by Philipp Blom
The shadow of the war was no longer hanging over them. They had no interest in the solemnity, anxiety, trauma, and tension of their elders. While others debated the crisis of society and fought for a great future, they answered with a coy boop-boop-a-doop and a sidelong glance at the next attractive person in the room. Politics was not for them, and their ideology was the Charleston.
“It Was Fun to Flirt”
FLAPPERS WERE FABULOUS. They had taken their life into their own hands and away from their parents. The girls wore short hair and scandalously short dresses, smoked in public and drank with men, were sophisticated about sex and blasé about marriage and other old-fashioned ideas, went to parties and made out in cars.
“I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” announced Zelda Fitzgerald, herself a goddess of flapperdom, summing up the attitude of this dangerously independent young generation. “Boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most. . . . Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on the choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt.”1
The cheerful nihilism of the flappers was a child of economic success and general escapism. After the first unsettled postwar years, with their violent strikes, race riots, Red Scare, and social strife, the peace economy had taken off and a new sense of optimism was making itself felt. “The chief business of the American people is business,” President Coolidge had said in a speech to newspaper editors in 1925, and this pragmatic outlook on life articulated what many people felt and wanted. After a decade of strife, it seemed, they had gotten away with it and things were becoming right again.
As Coolidge had made clear, the emphasis in the United States was on business, not justice. The income of the top 0.1 percent of the population equaled the total income of the bottom 42 percent, and those on the wrong side of the tracks were on their own, but there were jobs again and manufacturing was booming.
Nowhere was the new freedom more obvious than in the production of automobiles, the archetypal American product—a guarantee of prestige for some and mobility for all. They were also a crucial stimulus for a whole raft of associated industries: the construction of roads and bridges, the production and refining of crude oil, and an ever-vaster network of gas stations, tire manufacturers, auto repair shops, and tourist cabins and motels. America was taking to the streets. Around 1920, twenty-three out of every twenty-four cars built in the world were manufactured in the United States, and some ten million automobiles were registered in America; by the end of the decade this number had tripled, reaching just under one car per family. Almost half of them were Model T Fords, available for a mere $290 in 1924.
By 1929, American drivers would clock up a collective two hundred billion miles during a single year. Cars transformed the lives of isolated farmers who had previously had a much harder time reaching the next town, of office workers who could now choose to live in the suburbs, and of millions of teenagers who could get away from home to go to the movies or to parties, or to simply discreetly park their vehicles at dimly lit roadside spots and engage in the kind of devotedly nonverbal communication their parents would have never countenanced under their roof. “Petting” entered the vocabulary during the mid-1920s.
As manufacturing boomed, factories were producing things nobody had ever thought they needed: household appliances such as toasters and vacuum cleaners, cars and radios, cosmetics and lingerie, perfumed soaps and cigarettes and cameras. The decisive weapon in this war for people’s dollars was the transformation of citizens into consumers and the usurpation of their attention by the sleek and sexy seduction of advertising.
As early as 1920, a respected behavioral psychologist, John B. Watson, had resigned his position as chair of psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and accepted a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Watson was a specialist in animal behavior and had written a dissertation on the learning ability of rats. An admirer of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, he was convinced that conditioning was the key to the human psyche. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief,” he famously claimed, adding that talents and race had little or no power over social and cognitive conditioning.2 As an advertising man, he put his ideas into practice by arguing that a successful ad had to access the fundamental emotions of its customers—love, fear, rage, shame—and associate them with branded products by means of ceaseless repetition.
“Through the turnstile to a land of ADVENTURE!” trumpeted a 1929 ad for the grocery store Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service supermarket chain, with more than two thousand outlets throughout the United States. Others followed this logic. J. C. Penney had one thousand stores in 1928, and branded goods became a staple, offering not only predictable quality but also extended marketing opportunities. The Curtis Candy Company in Chicago sent out a fleet of planes to drop its Baby Ruth candy bars over forty American cities, and in 1926, after the sweet manna from heaven had come floating down with little parachutes, Curtis was selling five million candy bars a day.
Starstruck
IF CANDY BARS COULD BE SOLD according to this logic, so could movies and the dreams they projected onto the silver screen. Charlie Chaplin had transformed himself into a branded product as the universally recognizable Little Tramp, and Hollywood executives were quick to understand that the public wanted to live with their stars, or rather, that they wanted to live with a projection, a public image that could be created and carefully groomed. Movies, after all, were becoming seriously big business. In the mid-1920s, fifty million movie tickets were sold each week in America; by 1929, this number had risen to eighty million.
Before the war, the center of the film industry had been in France, but as French films were struggling to find the means of financing big-budget productions in a depressed economy and as the German and Italian film industries had failed to establish a strong position for very similar reasons (see Metropolis), Hollywood had become the place to be as well as the producer of the biggest and most successful movies, with stars such as Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr.
