Lillian Lorraine reportedly was a large influence on Anita Loos in the creation of the character of Lorelei for the novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". Although her affair with Ziegfeld was over by the end of the 1910s, her box office drawing power kept her in a number of his productions of the period. Lorraine's fame waned in the 1920s, and she worked for a period in vaudeville. Lorraine's first marriage was to Frederick M. Gresheimer. They married on March 27, 1912 after meeting on a beach. Ten days later, Lorraine announced that the marriage had been a mistake and that the couple
Anita Loos Loos began to write a sketch of Mencken and his vacant lady friends that would later become "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" began as a series of short sketches published in "Harper's Bazaar", Known as the "Lorelei" stories, they were satires on the state of sexual relations that only vaguely alluded to sexual intimacy; the magazine's circulation quadrupled overnight. The heroine of the stories, Lorelei Lee, was a bold, ambitious flapper, who was much more concerned with collecting expensive baubles from her conquests than any marriage licenses, in addition to being a shrewd woman of loose morals and high