Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  In her second article, ‘What Became of the Flappers’, she suggested that this spirit was not as easily decoded as writers and advertisers might believe: ‘The best flapper is reticent emotionally and courageous morally. You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.’60 It was a telling remark. Back in Montgomery, Zelda could write to Scott, ‘You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me.’61 But during the quarrels and confusions of the last eighteen months the distance between them had widened. There were times when she could access their old communion, when they talked late into the night, following the natural eddies of each other’s thoughts, but there were also subjects about which Zelda no longer confided in Scott – her self-doubt as a mother and her fear that she would never become more than a wife and muse. The old conflicts were intensifying, too: his drinking, her flirting and Scott’s anxiety over money, which grew the more helplessly extravagant they both became.

  Zelda had reluctantly agreed to spend the summer of 1922 in St Paul, because Scott insisted they could live more cheaply there. It was a mystery and a disappointment to her that the business of budgeting was so intrusive in their lives. Yet despite the huge sums that came in from Scott’s writing and from the sale of film rights to several of his works, he borrowed heavily from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and was permanently in debt to his publishers, Scribner’s, by several thousand dollars. When Zelda suggested what she regarded as a practical solution, that Scott spend more time on the smart upbeat stories, which sold so well, rather than wrestling with the novels that came so much harder, Scott reacted as if she had betrayed him.

  Another wife might have economized and effaced herself, Zelda knew. But she did not feel that was the kind of woman Scott required her to be. She believed that he still needed the inspiration of her free spirit, her ability to live ‘the life of the extravagant.’62 That was what he had fallen in love with, and it had become the selling point of his fiction. Scott himself had admitted as much to Edmund Wilson when he acknowledged that it was ‘the complete fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda’,63 that remained the most potent influence on his writing.

  * * *

  The next move of their marriage was to Long Island, which they hoped would be a compromise: secluded enough for Scott to focus on his third novel, and close enough to Manhattan to compensate Zelda for the dullness of her summer in St Paul. They rented a small, white stuccoed house, set back from a leafy road and close to the ocean. Yet Great Neck, the area they had chosen, proved far from modest: it had acquired the nickname Gold Coast because of its concentration of rich and famous inhabitants. Their closest neighbour turned out to be Max Gerlach, who was rumoured to be a bootlegger and who lived like a millionaire. Also living close by was the actor Basil Rathbone, and the columnist and immensely successful sportswriter Ring Lardner.

  Almost every night there was a party somewhere: lights strung up in a garden, cocktails by a swimming pool, a live band and a cabaret. Alternatively, there were drinks, dinners and theatre trips to New York, which was less than twenty miles away. At certain times of the day and night the road between Great Neck and Manhattan was chock full of cars, a rush hour of pleasure-seeking commuters. It was exactly the life that Scott would write about in The Great Gatsby, and for all his good intentions to be frugal and productive, he and Zelda found it impossible to resist.

  Journalists were constantly hovering around Great Neck and reports soon appeared of the newly arrived Fitzgeralds: the parties they attended, Scott’s fondness for ‘piquant hors d’oeuvres’ and their very public drinking bouts and petting. A full-page photograph of them was published in Hearst’s International and syndicated across America: Scott sitting behind Zelda and lightly holding her fingers; Zelda wearing a long string of pearls and with her hair unusually styled in marcelled waves. They were being presented as the faces of the jazz age – a term Scott himself had coined the previous year as the title of his second volume of short stories. And while Zelda was inclined to be dismissive of the photo and her ‘Elizabeth Arden Face’, she could still be seduced and excited by her place in the social limelight.

  Some people who met the Fitzgeralds around this time attested that they still appeared to be the perfect couple. Gilbert Seldes, editor of The Dial, recalled lying drunk on a bed when he first saw the ‘double apparition’ of Zelda and Scott, ‘the two most beautiful people in the world … floating toward me, smiling’.64 Others spoke of seeing them locked in their own world, talking, drinking, kissing, sometimes falling fast asleep entwined in one another’s arms.

