Unfortunately, when Ted Peckham read this endorsement, he was waiting outside a courtroom in Manhattan to hear the fate of his business, which had fallen afoul of the city’s licensing commission. Officially, he’d been hauled up for operating an employment agency without the proper license, but to his accusers, his offense was not bureaucratic but moral. “Activities of this nature lead to all sorts of indecencies and immorality,” the city’s deputy licensing commissioner argued in court. “The escort is not known to the woman and may not be reliable. Neither party has ever met before.” He went on to suggest that it was not just the women who were at risk: “It is also possible that the woman who hires the escort may not be of the proper type.” And finally, the city’s nightlife in itself was deemed suspect, as was any woman who wanted to enjoy it: “The escorts and those who hire them stay out all hours, day and night, visiting cabarets and night clubs and God knows where.” On June 7, 1939, Peckham was fined $250 and ordered to shutter his business.27
“Café Society” and 1930s Harlem
It was not just single women who found the doors of the Stork Club closed to them. The nightclub, along with most of the big nightlife venues at the time, was strictly racially segregated. In 1938, a left-wing impresario named Barney Josephson became the first nightclub owner to banish that policy from his new club in Greenwich Village, which he named Café Society, on purpose to poke fun at the uptown snobs who thought the only place minorities belonged was in the kitchen, or in the band. His club was a place where liberals, activists, artists, and intellectuals gathered, and its roster of talent shimmered. It was where, in 1939, Billie Holiday first sang a song called “Strange Fruit,” and it launched the careers of stars like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Paul Robeson, and many more. It was one of the rare places in Depression-era New York where black and white partygoers could meet as equals.
New York in the interwar years was a place of de facto segregation. There were no signs declaring open apartheid as there were in southern states, but there were only a few neighborhoods where black citizens could freely live, and the city’s restaurants, bars, and public spaces had for years been an unpredictable patchwork of acceptance and exclusion. Jessie Redmon Fauset, the literary editor of the The Crisis under W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote in her fiction and journalism of the humiliation of getting caught in those cracks. She described the exhaustion of trying to make a well-meaning white friend understand that her choice of restaurant for their lunch date wasn’t an option, and at the friend’s indignation, insist that she’d rather eat somewhere shabby and anonymous than go through the work of putting up a fight in public to be served. Or her anger at witnessing a white man tussle with a black woman for a subway seat, a man who would never dream of sitting if a white woman was standing, but whose chivalry sorted women into categories and judged by race first.28
In the years between the end of World War I and the start of the Depression, around 1.5 million African Americans had moved from the South to the industrialized northern cities. Immigrants from the Caribbean had also flocked to American cities, New York in particular, in the same period, and they made up a quarter of Harlem’s black population by 1930. The Depression slowed the movement until 1940, when the needs of the war industries spurred a second migration, drawing more than three times as many people north in the ensuing three decades. As early as the end of World War II, African Americans had become a predominantly urban population, and that shift would fundamentally reshape the political and cultural life of America’s cities.
The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s had turned the streets of upper Manhattan into a mecca for African American artists, writers, musicians, performers, and, in short order, hangers-on and tourists. Its ritzy image was boosted by journalists and photographers, black and white, who were enthralled by the style of the locals and the wild innovations of jazz. On 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, the three landmark nightclubs, Small’s Paradise, Connie’s Inn, and the Cotton Club, were all racially segregated—the last of these, the biggest and ritziest of them all, was also the strictest about keeping its white clientele separate from its black performers and servers, a gap enforced by the white gangsters who owned the place. But there were dozens of other speakeasies off the main drag, where prices were lower for drink and drugs, crowds were more mixed, and the music and dancing kept going long after the cabarets closed at 3 a.m. Many white visitors who wrote about “venturing” north of 125th Street to visit the jazz clubs treated the neighborhood as an exotic playground, without caring to know anything about the people who lived and worked there after the sun came up. Even those, like the photographer and bon vivant Carl Van Vechten, who tried to become a part of the neighborhood, and to boost the reputation of Harlem artists among wealthy white patrons, still saw it as foreign to the rest of the city, a place that needed to be interpreted before it could be understood by outsiders.
