Maiden Voyages

by Siân Evans

  The many opportunities for young women to advance their interests and possibly improve their financial situation through ocean travel were immortalised in a tongue-in-cheek comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, which was first published in the USA in 1925 and became a bestseller. It was written as a spoof journal; the narrator, Lorelei, and her best friend Dorothy are pretty and ambitious flappers living in New York, whose hedonistic lifestyle is funded by presents from a succession of naïve, wealthy men. Lorelei, after an early career in the movies, is now kept afloat financially by Mr Eisman, the Button King of Chicago. The women are not professional courtesans, but rather gifted amateurs, who rely on a judicious mixture of personal charm and playing one ‘gentleman’ off against the other. Central to the story is their trip on the liner Majestic, sailing from New York to visit London and Paris. Mr Eisman, alarmed by a serious rival for Lorelei’s affections, has persuaded her to travel to Europe with Dorothy on the grounds that it would be educational, and promises that he will join them in Paris. Lorelei recognises the excellent potential to be found travelling first class on a transatlantic liner. ‘I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship,’ and scrutinises the passenger list for new ‘gentlemen’ whose acquaintance they might like to make.

  On board the Majestic (which Lorelei admires, because it reminds her of the Ritz, and does not remotely resemble a ship), she is employed by one of her male admirers to charm some confidential military secrets out of another. She manages this adroitly, and presumably to her financial benefit, in the unlikely setting of the boat deck, while Dorothy amuses herself with a tennis champion. After various romantic and remunerative adventures in Paris, London and Vienna, Lorelei makes a conquest of a very wealthy though dull American called Henry Spoffard. Lorelei and Dorothy are whisked back to New York by Mr Eisner, who is concerned both by this new rival, and the bills he is still paying for the girls’ European shopping. Lorelei has vowed that she will eschew all male admirers on the return voyage, because she is considering Henry’s offer of marriage. However, old habits die hard, and her journal records that she was tipped off about ‘a gentleman on the boat who was quite a dealer in unset diamonds from a town called Amsterdam. So I met the gentleman, and we went around together quite a lot, but we had quite a quarrel the night before we landed, so I did not even bother to look at him when I came down the gangplank, and I put the unset diamonds in my handbag so I did not have to declare them at customs.’

  Lorelei was not unusual in attempting to smuggle her newly acquired diamonds past customs. American citizens returning to the United States were required to declare all foreign-bought goods over a certain value, and pay duty on them, but many otherwise respectable passengers saw nothing dishonest in evading duty, and they blithely sought the advice of the ship’s company. Purser Spedding recalled that women often asked him for help, and he always advised them to declare their purchases, especially in the case of jewellery. There were stern notices all over the Aquitania regarding smuggling, and the crew and officers had considerable incentives not to assist in this illegal pursuit. For example, a new diamond necklace bought in Amsterdam for £10,000 would have American duty of £6,000 chargeable on it, bringing the cost to its owner to £16,000. But a passenger might ask a steward or stewardess to help conceal it, and offer them a paltry reward, perhaps a mere £10 or £20. This was a high-risk strategy because, if apprehended, the passenger would be fined three times the value of the goods. In addition, every crew member knew that if they reported the misdemeanour, they would be handsomely rewarded by the Jewellers’ Protection Society. One swift wireless message from the steward and the hapless passenger would be apprehended, prosecuted and punitively fined. In the case of the £10,000 diamond necklace, the smuggler would be fined £48,000, and the steward would receive a cheque for £6,400. This was a life-changing sum in an era when a newly-built three-bedroom house in suburban London could be bought for less than £1,000.

  So rife was the crime that there were customs and excise agents who travelled the Atlantic in disguise, looking out for smugglers. One woman had bought a great many expensive dresses in Paris, and asked a fellow passenger for his advice on how to avoid paying tax on the gowns, not realising he was a customs officer. He advised her to replace the Parisian labels with Made in New York ones; he even provided her with fake labels. Her new clothes were confiscated at customs, and she was fined $12,000. If she hadn’t attempted to deceive and defraud the US government, she could have paid the duty, and kept both the dresses and her good reputation.