One of the greatest and most carefully managed movie stars, and one of the first to be broken by this system, was the radiant Clara Bow, the original It Girl. Bow’s beginnings certainly did not predestine her for a great career. The only surviving child of three (the first one, a girl, had died two days after birth and was dumped in the trash can by her distraught mother), she was born in 1905 or 1906 in the tenement slums of Brooklyn to an alcoholic father and a mentally unstable mother who was at times reduced to prostitution. As a child, Clara was lonely, hungry, and ashamed of her tattered clothes. She stuttered and had few friends, but whenever she could lay hands on a nickel she was off to the movies, her one escape from the poverty and the dirt surrounding her.
When the young girl announced her wish to go into acting, her mother was horrified. Waking up one night, Clara found her mother kneeling over her, holding a carving knife to her throat. She managed to fight her mother off and lock her in a room, and then did not dare to come home for three days. Bow made it into the movies by sheer determination, winning a talent contest and then making the rounds of agents until she was given a few small roles. By 1924 she was working in Hollywood. Her mother, meanwhile, had been committed to an asylum.
Working in the Hollywood studio system, which tended to view its actors as slaves, Bow was in front of the camera from dawn to dusk: in 1925 alone, she starred in fifteen feature films. The camera loved her. A vivacious girl from Brooklyn with no formal training but an immense presence and mesmerizing eyes, she could apparently play anything. The 1926 release Mantrap proved h
er breakthrough: “Clara Bow! And how! What a ‘mantrap’ she is! And how this picture is going to make her!” the Variety review shrieked. Bow had found her character in the role of a flirtatious everyday girl who makes her own decisions. Not for her the polite reticence of a young lady who waits to be spoken to. Seeing a man she finds interesting, it is she who pursues him, and it is she who slaps him when he makes an advance—not because it is unwelcome but because otherwise it would simply be too easy for him.
Despite her long hair and curves, Clara Bow was the perfect incarnation of the flapper, that mythical postwar creature consisting of equal parts fun, fashion, self-determination, and bootleg liquor. Her public loved her for it, and in a single month she received as many as forty-five thousand letters from her fans—more mail than an average town of five thousand inhabitants got.
The carefree Roaring Twenties needed their own star, and their designation for it. When English novelist Elinor Glyn, who specialized in risqué fiction for a broad market, published It in 1927, the word seemed perfect. Glyn herself was a surprising candidate to give the flapper generation an identity: born in 1864, overbearingly aristocratic in her manner, and with an impossibly exaggerated upper-class English accent, she seemed more like an unloved governess, whose charges’ low waistlines and loose morals were calculated to offend old folks everywhere.
But the prolific author, who was known for publishing up to three saucy novels per year, was savvy enough to invent a concept that sounded mysteriously alluring and yet empty of any definite content—the ideal marketing tool. In her novel, she defined the elusive quality as follows: “To have ‘It,’ the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. . . . In the animal world ‘It’ demonstrates in tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious, and quite unbiddable.”3
“The flapperism of today, with its jazz, necker-dances, its petting parties and its utter disregard of the conventions,” as one review described it, was ideal fodder for Hollywood.4 And so the fascinating and quite unbiddable Clara Bow was cast as the It Girl in a 1927 film based on Glyn’s novel, which styled her as the ultimate flapper.
Flapperdom was a universal fad and quickly spread abroad through movies, illustrated magazines, and jazz recordings. The Charleston swept Berlin and set London a-jitter. Flappers were celebrated by films and newspapers as part of a tide of an irresistible and irresistibly scandalous social and sexual liberation. The cosmopolitan Harry Graf Kessler noticed this when he visited a party in Berlin, where the new, nihilist freedom was celebrated with even more abandon—and with an American guest: “I reached [the] apartment past midnight. Once more the company was a weird collection, with nobody knowing anyone else. . . . The names of the women, in every stage of undress, were unintelligible and it was impossible to tell whether they were lovers, tarts, or ladies. . . . The gramophone ground out popular hits all the time, but Josephine Baker sat on a couch and ate ‘hot dogs’ instead of dancing. So it continued until three, when I took my leave.”5
While flapper culture took place mainly in bars (legal or otherwise) and other dubious haunts frequented by the young and wealthy for the hell of it, the new jazzy feeling received its hymn from a young American composer who in 1928 went to see France’s most famous composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger, a formidable presence in the European music world. A composer, teacher, and conductor, Boulanger was sought out by the most talented young composition students because she was known not only for her brilliance but also for her capacity to understand and support her student’s individual voice while working on the technical aspects of composition. The young man from New York who sat down at the piano and began playing some of his own pieces hoped to get a gloss of European sophistication because he self-consciously assumed his music lacked structure and intellectual depth. When he stopped, she simply told him that she had nothing to teach him. His name was George Gershwin.