Few Harlem Renaissance characters embodied uptown glamour quite like A’Lelia Walker, who in her wealth, independence, and penchant for hospitality was a forerunner to the Live-Aloner—albeit one who had been married three times, and took glamorous living to an extreme. Walker’s mother was Sarah Breedlove, better known as Madam C. J. Walker, the country’s first black female millionaire, who made her fortune selling cosmetics and hair-straightening products. When her mother died in 1919, A’Lelia was ready to embrace the role of heiress, hostess, and patron of the arts. She lavished her mother’s money on clothes, parties, and the finest and most expensive furniture, buying into the Harlem vogue with vigor and flair. A wall inside her two conjoined townhouses on 136th Street was adorned with poetry by Langston Hughes, who called her the “queen of the night” and “the joy-goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.”29 Her parties were legendary, at her townhouse and at her mother’s Hudson Valley estate: royalty and heads of state from Europe and Africa were invited to mingle with the artists, poets, and civil rights leaders who were driving the Harlem Renaissance. One possibly apocryphal tale claimed that one of her parties involved a carnivalesque inversion of racial hierarchies, with the white guests (including Van Vechten) made to eat in the kitchen and serve champagne to the black attendees, who were draped in the robes of kings and queens.30
When the crash hit, it flattened the Walker family business. A’Lelia’s priceless art collection, and soon enough her country estate, went on the auction block, and her patronage of poets and writers evaporated—she died not long afterward, in the summer of 1931, still partying as though the Depression had never happened. At the same time, many of the white publishing houses like Alfred A. Knopf, which had supported the Renaissance and the authors who defined it (mostly thanks to Alfred’s wife, Blanche), drew in their belts and left many of their authors out in the cold.31 During the Depression Harlem struggled, hit harder by unemployment than any other part of the city, and offered scant public support.
In 1932 the African American commercial artist Elmer Simms Campbell, a friend of band leader Cab Calloway, produced a map of the nightclubs of Harlem. Published first in Manhattan Magazine and then in the newly launched Esquire, it celebrated the energy of the various nightspots while also making clear that there was too much going on to crowd into one map, and that establishments opened and closed too quickly to be documented. It also made clear that while outsiders might be able to find a good time, they would need help to find the best of what was on offer. The witty map took a deliberately sunny-side-up view of the neighborhood’s spirit and ignored the routine, relentless discrimination that meant rents were higher and wages and living standards lower than anywhere else in New York. Even the “nice new police station” on the map, where black and white officers play cards together, looks like a friendly place.
Shortly after Campbell’s map was published, the repeal of Prohibition meant that the ease of getting liquor at the Mob-ruled nightclubs was no longer the draw for white tourists that it had been, and the influx of partying outsiders to the neighborhood began to slow. When Marjorie Hillis offer
ed her white readers advice on visiting Harlem in New York, Fair or No Fair, she suggested that they take an escort, “not because it’s dangerous, but because it will be dull.” For tourists, after all, the attraction was “the dance halls and night clubs,” and in daylight the neighborhood didn’t reveal much from the outside, or to outsiders. “It looks like any other not-very-smart section of the city, but with more black faces than white,” Marjorie wrote dismissively, in what was a typical attitude for white observers—the sense that Harlem was closed to them, and not worth the discomfort of exploring.32
For the women of Harlem who were not heiresses, however, the dance halls and nightclubs were just a small part of the larger cultural revolution that offered the possibility of a new, proud, and creative kind of life. They came from Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and all over the South, as well as the Caribbean and Europe; some had parents who had come north in the Great Migration some years before; some had migrated from no farther than midtown. Women like Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen were writing and publishing poetry and stories that sought to represent the experiences of black women in the modern city as well as in the rural communities that their authors were leaving behind. Jessie Redmon Fauset was editing, hosting literary salons, and nurturing new writers. Playwright Regina Anderson Andrews, who had fought to become the first African American supervising librarian in the New York Public Library, at the 135th Street branch, hosted regular artistic gatherings with her roommates at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue—when Zora Neale Hurston first arrived in Harlem, she crashed on their couch. At the World’s Fair, Harlem artist Augusta Savage created a monumental sculpture, “The Harp,” that was one of the few examples of African American art recognized as part of “the World of Tomorrow” there, outside the brief flowering of “Negro Week,” held in the summer of 1940. Savage, Andrews, and Fauset would be among the ten black women honored at the fair for their contributions to culture and the arts.33
Novelist and journalist Ann Petry first came to live in Harlem in 1938, by which time much of the energy of the Renaissance and its key players had dispersed—Hurston, by this time, was carrying out anthropological research in Florida under the auspices of the WPA. With her husband away serving in World War II, Petry wrote a weekly society column for one of Harlem’s newer, left-wing newspapers, the People’s Voice, and was the paper’s women’s editor in the early 1940s. In 1946, Petry published an immensely popular novel, The Street, in which she imagined the reality of life alone for a black single mother in Harlem. Her heroine, Lutie Johnson, tries to live according to the inspirational self-help principles of Benjamin Franklin, but the pressures of racism and the predations of men threaten her independence at every turn.