  Being detained by New York Customs on the basis of a tip-off, especially an anonymous one, could put innocent people to great trouble and inconvenience. It was galling to suffer the indignity of being suspected because some maliciously minded person had given false information to the authorities. One lady, a frequent passenger on the Aquitania, was detained while her entire baggage was minutely examined and she was strip-searched. She was not only delayed on the pier for hours but, later on, her home in New York was also searched by revenue officers. Nothing of an incriminating nature was found, and it was believed that all her trouble was caused by false information given by a jealous ‘friend’.

  While the fictional Lorelei and Dorothy were testing the sexual mores of the era aboard the Majestic, in real life the Atlantic Ferry provided transgressive and ambitious women with the opportunity to assert themselves on a foreign shore. The American-born actress Tallulah Bankhead took London by storm in the 1920s. Her reasons for crossing the Atlantic were complex: she was hopelessly in love with an English nobleman, but she was also driven by ambition to succeed on the stage. For a number of years she pushed the boundaries of respectable behaviour, relying on the novelty value of her exotic accent, her physical allure and her larger-than-life personality, and succeeded in both thrilling and scandalising her adopted city, London.

  Tallulah started acting on stage in New York in 1918, aged only sixteen. Her father, a US Congressman from Alabama, warned her to avoid men and alcohol; Bankhead later quipped, ‘He didn’t say anything about women and cocaine.’ She quickly gravitated to the Algonquin set, and embarked upon a series of torrid heterosexual and lesbian affairs. She was besotted by an English aristocrat, Napier George Henry Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington, who was studying banking in New York. ‘Naps’ had served in the RAF in the Great War, rising to the rank of captain. In 1919, on the death of his father, he inherited the title, as well as 18,000 acres in Dorset, but he did not fit the stereotype of the English nobility. Living mostly in his New York apartment, which was known as Naps’s Flat to his international coterie of hedonistic friends, he followed a distinctly flamboyant and bohemian lifestyle.

  When Naps returned to England, Tallulah was frustrated and restless. She missed him, and though she had been acting on the New York stage for five years, it was a competitive field. A psychic told her that her future lay across the Atlantic; ‘Go if you have to swim’ was the succinct advice offered. Fortunately, theatrical directors from Europe often visited New York looking for talent, and in 1923 Tallulah was contracted by the impresario Charles Cochran to play the part of a Canadian in a new London play called The Dancers. She sailed on the Majestic, a vast and opulently appointed liner, which was particularly popular with performers, actresses and musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. There was always a certain frisson among the more sensitive souls about embarking on this particular vessel, as it was the sister ship of the Titanic and Britannic, both of which had spectacularly come to grief. Perhaps Tallulah Bankhead, who was willing to take life-changing career advice from a self-proclaimed psychic, might have been less sanguine about the voyage if she had known that Violet Jessop, veteran survivor of the sinking of the Majestic’s two sister ships, was now working as a first-class stewardess aboard the last of the trio.

  Tallulah arrived in London to star opposite Gerald du Maurier, the leading matinée idol on the British stage. His daughter Daphne exclaimed, the
first time she encountered Tallulah, ‘Daddy, that’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.’ With her glorious hair, her unique voice and accent, her unrestrained dancing and acrobatics, Tallulah quickly conquered the West End. She appeared in more than a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, rapidly acquiring a fan club of ‘gallery girls’ who mobbed her at the stage door. One of them, Edie Smith, went to work for her as a personal assistant and stayed in her employment for the next three decades.

  She starred in the stage version of The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, playing a character very like her own persona. The radical heroine, Iris Storm, commits suicide by driving her yellow Hispano-Suiza into a tree at 70 mph, an act of defiance against the two-faced society that has cast her out. The drama critic Hannen Swaffer wrote admiringly: ‘She is almost the most modern actress we have.’4

  ‘Everything you did was headline news in the 1920s,’ observed the presenter Roy Plomley, when interviewing Tallulah in 1964 on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. While living in Mayfair, Bankhead bought a Bentley, which she drove herself. However, accustomed to the logical grid system of New York streets, she was constantly lost in labyrinthine London. Her solution was to engage a local taxi and pay the cabbie to drive his vehicle to her intended destination, while she tailed him in her own car.

