Loos kept Fairbanks on the go, but she adopted a different strategy for Constance “Dutch” Talmadge. In her 1978 book The Talmadge Girls, Loos admiringly described Constance’s “sense of fun … spontaneous, relaxing and feminine, it was downright sexy.” Yet Loos also noted “the perversity of Dutch’s charm,” whereby the actress “could have brought about the Trojan War and done it with a giggle.” Loos engendered sympathy for this fun-loving Helen of Troy of filmdom by making the audience delight in what she could get away with.
In A Temperamental Wife the male authorities of Washington are fair game for Talmadge’s Billie Billings, as she charms a cop, connives with a doctor, and makes a Senator succumb. Loos’s distinctive voice enhances Talmadge’s appeal, and Billie’s triumph when she finally gets the Senator on a sofa. As their clinch approaches, titles intersperse with the coming kiss — “Going…” “Going….” “GONE!” The rhythm of the titles with the action recall that Loos and Emerson were known as much for their editing as their writing. An advertisement in the June‒September 1919 Exhibitors’ Herald described them as “cutting and fitting this first production for First National.” But as the late scholar JoAnne Ruvoli indicates in her Loos entry in the Women Film Pioneers Project, it was Loos who did the lion’s share of all the film work attributed to the pair, whether writing, cutting, or producing.
A Temperamental Wife depended on the talents of more than one woman writer. An opening credit expresses “indebtedness for certain scenes to Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin’s [1918] play, Information Please.” One can understand why Loos took inspiration from this play by actress-writer Cowl and stage- and screen-writer Murfin: it depicts the flight of a heroine from her titled husband and the ruse of a false fire alarm to get him back. The story suited her star’s quicksilver and prankster nature. One can make equal sense of Loos’s changes, shifting the setting from the political world of London to Washington DC, and transforming a comedy of remarriage to one of catching a mate and then remarrying him. Watching Constance Talmadge scheme through both situations doubles the entertainment.
A moment which illustrates how Loos reshaped the play for Talmadge occurs when the heroine decides to leave her husband. In the play she promises, “I’ll teach John … that I’m entitled to some consideration … I’ll show him … Nobody in this house pays the slightest attention to me!” In the same scene in the film, instead of the dialogue, we see Billie lock the Senator out of their bedroom, and spy on him from her window, in an apparently close moment with his secretary. Loos links Talmadge’s actions, allowing her to parade expressions of stubbornness, regret, feigned indifference, sorrow, surprise, anger, and — on the phone with an admirer — renewed carefree allure.
Loos made five films starring Constance Talmadge, including A Temperamental Wife, with the little-known director David Kirkland. Loos viewed him as an assistant to John Emerson, whom she married in 1919.
Loos’s bond with Emerson, however complicated, and the formation of John Emerson‒Anita Loos Productions the year before their marriage in 1919, was instrumental in making A Temperamental Wife. Ads for Emerson‒Loos Productions in the trade papers of April‒August 1918 announced how the pair’s pictures “speak your language,” in films with “funny stunts and gingery sub-titles”— all ingredients the newly formed Constance Talmadge Pictures Corporation of 1919 sought for its first production. Constance’s company was founded two years after her sister Norma’s. Although Norma’s husband Joseph Schenck headed both Talmadge companies, the sisters’ approval over story naturally moved them to collaborate with Loos, who had proved her ability to write comedy for Norma in The Social Secretary (1916), as well as for Constance and Fairbanks as co-stars in The Matrimaniac (1916). – Gabriel Paletz