Topic: Anita Loos

Anita Loos (April 26, 1888 – August 18, 1981) was an American screenwriter, playwright and author.

Born Corinne Anita Loos in Sisson, California (today Mount Shasta), where her father, R. Beers Loos, had opened a tabloid newspaper for which her mother, Minerva "Minnie" Smith did most of the work of a newspaper publisher. Loos had two siblings: Gladys, and Clifford (Harry Clifford), the latter being the eldest who would be a physician and co-founder of Ross-Loos Medical Group. The family moved to San Francisco in 1892, where Beers Loos bought still another newspaper, The Dramatic Event, a veiled version of a Police Gazette, with money Minerva borrowed from her father. On pronouncing her name, "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation which is lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them."

While living in San Francisco, Loos followed her dissolute alcoholic father as they explored San Francisco's underbelly; together they would sit on the pier, fishing and making friends with the natives, feeding into her lifelong fascination with lowlifes and loose women. In 1897, at their father's urging, she and her sister performed in the San Francisco stock company production of Quo Vadis. Gladys died while their father was on one of his drinking and philandering "fishing trips". Anita continued appearing on stage, sometimes being the family's sole breadwinner. Eventually Beers Loos' spendthrift ways caught up with them, and in 1903, Beers Loos took an offer to manage a theater company in San Diego. There, Anita performed simultaneously in her father's stock company, and under another name with the more legitimate stock company in town. It was around this time that she started shaving years off her true age.