Anita Loos, Communist Cover Girl?
Unfortunately, I was blessed with a talent for spending extravagantly on nice clothes. When I discover a friend similarly afflicted, I will report back to my spouse that I have met another delightful companion who “can shop.”
Anita Loos was also a woman who could shop. She loved visiting a couturiere when traveling abroad, and as she wrote in A Girl Like I: “I’ve enjoyed my happiest moments when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across the sawdust-covered floor of a saloon.” Once she began making good money writing scenarios, her daybooks become filled with shopping appointments.
It’s a bit of a surprise, then to encounter the name Max Eastman in her memoir A Girl Like I. And yet there he is. (Incidentally, I’ve discovered that Max Eastman was born in my hometown Canandaigua, NY, which is also where Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted for voting)
Apparently, Anita met Max on her first trip to New York, part of a publicity tour for the D.W. Griffith film Intolerance. It was on this same trip that she met Vachel Lindsay and acted as a go-between for a near romance between the poet and actress Mae Marsh. But that’s a story for another day…
For the first part of his life Max Eastman was a true American radical. A writer and editor who promoted women’s suffrage, socialism, and pacifism. After the revolution, he visited the Soviet Union, and was aghast at the authoritarianism that emerged under Stalin. He sided with Trotsky, for whom he served as English-language translator. Later in life, Eastman turned, and railed against both socialism and communism in mainstream and conservative magazines. When Anita met him, however, he was in his radical youth, serving as editor of The Masses.
In her memoirs, Anita writes:
In Greenwich Village I also came to know Max Eastman, the Daddy of socialism in the United States, and Editor of The Masses. Affluent though I was, I became the cover girl on The Masses, and a favorite model for its far-to-the-left staff artist, Frank Waltz (sic). Never having a mind for politics, I brought my theories on the subject into focus during my friendship with Waltz (sic) and Eastman. They were (and still are) founded on the fact that whatever party happens to be in control, its personnel tends to be human and will be affected by blondes, bribery, and attempts at tax evasion. My radical friends used to think I was cute and laughed at my views, which I promised to revise the next time the United States produced an Abraham Lincoln. In the meanwhile, I preferred not to tamper with capitalism which, at the time, was producing some very delectable rogues.
I found Anita’s claim to have served as socialist cover girl a bit surprising. When not characterized by the sort of cynical apoliticism stated here, Anita’s politics tended to lean right of center. Her take on her husband Ralph Emerson’s labor activism was consistently cynical. And Eastman and his regular illustrator Frank Walts were at the radical edge of American politics.
In addition to learning a bit more about her political views, the other thing I’ve learned about Anita from working on this biography is that she’ll tell a stretcher if it serves her story.
I’ve been working closely with her published memoirs to get a sense of chronology and the general cast of characters, but I’ve been corroborating these against the daybooks she kept as well as various California newspapers that reported her doings. For example, she claims to have a poor grasp on her first husband’s name as a way of showing how insignificant that short marriage was. Off to the Coronado Eagle for me!
Anita also likes to claim herself as the first on a number of things. And sometimes she was! Indeed, I’m trying to sell my book based on the claim that she was the first woman staff screenwriter (a bit of a mouthful, but an accurate one). But other claims, such as being the first woman to bob her hair, seem less likely.
All this to say that I was a bit dubious about her claim to be a cover girl for The Masses (1911-1917), “the most dangerous magazine in America,” which was eventually pressed into closure by the government for its radical socialist and anti-war views.
I was also inspired to dive deeper into Anita’s claims because I love Frank Walts (note the correct spelling). I’d encountered him before while working on other research projects about W.E.B. Du Bois and Black visual culture. In addition to illustrating The Masses, Walts also created beautiful covers for The Crisis, the magazine outlet of the NAACP, which Du Bois edited at the time.
Walts’s illustrations are always spare, striking, and modernist in their design. Really gorgeous images. Could it be that my favorite magazine artist and favorite writer had a meeting of the minds via the era’s most radical magazine?
The answer is a little complicated. Here’s what I’ve come up with…
I started by looking through old covers of The Masses. There are a number of modern-looking young women with dark hair featured on the magazine covers during this period. However, I haven’t been able to determine that any are Anita.
Some certainly aren’t. In his book The Public Face of Modernism, Mark Morrison documents that the April 1916 cover pictured above was of actress Mary Fuller. Not Anita, but an indication that radicals were not immune to the appeal of popular entertainments.
As I kept digging, I turned up an image held by the Library of Congress that has both Anita’s name and Frank Walts’ attached to it.
This lovely object, which I’m now lusting after, is a book plate Walts made for Anita.
A lover of both presents (she called them loot!) and attention, Anita must have adored this. Alas, not a magazine cover.
I had nearly given up the possibility of verifying Loos’s brief stint as radical cover girl, when I looked to another magazine Walts worked for, The Liberator.
The Liberator was Eastman’s second magazine, which he founded in 1918 after the demise of The Masses. It was perhaps more dangerously political than The Masses, an organ of the Communist Party of America, and it published the great radical writers of the United States at the time, including Claude McKay, Carl Sandburg, James Weldon Johnson, and John Dos Passos. It also published the cover art of Eastman’s go-to illustrator, Walts.
Including…bum, bum, bum…a cover of Anita Loos for the second issue, April 1918. Here she is.
As a researcher, I so appreciated that the issue also contained a note about the image, confirming the identity of the cover girl and her ambivalence towards the magazine’s politics:
“Our cover design is a drawing by Frank Waltz, of Miss Anita Loos, the film-playwright. Its use does not imply that miss Loos endorses our opinions, but only that we endorse her picture.”
Of course, this image mirrors that of the book plate, so I likely would have connected the dots, but I love Eastman’s wry take on both Loos’s politics and her loveliness.
So, was Anita cover girl for the Masses? Unclear to me at present.
Were women like her, ambassadors of capitalist mass culture, gracing the cover of the magazine? Certainly.
Was Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the one-time cover girl of a famed communist magazine? Indeed she was.
If you’d like to learn more about these magazines, you can check out:
Mark Morrison’s Book The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920
