Loos returned to Los Angeles, checked into the Hollywood Hotel, then went in search of Griffith, who had recently formed the Fine Arts Triangle studios with Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett. There, Loos was offered a full-time job at $75 a week (today, about $1900), along with a bonus for any script that went into production. She wrote, “As far as I know there were no other Hollywood authors working on salary at the time, so I was possibly the movies’ first staff writer.” Her first screen credit, the unintentionally comical "Macbeth by William Shakespeare and Anita Loos,” was earned titling an adaptation of the play for Triangle’s most prestigious film release of 1916. The director of the picture, John Emerson, would soon become Loos’ second husband.

She began a collaboration with Emerson and his friend, actor Douglas Fairbanks, after Emerson, looking for story ideas, found a cache of Loos’ scripts in a file cabinet at the studio; Griffith had purchased them purely for the pleasure of reading them, unable to translate Loos’ verbal humor into his visual style of filmmaking. He thought the trio's first effort, His Picture In the Papers (1916) amusing, but held back the movie’s release because of its heavy reliance on Loos’ titles. When a booking crisis at New York's Strand Theatre forced the showing, the film became a smash hit. About this event, Loos wrote, “The New York Times published a review which said, in effect, that motion pictures had grown out of their infancy, satire had reached the screen." And, she added, "Douglas Fairbanks rose to stardom in a single week.” Over the next two years, Loos wrote scripts for nine more Fairbanks pictures, the most difficult part of which, she said, “was finding a variety of spots from which Doug could jump.” In a move unusual for the times, Emerson hired a press agent. Upon the publication of a series of newspaper and magazine features, he and Loos became almost as popular as Fairbanks, much to the actor’s chagrin. 

ANITA WRITES IN NEW YORK

Soon thereafter, the trio became a duo. Loos and Emerson signed a deal with Famous Players-Lasky and moved to New York, creating “John Emerson-Anita Loos Productions,” working with newcomers like Billie Burke, Marion Davies, and Norma Talmadge. This was when Emerson began, untruthfully, to claim co-authorship credit on Loos’ scripts, demanding top billing. Because she was so enamored, and comfortable with this familiar dynamic (“I had had an early schooling in male vanity from Pop.”), Loos agreed. She brought Emerson along when William Randolph Hearst hired her to make his girlfriend Marion Davies a star. Although Hearst kept trying to force Davies into serious dramatic roles, Loos understood that the actress’ true talent was to be found in light comedy; after much back and forth between Hearst and Loos, Getting Mary Married  was released in 1919. It was one of the few films in Davies’ career that turned a profit. 

About this time, Loos and Emerson were approached by the powerful movie producer, Joseph M. Schenck, who, along with his brother, had developed the Pallisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, and gone on to acquire a national chain of movie theaters, the Loew's Circut. He was looking to boost the career of his sister-in-law, Constance (Dutch) Talmadge; his wife, Norma Talmadge, was already established as one of the foremost dramatic stars of the era. (Another sister-in-law, Natalie, was married to rising comedian Buster Keaton.) Since Loos and Dutch had met in Hollywood on the set of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Loos felt that she “knew her potentialities.” Their first film, A Virtuous Vamp (1919)—its title supplied by Dutch’s boyfriend Irving Berlin—was a hit and “added a second star to [the] family," wrote Loos. "Thus began a series of comedies for Dutch in which her career paralleled Norma’s and one success followed another. Our pictures were filmed under the happiest circumstances; because the Schenck brothers [were] centered in New York, we worked there instead of in Hollywood.”

Loos (whom Emerson called Bug) and Emerson (whom Loos called Mr. E.) were married in June, 1919, at Schenck’s Long Island estate. About the ceremony, Loos biographer Gary Carey wrote, “Emerson was on the verge of nervous collapse as he took his place next to the bride. His voice couldn’t be heard in the responses, so Schenck resorted to ventriloquism. John opened his mouth,  but Joe spoke the words. When it was over, Anita wondered whether technically she hadn’t actually married Joseph Schenck.” Summing up their relationship, Loos later wrote, “I failed to realize that John suffered from a very dangerous pathological insecurity. When, after our marriage, he first heard himself addressed as Mr. Loos, it hit his egotism with a bang that reverberated as long as he lived. Had I been a femme fatale, I couldn’t have destroyed him more thoroughly. Yet through it all, John loved me, was amused by me, depended on me, and then, alas, he envied me. And until the day he died he resented me." Emerson's hypochondria, which had flared up in the past whenever he perceived that Loos was getting more attention than he, became more acute after the couple married. Over the course of their marriage, entire transatlantic voyages were made in pursuit of one cure or another.

