Men are the main providers of these things with Lorelei attracting a trail of suitable admirers wherever she goes. Money, expensive jewellery and the good things in life are all important to Lorelei – she likes nothing more than a glamorous diamond bracelet and a delightful glass of champagne or two. So Sir Francis Beekman wanted us to get out and look at the tower because he said that quite a famous Queen had her head cut off there one morning and Dorothy said “What a fool she was to get up that morning” and that is really the only sensible thing that Dorothy has said in London. For instants, they make a great fuss over a tower that really is not even as tall as the Hickox building in Little Rock Arkansas and it would only make a chimney on one of our towers in New York. In London they make a very, very great fuss over nothing at all. The majority of these attractions fail to impress her anyway, especially once she compares them to the buildings back in the US. In fact, she seems far more concerned with shopping, drinking champagne and collecting valuable trinkets than taking in the famous sights. It soon becomes clear that Lorelei has little interest in gaining a ‘traditional’ education while abroad. Naturally, Dorothy accompanies our narrator on her trip, and their story is presented as a series of entries from Lorelei’s diary, a sequence of amusing vignettes as the girls make their way from New York to London to Paris and beyond. The book’s main action really gets going when one of Lorelei’s male friends, Mr Eisman, ‘the Button King’, sends Lorelei to Europe with a view to broadening her horizons – a means of furthering her education if you like. So Mr Eisman gave me quite a nice string of pearls and he gave Dorothy a diamond pin and we all went to the Colony for dinner and we all went to a show and supper at the Trocadero and we all spent quite a pleasant evening.
Lorelei likes to think of herself as being very refined, someone who is part of a particular social set along with everything this confers – more of that later… At first sight, Lorelei – a blonde – appears rather witless and ditzy, while Dorothy – a brunette – seems sharper, more outspoken and more irreverent in her views. Lorelei and Dorothy are very different from one another. (You can read a little more about her career here.) The book was an instant success on its release in 1925 – the individual sections had previously been published in Harper’s Bazaar, so the market was ripe for its appearance as a complete text.īlondes features Lorelei Lee, a young American girl about town, and her best friend, Dorothy Shaw. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the debut novel of the American screenwriter and author Anita Loos.
Smart, engaging and uproariously funny – another great summer read for me. What a marvellous novella this turned out to be.
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