Where is the love?

Just a little post from deep in the muck of working things out…

How do women recollect their terrible romances? And, how can their biographers reconstruct the feelings that brought these women into the romance to begin with?

When Anita Loos’s second husband died in 1956, she wrote a simple sentence in her day planner: “Mr. E dies at 3am.”

By this point, Anita and Mr. E, as she called John Emerson, had been living separately for the better part of twenty years.

The two married in 1919, turning a business partnership into a relationship one. Emerson typically directing Loos’s scenarios. Later she would claim that he asked for cowriting credits on stories that were solely her own. She gave him these.

By 1937 things had gone badly. Very.

Anita wrote in her day book that this was “the toughest year.” Mr. E, who was never stable, had a significant bout of mental illness. On October 18th, she wrote, “Worst day Mr. E has ever had. He tries to kill me.”

From this point onward, the couple would never live together full time again. Anita committed John to a sanitarium.  He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. From time to time he’d improve, and live in a separate apartment, but then need to be committed again. For several years, Anita would pay occasional visits, or take John to lunch or a movie. Shortly before he died, Anita and her brother Clifford were working out a guardianship arrangement for Mr. E.

But this is a story of duration, not love.

By the time Anita wrote her various memoirs, Mr. E was long dead.

He’d betrayed her many times, and in every arena that mattered: romance, money, and work. At a moment in 1938 when it looked as though they might divorce (they never did), she wrote about a bad lunch during which she learned about Mr. E’s financial mismanagement of her assets:

“Dinner with Mr E. at Nonesuch. He goes into long demonstration of pimp arithmetic re our financial settlement.”

In short, by the time Anita was John’s caretaker, she was no longer in love with him. And by the time she wrote about the relationship, nearly fifty years after it had begun, her feelings were darker still. She liked to repeat a witticism that John was “one of them guys that lives by the sweat of his frau.”

And so, as a biographer, as someone who is on ‘Nita’s “side” (despite having spent time learning her many flaws), as a woman of “a certain age” watching friends and loved ones divorce, what I have is a problem.

I’m trying to construct how Anita felt when she first fell in love with John Emerson. There is so much of Anita’s life in her day books and her memoirs: the films she worked on, the celebrities she knew, her opinions about various public figures and happenings, what she wore, where she lunched. What’s a mystery is her early feeling of love for Mr. E.

The day books I’ve seen at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills don’t cover the early days of Mr. E. Further compounding things, much like Anita was by the time she wrote her memoirs, I am poisoned against the Mr. E. I know through her words.

My job this week is to describe the beginning of the romance as Anita would have felt it back in the 1910s, when Anita and John worked together making light comedies for Douglass Fairbanks.

What was this love and how do I source it? I need to understand this romance that would also become the great, slowly-unfolding disaster at the center of Anita’s working and personal life.

I find myself piecing together shards, combining them in the hopes of catching a feeling:

I know something of young Anita’s youthful ambitions, what she would have been likely to admire in her older beau. I know something of the atmosphere of the young studios where they made their films. And then, there are the photos, in which Anita, so often the center of publicity, looks admiringly at John, or allows him to be at the center of the frame. It looks something like love.