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For Fred and Oscar
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. DIANA
2. NANCY
3. TAMARA
4. TALLULAH
5. ZELDA
6. JOSEPHINE
7. DIANA
8. TALLULAH
9. NANCY
10. ZELDA
11. TAMARA
12. JOSEPHINE
Epilogue
Photographs
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Also by Judith Mackrell
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Diana c.1915 (© Getty Images).
2. Diana in the musical tableau La Damoiselle Elue (© Getty Images).
3. Diana in VAD uniform (© Getty Images).
4. Diana and Duff holidaying in Italy (© Getty Images).
5. Diana in the London production of The Miracle (© Estate of Bertram Park/Camera Press).
6. Diana posing for Curtis Moffat (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
7. Front cover of Blast (Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust / The Bridgeman Art Library).
8. Nancy as a published poet (The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin).
9. Nancy (The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin).
10. Nancy working at the Hours Press (© Gamma Keystone via Getty Images).
11. Nancy and African bangles (Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s).
12. Tamara Paris c.1931 (© Getty Images).
13. Autoportrait in Green Bugatti, 1929 (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013).
14. Tamara (© Getty Images).
15. Natalie Barney amidst Duncan-style nymphs (Private Collection / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Art Library).
16. Tamara de Lempicka, Four Nudes (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013 / Rex Features).
17. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (© Getty Images).
18. Tallulah in The Dancers, 1923 (© Getty Images).
19. Tallulah, 1928 (© Estate of Paul Tanqueray / NPG).
20. Tallulah conducting a charity treasure hunt (© Popperfoto / Getty Images).
21. Tallulah in Her Cardboard Lover, 1928 (© Popperfoto / Getty Images).
22. Tallulah in The Garden of Eden, 1927 (© Getty Images).
23. Zelda Sayre, Montgomery belle c.1918 (F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library / Harold Ober Associates).
24. Zelda and Scott in Westport (CSU Archives / Everett Collection / Rex Features).
25. Zelda with baby Scottie (F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library / Harold Ober Associates).
26. Zelda, Scott and Scottie celebrate Christmas (© Getty Images).
27. Zelda in practice clothes and pointe shoes (© Getty Images).
28. Josephine in Chocolate Dandies, 1924 (© Getty Images).
29. Josephine in faux ragamuffin guise (© Getty Images).
30. Poster for La Revue Nègre by Paul Colin (Private Collection / Peter Newark Historical Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2013).
31. Josephine in a variation of her iconic banana skirt (© Getty Images).
32. The Ebony Venus (© Getty Images).
33. Josephine with carved African elephant (© Getty Images).
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The 1920s was a decade of exhilarating change for women and this book tells the story of six in particular, each of whom profited from that decade in remarkable ways. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tamara de Lempicka, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker were famous in their own right; for each of them the Twenties was a moment of exceptional opportunity. Yet viewed as a group these women were also very representative of their times: they chased similar ambitions, fought similar battles, even shared the quirks of their generation’s collective personality.
The world they inhabited was also comparatively small. Despite living and working in a variety of cities, these women shared lovers and friendships as well as personal concerns. They were written about by the same novelists and journalists, photographed for the same publications. But biography is essentially about the colour and detail of individual lives and in writing this book I’ve been fortunate to profit from the groundwork of many other fine biographers. To their research and knowledge I owe a profound debt.
In the matter of language, the 1920s was a world away from our own politically conscious era. Young women were girls, blacks were often niggers, female actors were actresses, and even though this usage can grate on modern ears, I’ve opted to retain a flavour of it, for the sake of period accuracy. For the same reason I’ve presented quotations from letters and diaries, etc., in their original form, without tidying up oddities of spelling, grammar or idiom.
In the matter of money, which was of paramount concern to most of these women, I’ve tried to give a general sense of values and exchange rates, but not to track year-by-year changes. The franc in particular vacillated wildly against the other major currencies after the collapse of the Gold Standard in 1914, and its weakness against the dollar, coupled with bullish rises in the American stock market, was a major factor in Paris becoming so attractive to foreign artists and writers, and playing so central a role in this story.
The following offers the roughest of guides to the value of the money in the wage packets or bank accounts of these six women, using the Retail Price Index (RPI) to pin these values to the present day:
In 1920, £1 was worth approximately $3.50, or 50 francs, which equates to £32.85 in today’s values.
In 1925, £1 was worth approximately $5.00, or 100 francs, and equates to £46.65 today.
In 1930, £1 was worth approximately $3.50, or 95 francs, and equates to £51.75 today.
