Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

A Report of the Play Version of the Successful and Diverting Book by Anita Loos

DONALD FREEMAN

THE book called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes persists as the topic of the day. The sales in America are approaching the two hundred thousand mark, and even in England (despite the author's hint that any girl who managed to extract twenty pounds from an Englishman could walk across the English Channel), enthusiastic news of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may be he^trd around every London club and dinner table. The continued and wide-spread interest in this magnum opus of Anita Loos, suggests forcibly that the book is no mere feat in superficial humour.

In writing the amusing diary of a golddigger, whose creed is that "a kiss on the hand may make you feel very good, but a sapphire bracelet lasts forever", Miss Loos has delved deep into mysteries of the blonde soul, into the psychology of the predatory female. Although the burlesque is frequently extravagant, the truth remains basic. And chiefly for this reason, the book is more than an exploit—it is a permanent acquisition to any gallery of authentic American types.

Although, for years, the gold-digger has been part of the Broadway decor, the innumerable ditties dedicated to "hot sugar daddies" and their night-club "babies" have been replaced, in modernity's cycle, by countless lyrics duly crooned in compliment to "butter-and-egg men" and "cuties", it remained for Anita Loos to give the genus golddigger a literary importance, to commemorate a species born of the native moralities—as distinct a type as the American politician, jazzband leader, realtor or chiropractor. But of all these types, the gold-digger is the most alarmingly prevalent. You will find her in a West Hoboken soda emporium and you will find her lounging around the Ritz. I am informed by those who ought to know that, dreaming of Hispano-Suizas, and genuine pearl chokers, she will, nevertheless, catch any crumbs which fall her way—such as bath salts, cigarettes and perfumes. While constituting no serious menace to our country's morals, she is the menace extraordinary to the national purse.

Whatever literary defects might have been apparent in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the shrewd author has camouflaged, by filtering her superb material through the thick skull of her skittish heroine, Lorelei Lee—a perfect representative of the gold-digger type, of whom it might be said that she never gave a man an even break.

As one of the multitude of stage youngsters, (now grown up and famous), who played Little Lord Faimtleroy at the age of five—as a scenario writer who, at a fairly tender age, provided Douglas Fairbanks and the sisters Talmadgc with their cinema scripts, Miss Loos knows her way among the gold-diggers, and may be relied upon to give an accurate account of their strategies and depredations. Let serious literary critics say what they will about her style.

Meanwhile, with the assistance of her husband, John Emerson, Miss Loos has fashioned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes into a play. The stage-version is due in New York within the month—unless some presently unforeseen catastrophe intervenes. The verdict, out Chicago way, where the piece has been running prosperously all summer, is that the play is "funnier than the book". At any rate, it amused that hospitable city greatly, and succeeded in putting The Green Hat considerably in the shade in surpassing—by a wide margin—the boxoffice record previously registered by the Arlcn opus at the same theatre. As one, who for some reason or other, was in Chicago at the time, I may hazard the guess that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes will prove to be the best comedy of the theatrical season just getting under weigh.

Unaided by the devious devices of publicity usually set in motion to evoke the interest of a lethargic public prior to the opening of a play, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has been its own best press-agent. The book has had amazing esteem. Amusing to the low-brows, such erudite individuals as H. L. Mencken and Edith Wharton have also found it invigorating, and have made their opinions known. In another New York theatre, they have for months been singing a tune by Irving Berlin called (by permission of Miss Loos) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while scarcely a day goes by without some mention of the title in the newspapers. Even Punch, that most sedate of English comic weeklies, has become wildly excited about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and seems to have opened a department for the especial purpose of celebrating Miss Loos as a humourist. Meanwhile, Mr. Edgar Selwyn, the producer, has had enough applications for first night tickets to fill the Polo Grounds. What with the shrieks and groans of the disappointed, I dare say he is an exceedingly harassed man.

What the New York public will eventually see is a deft, sophisticated, and audacious comedy which keeps up its engaging momentum until the stage-hands reach out for the ropes to lower the impending final curtain.

Of course, considerable compression has been necessary to fit the book to the somewhat more drastic requirements of the stage, but, what is most unusual in the case of dramatizations— the process seems to have brightened Gentlemen Prefer Blondes considerably. Whereas the book form narratives usually become propelled bv a sort of obvious and noisy mechanism in their footlight adaptations, Miss Loos' book seems to have taken on considerable glamour and esprit- on the stage. The play begins, not as you would suspect, with a scene of rapport between Gus Eisman, the Button King of Cincinnati, and his protegee, Lorelei Lee. Rather it commences in the Imperial Suite of a transatlantic liner, with Lorelei and her girl-friend Dorothy well started on their tour of the Ritz Hotels of Europe, in their mad, mad quest, of an education for Lorelei. Mr. Eisman, who assumed heroic proportions in the book, has become a faint and somewhat plaintive obligato in the play. He puts in a belated appearance toward the last of the piece only to reap the bitter rewards of the unrequited. The second act takes place in a fashionable hotel in Paris, with Lorelei resting after the difficult ordeal of mulcting a tiara out of the charming but notoriously close-fisted Sir Francis Beekman, an Englishman of whom it is irreverently said that every time he squandered a ha'penny, the Royal Guard fired a salute. Inasmuch as the tiara was (ironically enough) once Lady Beekman's, a family complication is, of course, inevitable. It is upon Lorelei's idyllic happiness that Lady Beekman intrudes to make lavish protest of her titled husband's generosity—she who is variously described as a battering ram and Bill Hart's horse. After Dorothy informs Lady Beekman that the money for the tiara was paid for in cash before witnesses, the genteel spouse utters words of lamentation in this wise, —words, by the way, not to be found in the book:

LADY BEEKMAN: That's all very well, but I am quite sure that there were no witnesses present when my husband was supposed to have given Miss Lee that sum of money.

