In France, women would have to wait until 1944 to get the vote; however that didn’t inhibit the power of this post-war generation to dismay and disturb. Victor Margueritte’s 1922 novel La Garçonne created a national scandal (and sold half a million copies) by recounting the adventures of his heroine, Monique, after she has ditched her worthless fiancé to embrace a life of lesbianism, drugs and single motherhood.
At the beginning of the decade the fascinating, defiant flapper was a type more read about in novels and newspapers than encountered on the street, but within a few years, she’d become the image to which hundreds of thousands of ordinary young women aspired. Fitzgerald satirized these would-be flappers in his description of Catherine, a minor character in his novel The Great Gatsby: ‘… a slender worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle … When she moved about there was an incessant clinking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms.’6
Catherine exists in the novel only as a construction of flapper accessories and style; and to Fitzgerald in 1925 she symbolized the degree to which the transforming dream of the 1920s was fuelled as much by economics, the appetite for consumption, as it was by the lure of freedom. Within the competitive climate of post-war capitalism the new fun-seeking flapper with her dyed hair, bee-stung lips and Charleston frocks was proving to be a wonderful opportunity for business.
After a short post-war decline, the number of working women had risen sharply across the Western world (up to 500 per cent in parts of America), and those who were young and financially independent were opening up a lucrative market for the beauty and fashion industries. They were targeted with new brands of cosmetics and depilatories; with skin treatments that promised the rejuvenating magic of crushed almonds, pine bark, rose oil and hydrogen peroxide. Celebrities like Josephine were paid large sums to endorse them, for the profits to be made were immense. In 1915 American advertisers invested just $1.5 million in the beauty industry; by 1930 that sum had multiplied by ten. In 1907 the French chemist Eugène Schueller patented a new hair dye, which by 1930 had launched him and his company, L’Oréal, into one of France’s most lucrative enterprises.
Never before had so many ordinary women been told that it was their right to look lovely. Dieting fads and slimming pills flooded the market, all promising to produce the narrow-hipped, flat-chested flapper silhouette. Before the war few respectable women smoked, but numbers rocketed when cigarettes were rebranded as a route to slenderness. In 1927 Lucky Strike launched an ad campaign that featured the actress Constance Talmadge with a cigarette in her hand. The accompanying slogan, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’, generated a 300 per cent rise in sales.
The fashion industry entered a similar boom. With designers like Coco Chanel and Jean Patou pioneering narrow shift dresses and short skirts, it was possible for modern technologies to imitate their designs with unparalleled cheapness and speed. (In 1913 an average of twenty square yards of fabric went into the making of a dress; by 1928 that had been scaled down to seven.) Garments created in a French atelier could be run up in factories and sold through shops, department stores and mail order catalogues on both sides of the Atlantic.* Madelaine Vionnet was the first of the European couturiers to make ready-to-wear designs that could be shipped direct to America. For those uncertain how to wear the new styles, a barrage of tips were available in women’s magazines and newspaper columns. It was, in theory, a liberating democracy, yet the pressure to be fashionable brought its own miseries. As early as 1920 Fitzgerald wrote about the plight of a socially maladroit girl who is persuaded to cut off her one beautiful asset, her long hair.† In real life, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago tried to gas herself because ‘other girls in her class rolled their stockings, had their hair bobbed and called themselves flappers’, and she alone was refused permission by her parents.7
To some contemporary commentators this addiction to style was the mark of a superficial and self-absorbed generation. Samuel Hopkins Adams, in the foreword to his 1923 bestseller Flaming Youth,* anatomized the flapper as ‘restless and seductive, greedy, discontented, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish’. As she casually spent her money on a new powder compact or string of beads she also seemed shockingly a-political. She seemed oblivious of the battles that had so recently been fought on her behalf: the right to control her own wealth, to vote and to enter professions like the law. Even to wear the clothes of her choice. For decades, adherents of the British Rational Dress Society† – or the Aesthetic Dress Reform movement in Europe – had been ridiculed as cranks. Yet as they correctly claimed, the freedom to wear comfortable clothes was almost as crucial a right as universal suffrage. No woman could claim effective equality with a man while her organs were being slowly crushed by whalebone corsets, and her movements impeded by bustles and petticoats that added over a stone to her body weight.
But if the flapper seemed to her critics to be passive in her politics and selfish in her desires, to others she was celebrated as a new and necessary phase in feminism. The vote had been a public milestone on the journey towards emancipation, but just as important was the unfettering of women’s private emotions. The American writer Dorothy Dunbar Bromley applauded this generation’s ability to disengage from the traditional feminine virtues of sacrifice and duty. To her, their embrace of an ‘inescapable inner compulsion to be individuals in their own right’8 represented nothing less than a seismic shift in female consciousness.