As the daughter of a well-to-do family in suburban Connecticut, Petry had been visiting Harlem regularly for years to see shows and plays, and was a regular guest at the Emma Ransom House, the women’s residence at the YWCA in Harlem. One of the few convenient and respectable options for young African American women coming to the city in search of work, the Emma Ransom House could either be a permanent home, for five to eight dollars a week, or a temporary one, for around a dollar a night. Like its more glamorous counterpart, the Barbizon, the residence offered a place to stay and a social life, with optional maid and laundry services, a beauty parlor, space for social gatherings, and “beau parlors” where women could entertain male guests (under supervision, and only until curfew). But the YWCA also offered more practical services, including a trade school to train prospective nurses and secretaries, and an employment office to help job seekers. The veteran civil rights activist Dorothy Height, who worked at the YWCA in the late 1930s, recalled in her autobiography the pressure on the Emma Ransom House at the time of the World’s Fair, due to the “thousands of Negro girls” who were drawn by the promise of jobs. The staff had to convert one of their club rooms into an emergency dormitory, and did everything they could to make sure the girls weren’t turned away—even those who couldn’t afford the fifty cents a night for a bed in the makeshift dorm.34
It was no wonder that the World’s Fair jobs, and the YWCA beds, were so highly coveted. Young black women who came alone to New York in search of work during the Live-Alone era faced considerably fewer opportunities, and greater risks, than their white counterparts. Most found themselves shunted into domestic service, where legal protections were scarce and opportunities for advancement were few. But change was on the horizon, spurred by the national crisis of World War II, and the passing of laws prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry, which opened up factory jobs. Work outside the home was about to become the patriotic duty of all American women, many of whom were going to find themselves Live-Aloners for the first time. But Marjorie Hillis, this time, wanted no part of their struggle.
7
ROSIE AND MRS. ROULSTON
Live-Aloner No More
High Lindens, also known by the less bucolic, more cigar-chomping name of the John P. Kane mansion, is an elegant house on the north shore of Long Island, outside the well-heeled town of Huntington, and just a life preserver toss from the Huntington Yacht Club, once part of its grounds. Dating back to the 1830s, it is one of the oldest mansions on what would become known as the island’s Gold Coast. Originally a two-story, flat-roofed house with a colonnade along the front, its design was fully in keeping with the airy openness of Italian mansions that Edith Wharton celebrated in her book The Decoration of Houses. It was extended over the years until in 1917 it could be advertised for sale in Country Life magazine as a blend of tradition and modernity, appealing “to gentlefolk seeking a delightful country place of charm and pleasing atmosphere.” In addition to the seven-bedroom main house, the twenty-two-acre grounds encompassed three cottages, a greenhouse, and a bungalow perched on one thousand feet of private shoreline.1
The gentleman who fell for its charms was Thomas H. Roulston, head of a chain of more than seven hundred grocery stores that bore his name, tentacling out from their Brooklyn base across Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island. Thomas’s father lit out from County Tyrone in Ireland in the late nineteenth century in search of work and opportunity, and found it with a grocer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, whose store he eventually bought out. He hung up his own name, first on that store, and then across his adopted city. The principles guiding Roulston & Sons would still suit a thriving Brooklyn grocery store a century later: local produce sourced from Long Island farms, its own bakery, exclusive Roulston coffee roasted on-site, and “famous” eggs.2
When Thomas senior died in 1918, his eldest son, Thomas Henry, known as Harry, inherited the business, employing his bachelor brother as his second-in-command. High Lindens was Harry’s reward, and a marker of his new status as the family patriarch—but he and his family would get to enjoy it together for only a summer or two, before his wife Florence died in 1920. Thomas’s spinster aunt Charlotte moved in to help the widower keep his house and care for his children, and in due course both children, Elizabeth and Henry, grew up and married. They stayed close to home, and Henry went to work in the family firm, the third generation of Roulston men to do so.
