Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Yet if she was premature in her eulogy, Zelda might have grasped what few other cultural critics understood: The flapper was not long for this world. Like the Fitzgeralds, who began the decade in a burst of optimism and gusto, the Jazz Age was always too euphoric—and too manic—to sustain itself over the long run. It was fitting that Scott and Zelda, who were there from the start, began to unravel just as America began its steady descent into the Great Depression.

  CONCLUSION UNAFFORDABLE EXCESS

  ON OCTOBER 29, 1929—Black Tuesday—the stock market collapsed and America’s Jazz Age was officially over. So long to “I Love College Girls” and “The Sheik of Araby.” Hello to “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?”

  In fact, the stock market crash had little to do with the onset of the Great Depression. Very few Americans in the 1920s owned stocks or securities. Certainly the crash helped provoke the collapse of the nation’s banking system a year or so later. And with bank failures came a rash of personal bankruptcies and evictions. But the banks were bound to fail anyway. They were a slapdash affair—poorly regulated, unevenly capitalized, overextended.

  The simple truth was that America’s most prosperous decade had been built on a deck of cards. There was a price to pay for so lopsided a concentration of the nation’s riches. Good times relied on good sales, after all. The same farmers and workers who fueled economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny new cars and electric washing machines had reached their limit. By the late twenties, when advertisers told them that their cars and washing machines were outdated and needed to be replaced, the working class simply couldn’t afford to buy new ones. Unbought goods languished on the shelves. Factories cut their production. Workers were laid off by the millions. With consumer demand hitting new lows, America’s economy simply stopped functioning.

  Young flappers in 1927. Three years later, in the wake of the Great Crash, the flapper slipped out of sight and into memory.

  Still, Black Tuesday loomed large in the national imagination. A dramatic and singularly identifiable event, it struck many people as chiefly responsible for ushering out the abundance and frivolity of the 1920s and for ushering in a new era of scarcity.

  With the passing of the Jazz Age came the passing of the flapper. The world of the 1930s—a world of breadlines, industrial strikes, Father Coughlin’s radio rants, Huey Long’s demagoguery, the mounting specter of European fascism, the serious work of those sober young New Dealers in Washington, D.C.—made the cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking, Charleston-dancing flapper an unaffordable excess. There were more important things to talk about. America moved on to other topics.

  For the Hollywood flappers, the real crash had happened almost two years earlier. It was on October 6, 1927, during intermission at the New York City premiere of The Jazz Singer, that Walter Wanger—the Paramount executive who gave Louise Brooks her start in the motion pictures—raced to the lobby to make a long-distance call to his boss, Jesse Lasky, in California. “Jesse, this is a revolution!” he cried. Hundreds of moviegoers had just watched Al Jolson sing. Scratch that. Heard Al Jolson sing.

  Others had tried and failed. Who would have thought it would be those Warner Brothers—Harry, Sam, Jack, and Albert—who would figure out how to synchronize sound and film? The Warner brothers were about as dysfunctional a family as ever existed. Harry had once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, threatening to kill him. They were anything but professionals. But they’d just rendered every other studio obsolete. Overnight.

  Thousands of nervous film stars lined up to take voice tests. Would they pass muster? Were they washed up, finished, kaput? Clara Bow and Colleen Moore soldiered on. They made a few talkies—and not bad ones at that. Clara even starred in a film with Kay Francis, Lois Long’s former New York City roommate.

  But their careers never survived into the new decade. It wasn’t so much that the talkies killed them. More likely, the 1930s killed the public’s taste for actresses typecast as flappers.

  Facing more sober times, as well as mounting pressure from the decency lobby, the big film studios voluntarily cleaned up their act, adopted Will Hays’s Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, and banished sexual themes and imagery from the silver screen. It would be another thirty years before Hollywood would so freely depict carnal desire.

