Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" is a jazz song introduced by Carol Channing in the original Broadway production of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1949), which was written by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. It was based on a novel by Anita Loos. The song is perhaps most famously performed by Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 film "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". Monroe's character, Lorelei Lee, has been followed on a Transatlantic ocean liner by a detective hired by her fiancé's father, who wants assurance that she is not marrying purely for money. He is informed of
Anita Loos a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken and when he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken with what may have been love and preferred this group over the Round Table. She gradually realized Emerson paled in comparison to someone like Mencken, and disappointingly, high-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more "downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood for another Talmadge picture,