On his return from Europe, Gershwin worked his new ideas into a large-scale piece for orchestra, An American in Paris (1928). With its syncopations, car horns, and surprising turns, the idiom is decidedly more American than Parisian, but very possibly the title was intended less as a direct evocation than as a whimsical reference to Gershwin’s journey, on which he went to delve into a grand musical tradition and instead found his own orchestral voice. Paris, after all, was also Europe’s jazz capital, and black American musicians had made their home there.
While flapperdom never quite made it in Paris, it found there someone who would elevate aspects of it to an art. Like Clara Bow, Coco Chanel came from the wrong side of the tracks. Born in 1883, she was the illegitimate daughter of a laundrywoman and a street vendor, and was educated at a strict and joyless convent after her mother’s death when Coco was only twelve. The nuns taught her to sew so that the orphaned girl would have some income. With enormous, single-minded energy, she worked her way up from seamstress to head of an international fashion empire, financed in part by her judicious choice of lovers, most notably the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster.
Chanel had understood that high fashion needed to learn from the flappers and their impatience with corsets, long dresses, high collars, and general sense of stifling rigidity. She sought her inspiration not in the grand attire of famous women of the world but in the clothes of sportsmen, riders, sailors, and fishermen. Elegant and understated but at the same time vastly more practical than the designs worn by women before the war, her creations had a daring simplicity that made them de rigueur with the new urban elite. Perhaps her most lasting contribution to fashion was a stylish staple introduced in 1926, a piece of clothing so fundamental to a woman’s wardrobe that it became known by its acronym, LBD—little black dress.
The Teddy Bears’ Picnic
FLAPPERS WERE A DISTINCTLY AMERICAN phenomenon, perhaps the first wave of youth culture comprising fashion, music, behavior, language, and cultural icons that spread across the world. In totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union or Italy or in very conservative ones such as Spain, flapperdom never properly took hold, but its influence made itself felt from Dublin to Tokyo and from Shanghai to Berlin. Still, some very distinctive variations existed. In London, flapper fashions were on display in fashionable shops (at Selfridge’s they were worn by live mannequins lounging behind the glass), but the press was fascinated by a different craze: the Bright Young Things.
Perhaps the riot of irresponsible glamor and willful childishness could have happened only in England, and only as a reaction to the solemnity and the grief of the immediate postwar years, during which these fashionable young people reached their adolescence. While the nation was recovering from the collective shell shock of the casualties and the undermining of the social order, from the economic crisis, the strikes and the riots, and the terrible feeling that Britannia no longer ruled the waves as effortlessly as it might have done before, a privileged few fresh out of school or university simply giggled, put on silly costumes, and poured themselves another cocktail.
The years of postwar austerity were over, and times had changed, apparently for good. To many of the young people of 1928 the moral world of their parents seemed antediluvian. Virginia Woolf had observed that human nature changed in 1910. Her example had been her cook: “The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?”6
The idea that a domestic employee could talk to the mistress of the house as one woman to another, that the cook suddenly looked at herself as a sexual equal to her employer, had appeared revolutionary to Woolf. Now, twenty years and one war later, the entire game had changed again. Nietzsche had buried God; the Dadaists, the surrealists, the fascists, and the communists had proclaimed bourgeois values dead; Freudians had declared middle-class decency a
dangerous illness. The flapper generation carried on this great campaign, not sitting at writing desks or in newspaper offices, nor angrily demonstrating on the streets and in factories, but partying in nightclubs, alluringly seedy cabarets, and the homes of the wealthy.
Not everyone was so approvingly matter-of-fact about changing attitudes. Back in 1920, Dr. R. Murray-Leslie had scoffed that a lack of eligible young men had created “the social butterfly type; the frivolous, scantily clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined, to whom a dance, a new hat, or a man with a car, were of more importance than the fate of nations.” Another arbiter of taste decried suffragettes and other feminist activists as mannish and ugly: “Many of our young women have become desexed and masculinized, with short hair, skirts no longer than kilts, narrow hips, insignificant breasts,” wrote Arabella Kenealy in the Daily Mail in 1920.7
The young women thus insulted simply did not care. Their busy social calendars hardly ever left them the time to pick up a paper. Some of these enviable youths were the very incarnations of wealth and privilege. Among the prominent members of the Bright Young Things were Bryan Guinness, heir to a beer fortune, who was said to earn one-twelfth of a penny from every bottle sold; the fabulously wealthy and ineffably exotic American-Italian-English aesthete Harold Acton, famous at Oxford for declaiming T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land over Christ Church Meadows with a megaphone; Elisabeth Ponsonby, the daughter of Arthur Ponsonby, a senior Labour minister and antiwar campaigner; Henry Yorke, son of an industrialist and later better known by his pen name Henry Green; the archly eccentric Sitwell siblings Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell; the aristocratic but cash-strapped Mitford sisters, whose life choices would tear them apart; and Stephen Tennant, the gayest of the gay members of the set, whose costumes and general demeanor went down in legend and song and who would appear even at an ordinary soirée with gold powder adorning his wavy blond locks.