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

by Unknown

  It was all Wall Street; but since, in this instance, Wall Street was coincident with Main Street, it was super-Wall Street, nightmare Wall Street. Thus it is public property, and incidentally the property of every cracker-barrel philosopher, with or without a theory.

  Oddly enough, the newspapers under-played it, even though they gave it streamer headlines day after day. They were compelled to underplay it. If they had reproduced starkly the utter bottomlessness of the thing, anything might have happened. They withheld mention of many of the small houses that failed, of the hundreds of undistinguished suicides. It was an economic obligation that they should understate, that they should insert the qualifying word of hope and good cheer. On days when twelve million and sixteen million shares were being sold for whatever they would bring, to the quite conclusive ruin of butcher and baker, rich man and poor man, the papers sensibly concluded that it was not a time for realism. They naturally reported it in superlatives, as it deserved, but in such a way that hardly anyone realized that they were superlatives of tragedy. Instead, screaming laughter was the keynote. It became suddenly very respectable, even smart, to have been cleaned out in Wall Street. It was the joke of a month, of two, and its point dulled very gradually. The strange delight of the puff to one’s self-esteem conveyed by appearing (indirectly, of course) in headlines on the front page, served as a paralyzing drug to the humble. “STOCKS BREAK ON HUGE SELLING RUSH” somehow meant me and you and you, it was infinitely more personal than reparations or lobbying or elections. For that little hour we were intensely and thrillingly living. It was all like a children’s party on a roller-coaster. Wheee! Here we go! Hold on everybody! The uncertain intoxication of moving rapidly through space without any power under heaven to control the vehicle dulled for a while any accurate realization of exactly what was happening.

  It was a longer ride down than anyone had expected. Bump after anticlimactic bump shook off the few grim survivors. Everyone was pretty bored with it long before it was over. At last realism had its day. By word of mouth went the rumours of the failures and the suicides. Half the people you knew were penniless and beginning all over again. It was no joke, no joke at all, all that money gone—pouf! and what to use for money in the unmagical morning? The luxury and semi-luxury industries had laid off thousands of workers. Millions in contracts had been cancelled. The jewelers, the dressmakers, the fur houses, the steamship companies, suffered the worst immediate penalty. Men who a month before had been in retirement with comfortable fortunes were out looking for jobs. The tailor on the corner had had to fire his assistant, but the butcher was dead.

  It is easy to be cynical and to say that if you win in the stock market you are investing, but if you lose you are gambling. Yet that is very closely the popular philosophy. The amateur trader in buying stocks on margin does not do it in the same spirit that he plays poker or bets on a horse, that is, he does not take into equal consideration the two possibilities that he may lose his money as well as that he may double it. He believes that he is using his business head to make money and that if he has a good business head he will win. He does not admit that pure chance is the controlling factor. He does not admit it, that is to say, unless his stock goes down. In that case he lays it to bad luck, not to poor judgment. But if it goes up, that is good judgment. Although it sounds silly and perverse, the credo is simple enough and it has an integrity of its own. But during the past years in the United States it has been augmented by another premise. In such a great and prosperous country the small speculator has felt that he is, in a sense, underwriting America’s prosperity when he buys ten shares of so-and-so on margin. He has conceived of himself as riding along with his country on a wave of unlimited prosperity.

  This sensation of being a part of a well-to-do and comfortable society is what has logically led to the extreme conservatism of the American people, their extreme shyness of change. And this conservatism was demonstrated with the most astounding completeness throughout the stock market crash. In any other country in any other time so many ruined men, so many suddenly unemployed, would have become a danger, at least an embarrassment, to the country. But such a possibility is effectually checked in the United States by the fact that the average man has an enormous respect for the industrial structure that has given him so many gifts. This is translated into a thoroughly undemocratic awe of the lords of industry, far more binding than the awe of a medieval serf for his monarch because it is more intellectual. The captain of industry is not, in fact, a man at all: he is an invisible symbol, a force operating omnipotently down through a vast impersonal hierarchy. This is no place, however, for a study of American industry, surely a strange and unparallelled phenomenon, except for the notation of this awe in which the “small man” holds the “big man”, an awe which is one of the most valuable bulwarks of our civilization. It has served its turn again without a ripple of effort, in preventing this convulsion of the small man’s purse from assuming serious sociological or political significance, except as this may be led down controlled channels.