I would like to thank the following for their generous permission to quote from published and unpublished works: the Felicity Bryan Literacy Agency and John Julius Norwich for the Estates of Lady Diana Cooper and Duff Cooper for extracts from A Durable Fire: the Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper, edited by Artemis Cooper, compilation © Artemis Cooper 1983; The Rainbow Comes and Goes, The Autobiography of Lady Diana Cooper © The Estate of Lady Diana Cooper 1958; The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–1951, edited and introducted by John Julius Norwich © 2005; Cooper Square Press for extracts from Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase; Aurum Press for extacts from Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady by Joel Lobenthal; Random House for extracts from Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald; Gollancz for extracts from Tallulah: My Autobiography by Tallulah Bankhead; Scribner & Sons for extracts from the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and from the letters of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; the Harry Ransom Center for extracts from the personal papers of Nancy Cunard; the Estate of T.S. Elliot and Faber and Faber Ltd for extracts from The Waste Land; the Estate of Tamara de Lempicka for extracts from Passion by Design: the Art and Times of Tamara d
e Lempicka by Kizette de Lempicka-Foxall and Charles Phillips © 2013 Tamara Art Heritage, licensed by Museum Masters NYC.
Aside from the biographers and historians who’ve gone before me, all of whom are listed in the bibliography, I want to thank those who’ve given exceptional, generous help and advice in the writing and publication of this book.
Gillian Darley and Michael Horowitz, Kate and Paul Bogan offered fantastic hospitality; many friends were patient sounding boards for my ideas, and Debra Craine in particular went beyond the call of duty in reading and commenting on the book in its manuscript stages.
Enormous thanks to my brilliant editor Georgina Morley – scrupulous, funny and challenging; also to the rest of the editorial team at Macmillan including my very patient production manager, Tania Wilde, and meticulous copy-editor Shauna Bartlett. Thanks again to the staunch support of my agent Clare Alexander.
And finally love, as always, to my family.
Judith Mackrell, January 2013
INTRODUCTION
On 2 October 1925 a young American dancer from the black ghetto of St Louis stood on the stage of the Thèâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Her limbs were trembling from exhaustion as well as from the clamour erupting from the crowd below. People in the audience were screaming, shouting, drumming their feet; yet what seemed to her a terrifyingly hostile noise was in fact the sound of Paris acknowledging a star. Just three months earlier Josephine Baker had been a skinny chorus girl living on a modest wage and a hopeful dream. Now, repackaged as a burnished, exotic beauty, she was about to be hailed as a cultural phenomenon.
The Paris correspondent of the New Yorker reported that within half an hour of Josephine’s debut the city’s bars and cafés were talking only of the magnificent eroticism of her dancing. Maurice Bataille, a restaurant owner who later became one of her lovers, claimed that Josephine’s naked buttocks (‘Quel cul elle a!’) had simply given ‘all Paris a hard-on’.1 Yet over the following days she would be feted by artists and critics as a black pearl, an ebony Venus, a jazz age vamp with the soul of an African goddess.
Postcards of ‘La Baker’ went on sale, as did a range of Josephine dolls. Her shiny black hair and coffee-coloured skin, the source of so much abuse back home, were harnessed to the marketing of French beauty products: hair pomade for the glossing of Eton crops; walnut oil for the faking of summer tans. Her hard, supple body was celebrated as an icon of contemporary style – reflecting the glossy streamlined aesthetic of art deco and the gamine flair of the French garçonne.
To some of the young women who watched her dance, Josephine held out the possibility of their own transformation. In many parts of the Western world, the 1920s had been greeted as a decade of change. The Great War might have detonated the optimism of the early century, shattering millions of lives, damaging economies and toppling regimes, yet out of its carnage the modern world seemed to be reinventing itself with astonishing speed. Fuelled by the rising American stock market and the ferocious gearing up of industry, the Twenties was emerging as a decade of mass consumption and international travel, of movies, radios, brightly coloured cocktails and jazz. It was a decade that held out the promise of freedom.
For women, that promise was especially tantalizing. The war had delivered voting rights and jobs to many and it had started to redraw the social map. When Josephine Baker came to Paris, she was transported to a culture and marketplace that would have been unimaginable to her before 1914, and the same was true for the Polish-Russian artist, Tamara de Lempicka.
In Tsarist Russia, where Tamara had grown up, she had been cocooned in a life of pleasure and privilege. But when the 1917 revolution had smashed that life apart she had been forced into exile with her husband and small child. Living in a small hotel room in Paris she’d had no skills with which to support herself other than a relatively untutored gift for painting and an undaunted sense of her own entitlement. By the late 1920s she had used both to recreate herself as one of the most fashionable artists of the new decade.
Tamara’s most celebrated canvases were of her contemporaries, young women whose bodies radiated a lustre of sexual independence as redolent of 1920s style as Josephine’s dancing. In fact, Tamara always claimed an affinity with Josephine, even though she never attempted to paint her: ‘The woman made everyone who watched her weak with desire for her body. She already looked like one of my paintings, so I could not ask her to pose.’2
Another admirer of Josephine’s dancing was the poet and heiress Nancy Cunard. She, too, had left her home in England to settle in Paris, but while she frequented the same circuit of nightclubs, bars and parties as Tamara, her closest ties were with the Parisian avant-garde. That autumn she was disentangling herself from an affair with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and falling in love with Louis Aragon, one of the founders of surrealism.
