[4] In 1892, when Anita was three years old, the family moved to San Francisco, where her father bought the newspaper Music and Drama, with money that her mother "wheedled"[4] from her maternal grandfather,[4] dropped the subject of music, in which he had no interest, and retitled the weekly to The Dramatic Review, filled with the photographs of pretty girls, that copied the format of the British Police Gazette, and led to her father's romance with the opera singer Alice Nielsen.

While living in San Francisco, she accompanied her father, an alcoholic, on exciting fishing trips to the pier, exploring the city's underbelly (the Tenderloin and the Barbary Coast[4]) and making friends with the locals.

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.

[5] When Griffith asked her to assist him and Frank E. Woods in writing the intertitles for his epic Intolerance (1916),[11] she traveled to New York City for the first time to attend its premiere.

[8] Loos returned to California as Griffith was leaving Triangle to make longer films, and she joined director and future husband John Emerson for a string of successful Douglas Fairbanks movies.

Loos and company realized that Douglas Fairbanks' acrobatics were an extension of his effervescent personality and parlayed his natural athletic ability into swashbuckling adventure roles.

"[14] The pictures for Famous Players–Lasky were not as successful as their previous films, partly because they starred Broadway headliners not adept at screen acting and their contract was not renewed.

The couple joined the Talmadges and the Schencks at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, with Constance filling the void left by the loss of her sister.

Loos was among the first to join Ruth Hale's Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage as she continued with hers.

[5] "Sometimes I get enquiries [sic] concerning my marriage to a man who treated me with complete lack of consideration, tried to take credit for my work and appropriated all my earnings", Loos wrote in Cast of Thousands.

When he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady, began as a series of short sketches, illustrated by Ralph Barton,[17] published in Harper's Bazaar, known as the "Lorelei" stories.

[18] The heroine of the stories, Lorelei Lee, was a bold, ambitious flapper, who was much more concerned with collecting expensive baubles from her conquests than any marriage licenses, in addition to being a shrewd woman of loose morals and high self-esteem.

But when pressed, she admitted that toothless flirt Sir Francis Beekman was modeled after writer Joseph Hergesheimer and producer Jesse L. Lasky.

Dorothy Shaw was modeled after herself and Constance Talmadge and Lorelei most closely resembled acquisitive Ziegfeld showgirl Lillian Lorraine, who was always looking for new places to display the diamonds bestowed by her suitors.

Emerson had developed a serious case of hypochondria by this time, affecting laryngitis attacks to divert attention from her work;[8] in the words of his wife, "he was a man who enjoyed ill health.

Arriving in London, she was promptly taken under the wing of socialite Sibyl Colefax, whose drawing room had become filled with "the bright young things" of the day such as John Gielgud, Harold Nicolson, Noël Coward and notables such as Arnold Bennett, Max Beerbohm and Bernard Shaw.

The first film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (now lost) was released in 1928 starring Ruth Taylor as Lorelei Lee and Alice White as Dorothy.

Loos was starved of intellectual male companionship and met Wilson Mizner there, a witty and charming real estate speculator, and in some quarters – confidence man.

When they returned to New York in the spring of 1930, Emerson expressed his unhappiness at her inattention, threatening a relapse of his throat ailment and Loos would spend much more time alone.

[5] The first project Thalberg handed Loos was Jean Harlow's Red-Headed Woman because F. Scott Fitzgerald was having no luck adapting Katherine Brush's book.

Fitzgerald, an accomplished writer of novels like The Great Gatsby, was fired and replaced by Loos in a predominantly male run studio system.

While Emerson busied himself offering screen tests to young starlets, Loos was now free to see whomever she pleased, including her now quite ill friend Wilson Mizner.

At MGM, Loos happily turned out scripts; however, she frequently had to use Emerson as a conduit to communicate with directors and other executives who balked at dealing with a woman on equal footing.

By mid-1937 Loos had decided not to renew her contract with MGM; since friend and supporter Thalberg's death in September 1936, things had not been going well at the studio and every film felt like a struggle.

Loos was apprehensive, but Cukor insisted she do the changes on set, among his all-star bevy of leading ladies on this female-only picture that included Thalberg widow Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell.

In the fall of 1946, now a free agent, Loos returned to New York to work on Happy Birthday, a Saroyanesque cocktail party comedy written for Helen Hayes.

Biographer Gary Carey notes: "She was a born storyteller and was always in peak form when reshaping a real-life encounter to make an amusing anecdote.

Loos would become a virtual New York institution, an assiduous partygoer and diner-out; conspicuous at fashion shows, theatrical and movie events, balls and galas.

[35] After spending several weeks with a lung infection, Anita Loos suffered a heart attack and died in Manhattan's Doctors Hospital in New York City at the age of 93.