  Though Tallulah’s relationship with Naps was revived as a result of her moving to London, it was often stormy; on one occasion they met by chance in a nightclub, and he pretended not to know her. (In mitigation, he was escorting his mother; fashionable London nightclubs in the 1920s often attracted clientele of different generations in a way unimaginable nowadays.) Tallulah had her revenge as she swept haughtily past their table: ‘So, Lord Alington, you can’t recognise me with my clothes on?’ she hissed. Their romance eventually foundered, though they remained close friends.

  Tallulah’s lifestyle epitomised a certain type of celebrity at the time. She was the ultimate Bright Young Thing and consummate party animal, with a passion for bourbon and cocaine, and an unsettling habit of removing all her clothes in public. She smoked four packs of Craven A cigarettes a day, and consequently had a voice that one critic likened to the sound of ‘a man pulling his foot out of a bucket of yoghourt’.5 Idolised by the theatrical world, and a friend of Noël Coward, she was much in demand on the London scene of the 1920s. Off the leash in London, Tallulah was shockingly outspoken but wickedly witty, and she related stories of her latest sexual conquests to the thrilled party-goers of Mayfair. Her alien beauty, consummate acting ability and, above all, the novelty of her accent made her the toast of the town, and allowances were made for her behaviour; had she behaved in the same manner in New York, it is likely she would have been arrested.

  But Tallulah’s determination to flout conventions, both privately and professionally, did eventually bring her into conflict with the British establishment. In 1926 Tallulah appeared in a stage drama called Scotch Mist, playing the promiscuous wife of a British Cabinet minister. The Bishop of London was appalled and complained to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, but as a result of the scandalised press coverage, the play became a box-office success. Unexpectedly finding herself wealthy, Tallulah acquired the lease on a house in Mayfair – No. 1 Farm Street – and engaged fashionable Syrie Maugham to redesign its interiors. There she threw hedonistic parties that lasted for days, where the participants might be found passed out on the floors or draped languidly over the furniture. Cocaine was the drug of choice for many showbusiness figures between the wars; when asked if it was addictive, Tallulah replied: ‘Of course not! I ought to know. I’ve been using it for years.’

  Eventually, serious allegations of ‘indecent and unnatural practices’ were made against Tallulah, and a report was presented to the Home Secretary in August 1928. The confidential files, which were only released in 2000 by the Public Record Office, reveal that Special Branch detectives searched for incriminating evidence against her on the grounds of public morality. The central allegation was a serious one, that the actress was in the habit of seducing Eton schoolboys on Sunday afternoons, after providing them with cocaine. The rumour was that five or six Eton pupils were accused of ‘breaking bounds’, being absent without permission from school after being picked up by car, in order to meet the actress at the nearby Hotel de Paris in Bray. While the details are confused, there may have been some truth to this story as other sources claim that the Eton authorities objected to Tallulah providing cocaine to the schoolboys before chapel, as it made them ungovernable during evensong. MI5 had received a copy of a circumspect private letter written by the headmaster of Eton to a number of parents, denying that any boys had recently been expelled, but admitting that two boys had been ‘dismissed’ and a further three ‘disciplined’ on the unlikely grounds of having infringed the school rules about motoring.

  But once subject to outside scrutiny, the British establishment quickly closed ranks; the investigators found no witnesses or evidence at either the hotel or the school, and they eventually reported: ‘No information could be obtained at Eton … the headmaster is obviously not prepared to assist the Home Office – he wants to do everything possible to keep Eton out of the scandal.’ They concluded that Tallulah Bankhead was ‘an extremely immoral woman’, but the investigation seems to have gone no further. However, Special Branch missed, or perhaps ignored, an odd and possibly significant coincidence in this story. The highly respectable headmaster of Eton, who had resolutely refused to co-operate with the investigators, thereby stopping the enquiry in its tracks, was Dr Cyril Alington. He was descended from a long line of unimpeachable clerics, but he was also related to Tallulah’s former lover, Naps, the 3rd Baron Alington. In November 1928, three months after Special Branch failed in their attempts to have Tallulah thrown out of Britain as a danger to public morality, Naps married Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, the daughter of the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury.

