Joshua Zeitz Read online

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpts from Lulu in Hollywood, by Louise Brooks, copyright © 1974, 1982 by Louise Brooks. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Dell Publishing: Excerpt from Exiles from Paradise by Sara Mayfield, copyright © 1971 by Sara Mayfield. Reprinted by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Doubleday: Excerpt from Silent Star by Colleen Moore, copyright © 1968 by Colleen Moore. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  The New Yorker/The Condé Nast Publications Inc.: Excerpts from The New Yorker—Talk of the Town: Tables for Two and On and Off the Avenue, courtesy of The New Yorker/ The Condé Nast Publications Inc. www.newyorker.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Joshua Zeitz

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zeitz, Joshua.

  Flapper : a madcap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made America modern / Joshua Zeitz.—1st ed.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. United States—History—1919–1933—Biography. 2. Women—United States—Biography. 3. Celebrities—United States—Biography. 4. Artists—United States—Biography. 5. United States—Social life and customs—1918–1945. 6. Women—United States—Social life and customs—20th century. 7. Sex customs—United States—History—20th century. 8. Sex role—United States—History—20th century. 9. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. 10. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  E784.Z45 2006

  813′.52—dc22

  [B]

  2005024297

  eISBN: 978-0-307-52382-2

  v3.1_r1

  For Juli-anne

  The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts …

  —WILLA CATHER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION: TANGO PIRATES AND ABSINTHE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 THE MOST POPULAR GIRL

  Chapter 2 SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA

  Chapter 3 WILL SHE THROW HER ARMS AROUND YOUR NECK AND YELL?

  Chapter 4 FLAPPER KING

  Chapter 5 DOING IT FOR EFFECT

  Chapter 6 I PREFER THIS SORT OF GIRL

  Chapter 7 STRAIGHTEN OUT PEOPLE

  Chapter 8 NEW YORK SOPHISTICATION

  Chapter 9 MISS JAZZ AGE

  Chapter 10 GIRLISH DELIGHT IN BARROOMS

  Chapter 11 THESE MODERN WOMEN

  Chapter 12 THE LINGERIE SHORTAGE IN THIS COUNTRY

  PART TWO

  Chapter 13 A MIND FULL OF FABULATIONS

  Chapter 14 AN ATHLETIC KIND OF GIRL

  Chapter 15 LET GO OF THE WAISTLINE

  Chapter 16 INTO THE STREETS

  Chapter 17 WITHOUT IMAGINATION, NO WANTS

  Chapter 18 10,000,000 FEMMES FATALES

  Chapter 19 APPEARANCES COUNT

  PART THREE

  Chapter 20 PAPA, WHAT IS BEER?

  Chapter 21 OH, LITTLE GIRL, NEVER GROW UP

  Chapter 22 THE KIND OF GIRL THE FELLOWS WANT

  Chapter 23 ANOTHER PETULANT WAY TO PASS THE TIME

  Chapter 24 THE DREAMER’S DREAM COME TRUE

  Chapter 25 SUICIDE ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

  CONCLUSION: UNAFFORDABLE EXCESS

  Notes

  Photography Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Living life on the edge, two young flappers demonstrate the Charleston on the roof of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel, December 11, 1926.

  INTRODUCTION TANGO PIRATES AND ABSINTHE

  ON MAY 22, 1915, amid a flurry of cameras and a battery of outstretched hands, most bearing autograph books and pens, Eugenia Kelly, the young heiress to a sizable New York banking fortune, pushed past waves of idle celebrity watchers and slowly wound her way up the marble staircase at the Yorkville Magistrate’s Court, on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side.1

  Walking beside her lawyer, nineteen-year-old Eugenia impressed bystanders as unexpectedly well poised and confident. She sported “a green shade Norfolk suit,” one courtroom observer reported, “a white silk shirt waist with a loose, rolling collar, and a bright red necktie. Her wavy hair was covered by a tri-cornered brimless hat of black straw, decorated with yellow and a rosette.”

  Eugenia couldn’t have struck a sharper contrast with her mother, Helen Kelly, a matronly widow of ambiguous middle age who arrived at the magistrate’s building just moments after her daughter. Mrs. Kelly was clad in an old-fashioned, long-necked black dress whose severity found only the slightest relief from the touch of white lace that wrapped around her collar. As she took her seat in the courtroom, Mrs. Kelly fixed her gaze nervously on Eugenia, who refused to acknowledge her mother.

  And no wonder. Just two nights earlier, Mrs. Kelly had sworn out an arrest warrant against Eugenia and asked that a judge commit her to a correctional institution. After hearing Mrs. Kelly’s woeful tale, a local magistrate immediately consented to the request. That evening, without warning, two plainclothes detectives confronted and arrested Eugenia inside a restaurant at Pennsylvania Station. She spent several late hours in lockup until her older sister arrived with bail money.

  Eugenia, it seemed, had turned overnight from a sweet young society belle into an irredeemable wild child. By her mother’s estimation, she was even “likely to become depraved.”

