Marilyn Monroe dress, which prompted veteran star Joan Crawford to describe her behavior as "unbecoming an actress and a lady" to the press. While "Niagara" made Monroe a sex symbol and established her "look", her second film of the year, the satirical musical comedy "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", established her screen persona as a "dumb blonde". Based on Anita Loos' bestselling novel and its Broadway version, the film focuses on two "gold-digging" showgirls, Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw, played by Monroe and Jane Russell. The role of Lorelei was originally intended for Betty Grable, who had been 20th Century-Fox's most popular "blonde bombshell"
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