think that the lobby of the Kunst theatre did not smell any worse than all of the other places in Munich. So then Dorothy spoke up and Dorothy said “You can say what you want about the Germans being full of ‘kunst,’ but what they are really full of is delicatessen.”

And then it’s Vienna and Dr. Froyd! 

Apparently our Lorelei from Little Rock lacks inhibitions. One can only imagine the full meeting of these two minds. 

This blend of linguistic naïveté, moral vanity, and lack of self-awareness is what makes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes deliciously funny. Lorelei is the unreliable narrator. She never questions herself, and in never questioning, she exposes everything – her own prejudices, her social aspirations, and the world of grasping  hypocritical men and ornamental women she inhabits.

Loos’s genius lies in letting Lorelei speak for herself, and trusting the reader to hear the satire in the gaps between what she thinks she’s saying and what she actually reveals.

Anita Loos captures Lorelei Lee’s voice with a tone of perfect, champagne fizz and irony. I really enjoyed this one.

The #1925Club is hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, All welcome.