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.
Life and career
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 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 The Dramatic Event, a veiled version of the British Police Gazette, with money that Minerva borrowed from her father.
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 and making friends with the locals. This fed her lifelong fascination with lowlifes and loose women. In 1897, at their father's urging, Loos and her sister performed in the 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.
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.