Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  The hostess came up to us. She was very beautiful, as I have explained. She smiled at my father . . . and, by the red pig’s bristles!, the old war-horse smiled back at her.

  He turned to me.

  “Being in an alien land I must conform to alien customs. I shall dance with her.”

  He danced with her the rest of the evening. He did several new steps . . .

  He also drank forbidden spirits. Many of them.

  I had great difficulty in putting him to bed. He was babbling about dancing, about forbidden spirits. He murmured that an Asian gentleman should observe the customs of alien lands.

  “Yes,” he muttered as I got him into his bed, and he looked at me with a stern expression, “it is good and just. Labid considered it right. And Mahommad el-Darmini, the great sage, specially recommended spirits in alien lands. Tell the wallah to call me early. The mouse-haired woman has asked me to lunch . . .”

  • • •

  In the morning he addressed me:

  “Tell me, my son. You know this great land and its quaint customs. In writing a little note to a mouse-haired woman, would it be thought graceful to employ the beautiful Afghan term of endearment, ‘Blood of my Liver’? Or would it be better to use the charming Pukhtu, ‘Wind of my Nostrils’?”

  THE ART OF BEING A BOHEMIAN

  ROBERT C. BENCHLEY

  FROM MARCH 1916

  Some day, when Fate has delayed your laundry and you have only one clean collar left, go down and take a try at being a Bohemian. You can do it. Hundreds of people, with no worse bringing up than you have had, are doing it, and, after it is all over, and you have had a cold shower, you’ll feel ever so much better for it. Your own home life will seem cheerier and brighter and you won’t mind the hearth and fireside half so much.

  All that you have got to do is, after the day’s work is done (the day’s work may consist in thumbing a wad of clay into futuristic representations, writing liberated verse, or selling life insurance) to gather with the crowd in some so-called restaurant that has boxes for tables in the front parlor and a bunch of gutta-percha grapes suspended from the ceiling. Then you must toast the proprietor in eau de quinine and of course call him by his first name. (Any first name will do.) That’s practically all there is to Bohemia. The distinction lies in the length of time you can stick it out. If you do it for one night only, you call it “slumming.” If you have a good digestion and stick out a winter at it, you call it living the wild, free life of Bohemia.

  • • •

  The charm of Bohemia lies, not so much in its delights (as practiced in this country) as in the alluring things which have been said of it in its native climes. From the Quarter Latin of Paris we have had wafted to us triolets and sketches, operas and novels, all fragrant with the long-haired, happy abandon of the French artist, who lives in a garret and eats, to all intents and purposes, nothing at all, but who simply can’t sing long or hard enough about Love and Mimi, and the Stars, and the pale, gray fountain in the Parc Monceau.

  It is a free life, they would have us know, and one filled with incomparably tender memories.

  You will notice, though, that most encomiums on Bohemia are “tender memories” and done in the past tenses. “Those were happy, golden days,” or “Long ago, when Love and We were young.” Seldom do we get a scented iambic about Bohemia to the effect that the writer is going over to Tony’s place to-night to eat onion soup and spaghetti au gratin. Like the measles, which are so delightful in retrospect because we remember only the period of convalescence and its accompanying chicken and jellies, Bohemia seems to be a state which grows dearer the farther away you get from it.

  • • •

  However, no one will deny (and even if any one did, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me, because this is the nub of my whole story, and if I should concede a point here there would be no use sending it to the editor at all) that the lure of New York’s Bohemia is an importation from Montmartre, in Paris, and that the unshaven Frenchman in his corduroy jacket and black tam-o’-shanter, is the artist’s drawing for those Americans who come to New York from Waterbury, Conn., or from Erie, Pa., resolved to be Bohemians even if they choke in the attempt. Indeed, the Bohemia of New York has the imitative effect of high school theatricals—plenty of grease paint, properties and costumes—plenty of wonderful hand-painted scenery and all that sort of thing, but somehow, it is emotionally a trifle forced.