  For the class affected in this event is probably the most important body of citizens in any country: the ambitious, comfortably placed, industrious and responsible small brains and small talent of America, the non-commissioned and minor commissioned officers of the industrial army, and their wives. For many of these the most important financial event of their lives will always remain the 1929 Wall Street panic. Conclusions of some kind they must manufacture and nourish for the sake of their self-respect, but what they will be I do not know.

  For they have seen some very peculiar sights. They have watched, among others, the common stock of the United States Steel Corporation, one of the strongest and wealthiest companies anywhere in the world, tumble over 100 points from 260; Westing-house Manufacturing from almost 300 to 100; General Electric break in two from over 400 to under 170; Montgomery Ward from 156 to 49; Continental Can from 92 to 40. The gilt-edged stocks of the world crumpled in value at a time of uninterrupted and in some cases mounting prosperity; and after the assurances of the president and leading industrialists to the effect that business was “sound”, conditions “healthy”, had been published, they continued to crumple. The banks bought, the big financiers announced that they were buying, and still they sagged.

  During that time, wealth as represented by confidence in the securities of American industry had absolutely vanished. In that sense (and a unique sense it is, too) the United States of America went through a bloodless revolution. It ran true to the standard form of revolutions in being based on disillusion and desperation. It was an attack in the strictest sense on the foundations of society. And the revolutionaries were ultimately suppressed: they were bankrupted. By the very act of their revolt (merely that of selling their holdings at any price) they were made powerless. As too, with all other revolutions, their loyalty was rejected, they were literally forced into revolt. But like the skeletons of dead coral that pile one on another and in a mass anonymity make their totality felt, so the total of this despairing selling raised its head for a terrible hour above the smooth surface of American prosperity and optimism.

  But, whatever the beginnings, the end involved the reversal, perhaps the destruction, of several principles inherent in the current American social hierarchy. America is a capitalistic country, but it is unique among capitalistic countries in that the rewards and the responsibilities of its industries have been more and more widely distributed among the small investors. The “big fellows” may retain the key positions but they have made at least a pretense of deferring to the wishes of the thousand small stockholders. The 1929 panic to a large degree eliminated these small people and returned the vast majority of ownership to the professional capitalists and traders. This development alone is absorbingly interesting from the sociological point of view, but there is another and perhaps more vital consequence of the catastrophe. From the beginning of time, in all forms of society, humanity has reposed its faith in the
absolute necessity of conservatism. But part of the secret by which America has so magnificently exploited its industrial pre-eminence in the world today has resided in its lack of conservatism in the financial (not the social) sense. The American method has been to use capital two or three times over simultaneously, to keep the ball always in the air, to make capital dynamic, not static.

  But the 1929 panic constituted a perfect contradiction of America’s belief in the instruments of its prosperity. It was a complete volte-face.

  But on whose part? Those who recanted, who sold out and are bankrupt, have already been forgotten. Wall Street wants fresh money, fresh optimists. During the hysteria the small investors were left to make of it what they could. No concrete official endorsement of their former belief was anywhere forthcoming. The Morgan gesture was only a gesture. The market was permitted to seek its own level. The stadium of rich, nasty old men, the shell-backed tortoises, mixed with their tears the salty I-told-you-sos.

  The “small people” demonstrated again that, together, they can do anything, but in this instance they only ruined one another.