The couple (always taking separate rooms) had earlier moved from the Algonquin Hotel to the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, where the Schencks and Talmadges resided. After their marriage, they found a more permanent address in Murray Hill, then moved to a brownstone on Gramercy Square. In 1921, Loos bobbed her hair. She was among the first women in the public eye to adopt this bold, controversial hairstyle. While working for Schenck on film scripts, she dashed off several Broadway plays, including The Whole Town’s Talking (1923) and The Fall of Eve (1925). When Mr. E. insisted the couple spend Tuesday evenings apart, Loos and the Talmadge girls went to Harlem, often accompanied by a young George Gershwin. About these evenings, she wrote, “jazz was in the air; new rhythms were being extemporized that were giving America its first serious standing in the world of music. At Small’s Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom the Charleston and black bottom were danced not as we did them, with a main thought toward showing off; the strut in Harlem was expressing an apotheosis of the human body that even our own high priestess of the dance, Isadora Duncan, admitted she could never achieve.” When Loos felt like staying closer to home, she met up with the “Tuesday Widows” club: the Talmadge sisters and their mother Peg, Marion Davies, Adele Astaire, and a revolving group of chorus girls (depending on who could get the night off) from the Ziegfeld Follies. On other Tuesday evenings, Loos enjoyed the company of some extraordinary men, among them her hero, H. L. Mencken. 

ANITA WRITES THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

Loos began to write what would later become Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on a train trip to Hollywood in mid-1924. “Prompted by a flirtation that Henry Mencken was having with a stupid little blonde,” she recalled, “I wrote a skit poking fun at his romance. I had no thought of it ever being printed; my only purpose was to make Henry laugh at himself, which it did.” Upon her return to New York in early 1925, she sent the short story to Mencken, who told her she was possibly the first American writer to make fun of sex, and urged her to publish. So she began a serialization for Harper’s Bazaar, which over its run doubled the magazine's circulaton. The novel, published in November 1925, brought Loos praise from literary luminaries such as Aldous Huxley (“I was enraptured by the book.”), William Faulkner (“I wish I had thought of Dorothy first.”), James Joyce (who had been “reclining on a sofa and reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for three whole days.”), and Edith Wharton (who said to Frank Crowninshield, “I am just reading the Great American novel (at last!) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I want to know if there are—or will be—others, and if you know the funny woman, who must be a genius.” He did.).

Emerson, with his now customary lack of imagination, had dismissed Blondes as a frivolous exercise written for a female audience (published in a fashion magazine, no less!), so Loos received sole authorship credit. He had a change of heart, however, before the book's publication, and demanded she use the dedication, “To John Emerson, except for whose encouragement and guidance this book would never have been written.” Loos was "stunned, and then," she wrote, "as usual, the reason for it struck me as amusing… there remained only one way through which John could save face: by pretending that he himself had been responsible for it. I agreed to use the dedication, but [my publisher], although he, too, was amused, refused to print it in toto.” The abbreviated dedication read simply: “To John Emerson.” She later implied she would have preferred to dedicate the book to Mencken. By the end of the decade, Loos enjoyed worldwide celebrity; Blondes had been translated into 14 languages (including Chinese), and had made her a millionaire.

While completing the sequel to Blondes, Loos entered a period she called “semiretirement,” socializing  in London, in the circle of Sybil, Lady Colefax (which included Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, John Galsworthy, and Margot Asquith), and in Paris, where she had tea with Edith Wharton, and frequently met up with Cole Porter and his wife Linda, and Elsa Maxwell and partner Dickie Fellowes-Gordon. Mr. E., who claimed to be suffering from a variety of illnesses including laryngitis, hives, and boils, was often absent. In 1928, for But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, Loos composed this lengthy, somewhat ironic dedication: “TO JOHN EMERSON who discovered, developed, fostered and trained whatever I may have if I have anything that is worthwhile.” For the next two years, the couple spent autumn in New York, January and February in Palm Beach, Florida, and spring and summer in Europe. An entry from Loos' diary during this time read “TOO MUCH TRAVELING!”

