Gentlemen prefer blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady is a novel written by Anita Loos that was serialized in Harper’s Bazaar in 1925 about the highly amusing Lorelai Lee and Dorothy Shaw, partying with rich older men in New York and Europe. The way the sexual is constantly hinted at but never really discussed makes a lot of the spice of this comic novel.
All the characters inspired by people Anita Loos knew, most of them well known at the time. For example, Edward Goldmark, the film producer, is based on Samuel Goldwyn. Henry Spoffard is Will H. Hays, famous for the Hays Code that censured immoral content in films.
Once published in book form this short novel became, oddly, a writer’s book. This satire was embraced by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, HG wells and F. Scott Fitzgerald who knew a thing or two about the party scene of the early 20s. Written in a nonliterary spoken style, spelling mistakes included (“the Eyeful Tower is devine“). The illustrations are by Ralph Barton, the favorite caricaturist of the flappers, as the hippest partier of the Jazz Age were called.
Illustrations by Ralph Barton
“I always believe that there is nothing like trying and I think it would be nice for an American girl like I to educate an English gentleman like Piggy, as I call Sir Francis Beekman”.
“The gentleman at the jewelry store said that quite a lot of famous girls in Paris had imitations of all their jewelry and they put their jewelry in the safe and they really wore the imitations so they could wear it and have a good time but I told them I thought that any girl who was a lady would not even think of having such a good time that she did not remember to hang on to her jewelry.”
Fair use,wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29149668
Corinne Anita Loos (1888-1981) was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood,
By studio publicity image, Fair use,en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16799037
By Alfred Cheney Johnston – Photoplay (Jan. – Jun. 1922) at the Internet Archive, Public Domain,
THE INACTIVIST 