But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, the sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
By Francis Booth | On July 22, 2024 | Comments (0)
Anita Loos’ wildly successful 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was followed by a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Published in the U.S. in 1927 and in England in 1928, it continued the adventures of the free, independent but ditzy Lorelei Lee and her friend, Dorothy Shaw.
Despite her misspellings and malapropisms, Lorelei is very much the modern, free 1920s woman and though she is deliberately written to appear as a “dumb blonde,” she is actually extremely sharp (and beautifully written in a virtuoso performance by Loos).
Lorelei wants us to understand that she is not a gold digger but a “diamond collector” and her faux-naïve monologue – the novel purports to be Lorelei’s diary – contains many other gems that sound in retrospect as though they were written specifically for Marilyn Monroe, even though Monroe was only two years old when the novel was published:
- “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
- “Money may not buy happiness, but it sure does make it easier to be glamorous.”
- “Being blond means never having to say sorry for being fabulous.”
Not that Lorelei intends to be dependent on a man —“Why chase after a man when you can chase after a job and have both?” And, as she says, “success is the best revenge, especially when you’re wearing a stunning dress.”
The famous 1953 film adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, bears only passing resemblance to the original book, and 1955’s Gentlemen Marry Brunettes film, starring Jane Russell and Jeanne Crain as Dorothy Shaw’s daughters, even less so.
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925 novel)
by Anita Loos
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Lorelei Lee doesn’t need to be saved
Like the best of modern 1920s women, Lorelei doesn’t need to be saved, she just needs a man to spend his savings on her. “I don’t need a knight in shining armor, I need a man who can keep up with me.”
And: “I refuse to be just another pretty face. I’m here to own the room and conquer the world.”
There is also a quote in the original novel that gives the clue to the incomplete nature of the book’s title, “Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but smart men prefer a blonde with a brain.”
At the beginning of this sequel, Lorelei tells us that she is “going to begin a diary again, because I have quite a little time on my hands.” The new diary, like the one in the previous novel, is full of the delightful non-standard spellings and howlers as the first one – Loos’ technical skill is severely underrated in my opinion.
In the new diary, Lorelei’s foil Dorothy is back as her sounding board. “I mean sometimes Dorothy becomes Philosophical, and says something that really makes a girl wonder how anyone who can make such a Philosophical remark can waste her time like Dorothy does.”
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More about Anita Loos
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Lorelei tries on some careers
Now married to Henry, who is of “the wealthy classes,” Lorelei says that “practically every married girl ought to have a career if she is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants.” And especially, as in her case, if she is married to husband like Henry, who is “quite a homebody and, if the girl was a homebody to, she would encounter him quite often.” So
Lorelei tells her diary that she needs to get out of the house and “to meet brainy gentlemen who have got ideas on the outside.”
The first career Lorelei tries is the cinema, where she stars in “a superproduction based on sex life in the period of Dolly Madison” [wife of James Madison, fourth president of the United States at the beginning of the 1800s].
The production team argue as to whether it should be full of “Psychology,” mob scenes and ornamental sets or full of a “great moral lesson,” as Henry wants. “I did not care what it was full of, as long as it was full of plenty of cute scenes where the leading man would chase me round the trunk of a tree and I would peek out at him, like Lillian Gish.”
Well, when our cinema was finished the title turned out to be “Stronger than Sex,” which was thought up by quite a bright girl in Mister Goldmark’s suite of offices. And the great moral lesson was, that girls could always help it, if they would only think of Mother.
Lorelei has a baby
But Lorelei becomes pregnant and has to give up her career in the cinema. Dorothy says that “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank,” and Lorelei is happy to be pregnant so soon after the marriage because “the sooner a girl becomes a Mother after the ceremony, the more likely it is to look like Daddy.”
Dorothy advises her however to only have one “kiddie” because she thinks that “one is enough of almost anything that looks like Henry. But Dorothy has no reverents for Motherhood.”
Henry wants to stay in Philadelphia to have the baby because, as Lorelei says, in Philadelphia he is quite “promanent,” whereas Lorelei is desperate to move to New York, even knowing that “the riskay things that Henry can think up may intreege the suberbs of Philadelphia, but they really would not be such a thrill in New York.”
She asks a New York friend, who is “very, very promanent” to get invitations for Henry to join various societies. It works; “when Henry started in to receive all of those invitations, it made him feel very good to think that his promanents had reached New York.”
She decides to “become literary”
After the baby comes, Henry settles “quite a large settlement on me.” But Lorelei is bored and soon starts to think of a new career. “I decided not to produce any more cinemas, because ‘Stronger Than Sex’ went right over people’s heads and became a financial failure. So I decided to become literary instead and spend more time in some literary envirament, outside the home.”
Lorelei starts with probably the most literary environment in New York, the Algonquin Hotel, still the real-life home in 1928 to Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle; she goes for lunch and charms the waiter into sitting them next to the famous writers.
After Dorothy gets bored and leaves, Lorelei is invited to sit at the table of “all the geniuses” by one of them, who says to his companions, “you are always discovering a Duse, or a Sapho or a Cleopatra every week, and I think it is my turn. Because I have discovered a young lady who is all three rolled into one.”
Lorelei has already said of this man that he “is always falling in love with some new girl” so she is not surprised when he says he has “noted my reverants for everything they said and he finally told me that he realised I had more in me than I looked, so he issued me an invitation to come to luncheon every day.”