The stock market crash in late 1929 wiped out a large portion of Loos’ wealth, but did not leave the couple destitute. In 1930, Mr. E. informed her that he had lost the rest of their money. “There’s enough left from our disaster to support one of us,” he told Loos.“Naturally, I’ll have to count every penny. But my Bug’s in luck because she’s healthy and can go to work.” So Loos wrote and oversaw the production of two Broadway plays, a dramatization of Brunettes called The Social Register (1931), and an adaptation of a Hungarian play, Cherries Are Ripe (1931). Because of a slow Broadway season, neither play did well, and, having nothing to fall back on, the couple lost their Gramercy Square home. One day, while packing for the move to a hotel, Loos came upon a stash of love letters other women had sent to her husband; she asked him if he wanted a divorce. “He grasped me in agitation,” she wrote. “‘No, no, no, Buggie! I’ll never leave you; you’re so gullible you might fall into the hands of some crook who’d get hold of your money!’” Insisting they now live apart (while keeping their financial arrangement intact), Emerson moved to “bachelor quarters” at the Lamb's Club and Loos found an apartment on East 79th Street. “A wide variety of kept or semikept men has developed since the disappearance of the gold digger of the Twenties,” she wrote in 1974. “In cases where a girl has talent, any husband or lover can ‘manage’ her career. And, although he generally mucks it up thoroughly, he’s able to save face...”

ANITA WRITES IN HOLLYWOOD (REPRISE)

In late 1931 “there suddenly came out of left field” Loos recalled, “an offer from MGM for me to write a movie script at $3500 a week!” Leaving Emerson behind, she boarded the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central Station, bound for a far different California than the one she had left. “In Kansas City,” she wrote, “the conductor brought me a telegram from Mr. E., reminding me that he was still living only for his Bug. Had he only wired ‘I’m still living on my Bug,’ I’d have adored his impudence and possibly fallen in love with him once more.” But Loos had already made arrangements to meet up with old friend Wilson Mizner at the Brown Derby in Los Angeles, and was looking forward, not back.

MGM’s esteemed studio head Irving Thalberg brought Loos on board after several writers (including, notably, F. Scott Fitzgerald) had tried and failed to adapt Katherine Brush’s popular novel Red-Headed Woman for the screen. Thalberg told Loos, “I want you to make fun of its sex element just as you did in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” She completed the script in just four months, while MGM’s publicity department looked for an actress to play the lead. Of their choice, Jean Harlow, Loos noted, “Underlying Jean’s raffish sense of humor was a resignation unusual for one so young. Nothing would ever surprise Jean. She knew exactly how people were going to react to her; if men were stupid enough they’d fall for her; if they had good sense, they’d laugh her off.” While the film enjoyed massive popularity, it also brought down the wrath of the Hays Office. As a result, Joseph Breen, whom Variety called the “supreme pontiff of picture morals,” began rigidly enforcing censorship rules; he would go on to hinder free expression in Hollywood for the next twenty years.

Much to her surprise, Loos enjoyed being back in Hollywood, reunited with her mother, father, and brother Clifford, and "living alone in a cozy bungalow with a Persian cat and a competent maid to bully me... Hollywood," she wrote, "may have been uncouth, but from being the remote outpost it was at the beginning, it was now in the mainstream of life.” Many friends from New York, London, and Paris lived there now, and others could be depended upon to visit regularly. So she was pleased when Thalberg offered her employment on a permanent basis, at the weekly salary of $2500. “In a state of euphoria, I accepted Irving’s deal right then and there,” she wrote. “It meant that my good times would be assured for two more years, while Mr. E. could remain in New York nursing his ailments and basking in the sympathy of his current lady friend." This was not to be. Mr. E. insisted Loos renegotiate the deal so they could “work together again as a team.” She shuddered, as their "collaboration," she said, had long consisted of him “glancing over my morning’s work while he was eating breakfast in bed.” The truth of their partnership had become an open secret throughout the industry; when Loos asked Thalberg to hire Emerson (and split her salary between them), he balked, then finally agreed, telling her "You are even more of a masochist than I am."

The couple moved to a suburban home in Beverly Hills; the maid, disliking Emerson, had taken the cat and left. “A typical day for me,” Loos wrote, “was to begin writing in my own room. At 4 a.m., I was delightfully alone with a sneaky feeling of freedom from having to protect Mr. E.’s ego throughout all his waking hours… After five hours of work I was at the studio by ten and still free because Mr. E. didn’t show up until after lunch.” One of the highest paid writers on the MGM lot, Loos created original scripts like Riffraff (1935), and was also expected to work as line producer and script doctor, usually without credit. In 1936, she and writing partner Robert “Hoppy” Hopkins began work on an original idea that was close to both of their hearts. San Francisco (1936) paid tribute to the city they both loved, and to their dear friend and idol, Wilson Mizner. About Mizner, who had died in 1933, Loos wrote, “everything about that aging reprobate was exciting: the aura of his reckless past; the challenge of his being a highly unsuitable companion: his air of tranquil assurance, which, as a rule, exists only in men of genius.”