  CLARA’S GOOD LUCK ran out early on.1 Too trusting, too eager for affirmation, she lavished much of her income on hangers-on, including her father, who squandered more than his share on a string of bad business deals. Her affair with a married man ended in an embarrassing public scandal when his wife sued Clara for damages. Clara settled out of court, but Paramount seized her escrow account of $55,000 and counting, citing noncompliance with the morality clause in her contract.

  Things got worse in 1931 when her former secretary, Daisy De Voe, went on trial for stealing large sums of Clara’s jewelry and cash. As a parting shot, De Voe published a book chronicling Clara’s alleged sexual exploits. All of Hollywood was agog. Rumor even had it that the flapper queen had entertained the entire University of Southern California football team in her bedroom. It wasn’t true. But it didn’t matter. B. P. Schulberg called her “crisis-a-day Clara” and fired her from Paramount.

  Troubles at work meant troubles at home. A series of well-publicized mental breakdowns ensued. With a mother and grandmother who had died in an insane asylum, Clara feared that she, too, would end her days in an institution.

  Things improved in 1931 when she married Rex Bell, a cowboy film star who treated her well and fathered her two children. They lived in seclusion on a ranch in Nevada. Rex became the state’s lieutenant governor. Though she tried several times to make a comeback on the silver screen, Clara Bow’s career finally came to a halt in the mid-thirties. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Clara battled severe depression and began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia.

  In the late 1940s, she began an intense course of psychotherapy at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. There she unbottled a number of long-repressed childhood memories, including the knowledge that her father raped her repeatedly when she was a young girl. In the years that followed, Clara withdrew from therapy and moved to a small two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles. She rarely left the house.

  Rex died on the ranch in Nevada, alone. A few years later, in 1965, Clara passed away at her small hideaway in Culver City.

  “Miss Bow,” someone once asked her, “when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”

  Clara could only shrug. “I ain’t real sure.”

  COLLEEN MOORE’S LIFE took a happier turn. Though she continued to make films until 1934—even playing opposite Spencer Tracy in The Power and the Glory, which she regarded as the best film she ever made—Colleen’s public wanted her “to go on being a wide-eyed, innocent little girl.”

  “I was too old for that,” she later wrote, “—and too tired of it in any case.”

  Colleen’s marriage to John McCormick—unsteady from the start because of John’s tendency to disappear on two-week benders—ended in divorce. A second marriage also fell apart.

  The punishing routine she had kept for over ten years in the film industry—eighteen-hour workdays, constant travel, a fish-bowl existence—left her exhausted and yearning for a simpler life. In the late 1930s, Colleen married Homer Hargrave, a wealthy Chicago financier. She invested her film earnings in the market and made a killing. Then she wrote a book that instructed ordinary people on how to do the same. She rented out her Hollywood mansion and later sold it, preferring to reinvent herself as a devoted Chicago wife and stepmother to Hargrave’s children.

  Late in life, she wrote a lively account of her years in Hollywood.

  If the crash ruined the fortunes of many a famous flapper, Colleen weathered the storm with anonymity and good cheer. “You just can’t live comfortably on less than $2 million,” she told an acquaintance.

  She died in 1988, a wealthy and content woman.

  UNLIKE COLLEEN MOORE,
Louise Brooks despised Hollywood from the start. She had never intended to be an actress, much less a film star. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked.2 “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.”

  This wasn’t the sort of attitude that was going to help Louise win friends and influence people in the rough-and-tumble world of studio politics. Still, when Paramount geared up in 1928 to make the transition to talkies and renegotiated the contracts of its major stars, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary. No raise, but no pay cut, either. “You can stay on at $750 per week or leave,” he told her.

  Louise stunned Schulberg—and the entire film industry—by walking away. She was tired of Hollywood and of making less than Clara Bow and Colleen Moore.

  Instead, she traveled to Berlin, where the German director G. W. Pabst recruited her to play the lead role in his pioneering work, Pandora’s Box. It was arguably the last great film of the silent era, and it was her finest part ever. But the critics panned it. Louise stayed in Europe to shoot another film with Pabst and several more in England. Then she ran out of money. She crawled back to California on her knees.