  For months, Eugenia had been frequenting the dance halls on Broadway, where she acquired an insatiable appetite for jazz, cigarettes, absinthe, and brandy. She was also keeping company with an older married man, Al Davis, whom authorities described as a “tango pirate”—a confidence man who preyed on unsuspecting rich girls.

  Though money was the primary motive driving Mrs. Kelly’s concern—Eugenia would inherit $10 million on her twenty-first birthday, and the family was hell-bent on stopping her from squandering her bequest on a miscreant like Al Davis—she shrewdly justified her case by highlighting Eugenia’s antisocial behavior.2

  What to do with a young woman who stayed out until three or four in the morning? Every night. With the exception of her lawyer, all parties concerned, including the state magistrate, seemed to agree that Eugenia was out of control. Maybe even criminally wayward.

  “Why, if I didn’t go to at least six cabarets a night,” she allegedly told her mother, “I would lose my social standing.”

  The weepy-eyed Mrs. Kelly had tried everything: increasing Eugenia’s allowance, docking her allowance, begging her to stay home, ordering her to stay home. She had even tried locking the front door of her East Side town house after midnight, in the hope that Eugenia wouldn’t risk spending a long, cold night on the front porch stoop. No use. Eugenia had smashed out the glass window above the brass handle and unlocked the door from the inside.

  In vain, Eugenia’s lawyer, Frank Crocker, asked that the charges against his client be dismissed. She was nineteen years old, after all—an adult, legally entitled to make her own mistakes. This motion only infuriated the magistrate, who dressed down Crocker in no uncertain terms. “The issue is plain,” he bellowed, “as to whether the defend
ant is disobedient to the reasonable commandment of her mother, who is her natural and legal guardian; whether she associates with vicious and depraved people; and whether she is liable to become morally depraved.” The trial would proceed.

  To the public’s delight, Eugenia was in fine form the next day when she took the witness stand.

  “You are too nice a girl, Eugenia,” said John McIntyre, counsel to Mrs. Kelly, “to be hauled into court this way, and to have your name daily blemished by this notoriety. You are breaking your mother’s heart. If you will promise now to go home to her, to cut out this Broadway crowd, to eliminate this man Al Davis from your mind, I will drop this thing right now.”

  “I will not go home to my mother,” Eugenia snapped back. “I am not going to apologize to any one for anything that I have done. I am not going to give up my acquaintance with Al Davis. My mother started the ball rolling, and I will see this thing through to the end.” With steely-eyed conviction, Eugenia declared, “I do not think they can send me away.”

  Clearly uncomfortable with his role in the case, Maurice Spies, the deputy assistant district attorney, tried to reason with Eugenia. “Do you realize what this means to you?” he pleaded. “Do you know that you are in danger of being sent to some institution?”

  “Well, I am the one that will be sent away,” she rejoined, “not you, so this is my business and not yours.”

  Captivated newspaper readers were just getting acquainted with the strange case of Eugenia Kelly when, on the third day of the trial, in a sudden and disappointing about-face, the defendant yielded to the state’s demands and formally repudiated her lifestyle.

  “I was wrong and mother was right,” she told the judge, somewhat unconvincingly, in court.

  It seemed that, following a marathon negotiation session, mother and daughter had come to a mutual understanding, brokered by lawyers for Mrs. Kelly, as well as several Catholic priests who were longtime associates of the family. Realizing that her inheritance was in jeopardy, Eugenia agreed to cut off all contact with Al Davis and the Broadway crowd. In turn, her mother would drop all charges.

  “Eugenia is not innately bad,” Mrs. Kelly assured members of the press. “She is a good girl, but she was blinded to a true perception of life by the white lights of Broadway.”

  Her daughter agreed, summoning almost identical language in her apology to the court. “I realize now,” she admitted, “that I was dazzled by the glamour of the white lights and the music and the dancing of Broadway.”

  It wasn’t enough for the magistrate, who was determined to use the case to issue a sweeping moral judgment from the bench. He ordered Eugenia to stand before him and, with court reporters working furiously to record his every word, tore into the young defendant for what must have seemed an interminable length of time.

  “You come from one of the best families in the city,” he chided. “I can remember, as a young man, that your grandfather stood so high in this community that when men passed him in the street they lifted their hats out of respect to him. Your father was a high type of man, and one of the city’s best citizens. I am afraid you have acted a little foolishly. The best friend you have is your mother. Sometimes we may disagree as to what a mother says, but when we think it over calmly we realize all she does is for our interest and benefit. After you think this over you will realize that your mother was guided by the right motives in trying to do what she could to save you.

  “I think you will agree with me in the end,” he concluded, “that she is entitled to a great deal of consideration on your part for bringing you to a realization that you were doing something that is not going to benefit you. Bear that in mind, please, and realize that, after all, your mother is the best friend you have. Will you promise to do that?”

  “Yes, yes, your Honor,” Eugenia replied, though probably not without digging her nails into the palm of her hand.