  The writer John Dos Passos thought them brilliant: Scott, when sober, could speak with visionary clarity about America and American culture; Zelda was simply Zelda. One night a crowd had gone out driving, and as they passed a half-deserted amusement park, she insisted that the shy, stammering Dos Passos take her for a turn on the ferris wheel. As they whirled between darkness and garish lights, Dos Passos was both unnerved and entranced by the ‘strange little streak’ in Zelda’s conversation, the glittering non sequiturs of her ideas, the harsh satirical beat of her humour.65

  The writer Carl Van Vechten was equally impressed. Zelda ‘was an original … she tore up the pavements with her sly remarks’.66 There might be trouble in her and Scott’s marriage, but to Van Vechten this was part of the Fitzgerald magic. The two of them ‘tortured each other because they loved one another devotedly’67 – just like the couple Van Vechten would model on the Fitzgeralds in his own 1930 novel Parties.

  For Zelda and Scott, however, the symbiosis between torture and love was losing its romance. Scott was again drinking too much, not simply because he was going to too many parties, but because he was depressed at the halting progress of his new book. Each novel seemed to become more difficult to write, and he woke up at nights in a cold sweat, terrified that his talent was deserting him, that he would be left with nothing but debts and a wasted life.

  Zelda, too, was conscious of wasting time. She had come to Great Neck with the intention of working on her magazine commissions: in the autumn of 1923, when a journalist from the Baltimore Sun asked what career she would follow if ever she had to earn a living, her most seriously considered answer (after suggesting a Follies dancer or a film star) was to become a writer. But she had never learned self-discipline, and she lacked the determined independence of her Montgomery friend Sarah Haardt. Sarah had refused to marry, arguing that ‘there is so much in life, so much for a woman to see and do’.68 She had graduated from college and had already had several short stories accepted for publication. The contrast would not be lost on Zelda when her own first story was accepted by the Chicago Tribune in 1925. Our Own Movie Queen was published not under her name, but under Scott’s infinitely more commercial byline.

  Yet if Zelda had moments when she longed to experience something of Sarah’s vocation, she couldn’t separate herself from the person that Montgomery and Scott had made her to be: feckless, lovely and spoiled. It was easier to decide she was ‘only good for useless pleasure’69 and order in expensive seafood and vintage champagne on a whim, to telephone Nathan and the rest of the Manhattan gang to come out for the evening. She and Scott might be suckered into what John Dos Passos disdained as a ‘Sunday supplement style of celebrity’, but she didn’t know how they could stop.

  Scott wrote a summary of every year in what he called his personal ‘ledger’. In the last eighteen months his situation had shown a terrifying downward slide. While 1922 had been ‘a comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year, no ground under our feet’, 1923 had been ‘the most miserable year since I was 19, full of terrible failures and acute miseries’.70 Scott feared he was squandering his talents as well as his money. His new novel still slipped and seethed out of his grasp, he was worn down by the ugly predictability of the rows between him and Zelda. He was humiliated by the time he was wasting on pointless parties, and above all he was terrified by his inability to control hi
s finances. During the past twelve months he and Zelda had earned $36,000 (roughly $480,000 today) between them (a tiny proportion of that coming from her), yet every month they spent over $600 on basic living costs, and haemorrhaged even more on hotels, theatre tickets, clothes, drink and their second-hand Rolls-Royce.

  Scott believed that they should make a drastic move, not just to a different town this time, but to France, where the favourable exchange rate would make life very much cheaper. By now Zelda was sufficiently anxious and unsettled to agree. If Scott was freed from money worries he might drink less and he might also spare more time from his desk for her and Scottie. If it was true that two people could live on $5 a day in France, perhaps two people could also find a reprieve for their marriage.

  Chapter Six

  JOSEPHINE

  Freda Josephine McDonald had very little on her mind when, at the age of fifteen, she agreed to marry Billy Baker, a handsome easy-going young man from Philadelphia. Billy had fallen in love with Josephine when he saw her dancing at the local Standard Theatre. Hot licks of jazz rhythm jumped around her skinny body, her long legs were bendy as India rubber, and when she flipped into one of her comic routines the crowd went wild for her. Josephine’s big round eyes glittered as she vamped her crazy grin. She strutted like a chicken, and when she exited the stage with her back arched and her butt jutting out like a feathered tail she looked as sweet, sexy and funny as any girl Philadelphia had seen.