  But by the time she returned to Hollywood in 1930, Louise was persona non grata. Paramount blacklisted her on the grounds that she still owed the studio a film. For a time, there was talk of a contract with Columbia Pictures, but nothing ever came of it. Friends helped her secure a few minor parts here and there. By 1938, however, it was obvious that her film career was over. She moved back to Wichita and operated a dance studio for a few years. Then she returned to New York and worked behind the sales counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, picking up occasional voice-over work for radio soap operas.

  Finally, she got desperate. For a time in the 1940s, she worked on and off for a high-priced escort service. For solace, she turned to liquor and pills.

  Salvation came in the 1950s when film buffs, now inured to the talkies and in search of the industry’s avant-garde past, rediscovered the silent era. In 1955, Cinémathèque Française featured Brooks in an exhibit entitled “Sixty Years of Cinema.” The following year, with few other prospects, she accepted an invitation to move to Rochester, New York, where she began a new career as a film historian at the Eastman House. Her writing appeared in several important journals and earned acclaim for its brisk style and trenchant analysis of old Hollywood.

  By 1979, when Kenneth Tynan revisited her early career in the pages of The New Yorker—his article was entitled, simply, “The Girl in the Black Helmet”—Louise had been canonized as one of the most brilliant and sexually alluring figures of the silent film era. Yet personal happiness eluded her. Louise’s two marriages ended in divorce. A born loner, she retreated from old friends and family in later years as her health faded.

  Louise Brooks died alone at her house in Rochester in 1985. She was seventy-eight years old.

  LIFE TREATED LOIS Long somewhat more kindly. Harold Ross’s bad-girl columnist carried on as the New Yorker’s in-house fashion columnist until 1970, when she retired to a farm in Pennsylvania.

  Her work continued to set new standards for fashion commentary. William Shawn, who followed Harold Ross as editor of the magazine, believed that Long was “the first American fashion critic to approach fashion as an art and to criticize women’s clothes with independence, intelligence, humor, and literary style.” All of which was true. Yet after the 1920s, Long lost her place in the elite circle of New Yorker staff writers.

  The magazine matured slowly from its origins as a lighthearted journal of urban “sophistication” and humor into a serious outlet for political discourse, biography, poetry, and cultural commentary. Lois Long never made the parallel journey. Her writing was still crisp and irreverent, but it was eclipsed by works of greater and more lasting import.

  Lois Long and Peter Arno had a daughter together but divorced in 1931. Other staff members couldn’t help but notice that Lois sometimes came to work with black-and-blue marks on her arms and bruises on her face. She never discussed the matter, but few of her colleagues were surprised. Arno’s temper was as famous as his wit.

  When she died in July 1974 at the age of seventy-three, The New York Times accidentally ran a picture of the wrong person next to her obituary. The last laugh was on Lois Long. She would have approved.

  OVER THE COURSE of her long career as a fashion journalist, Long had plenty of occasion to cover the new spring lines at the House of Chanel. As she could have testified, Coco’s reputation as a leading innovator of women’s couture and accessories hardly diminished. In 1922, she launched Chanel No. 5—known as much for its distinctive bottle as for its scent. The thirties saw her refine the signature Chanel style: Hemlines dropped and waistlines crept up. But the fundamental idea behind Chanel’s designs—comfort and elegance for the New Woman—remained the same.

  In 1939, the House of Chanel turned out an evening dress in ivory cotton organdy, with red, white, and blue embroidery—part of her “tricolor” collection celebrating French nationalism. The piece was uncharacteristically mawkish, but with Western Europe besieged by the Axis threat, the times seemed to call for such a design.