  However, when the desire to be like a French Bohemian begins to form in your heart, you should make your way to Washington Square and pick a path around delightfully Parisian ash-cans and artistically soiled children until you come to any one of those old barracks which manage to elude the tenement-house law because they operate under the name of “studios.” If possible there should be a line of washing hung out in a prominent place. A line of washing in Harlem is crass. In West Eighth Street it is the highest form of Art.

  For proper Bohemian garb, any one of those books on the ateliers of Paris will furnish invaluable suggestions. If the New York clothing stores are not up (or down) to fitting you out, any costumer will be glad to assist you. Then, when you are properly clothed, and as soon as your studio (or store) has closed, or the packing-boxes are all stenciled, you must get the jolly girls and fellows all together, muss up their hair, and bohême. Some folks bohême in studios, and have their food brought in from an unpicturesque but convenient delicatessen shop. In such cases the great thing is to eat it by candle-light. Or it may be that you will want to dine at Musette’s or “The Duke’s” or “Phillipa’s,” preferably in some subterranean resort which is a remodeled residence of the Chester A. Arthur era, where a lubricated meal is served with something red in a bottle, as a premium, at a price that would buy a piece of beef-steak and a good glass of milk at Childs’.

  Then, if it happens to be the special or gala night of the week at that particular restaurant, the evening is spent about the tables in just as jolly a revel as you can imagine—among young people who really need the sleep. The girls smoke, whether they like it or not, and the carefree lads all sing French songs (almost in French) and clink glasses, and play on a variety of instruments until you’d swear they were being paid for it.

  So you see how simple it is to be a true Bohemian—if you can only give the time to it. Bohêming is a thing to be taken up seriously, like skating, and with constant practice and a little gritting of the teeth, you can in time come to be as care-free and unconventional as a Naiad in those art-photographs that they will insist on publishing in Vanity Fair.

  • • •

  The only trouble with this pitiless exposé of Bohemia is that I know practically nothing about the subject at all. I have only taken the most superficial glances into New York’s Bohemia and for all I know it may be one of the most delightful and beneficial existences imaginable. It merely seemed to me like a good thing to write about, because the editor might, while reading it, think of a dashing illustration that could be made for it. You know the sort of thing. Men and women sitting on boxes, drinking eau de quinine, toasting people, and all that sort of thing. Indeed, the whole article might almost be condensed and made into a page of illustrations with only a very few snatches of the text retained as captions for the pictures. And, if I have been entirely in error in my estimate of Bohemia, maybe some real, genuine Bohemian will conduct me, some night, where the lights and good-fellowship are mellow and rich and where we may sit about a table and sing songs of Youth and Freedom, and Love, and Girls, like so many Francois Villons.

  I think that in a way I’d like it. It would be picturesque, and then, after all, it does permit one to wear those wonderful shirts with soft collars and no cuffs.

  WHY I HAVEN’T MARRIED

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER)

  FROM OCTOBER 1916

  I. RALPH, WHOSE PLACE WAS IN THE HOME

  You see, this was the way it happened. The
first one of them all was Ralph. His was one of those sweet, unsullied natures that believes everything it sees in the papers, and no matter what I said, he would gaze into my eyes and murmur “yes.” He had positively cloying ideas about women. If any girl in his vicinity lit a cigarette, Ralph’s eyes, behind their convex lenses, assumed the expression of a wounded doe’s. He superfluously assisted me up and down curbs; he was always inserting needless cushions behind my back. He laboriously brought me a host of presents that I didn’t want—friendship calendars, sixth-best sellers, and the kind of flowers that one puts in vases—but never wears. He had acquired a remarkable muscular development merely from helping me on with so many wraps and coats. His greatest fault was his lack of them.

  I felt that life with Ralph would be a deep dream of peace, and I was just on the verge of giving him his answer and receiving his virginal kiss, when, in a flash of clairvoyance, I had a startlingly clear vision of the future. I seemed to see us—Ralph and me—settled down in an own-your-own bungalow in a twenty-minute suburb. I saw myself surrounded by a horde of wraps and sofa pillows. I saw us gathered around the lamp of a winter evening, reading aloud from “Hiawatha.” I saw myself a member of the Society Opposed to Woman Suffrage . . . . . .