  A PORTRAIT OF JOAN CRAWFORD

  DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR. (HER THEN-HUSBAND)

  FROM JULY 1930

  Joan Fairbanks (is my bosom swelling) née Crawford is one of the few people in the film colony who does not change her manner at the close of the working day. If she is any different then, it is only an instinctive nervous let-down after the tension to which she subjects herself during her work. She has the most remarkable power of concentration of anyone I have ever known. Under any circumstance this tremendous faculty is at her very finger tips. She is consumed with an overwhelming ambition.

  I sincerely doubt if she has the faintest idea where her ambition is to carry her, but that does not worry her at all.

  She is always prepared for any emergency. She has a great capacity for study. If she feels that she is not up to standard in a certain line she will go to any extreme to master it. Although she has a great desire to write, it is the one ambition in which she lacks the self confidence that is evident in her other undertakings.

  In her spare time, when there is such a time, she covers herself in yarn, threads and needles and proceeds to sew curtains and make various types of rugs. Entre nous, they are quite good.

  She is not easily influenced, and must be thoroughly convinced before she will waver in her opinion on any point. She must always feel herself moving forward, and when anything tends to arrest that progress she sulks mentally. She will stand by a belief with Trojan ferocity. She has temperament without being temperamental. She demands the things to which she knows she has the right, and will ask for no more until she knows with all sincerity she is worthy of it. This is particularly true in her professional life. When she meets with disappointment she has a tendency toward bitterness rather than remorse, which no doubt, is a throwback from an acute memory of less happy days.

  She is extremely sensitive to surroundings and instantly conscious of any discord. When she is depressed she falls into an all-consuming depth of melancholy out of which it is practically impossible to recover her. At these times she has long crying spells. When it is over she is like a flower that has had a sprinkling of rain and then blossoms out in brighter colors. She is extraordinarily nervous. She is frightened out of her wits to be left alone in the dark. She has a secret desire to eat everything with a spoon as a small child would.

  She has seen life in its less fortunate aspects, yet remains thoroughly unsophisticated at heart; however, she likes to be thought sophisticated. Like many people who have had little happiness in their own childhood, she has a tremendous sympathy for children. She loves to play like a child and adores dolls. She takes a great interest in clothes and all things feminine yet has the analytical mind of a man. She is an excellent business woman but a poor trader.

  She is intolerant of people’s weaknesses. If someone does her a wrong she is slow in forgetting it but when she does there is no doubt of her attitude. It is difficult for her to hide her feelings and she is embarrassingly honest in her opinions.

  She wears her fingernails at an abnormal length. She is forever devising new ways to fix her hair. She loves to cook. She is thoughtful to a point of extravagance. She never drinks but smokes like a cowboy on his last cigarette. She is sensitive about her lower teeth being crooked. She has a deadly fear of all doctors. She takes a pardonable pride in the strides that she has made in her chosen field yet she is never satisfied with her work. Jealousy is not in her makeup but she resents those who have become successful without serving the same trying apprenticeship that she herself experienced.

  She loves to have a masseuse give her a treatment and she could spend hours every day having her head scratched. She walks pigeon-toed. Her temper, in its threatening stages, is alarming but actually it is harmless. She has a passion for antique furniture. She drinks quantities of coffee and puts away at least eight or ten glasses of water every day. She has a tendency to dramatize any anecdote which she may relate. Music affects her emotionally. She is sentimental to an extreme degree, and is gullible when the most obvious sob stories are told.

  There are innumerable things that I might add to what I have already stated but I hope that I have already given a fair picture of her. She is a ten-year-old girl who has put on her mother’s dress—and has done it convincingly.

  A CLOSE-UP OF COLE PORTER

  CHARLES G. SHAW

  FROM FEBRUARY 1931

  On a farm, near the town of Peru, which lies in the Indiana wheat belt, Cole Porter was born on the ninth of June, 1892. He began to study music at the age of six, originally turning his energies to the violin. At eleven, he composed a waltz, called the Bobolink Waltz, which was later published. He is since accountable for Let’s Do It, What Is This Thing Called Love?, You’ve Got That Thing and a horde of other popular refrains.

