Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend

Press, 3 September 1981, Page 12

Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend

By

ANTHONY BURGESS,

“Observer”

I was sitting in the Oslo sun having just read of Anita Loos’s death. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is not the only book she wrote, but it is the best-known, and the title is known even to those who never saw the film. It has been taken as a true, or at least a proverbial, statement. But do they really? Looking about me at the women of the North, I saw that here at least, people

had little choice in the matter.

But in the world as a whole there are very few blondes, and this grants, them scarcity value.

In dark-skinned countries blondes are auriferous goddesses; in countries like Britain, where there is a whole spectrum ranging from raven to pale wheat, blondes have been both desired and feared.

They are supposed to be temperamentally different from brunettes, and this is a circumstance that was exploited long before Anita Loos.

In her novel Corinne, Madam de Stael has a darkhaired genius as heroine, a noble actress before whom all Italy prostrates itself; but, in matters of love, Corinne fears defeat from a blond rival.

The Corinne tradition appears in England in George Eliot’s The. Mill on the Floss, where the brunette Maggy Tulliver has a similar blond bete noir.

But in both authors blondeness is dangerous because it stands for the fire of the hearth — not of tempera-

ment; blondes are dolls wearing satin and lace and smelling of cologne, and men want to install them in houses.

The 19th century blond is best typified in Lucy Manette, whom Sidney Carton first sneers at and then dies for.

The 20th century has introduced the cult of the blonde siren, platinised by Jean Harlow but not by Mae West or Marilyn Munroe. Blondeness became more than colour: it stood for the slinky dresses of Carole Lombard and the arch-look of Marlene Dietrich. There was no domesticity in it; blondes were there for men’s ruination.

When, in films, men. have blondes for wives, they are either endowed with the siren temperament which makes them unfaithful and eventually, murdered, or else they are of Scandinavian origin (probably Minnesota) and hence have totally cornfield associations. Blond sirens ate never from the deep north. Reality, as opposed to the cinema, gives us two main kinds of blonde — the frail

anaemic and the Junoesque. There is no woman more appealing to the protective in men. as Corinne and Maggy Tulliver realised, than the blue-eyed, washedout, insomniac-looking dolls with thin limbs and an aura of orphanage deprivation.

Dark girls with the same physique seem at least to have blood in them and don't as Fay Wray, in King Kong (or Kong King as it is called in Oslo), have to be rushed to the nearest hash joint to be fed.

The Junoesque blonde, or statuesque blonde as she is known in show business, represents the opposite pole, and blue-eyed fairness takes on a meaning with little of the seductive in it.

Such blondes are either to be looked at from a distance, or brought close, permitted to be cruel, especially to blondes of the other type. They can parody the siren, as Mae West did, but they cannot be her.

Of course, fashion comes into this blonde-brunette business, and it may be said that the cult of the blonde lost its validity in the late fifties, when Italian film stars evinced more allure

than their rather rarefied counterparts from America.

Gina Lollobngida and Sophia Loren were obviously real women, while Doris Day was clearly a cleansed artefact. '.

Blondes are traditionally held to be less bright than brunettes.’

The myth of the dumbness of blondes probably started among their dark sisters. During the war I' had to master a quiz for members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. “Blondes v. Brunettes” I suggested. There weren’t enough blondes available, so a brunette was told to join the blonde team. “Coo, am I as dumb as that?” she said, undulating towards it.

Blondeness is also regarded as clean. Aldous Huxley's first wife Maria, was appalled at Frieda Law-, rence's filthy, housekeeping, yet conceded that she must be fundamentally clean, being blonde.

Dirty blondes are not, in fact, easily conceivable. Blonds belong to the privileged races such as the Germans: It is the blonde Gretchen of Goethe who is

the eternal woman leading us upwards. The great dark women of literature, like Cleopatra and Anna Karenina, are goddesses of defeat. But the distinction makes little sense. For cosmetics can turn a woman into whatever she wishes. Ann Gregory, according to W. B. Yeats, could be loved not for herself alone but only for her yellow hair. The girl, very sensibly, said that she could buy a hair dye and make herself black or brown or carrot.

To set up a polarity when we have only a spectrum is a silly thing to do. And we ought to remember that Anita Loos was having a joke at the expense of ( H. L. Mencken, that very GermanAmerican who loved beer, sauerkraut, and the goddess of the North. She wrote a sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it is called Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Meaning that gentlemen prefer both. Copyright — London “Observer” Service. J