DOROTHY: AS a matter of fact, I was present myself.

LADY BEEKMAN: Oh, you were there! Well, who is going to believe you, pray?

DOROTHY: Say, Lady, if this is going to be an insulting match, I want to warn you that I took first prize in my class at the Follies.

LADY BEEKMAN: Oh, I don't doubt that! I know exactly what sort of creatures I've to deal with. But I also know that my husband never gave that amount of money to any one.

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Continued from page 54

DOROTHY: And how do you know?

LADY BKKKMAN: I've been married to Sir Francis Beekman for thirty-five years and the last gift he gave me was my wedding ring.

DOROTHY: Well, lady, if you ever took a good look in the mirror, you'll realize that wedding ring was no slouch of a gift.

LADY BKKKMAN: That will do. I happen to know that tiara is right here in your rooms. Now I am giving you this one chance to hand it over to me and avoid further trouble.

LORKLKI: Well, Lady Beekman, I'm not going to give it to you. So there!

DOROTHY : I should say not! When a girl works as hard for anything as my friend did for that tiara, it belongs to her.

LADY BKKKMAN: Young woman, you will either hand over that tiara to me this instant or I will bring action in the courts of law that will leave you without a shred of reputation.

DOROTHY: Say, .look here, lady. You could no more hurt my girl friend's reputation than you could sink the Jewish fleet.

LADY BKKKMAN : I should be obliged to you, young woman, to keep out of this.

LORKLKI: Don't you listen to her, Dorothy! I think it's wonderful of you to stand up for my reputation.

LADY BKKKMAN: I shall prove in open court that there was undue influence exerted over my husband.

LORKLKI: If you wear that hat into court, we'll see if the Judge thinks it took undue influence to make Sir Francis Beekman look at any girl.

LADY BKKKMAN: H'm. Is that so?

DOROTHY: It certainly is! You've got to be Queen of England to get away with a hat like that.

There is still room in the play to include Lorelei's own version of her liftstory—as perfect a gem of biography as can be imagined. In the play this shadow of her past threatens for a moment to stand between Lorelei and her betrothed, Mr. Spoffard, the Philadelphia censor and moral reformer. It is then that Lorelei, with heavy heart, tells a story so simple and true as to win from the redoutable Mr. Spoffard forgiveness as complete as any erring woman could desire. But here it is verbatim!

"My family all used to live in a small size town near Little Rock, and one day Papa and I had quite a littlequarrel because Papa didn't seem *0 like a gentleman who used to pay calls on me in the park. So papa thought it would be good for me to get away and he sent me to Little Rock to study how to become a stenographer . . . So I was in the business college in Little Rock for about a week when a gentleman named Mr. Jennings paid a call on the business college because he wanted to have a new stenographer. So he looked over all we college girls and he picked me out. So then our teacher told him that I was only there less than a week, and I had quite a lot to learn yet, but Mr. Jennings told the teacher that he would help me finish my course in his office, because he said that he was only a lawyer anyway and I really did not have to know so much . . . So Mr. Jennings helped me quite a lot, and I stayed in his office about a year, when I found out that he was not the kind of a gentleman that a girl is really safe with . . . Well— one evening when I went to his apartment to do some work, I found a girl there who was famous all over Little Rock for not being nice. So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings, I had quite a had case of hysterics, and my mind became a blank . . . And when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand, and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.''

The relation of the story is the more convincing, I think, because June Walker makes it seem real and not ridiculous. A trying role—if Miss Walker would confess it—hers is the very embodiment of an articulate moron. The guffaws fall to the lot of Miss Edna Hibbard, who has a decided flair for delivering the patter known as "wise-cracks" with the delicacy of the proverbial bull in a china shop, but the audience smiles to Miss Walker, thereby proving her the better comedienne. After roles involving the scrubbing of floors in two of last season's departed dramas, Miss Walker (a brunette) probably finds her access to the gilded world of the blonde gold-diggers agreeable. I hope G. P. Huntley is with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when it arrives in New York. Seeing his impersonation of Sir Francis Beekman, in Chicago, I marvelled at his skill in that phase of the theatre's craft catalogued as character acting.

The success of the play in New York rests upon no mere hazard. Already Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in hook form has been translated into several languages. (It is, by the way, a "best-seller" in Germany). Several road companies have been organized wherewith to spread Miss Loos' wisdom throughout these United States. A London production of the play has been scheduled but I greatly fear that references to the equestrian capabilities of the Prince of Wales and the Queen of England's hat will not he included in the English version. The authors, moreover, have disposed of the American motion picture rights for a tidy sum. All of which proves, of course, that it is best for every author to be concerned with recognizable types. Lorelei Lee is, of course, a sublime example.