  On finishing prep school (Worcester Academy), Cole Porter made a hasty tour of Europe, returning to the U. S. A. in the fall of 1909 to enter Yale as a Freshman with the class of 1913. His best-known student creations—Bingo and Bulldog—are two of Yale’s most popular ditties.

  After graduation, he turned to the Harvard Law School—though probably the last man on earth fitted for the law—where he spent two years thumbing tomes on pleas and torts. In 1915, he entered the Music School of Harvard, withdrawing before the end of the term to produce, in collaboration with T. Lawrison Riggs, a musical show entitled See America First, which became memorable solely for the one-step: A Shooting Box in Scotland. The following two years were spent in New York and France, Cole having enlisted in the Foreign Legion, subsequently transferring to the Fifteenth (French Army) Regiment of Artillery. Shortly after the Armistice, he married Linda Lee Thomas and, returning to America, knocked off the score for Raymond Hitchcock’s Hitchy-koo whose Old Fashioned Garden sold more than two million copies. For a London revue, known as Mayfair to Montmartre, he wrote The Blue Boy and a year later, with one Gerald Murphy, fashioned Within the Quota, a vehicle for the Swedish Ballet. He has since turned out a Greenwich Village Follies score, an Ambassadeurs revue, Paris, Wake Up and Dream, Fifty Million Frenchmen, and The New Yorkers, serving in each case as both composer and lyricist.

  • • •

  So much for the sketchy outline of Cole Porter’s major accomplishments. I would now touch upon a more personal side—a side embracing his idiosyncrasies, likes, aversions, tastes, and habits—in short, his real and innermost self.

  He is wholly unable to shave himself, which operation must be performed at an average of twice a day. He never carries a walking stick or gloves and wears a hat as little as possible. Most of his suits are gray and he has a passion for soft shirts with collars attached. He writes entirely with his left hand, at an angle almost upside down. He loves a good dirty limerick.

  To continue to write musical shows and, eventually, to die in Venice, is his notio
n of life’s supreme happiness. He attributes his interest in Venice to a picture of the Grand Canal painted on the front-drop of the Peru (Indiana) Opera House, which he was in the habit of visiting as a youth.

  He speaks excellent French, fair Italian, and a little Spanish, though he prefers listening to talking. He is the world’s worst story teller by long odds. His favorite cigarettes are Old Golds.

  His dislikes are many and varied, among the more pronounced being golf, steam-heated rooms, pressed duck, English railway hotels, Belgium, and poetry. He delights, however, in all kinds of scandal and crime news. He is five feet, seven and a half inches tall and weighs a hundred and forty pounds. In America he likes town; in Europe he prefers the country.

  He needs only five hours’ sleep and, save for an occasional headache, keeps in pretty fair trim.

  He is the possessor of a Croix de Guerre and belongs to the Racquet and Tennis Club of New York and the Traveller’s of Paris. His favourite music is that of Stravinsky, Bach, Mozart, Gershwin, and Rodgers: his favourite lyric writer, P. G. Wodehouse. He almost never goes to concerts.

  His hair is straight and black and his eyes are large and brown. He loves having people around him—people of all kinds and ages. He is full of enthusiasms but is constantly changing his plans.

  During the writing of a musical show or revue score, he lives with his music, day and night. He is able to concentrate on work in the centre of the liveliest doings, just as he is a fellow of many moods. He has often played for the King and Queen of Spain and the Prince of Wales. His Paris house in the rue Monsieur, has a room done entirely in platinum. He is prone to seasickness and takes Mothersill’s by the bottleful.

  He has studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, under the eminent master, Vincent d’Indy. In playing the piano he uses his left hand little—though with great effect. He whistles a fifth higher than he plays.