But Lorelei has already decided to join another organization, the Lucy Stone League – a real-life women’s establishment founded in 1921 that advocated women keeping their name after marriage. Lorelei wants to be able to “write my book without my identity being sunk by having the name of a husband to crush me.”
Because a girl’s name should be Sacred, and when she uses her husband’s it only sinks her identity. And when a girl always insists on her own maiden name, with vialents, it lets people know that she must be important some place or other.
And quite a good place to insist on an unmarried name, is when you go to some strange hotel accompanied by a husband. Because when the room clerck notes that a girl with a maiden name is in the same room with a gentleman, it starts quite a little explanation, and makes a girl feel quite promanent before everybody in the lobby.
But Dorothy said I had better be careful. I mean she says that most Lucy Stoners do not really worry the room clerck, because they are generally the type that are only brought to hotels on account of matrimony.
But Dorothy said that when Henry and I waltz in and ask for a room with my maiden name the clerck would probably get one good look at me, and hand Henry a room in the local jail for the Man act [the Mann Act of 1910 criminalized the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”].
“I do not listen to any advice about literature from a girl like Dorothy. And so I joined it.”
Lorelei’s novel and Dorothy’s misadventures
Lorelei decides to write her novel about Dorothy, which “is not going to be so much for girls to resemble, as it is to give them a warning what they should stop doing.” Dorothy turns out to have had a very interesting childhood, starting from “quite a low enviranment,” and though she has improved herself to the extent of living at the Ritz, Dorothy still “does nothing but fall madly in love with the kind of gentlemen who were born without money and have not made any since.”
By the age of sixteen Dorothy has ended up working among grifters and tricksters in a “Carnaval Company” but still seems to be a virgin, “without the subjeck of ‘Life’ being brought to turn notice. Because when I was only 13, I sang in our church quire, and practically every boy in our quire had at least mentioned the subjeck and some of them had done even more.”
Lorelei’s reasoning for this is that in a Carnaval Company “nothing is Sacred,” and people can make jokes about matters of Life. “But Love is so Sacred in a church quire, that they never even mention it above a whisper, and it becomes more of a mistery. And when a thing is a mistery, it is always more intrieging.”
So for Lorelei growing up there was ironically “quite a lot more Love going on” than in Dorothy’s traveling circus.
Eventually, Dorothy has come to the conclusion that it is time that she gave the “love racket” a whirl, “and find out for herself if it had really been over-advertised.” Her skepticism is not surprising to Lorelei, given that she lives in the company of people whose whole lives involve swindling the public. But when Dorothy “decided to do it,” and “find out about ‘Things,’” the only person she could think of who might be interested is the “Deputy Sherif” so she gives him “a kind word.”
After going with him to the cinema, Dorothy decides to let the Deputy Sherif kiss her, Dorothy’s first kiss. It is a big disappointment. “Dorothy says she felt like a little boy who had just found out that Santy Clause was the Sunday School Superintendant.”
Dorothy passes up the chance to marry into the Deputy Sherif’s wealthy family and runs away to join an acting company run by a Frederik Morgan, having decided on her new career after seeing Morgan playing the lead in “The Tail of Two Cities,” after which “the whole subjeck of Sex Appeal had taken on quite a new aspeck to Dorothy. And Dorothy says she decided that all of the things the Deputy Sherif had tried on her, that only made her squirm, would be a Horse of a different color with that leading man in the role.”
So Dorothy accompanies Mr Morgan up to his apartment where he tells her the story of “his Life,” which includes the fact that he has a wife but had to send her away because “an Artist must use all of his feelings to develop his temprament by.”
And then he told Dorothy that she would probably turn out to be an Artist herself, as soon as she got her temprament developed and found out about Life.
And he said that he himself would be willing to teach her about Life and give her all his ade. And he told her it was really quite a large opertunity for a girl like her, when society women with strings of pearls were after it. So after he finished his recomendation, he asked Dorothy whether she would like to go home, or take off her things and stay awhile.
So Dorothy took off her things.
But it turns out that learning about Life does not improve Dorothy’s acting “temperament” and, worse, it “did not turn out to be so enjoyable to her, after all. I mean, Dorothy is never at her best in a tate-a-tate.”
Both parties agree to “let the matter drop,” but Dorothy continues to act and then gets a job at the Follies, where she impresses a millionaire polo player, Charlie Breene. But the rich boy bores her and she gives him the slip. “And Dorothy says that running out on millionaires has been her specialty ever since.”
So, despite impressing the polo player’s millionaire society mother, Dorothy runs off with a “saxaphone player” she met at the Follies. The marriage goes wrong for Dorothy on the way to the wedding, when she sees her future husband Lester in the daylight for the first time and is not impressed; she spends the next several chapters trying to get away from him, with the ostensible help of the Breene family’s money and lawyer, during which Dorothy goes on a trip to Paris.
The polo player’s family money had actually been secretly supporting Lester and when the money stops, he blackmails the Breenes’ lawyer into paying him $10,000 to go away. The upshot is that Dorothy is now free to marry Charlie so her worried family pay the lawyer to frame her on a drugs charge and the police lock her up.
But Lorelei comes to her rescue and then Charlie reappears, having been cut off from his family’s money and got himself sober. Dorothy falls in love and, reader, she married him.
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The 1955 film, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes,
has little in common with the 1927 original novel
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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
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