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On 7 January 1928, Paramount greeted film exhibitors with a two-page advertisement in Motion Picture News carrying the title "an intimate little message from the most popular blonde in the world" (fig. 1).1 The ad featured Ruth Taylor as Lorelei Lee, the eponymous blonde in Paramount's upcoming adaptation of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In the ad, Taylor perches atop an enlarged copy of Loos's novel with a cartoon version of Lorelei on its cover. Taylor's earrings, necklace, and hair style echo those of the cartoon drawn by Ralph Barton, whose illustrations accompanied the original 1925 serial in Harper's Bazar2 and also appeared in the book. The second page of Paramount's ad conveys Lorelei's "intimate message," reminding exhibitors that Loos's "book sold over a million copies" and the stage adaptation was "a big success."3
Paramount's ad for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes foregrounds the interrelationship of industry and capital at work in shaping adaptations for commercial entertainment. Through visual and textual references to the serial, novel, and play, the ad indicates the various industries, including women's periodicals, book publishing, theatre, and film, that inform Paramount's adaptation. Taylor's Lorelei echoes the book's Lorelei, who mirrors the serial's Lorelei, who was also embodied onstage. Paramount's marketing underscores the commercial concerns driving this inter-industrial palimpsest of Loreleis by invoking the success of previous iterations of Blondes to assure exhibitors of the film's potential profits. As Taylor cajoles exhibitors, in the parlance of Lorelei Lee, "Everybody says Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on the screen is sure to make a lot of money for you gentlemen."4 Such marketing for Paramount's film demonstrates how efforts to capitalize on Blondes's success carried the influence of previous representations of Lorelei, and the femininity she represents, across industries in 1920s entertainment.
The commercial concerns shaping 1920s adaptations of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes reveal the interrelationships among entertainment industries, and how these relationships affected constructs of femininity in early twentieth-century culture. Throughout the 1910s and '20s, commercial entertainment industries, including women's periodicals, book publishing, theatre, program publishing, film, and fan magazines, operated in an interrelated system that shaped and circulated representations of femininity in the era of the flapper. Commercial concerns motivated the number of adaptations proliferating within this system, since theatre and studio heads-a group primarily composed of...