"I started life clutching in my childish fist a front-row ticket," wrote Anita Loos, "to that great melodrama, the Twentieth Century." Her first piece was published in the second year of the century, when she was eight years old, and by the end of World War I, she was a veteran scenarist in the new medium of motion pictures. She became an internationally celebrated satirist by the time of the Great Crash, and then an enormously successful screen-writer in the heyday of Hollywood talkies. More recently she was a prolific chronicler of the several golden ages of film in which she thrived and later became an occasional guest on television talk shows where she delighted eager listeners with tales about the astonishing number and variety of celebrities she counted as her friends.

Anita Loos was born in Sisson (now Mount Shasta), California, to Minnie Ellen Smith Loos, a...