ANITA SURVIVES THE WORST YEAR OF HER LIFE

When Thalberg died in late 1936, MGM descended into chaos. Producer Bernie Hyman, hoping to replicate the success of San Francisco, put Loos to work on a vehicle for Harlow and Clark Gable called Saratoga (1937). Hyman and Loos fought about the script, and then Harlow died halfway through filming; MGM released the movie quickly in order to capitalize on Harlow’s death. By this time, Loos’ contract had ended; she took a trip to New York, leaving Emerson behind to negotiate a deal with producer Samuel Goldwyn. She soon realized she had made a mistake, noting in her diary that Goldwyn was “the most vile slimy loathsome mouse I ever dirtied myself by contracting [sic].” Matters went from bad to worse. "One evening," she wrote, "we were alone together in our living room when, without warning, [Mr. E.] clutched my throat and started to choke me." After she was rescued by her driver, Loos convinced Emerson to voluntarily commit himself to Las Encinas Sanitarium. Several "diagnoses" have since been put forward to explain his increasingly erratic and finally psychotic behavior, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder among them. Far from the harmless eccentric Loos believed him to be, Emerson had become quite dangerous. 

Loos had never paid much attention to her finances; now she needed her brother's help to sort them out. What they found was shocking. First of all, the contract Mr. E. had negotiated with Goldwyn paid her only half the salary she thought she was getting; the rest went to Emerson as a $100,000 signing bonus, with which he had bought annuities payable only to himself. He had also transfered $150,000 from their joint account into accounts of his own. “Clifford then began further investigations,” she wrote, “and learned that Mr. E. had registered all my property in his own name; including the house [on Santa Monica's 'Gold Coast,' designed by celebrated architect Richard Neutra] for which my earnings had paid. Mr. E. even got me to turn over to him the royalties on my books, without my being aware I’d signed them away.” She comforted herself with the thought that payouts on Mr. E.’s annuities would keep him safely in Las Encinas until the day he died.

With no little difficulty, Loos bought out her contract with Goldwyn in early 1938. Back at MGM, she bounced around, doing uncredited work on a number of film scripts, and in the musical department on the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney picture, Babes In Arms (1939). She hit her stride when, once again stepping in for Fitzgerald, she adapted Clare Boothe Luce's Broadway smash of 1936, The Women in just under three weeks. It was like old times for Loos, working closely with director George Cukor, who insisted she be involved in all aspects of production: shooting, re-writes, publicity, previews, and even the editing of trailers. The Women (1939) was hailed as one of the best films of the year. Unfortunately, this creative experience, so reminiscent for Loos of the Thalberg years, was an aberration. She was soon back to script-doctoring on Another Thin Man (1939), then assigned the screenplay Susan and God (1940) for Joan Crawford, about which Loos noted, “War is imminent, making it hard to concentrate on Susan’s problems with God." She then rapidly turned out four more scripts for MGM: Blossoms in the Dust (1941), When Ladies Meet (1941), They Met in Bombay (1941), and I Married an Angel (1942). In August, 1943, Loos' contract was unceremoniously ended.

ANITA WRITES BICOASTALLY

Seizing the opportunity to work again with Loos, Joe Schenck, now a chief executive at Twentieth Century-Fox, offered her a position working exclusively on vehicles for upcoming star Dorothy McGuire; the best thing about this arrangement was that she didn't have to report to the studio, and could write anywhere. Perhaps looking for a way back to New York, she had written a play with Lionel Barrymore for his sister, Ethel; in late 1943 it was ready to go into production, so Loos closed up the Santa Monica beach house and took a room at New York’s Plaza Hotel. For various reasons and after several stops and starts, the play, Old Buddha, never made it to the stage. Upon the death of her father in 1944, Loos returned to Hollywood and did uncredited work on the McGuire script, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Before leaving New York she enjoyed another consequential lunch, this time with old friend Helen Hayes.