  Tallulah’s reputation for outrageous behaviour was well-founded, and she walked a fine line between being admired for her chutzpah and damned for her conduct. She had been fêted and rewarded in London, but with Naps now married to the daughter of an earl, and the father of a daughter born in 1929, Tallulah realised she had finally run out of road in Britain. She was offered a lucrative Hollywood contract of $5,000 a week by Paramount Pictures, and in January 1931 she sailed back to America. Her sojourn in Britain had brought her public notoriety, largely based on her novelty and ‘otherness’, as well as considerable stage success.

  For Josephine Baker, crossing the Atlantic completely transformed her life. As an African-American woman born in poverty in 1906 in St Louis, she had a difficult childhood. She was sent to be a housemaid aged only eight years old, but was badly treated by her employer. She witnessed the horrific violence of the St Louis race riots, and was briefly married at thirteen, then ran away to Harlem in New York, where she started dancing for nickels to entertain queues of people waiting to get into music halls. Entirely self-taught, she turned professional aged fourteen. In New York, aged nineteen, while appearing at the Plantation Club, Josephine was offered a place in a new dance show produced by an American called Caroline Dudley, a wealthy white socialite and frequent visitor to Harlem, who was recruiting black performers and musicians for a show featuring jazz music and dance. The show, La Revue Nègre, was to be staged in Paris. Mainstream France and Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s had an ambivalent attitude to black culture, but Paris was generally much more welcoming than the major US cities, where discrimination was part of the everyday experience. African-American jazz musicians were very popular in the entertainment world of Paris by the mid-1920s, and professional performers flocked to the laissez-faire cosmopolitan nightclubs and music halls of the most sophisticated city in the world. The exuberant style of music and dance embodied the great sense of relief at the end of the war, and the artistes were admired for their creativity and skills rather than judged by the colour of their skin.

  Josephine Bak
er sailed for France on the Berengaria on 15 September 1925, along with twenty-four black musicians. The Berengaria was previously the German flagship Imperator, but had been handed over to Cunard after the Great War as part of the reparations agreement for a discounted fee of £500,000, and was now the largest of the line. The previous year, Cunard had recognised that there was a burgeoning market in American tourist-class passengers from the States, travellers who required comfortable but affordable voyages to Europe. Cunard therefore upgraded the Berengaria’s third-class facilities, providing better victualling for all passengers, refitted cabins and enhanced waiter service in the restaurant. The Cunard company minuted the popularity of this new class of travel for Americans heading east on a restricted budget, and its affordability enabled performers such as Josephine and her fellow musicians, as well as students and teachers, to travel across the Atlantic in relative comfort, and in increasing numbers.

  The Berengaria arrived in France after seven days afloat, and rehearsals for the show started immediately. Josephine Baker’s extraordinary style of dancing – a blend of sinuous hip-grinding and energetic gyrating, cakewalking and tap dance – quickly made her a star. Her inaugural performance was on 2 October 1925 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She performed a danse sauvage, bare-breasted and wearing little more than pearls and feathers, to an initially stunned and then rapturous Parisian audience. Josephine Baker was an overnight sensation; within two years of her arrival in Paris she was the acclaimed star of Paris’s legendary cabaret hall, the Folies Bergère, where she became both celebrated and notorious for her ‘Banana Dance’ (performed topless, with a ‘skirt’ of bananas). The French admired her chic appearance, her phenomenal stamina, her inventiveness and humour. Picasso and Hemingway were fans; she was known in the press as the Bronze Venus and admired as an accomplished artiste, a star and a socialite. While some black contemporaries criticised her for perpetuating racial stereotypes, Josephine knowingly used the tropes and imagery of the day in a way that ridiculed prejudices and knocked down the barriers of segregation. Her success on stage allowed her to open her own nightclub in Montmartre, Chez Josephine, which was small, exclusive and very expensive.