  Two years later, with Nazi Germany firmly in control of northern France and a puppet government installed in the south, Coco did as she always did—she cozied up to power. Indeed, shortly after the war, when a British MI6 agent interrogated Walter Schellenberg, an SS officer and top aide to Heinrich Himmler, the resulting interrogation report revealed that Coco, who was then in her late fifties, and Schellenberg, who was in his early thirties, spent the war years as lovers. Chanel used her connection to Schellenberg to keep her residence at the Ritz, which housed ranking Nazi officials stationed in Paris. Schellenberg, in turn, used Chanel in an ill-fated effort to reach a détente with the British government.

  Because Coco enjoyed close ties to Winston Churchill and to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, both of whom harbored pro-Nazi sympathies, Schellenberg hoped she might be useful in forcing a regime change in London and drawing Britain out of the war. At the behest of her Nazi patrons, Coco even embarked on a bizarre and unsuccessful peace mission to England.

  In the days following the liberation of Paris, Coco was arrested and released by French gendarmes. She fled the country before she could be subjected to formal charges and trial—and before she could be rounded up with hundreds of other “horizontal collaborators,” shaved bald, and paraded through the streets. Instead, she spent the better part of ten years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland.

  Exile, however, did not suit Coco. In 1954, she staged a dramatic comeback, reclaiming her place as the world’s leading designer of haute couture. Much as she had given the New Woman jersey and tweed, she now gave the New Woman’s granddaughter pea jackets and bell-bottoms.

  Coco was in her studio, hard at work, when she died in 1971. She never married.

  Shortly after World War I, Boy Capel—the great love of Coco’s life—wed another woman. Months later, he died in a car crash in southern France. Coco drove to the site of the accident and wept.

  In 1926, she introduced the “little black dress.” She told close friends that she had put the whole world in mourning for Boy.

  THE OTHERS GOT on with their lives, too. John Held lost a fortune on the stock market and several wives to his own weird capriciousness.

  Oh! Margy! didn’t make much sense in the postflapper world, but still he managed to scratch out a respectable living as a gentleman farmer in New Jersey and an occasional contributor to magazines and newspapers.

  He died in 1958 of throat cancer, just as he was on the verge of being rediscove
red by a generation of art critics who had been too young to appreciate his work when it first appeared.

  Gordon Conway married and divorced. Then, strangely, for reasons no one ever really understood, she withdrew in the 1930s from the world of commercial art. After a long but happy retirement, she died on her farm in Virginia in 1956, at the age of sixty-one.

  In 1937, Bruce Barton, the adman who gave new meaning to the works of Jesus Christ, won a special election to Congress from New York’s silk stocking district. He served three years in Washington before going down to defeat in an ill-fated U.S. Senate race in 1940. Along with his House colleagues Joseph Martin and Hamilton Fish, his outspoken opposition to American involvement in World War II earned him the opprobrium of Franklin Roosevelt, who delighted crowds with scathing references to the apocryphal firm of “Martin, Barton & Fish.”

  When he died a rich man in 1967, Madison Avenue hailed him as a founding father of modern advertising.

  IT WAS SCOTT and Zelda Fitzgerald, of course, who seemed in some uncanny way to embody perfectly the end of the Jazz Age, just as they had helped spark its beginning.

  In 1930, while they were traveling in Europe, Zelda suffered the first in a series of debilitating mental breakdowns. She would spend most of the balance of her life in hospitals—sometimes teetering on the edge of sanity, other times lucid and upbeat.

  Scott and Zelda kept up a furious correspondence throughout the thirties, but they rarely lived together. Their long, heartfelt letters revealed two people incapable of reconciling themselves to the passing of time. They lingered over distant memories of the early days in Montgomery, Manhattan, and Antibes—of “the strangeness and excitement of New York,” Zelda wrote, “of reporters and furry smothered hotel lobbies, the brightness of the sun on the window panes and the prickly dust of late spring; the impressiveness of the Fowlers and much tea-dancing and my eccentric behavior at Princeton.3 There were Townsend’s blue eyes and … a trunk that exuded sachet and the marshmallow odor of the Biltmore.… There were flowers and nightclubs.… At West Port, we quarreled over morals once, walking beside a colonial wall under the freshness of lilacs.…”