For birth-control campaigners like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, the key battle was for sexual freedom. Change was slow: pre-marital sex was still far from the norm for women in the 1920s, but while only 14 per cent of American women admitted to it in 1900, by 1925 the number had risen to 39 per cent. Contraception for women was drastically enhanced with the invention of the Dutch Cap; divorce was very gradually gaining social acceptance, and much else that had been shadowy in the sexual lives of women was more openly acknowledged. The fashionable chic attached to lesbianism in the 1920s might not have been a true reflection of public opinion, but it saw many more women daring to identify and acknowledge their sexual tastes. One of the most brazen was Mercedes de Acosta, whose tally of lovers was said to include Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead. ‘Say what you will about Mercedes,’ commented her friend Alice B. Toklas, ‘she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.’9
To Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, it was the flapper’s willingness to assert her own desires that made her key not only to feminism but to the larger spirit of the age. Traditional notions of reverence, obligation and prudence had been devalued by the war. As Aldous Huxley wrote to his father in late 1923, it was as though his generation had experienced a ‘violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch’.10 From one perspective that moral disruption left its survivors precariously untethered to any solid sense of principle or place. Gertrude Stein famously described them as ‘the lost generation’. Yet from another perspective this ideological weightlessness felt like liberty. It gave the young permission to turn their back on the past and focus on their own brightly lit present.
The present moment was pretty much all that Zelda Fitzgerald cared about in 1920 as she rode down 5th Avenue on the bonnet of a taxi. That and her determination to be unlike all ‘the little women’ back home in Montgomery.
Seventeen-year-old Tallulah felt much the same as she swaggered around New York, quipping, ‘I’m a lesbian, what do you do?’ So, too, did Nancy as she drank jugs of cheap white wine and courted scandal on the arm of her black lover, or Josephine as she saw her image blazoned across Paris.
All these women lived many of their private moments on the public stage. Having made their names as writers, painters or performers, as well as popular celebrities, the things they said and did, the clothes
they wore, were routinely reported in the press and had a widespread impact on other women. Yet stylish, talented and extraordinary as these six were, to imagine their lives now one has to look past the glamour and glare of their fame. Often they feel closest to us when they were struggling and uncertain. None of them had role models to follow as they grappled with the implications of their independence. Their mothers and grandmothers could not advise them how to combine sexual freedom with love, or how to combine their public image with personal happiness. Tallulah and Josephine, who wanted enduring love, were duped time and again by grifters and sensation seekers, interested only in their money and their éclat. Nancy, trying to live as fearlessly and frankly as a man, was dogged with the reputation of a nymphomaniac. And while all six women attempted marriage, only Diana became adept at the compromises involved. Children were even more complicated. Tamara de Lempicka could never shake off accusations from her family that, in her determination to experience everything for the sake of her art, she had become an unnatural, even destructive mother.
By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s all six women were reaching critical points of transition in their lives. This book, too, ends on the cusp of the old and new decade. It was the point at which the experimental party spirit of the Twenties was coming into collision with economic crisis, with the extreme politics of communism and fascism and the gathering clouds of war. And just as this moment heralded the winding down of the jazz age, so too it marked the end of the flapper era. While some of that generation were settling into more traditional lives, others were simply too tired or too damaged to sustain their former momentum.
Short-lived as it seemed, however, the Twenties had created a historic shift for women. So many had tried to flex their freedom in unprecedented ways, so many had stood up against those who judged them. Some of their behaviour was self-promoting and silly – Tallulah turning cartwheels along a London pavement; Zelda throwing herself fully dressed into a fountain; some of it was destructive – Nancy breaking hearts and making herself ill as she experimented with lovers across London and Paris – but it was never less than valiant. In their various attempts to live and die in their own way, the flappers represented a genuinely subversive force. Willing to run the risks of their independence as well as enjoy its pleasures, there were good reasons for them to be perceived as women of a dangerous generation.
Chapter One
DIANA
Two months after Britain went to war against Germany Lady Diana Manners was being chauffeured across London towards Guy’s Hospital and her new vocation as a volunteer nurse. It was barely four miles from her family’s Mayfair home to the hospital in Southwark, yet Diana was conscious that, to her distraught mother sitting in the car beside her, it was a journey into the wilderness.
During tearfully protracted arguments Diana had tried to convince her mother that enlisting as a VAD (member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment) was not a lone, wilful act. Among the thousands of women who were queuing to serve their country, a number were Diana’s own friends, and some were volunteering for much more arduous duties: driving ambulances, working in munitions factories or nursing at the Front.
Yet to the Duchess of Rutland, the idea of her daughter working in one of London’s public hospitals, making tea and washing patients, was barely less squalid than her volunteering to walk the streets as a prostitute. As the family Rolls-Royce crossed Southwark Bridge and began to nose its way through grimy cobbled streets, jostled by crowds, assailed by smells from the docks and from the piles of festering rubbish, the Duchess’s worst fears seemed justified. Years later Diana could still recall the detail of that stiff, silent drive. The dark drizzle spattering against the car’s windscreen; the stricken expression on her mother’s face; the momentary faltering of her own courage as they pulled up outside the gaunt, grey façade of Guy’s.
It was not a welcoming scene. A huddle of nurses was crossing the wide courtyard, heads bowed against the blustery wind, skirts whipped around their legs. Equally drear was the expression worn by the elderly housekeeper as she opened the door and led the way silently upstairs to the room where Diana was to sleep. There was nothing as frivolous as a full-length mirror among its bare furnishings, yet as she changed into her nurse’s uniform the look in her mother’s eyes told Diana that, to the Duchess at least, she appeared hideous.