Loos met Hayes in New York in 1927, when Loos was “caught up in the brouhaha” of producing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for the stage. Hayes had been up for the lead, but, wrote Loos, “my husband, who, following the tradition of Broadway husbands, was managing my affairs, rejected Helen hands down.” She continued, “The girl chosen to play Lorelei Lee was a competent actress and she got away with the part. But I now realize that had it gone to Helen, she would have given it that extra dimension which separates art from adequacy.” After their initial meeting, Loos would run into Hayes at gatherings of the Algonquin Hotel’s Round Table, the group Loos later described as “a boring set of exhibitionists” (the exceptions being H.L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, Joe Hergesheimer, and Theodore Dreiser). Charlie MacArthur, who had left Dorothy Parker to marry Hayes, was part of a Round Table satellite group Loos deemed “Musketeers of the Twenties who free-wheeled about town dipping into everything.” She got a kick out of MacArthur’s outrageous wit, and already his buddy, became good friends with Hayes after the couple married.

Over that now historic lunch at 21, Hayes worried that costume dramas had come to define her. “I’m afraid of getting to be grandiose," she told Loos. "Why don’t you write me a really rowdy part, where I can kick up my heels?” The result was Happy Birthday, which went into rehersals on Broadway in September, 1946, and opened in late October. The play, a great success for both friends, ran for almost 600 performances. Back in Santa Monica at Christmas, Loos wound up her West Coast business, put her house on the market, and said good-bye to a circle that included the Huxleys, the Hubbels, George Cukor, Ray Goetz, Rouben Mamoulian, and Christopher Isherwood. She ignored Mr. E.’s entreaties to take him along. By early 1947 she was once again at the Plaza, in search of more permanent accommodations.

ANITA, BACK IN NEW YORK AT LAST!

Loos found a small apartment at the Plaza Hotel Annex on West 58th Street, and happily immersed herself in multiple projects for the stage—an adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer for Mary Martin, which was abandoned after Martin took a career-changing role in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1948); a play about Josephine Baker, alternately titled Jacqueline or Montparnasse, for which no lead actress was ever signed (although Lena Horne, Hilda Sims, and Dorothy Dandridge were all considered); and Mother Was a Lady, co-authored with another Hollywood ex-pat, screenwriter Frances Marion, as a vehicle for their friend, actress ZaSu Pitts. Loos was, at this time, romantically linked with actor Maurice Chevalier, who was then appearing on Broadway.

In 1948, producers Herman Levin and Oliver Smith invited Loos to lunch at the Colony to pitch their latest idea, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—the musical! Their timing was good; Mother Was a Lady had just been dropped from the Broadway calendar, and Loos had already written the Blondes' script in 1926. Seeing the potential in their idea, she readily agreed. But, as she had no experience in writing librettos, the process of adapting her script was rocky; at times the project almost stalled. The book was eventually completed with uncredited help from Levin’s friend Billy Rose, who also proved instrumental in raising the necessary subcriptions. To play the part of Lorelei, Loos and composer Jule Styne chose the relatively unknown actress Carol Channing, about whom Loos said, “You can cast Lorelei two ways, with the cutest, littlest, prettiest girl in town or with a comedienne’s... comment on the cutest, littlest, prettiest girl in town. I wrote her as a comedy, and Broadway is attuned to satire.”Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a triumph, opening in December, 1949, and running for nearly two years. Loos enjoyed a celebrity the likes of which she hadn’t known since the 1920s.

Shortly after Blondes' opening, Loos moved from the Plaza Hotel Annex to a large apartment in the Langdon Hotel at Fifth Avenue and East 56th Street. Her novella, A Mouse Is Born, was published on January 1st, 1951, to mixed reviews. In the whirlwind of her first transatlantic voyage in two decades, she sailed to Dublin, staying with Adele Astaire and husband Charles, Lord Cavendish, then flew on to Paris, where she lunched with Colette at the Restaurant Le Grand Véfour, and sat for photographs, in couture, for Elle and Paris-Match. After returning to New York, she wrote a stage adaptation of Colette’s Gigi; Colette adored the treatment, later describing Loos as "the most subtle and friendly of collaborators." While still in the beginning stages of production, Loos received a wire from Colette: she had found an actress who looked exactly like the character she visualized in her novel. With newcomer Audrey Hepburn playing the lead, Gigi premiered on Broadway in November, 1951 and ran profitably through May, 1952. It would have run longer, but Hepburn had an appointment in Hollywood to make Roman Holiday (1953), the first picture in an illustrious film career that would span three decades. 

