A Valentine from Modernist Women and Their Dogs

This Valentine’s Day, a note on some loves of Anita’s life.

Anita Loos was married twice. Her first marriage was to a man named Frank Palma that was so unremarkable that it barely registers in her memoirs. While still married to Frank, Anita met John Emerson, the man to whom she’d stay married from 1919 until his death in 1956.

The Emerson-Loos marriage and work partnership (he directed and sometimes took writing credits for films on which she worked) was troubled almost from the start. More on that in future posts, but to give a flavor of the thing, Anita loved repeating the quip that he was the kind of man who lived “by the sweat of his frau.”

But you know who didn’t wrong Anita? Her beloved dog, named for one of her favored stars, Jimmy Cagney.

For your Valentine’s Day, here’s a roundup of modernist women and some of their least problematic objects of affection.

Anita Loos and Jimmy Cagney, 1953

Richard Avedon photo of Dorothy Parker and Cliche, 1958

Image of Zora Neale Hurston with unknown dog from University of Florida Digital Archives

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas with Basket, photo by Carl Mydans for Life Magazine

A note and a reference: While it was easy to do an internet search for white women and their dogs, I struggled to find images of the Black women of modernism (Zora Neal Hurston, Jesse Fauset, Nella Larsen) with dogs. If you ever want to read about a terrifying dog, though, check out Their Eyes Were Watching God. If you have photos of these important women of the Harlem Renaissance with their pets, I’d love to know about this. In the process of putting together this post, I found a wonderful photo project Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves by Ann-Janine Morey, which uses archival photos of Americans and their dogs to consider the way pets become a vehicle for expression of identity for people of different classes, races, and genders.