A Philadelphia copywriter named Frances Gerety is credited with coining the phrase, “A Diamond Is Forever” for De Beers in 1947. But a similar phrase served as a punchline more than twenty years earlier, in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “Kissing your hand may make you feel very very good,” observes Loos’s narrator, Lorelei Lee, “but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.” It seems right that the line Advertising Age called “the slogan of the century” originated in Anita Loos’s novel. Lorelei Lee at least would have found it most intreeging.
Loos’s premise is deceptively simple. The novel is the diary of a young blonde woman from Little Rock who has recently arrived in New York City. The gentlemen Lorelei meets—many of them titled, most of them married, all of them rich—attack her like flies on honey. They shower her with jewels, believing they will dazzle the country girl into submission, but Lorelei, despite lacking a particularly sophisticated lexicon (having never having attended colledge) outsmarts them all. It’s not that she doesn’t love jewels. She’s obsessed with jewels. It’s just that she knows that the best way to maximize her jewelry collection is to maximize her gentlemen.
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