In 1952, Loos and her maid/companion Gladys Turner moved to a large apartment at 171 West 57th Street, across from Carnegie Hall. In the time-honored tradition of New York real estate, acquiring this apartment was a matter of not what Loos knew, but whom she knew (the apartment became available after Jule Styne’s friend’s mother died). Always diligent about maintaining her health and her weight, Loos began the tradition of summering at Montecatini Terme spa, near Florence, Italy. Over the next decade, she endeavored to write and produce several Broadway plays, without much luck. Mr. E died in March, 1956, leaving Loos some money in trust that brought her a few thousand dollars a year. In the spring of 1958, Loos finished an adaptation of Colette's Chéri, which opened in October, 1959, and closed a month later. This experience, along with the changing tenor of Broadway, put an end to her career as a Broadway playwright. Her novella, No Mother to Guide Her, another Hollywood-based satire, was published in 1961.

ANITA WRITES HER MEMOIRS

In 1965, Loos learned her adaptation of The King’s Mare had found a West End producer; the play had a moderately successful run in London. Her memoir, A Girl Like I, which covered the periods of her childhood and early career in Hollywood and New York, up to the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was published in September, 1966. It garnered much praise and attention; The New York Times Book Review devoted an entire page to it, andThe Nation deemed it “the most remarkable Hollywood memoir ever written for its candor, its wit and its intelligence.”The New Yorker hoped that a second installment would be written soon. Viking Press threw a bash at the Plaza Hotel’s Terrace Room for Loos and many of her closest friends, including Hayes, Paulette Goddard, and Tallulah Bankhead, and celebrity acquaintances such as Truman Capote and Edmund Wilson. In November, Loos attended Capote's black and white masked ball in a black lace Balenciaga gown and ostrich feather wrap. To those who thought the gala inappropriate in the era of the Vietnam War, she proclaimed, "A little glamour might do everyone good just now."

According to the front flap of Twice Over Lightly’s dust jacket, “Helen Hayes, in a moment of irritation combined with zest, said to her friend Anita Loos: ‘I used to think New York was the most enthralling place in the world. I’ll bet it still is and if I were free next summer, I would prove it.’ And she did, launching herself and her skeptical companion on a series of explorations through all five boroughs of the fabled city.” Published in 1972, written in the form of a dialog between two friends and exhibiting the best kind of travel writing, the book provides a fascinating glimpse of a city as it existed before the combination of high rent and corporate interests destroyed much of its character. As usual, Loos kept up a busy social pace, enjoying MOMA’s retrospective film series along with friend Lillian Gish, and going to the Maisonette at the St. Regis with a group called “the girls” to see another friend, pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin. Part two of her memoirs, Kiss Hollywood Good-By (1974) was published to greater acclaim than part one. Over the next four years, she wrote two more books: Cast of Thousands (1977), a Hollywood-themed coffee table book, and The Talmadge Girls (1978), a recollection of the lives and times of the irrepressible Peg Talmadge and her famous daughters. 

By the time Loos died in 1981 at the age of 93, she had been misrepresenting her age for over 70 years, and would have been amused to see the confusion this caused in many of her obituaries. The New York Times, (who ultimately got her age right but the age at which she began screenwriting wrong) called her a “New York social institution” and commended her on “a relentless desire to rebel, an honest love of flim-flam and a disarmingly pertinent comic vision of life.” As The Guardian wrote, Loos (much like her father, R. Beers) was “a born raconteur, the life and soul of many a… party, with a hawkish eye on the glamorous, or scandalous, events that surrounded her.” For over fifty years, she socialized with the best and the brightest in America and in Europe, and developed life-long friendships with some of the most brilliant artists of the Twentieth Century. Much has been written about Anita Loos, and for good reason: she was an original, an inspired and disciplined writer with a raft of penetrating observations about human beings and their foibles, who possessed a great talent—in her life as well as her writing—for finding the humor which exists at the exact moment when male entitlement and female disempowerment collide. The sheer longevity of her career would be astonishing for anyone, let alone a woman in a man’s world. She was no deal-maker, and was often forced to keep several projects in the air at any given time in the hope that one would get picked up. But she worked steadily throughout liberal and conservative eras alike, and achieved success beyond almost anyone else’s measure in the cutthroat, ultra-competitive arenas of Hollywood, Broadway, and New York publishing. As much a product of the Progressive Era at the turn of the last century as she was a “modern woman,” she summed up her attitude about the feminism of the 1970s thusly: “They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.”