She felt guilty at the pain she was causing, but she was exhilarated, too. Even though the collar of her mauve and white striped dress was starched to a punitive stiffness and the coarse, regulation cotton felt harsh after the chiffon and silk to which she was accustomed, these discomforts brought a sense of transformation. When Diana tied her shoelaces and tightened her belt it was with the knowledge that for the first time in twenty-two years she was asserting some control over her life.
Apart from the death of her older brother Haddon when she was two, and the misery of being confined to bed when she was ten by a rare form of muscular atrophy,* Diana had known little beyond family parties, seaside holidays and servants whilst growing up. But there were constraints as well as privileges. Her family’s expectation that she would marry into money and rank required the dowry of an unblemished reputation, and even when she regarded herself as adult, every hour of her waking life remained, theoretically, under scrutiny. She wasn’t permitted to spend a night away from home, except at the house parties of approved friends; she wasn’t supposed to walk by herself in the street, nor dine alone with a man. She’d developed a hundred ways of dodging her chaperones and keeping certain activities secret, yet such deceit had long ceased to be amusing. It was simply demeaning.
Life at Guy’s would be very hard, with long days of menial drudgery hedged around with dozens of petty restrictions. But still it spelled deliverance. Not only would Diana be living away from home for the first time, but during her precious off-duty hours she would be free to do what she wanted and see whomever she chose.
This hunger for independence was shared by many of the other 46,000 British women who signed up to become VADs,* and by millions of others around the world. When the European powers declared war they inadvertently held out to women a momentous promise of freedom. The American journalist Mabel Potter Daggett spoke too optimistically and too soon when she declared, ‘We may write it down in history that on August 4, 1914 the door of the Doll’s House opened’, but for many that was the great expectation and the hope.1
In Britain, the flood of recruits to the Volunteer Aid Detachment was a phenomenon of enormous interest to the press, with stories and photographs of the richest and most beautiful regularly featured in society columns. And Diana would rapidly become one of the most prominent. She seemed to the public to be practically a princess, having been born to one of the oldest families in Britain (the Rutland title dated back to 1525, the Crawford title on her mother’s side to 1398), and also to one of the richest. In 1906, when her father, Sir Henry Manners, had inherited his dukedom, he took possession not only of thousands of acres of land, but of country houses, farms, coal mines and dozens of entire villages.
The idea of Diana emerging from this palatial life to nurse the poor and wounded was enormously appealing to the British, and throughout the war she was showcased in many, mistily sentimental press photos. D.W. Griffiths featured her in his 1918 propaganda film Hearts of the World because, he said, she was ‘the most beloved woman in England’;2 she was enshrined in a wartime adaptation of the music-hall song ‘Burlington Bertie’ with the lines, ‘I’ll eat a banana/With Lady Diana/Aristocracy working at Guys.’
Yet even more fascinating to the public than Diana’s ancestry was her life as a socialite. Ever since she had come out as a debutante in 1910, the suppers and nightclubs she attended, the outfits she wore and the amusing chitchat attributed to her were regularly reported in magazines like The Lady and in the gossip columns of the press. Her reputation extended far beyond London: the Aberdeen Journal confidently informed its readers that ‘no fancy dress ball was compl
ete without the presence of Lady Diana’ and across the Atlantic, the New York American described her as a necessary embellishment to smart and artistic circles.3
Diana’s originality, her perceived cleverness and beauty were all that her mother Violet had hoped for. Despite her public commitment to family tradition, the Duchess had artistic, almost bohemian instincts, which she had passed on to her daughters. If Diana, in 1914, was restless for a life beyond her allotted destiny, it was her mother who was partly responsible.
As a young woman Violet had been a willowy beauty, the dark, pooling intensity of eyes and the pale auburn cloud of her hair lending her a dreamy, otherworldly distinction. She was sympathetic to the Aesthetic movement in dress, disdaining the elaboration of bustles and puffed sleeves for a simpler style of gown, and affecting a Romantic spontaneity, with lace scarves fluttering at her neck and wrists, posies of wild flowers pinned to her waist, the family tiara worn back to front to hold up her mass of hair. She was clever about the things that concerned her. As a key member of a group of late nineteenth-century intellectuals, nicknamed ‘the Souls’*, Violet talked about art and berated the philistinism of the Victorian age. She was also much admired for her own amateur gifts, with several of her busts and her silver-point and pencil portraits exhibited in London galleries.
A reputation for being different, even mildly rebellious, had attached itself to her. While Violet deferred to the formal duties of a Duke’s wife, she clearly preferred intimate suppers to grand dinners and court events. More subversively still she counted actors like Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife Maud among her intimate friends. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, this was odd behaviour for a duchess. However elevated the Trees might be within their profession, they were still theatre people, whose circle had included the scandalous Oscar Wilde. Lord and Lady Salisbury, who lived one door away from the Manners’ London home, in Arlington Street, were certainly wary of moral contagion. They refused to let their children visit the house, because of the ‘foreign actresses and people like that’ who might be encountered there.4
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 2