When he met Marjorie Hillis at a Christmas party in 1938, Harry Roulston was a wealthy widower in his early sixties, self-made, active, and devoted to his family. As a talented salesman, it’s possible he reminded Marjorie of her beloved father, and like Reverend Hillis, Roulston was clearly a man who relished a challenge. His grocery stores would have been a familiar feature of Marjorie’s Brooklyn childhood, but she didn’t meet their owner until she was already famous as the Live-Alone guru. Undaunted, he took her on vacation to Nova Scotia, and at some point managed to convince her that even though they were mature people long past the age of foolishness, romance still might have the power to win out over even the most elegant breakfast in bed. Or perhaps he argued that the solitary delights she celebrated in Live Alone could be all the more delightful when shared.
On August 1, 1939, at her sister’s home in Pennsylvani
a, the staunch Live-Aloner got married. The forty-nine-year-old bride wore a gown of “pale smoke blue” in marquisette, a gauzy mesh fabric lightweight enough for the summer heat. She wore a hat with an ostrich feather perched on her tightly curled iron-gray hair, and carried a bouquet of rosebuds and orange blossoms. Her sister, Nathalie, was her matron of honor, and the best man was Henry, her adult stepson—coincidentally also married to a woman named Marjorie. The event offered the press an irresistible combination of society wedding and minor sociological scandal. In the loyal Brooklyn Daily Eagle, under the headline “Goodby [sic] to All That,” the paper’s anonymous “Trend” columnist had an exuberant time with the Live-Alone guru’s capitulation to matrimony. “Literati, cognoscenti, illuminati, intelligentsia and sweet old Aunt Matty just beamed,” Trend rattled off, in the convoluted “corkscrew” English popular with smart magazines of the day.3 Several other New York newspapers covered the wedding, no doubt as a diverting distraction from the worsening news in Europe.
To the more cynical of these observers, Marjorie Hillis was exposing herself as a fraud by getting married. In June, when she announced her engagement, the Chicago Tribune ran her photograph under the headline “Didn’t Like It.” From her “bachelor-girl apartment,” she told reporters that she was “prepared to endure a fair amount of jocularity,” wrote the Herald Tribune, but considered the trade-off worthwhile.4 The New York Times, finding the bride-to-be’s phone busy, speculated that she had taken it off the hook to avoid facing the indignation of her single fans, who surely considered her engagement a “gross betrayal”—although it didn’t manage to find any fans who would say as much in print.
On the occasion of the wedding announcement and several times afterward, Marjorie struggled to convey the nuances of her theory and her actions to skeptical journalists. “At first with patience and then with resignation, our bride of the week tried to explain when her engagement was announced last month that she didn’t say in her book she preferred single blessedness,” “Trend” reported. “She did say, though, that Mr. Right would have to be strict Grade A.” If he was, then the essence of the Live-Alone message could survive even Marjorie’s coupled state. She was still arguing that women should cultivate the highest standards for themselves, choose their lifestyles according to their own desires, and never marry a lower “grade” of man out of social pressure and simple fear. Seen in this light, her wedding did not repudiate, but reinforced her quietly radical rethinking of what happiness could look like for women, and how it might be achieved.
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