  So I told Ralph that I wouldn’t, just as gently as possible, and he went away to sob it out on his mother’s shoulder.

  II. MAXIMILIAN, TABLE D’HOTE SOCIALIST

  Maximilian was the next disillusionment. He was an artist and had long nervous hands and a trick of impatiently tossing his hair out of his eyes. He capitalized the A in art. Together we plumbed the depths of Greenwich Village, seldom coming above Fourteenth Street for air. We dined in those how-can-they-do-it-for-fifty-cents table d’hôtes, where Maximilian and his little group of serious thinkers were wont to gather about dank bottles of sinister claret and flourish marked copies of “The Masses.” I learned to make sweeping gestures with my bent-back thumb, to smile tolerantly at the mention of John Sargent; to use all the technical terms when I discussed Neo-Malthusianism. Maximilian made love in an impersonal sort of way. He called me “Comrade” and flung a casual arm across my shoulders whenever he happened to think of it.

  But the end came. Maximilian painted my portrait. Chaperoned by an astounded aunt, I posed for him in an utterly inadequate bit of green gauze; posed until every muscle ached. Finally, one day, Maximilian flung his brush across the room—narrowly missing my aunt—threw himself into a chair, and wearily drew his hand across his eyes, murmuring, “It is done.”

  I stole around and looked over his shoulder at the canvas—and immediately Love went out of my life. Reader—are you by any chance a pool-player? Well, the only thing I can think of that the portrait resembled was what is known in pool circles as an “open break.” I turned and fled from Max and Bohemia. I didn’t know much about Art, but I knew what I didn’t like.

  III. JIM—OF BROADWAY

  Perhaps it was only natural that the next one should be Jim. He was a thirty-third degree man about town. He could tell at a glance which one of the Dolly Sisters was Mrs. Harry Fox, and he could keep track of Nat Goodwin’s marriages without calling in the aid of an expert accountant and a Burrowes adding machine. His peacock blue Rolls-Royce had worn a deep groove in Broadway and his checked suits kept just within the law about disturbing the public peace. Jim was a man of few words; his love-making consisted of but two phrases—“What are you going to have?” and “Where do we go from here?” I shall never forget the thrill of entering restaurant after restaurant with Jim and watching the headwaiters do everything but kiss him.

  It was an idyll, while it lasted. We used to sit, a table’s breadth apart, at cabarets, and shriek soft nothings at each other above the blare of the Nubian band, while waiters literally groveled at our feet. Jim gave me the deepest, truest love he had ever given a woman. In his affections I was rated third—first, and second, Haig and Haig; and then, third, me. I began to feel that life with him would be one long all-night cabaret, and I was just about to become the owner of the largest engagement ring in the city, when, one night we went to a dinner. Not a cabaret dinner, but one where two famous authors sat and ate with their forks, just like regular people. Everyone was properly stricken with awe—everyone, that is, but Jim. While the rest of us hung on the gloomy utterances of the authors, Jim loudly discussed (with a kindred spirit across the table) the certainty of “Hatrack’s” winning the fourth race at Belmont Park, offering to back his conviction with a large quantity of coin of the realm, and urging that his friend either produce a similar amount of currency, or else desist from arguing. Under cover of the table, I kicked him into quietude. Presently a point was reached in the lofty-browed discourse whereon the two celebrities differed, and, as if going to the right source for information, they turned to Jim.

  “Now what is your opinion of Baudelaire?” they inquired.

  Jim looked up with that same perfectly-at-home air with which he entered the New Amsterdam theater on the first night of the Follies.

  “I really can’t say,” he explained, affably, “I’ve never seen him get a good sweat-out in practise.”

  The silence that ensued seems still to crash in my ears . . .

