Chic seems". By contrast, in Anita Loos' novel, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1925), the diarist Lorelei Lee recorded that "the French use the word 'sheik' for everything, while we only seem to use if for gentlemen when they seem to resemble Rudolf Valentino" (a pun derived from the latter's being the star of the 1921 silent film, "The Sheik"). The Oxford Dictionary gives the comparative and superlative forms of "chic" as "chicer" and "chicest". These are wholly English words: the French equivalents would be "plus chic" and "le/la plus chic". "Super-chic" is sometimes used: "super-chic Incline bucket in mouth-blown, moulded glass". An
Anita Loos ""Blondes"" would see three more printings sell through by year's end, and 20 in its first decade. The little book would see 85 editions in the years to come and eventually be translated into 14 languages, including Chinese. When asked who the models for her characters, Loos would almost always say they were composites of various people, but when pressed, admitted that toothless flirt Sir Francis Beekman was modeled after writer Joseph Hergesheimer and producer Jesse L. Lasky. Dorothy Shaw was modeled after herself and Constance Talmadge, and Lorelei herself most closely resembled acquisitive Ziegfeld showgirl, Lillian Lorraine, who was