Nancy had grown up a lonely, bookish little girl but her antagonism towards her socially voracious mother had hardened her determination to make a new life for herself in Paris. Eight years later, her transformation from English heiress to Left Bank radical would appear complete. Her hair was sharply cropped, her eyes outlined with kohl, her arms loaded to the elbow with ivory and ebony bangles, and among her long list of lovers would be a black jazz pianist from Georgia.
Also in Paris during the mid-1920s was Zelda Fitzgerald. Originally a small-town Southern belle from Alabama, her ‘slender supple’ grace and ‘spoiled alluring mouth’ had famously become the template from which her husband, the novelist Scott Fitzgerald, created his exquisitely modern heroines.3 Her former childhood friend Tallulah Bankhead had much admired Zelda, feeling herself to be the plump and truculent ugly duckling of her own Southern family, but at the age of fifteen Tallulah had starved herself into beauty and won a minor film role in a magazine competition. From there she progressed to a career on Broadway and in London’s West End where, by 1925, she had become a star. Brash, witty and luxuriantly pretty, Tallulah was a novelty on the London stage.
No less exotic to American audiences was the very English, very aristocratic Lady Diana Cooper, who during the mid-1920s was touring the States in Max Reinhardt’s theatrical spectacle The Miracle. As the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, Diana was only one rung below royalty and as such had grown up in a gilded cage, from which she was expected to emerge on the arm of a rich and titled husband. When she fell in love with a man who possessed neither money nor rank, she broke with centuries of tradition. She had committed herself to earning the money that would launch her husband in politics and had done so by embarking on a career that a generation earlier would have risked social disgrace.
By the autumn of 1925 all six of these women were travelling to places far beyond those that they, or anyone else, could have envisioned. They didn’t do so as a recognizable group, although their lives intersected in many ways. But the journeys they took were emblematic of larger changes that were taking place around them, and which were throwing the lives and expectations of women into profoundly different configurations.
To the public eye, these changes were sufficiently vivid to inspire the branding of a new breed of women – the much demonized and much mythologized ‘flapper’. Like Ardita Farnam,4 one of Scott Fitzgerald’s early heroines, the flapper seemed to be motivated by a single aim: ‘to live as I liked always and to die in my own way’. Riding the transforming dynamic of the 1920s she was seen to demand everything that had been denied her mother, from choosing her own sexual relationships and earning her own living, to cutting her hair, shortening her skirts and smoking cigarettes in public.
For Diana, the oldest of the women in this book, the determination to ‘live as I liked’ was rooted in the harrowing dislocations of the war years. As traditional rules of class were suspended she found the nerve to defy her family, first to volunteer as a nurse, then to claim the marriage and career of her choice. Nancy, too, used the war to carve out her own rebellion, but she would push far beyond Diana in embracing the most radical elements of th
e Twenties’ experiment in art, fashion and lifestyle. Tamara, Tallulah and Zelda also journeyed remarkable distances during the decade, but they not only embodied the flapper through the spirit of their personal lives they gave her a very public stamp – Tamara in the women she painted, Tallulah in the characters that she portrayed on stage and Zelda in the fictional heroines created by Scott, and eventually by herself. As for Josephine, who became internationally famous as the physical incarnation of jazz, and the free syncopated energy of the Twenties, she made the most remarkable journey of all as she transcended the poverty of her childhood to become an icon of black music, and modernist art.
Of course, the six women in this book experienced the 1920s in exceptional ways. But what made them emblematic of their time was the spirit of audacity with which they reinvented themselves. The young women of this era weren’t the first generation in history to seek a life beyond marriage and motherhood; they were, however, the first significant group to claim it as a right. And from the way the flapper was written about and represented it was clear that, to many, she represented a profound social threat.
During the late nineteenth century the term flapper had still carried a suggestion of innocence, evoking the image of gawky, unfledged teenage girls, but even by the end of the war the term was acquiring connotations of brashness and defiance. In October 1919, The Times published a column about the new flapper, warning of the restive mood that was brewing among Britain’s young female population. Two million of them had taken paid work during the war and a substantial number were determined to remain in employment, despite pressures to relinquish their jobs to returning soldiers. The following year, the same paper went on to question the wisdom of extending voting rights to women under thirty, dismissing them as a single feckless type, the ‘frivolous scantily-clad, jazzing flapper … to whom a dance, a new hat or a man with a car is of more importance than the fate of nations.’5 Given the terrible decimation of Britain’s young men during the war, newspapers also bristled with warnings of the destabilizing effect these flappers might have on the country, as an unprecedented generation of unmarried and independent women appeared to be hell-bent on having their own way.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 1