  IV. CYRIL, HERO OF THE SOCIAL REGISTER

  Cyril, the next event, was almost the man. People are still shaking their heads over my idiocy in not taking him. You see, he had practically all the money in the world, and the plot of the Social Register was almost entirely written around his family. In spite of all that he was most amazingly intelligent. In fact he had such a disconcertingly remarkable memory that every time I said a clever thing, he remembered just who had written it. Cyril led a blameless life; whatever he did, one might rest assured was Being Done. His was a perfect day, from his cold shower at 11:30 to his appearance at the opera, exactly three-quarters of an hour late. The one religious rite in his life was his weekly pilgrimage to a sacred Mecca up the Hudson, to assist at the mystic ceremonies of the smartest week-end in America. His clothes—but who am I to write of them? It would require all the passionate lyricism of a Swinburne to do them justice. He made the debonair young gentlemen in the clothing advertisements look as if they’d been working on the railroad. Collars were named for him. What more can be said?

  Yes, Cyril was faultless. I had almost decided to devote my life to living up to him, when, one terrible night I found a hideous flaw in him. It was at the opera. I remember that it was one of those awful German atrocities, and the stage was full of large, strong women, shouting “Yo ho” at each other. Relentless Fate directed my gaze to Cyril’s left hand, as he sat there all unconscious in the box. And I saw it! Saw that his white glove, the glove of Cyril the impeccable, had split like that of a mere broker or bank clerk, split all the way around the thumb, the edges gaping like a hideous wound, and a part of his hand exposed in all its glaring nudity. I hid my eyes, but the sight had seared my brain. . . .

  V. LORENZO, THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

  Lorenzo was the next occurrence. Never have I seen anyone so bubbling over with good, clean fun. He specialized in parlor tricks. Give him but a length of string, three matches, and a lump of sugar, and he would be the life of the party for an entire evening. He had an uncanny habit of leaving the room for two minutes and, on his return, telling you exactly what card you had drawn from the pack. He had amassed a great repertoire of parlor anecdotes in Irish and negro dialects. It was he who wrote most of the jokes about the Lord car. It broke Lorenzo’s heart to see people wasting their lives in mere conversation; he panted to gather them all in a big circle and play guessing-games. Nor did he care for one-steps, fox-trots, or such selfish dances; no, Lorenzo insisted on Paul Joneses and Virginia reels, so that all the people could get to know each other.

  He did imitations, too, of bumble bees and roosters and fog-horns and of a man sawing wood. This last imitation had amazing touches of realism in it, especially when he came to the knot-holes. Lorenzo wa
s not a fanatic on athletics; he didn’t go in for golf or tennis, but he certainly played a rattling good game of parcheesi.

  Life with Lorenzo might have been a continuous round of innocent little parlor tricks and yet—those tricks were the drawbacks to my happiness. I feared he might so perfect himself in his chosen art that I could never know at what moment he was going to reach over and take a guinea pig out of my hair, or remove the flags of all nations from my unsuspecting ears. The nervous strain would have been too great; and so we parted.

  VI. BOB, SON OF BATTLE

  Bob came next. I had always thought the American flag was the personal property of George M. Cohan until I met Bob and found that Mr. Cohan had ceded a half-interest in it to him. Bob was every inch a soldier, and you never could forget it. He wore his khaki uniform whenever it was possible (or even probable) and he always wore his chest well swelled out, the better to display his badge of honor—that awe-inspiring little bit of red ribbon that meant he kept his gun cleaner than any one else in his tent. The word “preparedness” was to him as a red flag to an anarchist. He lived but for the season at Plattsburg. He even carried the thing so far as to stand outside of a property tent, with all the persuasiveness of a Billy Sunday, exhorting the halt, the maimed, and the blind to enlist, like little men. He spoke tenderly and at great length of his horse, which, I gathered from his conversation, shared his pillow. He used to relate little anecdotes of its startlingly human intelligence. It walked, it ran, it neighed, it slept, it evinced a liking for oats. It even—yet some there are who say that dumb beasts have no souls—had been known to whisk away flies with its tail. Bob was a martial and God-fearing youth. I feel sure that every night before he went to bed he knelt down and asked General Leonard Wood to bless him and make him a good boy.