  Eugenia didn’t keep her promise for very long. Within the space of three months, she eloped to Elkton, Maryland—the North American capital of eleventh-hour marriages—with the recently divorced Al Davis. Sporting a plain suit coat and carrying a large bouquet of roses, the incorrigible Miss Kelly found that her reputation preceded her, even below the Mason-Dixon Line. In vain, she and Davis spent several frantic hours trying to find a clergyman who would perform the ceremony until, finally, the Reverend Henry Carr, a minister who specialized in last-minute wedding ceremonies, agreed to consecrate their union.

  The story didn’t end happily ever after. Two years later, as America made a fateful break with its isolationist heritage and sent the first round of doughboys off to the Great War, Eugenia Kelly quietly inherited her fortune. Before the 1920s were out, she and Al Davis had divorced.

  By then, nobody cared. The guardians of feminine virtue and Victorian morality had much bigger problems with which to contend. Every girl, it seemed, wanted to be Eugenia Kelly.

  It was the age of the flapper.

  IT’S NOT CLEAR how or when the term flapper first wound its way into the American vernacular. The expression probably originated in prewar England. According to a 1920s fashion writer, “flapper” initially described the sort of teenage girl whose gawky frame and posture were “supposed to need a certain type of clothing—long, straight lines to cover her awkwardness—and the stores advertised these gowns as ‘flapper-dresses.’ ”3

  Shortly after the closing shots of World War I, the word came to designate young women in their teens and twenties who subscribed to the libertine principles that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and actresses like Clara Bow popularized in print and on the silver screen.

  An early reference in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defined the flapper as “A young girl, esp. one somewhat daring in conduct, speech and dress,” a designation that at least one eighteen-year-old woman in 1922 seemed ready to embrace. “Of all the things that flappers don’t like,” she boldly explained to readers of The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, “it is the commonplace.”4, 5

  If historians still disagree about how and when the term came into vogue, by the early 1920s it seemed that every social ill in America could be attributed to the “flapper”—the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors. She was the envy of teenage girls everywhere and the scourge of good character and morals. Nobody could escape the intense dialogue over the flapper. “Concern—and consternation—about the flapper are general,” observed a popular newspaper columnist of the day.6 “She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her out of grownup company or conversation. Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who fear her and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course.”

  The U.S. secretary of labor decried the “flippancy of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flapper.”7 A Harvard psychologist reported that flappers possessed the “lowest degree of intelligence” and posed “a hopeless problem for educators.”8 In 1929, the Florida State Legislature even considered banning use of the term flapper, so infamous was her character.9

  It’s easy, in retrospect, to lose sight of just how radical the flapper appeared to her elders. Until World War I, few women other than prostitutes ventured into saloons and barrooms. As late as 1904, a woman had been arrested on Fifth Avenue in New York City for lighting up a cigarette. It wasn’t until 1929 that some railroad companies formally abolished their prohibition against women smokers in dining cars.10

  Given how new the “New Woman” really was in America, it’s little wonder that she dominated the public debate in the 1920s. Throughout the decade, headlines reported terrible stories of young girls driven to ruin, like a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who committed suicide after her mother forbade her to don flapper wear.11 “Other girls in her class rolled their stockings, had their hair bobbed and called
themselves flappers,” readers learned. “She wanted to be a flapper, too. But her mother was an old fashioned mother, who kindly but firmly said ‘No.’ So the girl put a rubber hose in her mouth and turned on the gas.”

  NOT EVERYONE THOUGHT the flapper’s triumph represented civilization’s decline. Writing in September 1925, at the height of the Jazz Age, Bruce Bliven, editor of The New Republic, penned a lighthearted profile of “Flapper Jane,” a nineteen-year-old representative of the youth generation and exemplar of the New American Woman who seemed everywhere on display in the years just following World War I.12 Maybe “Jane” was real. Maybe she was the work of Bliven’s imagination. In all probability, she was a composite figure.

  Her minister, wrote Bliven, “poor man,” condemned Jane as “a perfectly horrible example of wild youth—paint, cigarettes, cocktails, petting parties—oooh!” Her critics linked her with “prohibition, the automobile, the decline of Fundamentalism,” and any number of other sweeping social changes. She was one of those reckless youths who “strolls across the lawn of her parents’ suburban home, having just put the car away after driving sixty miles in two hours.” A “very pretty girl” made up “for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes,” Jane imitated the “swagger supposed by innocent America to go with the female half of a Paris Apache dance.”

  To Bliven’s rhetorical question—“Jane … why do all of you dress the way you do?”—the young flapper replied, “In a way, it’s just honesty. Women have come down off the pedestal lately. They are tired of this mysterious feminine charm stuff. Maybe it goes with independence, earning your own living and voting and all that. There was always a bit of the harem in that cover-up-your-arms-and-legs business, don’t you think? Women still want to be loved, but they want it on a 50-50 basis, which includes being admired for the qualities they really possess.”

  Ultimately, Bliven ventured that there was “a good deal more smoke than fire” in the flapper’s general conduct. Rather than evidence of a great unloosening of morals, she was proof positive that “women today are shaking off the shreds and patches of their age-old servitude. ‘Feminism’ has won a victory so nearly complete that we have even forgotten the fierce challenge that once inhered in the very word.