  As far as Josephine was concerned, Billy had simply been a friendly pair of arms to snuggle into after she left the theatre at night; when they first became lovers she’d had no idea of marrying him. But his father, Warren Baker, had taken a shine to her and was unhappy to think his son might be taking advantage. He suggested the two of them should make their relationship official, and so on 17 September 1921, they stood in front of the Reverend Orlando S. Watte and swore that there was no lawful impediment to their becoming man and wife.

  During that short ceremony Josephine had seen no reason to inform the Reverend Watte of her exact age, nor did she think it necessary to tell anyone that she already had a husband, in another city. She’d only been thirteen when she and Willie Wells had got married down in St Louis, and they’d barely been together two months. Certainly she’d seen nothing of Willie since she’d broken a beer bottle over his head and he’d stumbled, bleeding, out of the house. He was part of another life, and Josephine had done her best to forget him.

  Here in Philadelphia, with Billy Baker and his family, there were no fights. Billy’s mother might disapprove of Josephine – her skin was darker than Billy’s and she was a chorus girl with apparently no family to speak of – but Pa Baker treated her with affection and respect. While most people still called Josephine by her childhood nickname Tumpy, Warren referred to her as ‘Daughter’, clearly taking pride when he ushered her gallantly to a table in the restaurant he ran. He bought new clothes for her, a silk turban and a seal-skin coat. Sometimes, on her Sundays off, he took her on the eighty-mile train journey to Harlem, where he treated her to lunch at Dabneys on 132nd Street, followed by a matinee show.

  It was just a few weeks after Josephine and Billy married that Warren Baker acquired tickets for the latest New York sensation. Shuffle Along was the first all-black musical to succeed on Broadway for over a decade and everything about it had been praised by the critics, from the catchy wit of signature songs like ‘Bandana Days’ to the brilliance of Florence Mills, the winsomely graceful lead with the extraordinary, bubbling coloratura voice.

  The New York American had even delivered a panegyric to the chorus line – so exuberant a contrast to the stiffly drilled routines of white girls that ‘every sinew in their bodies [had] danced’.1 A few months ago Josephine herself had yearned to be one of those girls, and had auditioned for the show when it was assembling its Broadway cast. But while most cities in America didn’t fuss over the age of chorus girls, in New York the rule that they had to be at least sixteen years old was strictly enforced.

  Watching the show now, beside Pa Baker, Josephine’s body ached to be up onstage, performing alongside Florence Mills, whom she idolized. And when she returned home to Billy and the scrappy vaudeville show still playing at the Standard, Josephine could no longer imagine why she’d been so content with life in the Baker household. A few weeks later, when she heard that a second touring cast was being put together for Shuffle Along, she didn’t even think to consult Billy or his family before auditioning.

  Josephine was good at focusing on the future. Her audition was successful (no one asked about her age) and in February she was hired to become one of the Happy Honeysuckle girls, earning what was, to her, the fabulous wage of $30 a week. In her excitement, she spared little thought for the effect her departure might have on her five-month marriage; she felt she had simply taken the necessary next step towards success.

  When she arrived in New Haven for the start of the tour, the first person she saw was her friend Maude Russell, who had been working as a singer and dancer at the Standard. She was pleased to see a familiar face, but when Maude called out ‘Tumpy’ and held out her arms in an affectionate embrace, Josephine put up a hand to interrupt her. ‘My name is not Tumpy any more,’ she said. ‘My name is Josephine Baker.’2

  * * *

  Names were important to Josephine. At the Female Hospital in Saint Louis where she’d been born on 3 June 1906, official records had marked the uncertainty of her provenance, identifying her father with the simple abbreviation Edw. Her mother, Carrie, would never commit herself to naming, unequivocally, who Edw. might be. Sometimes she would hint at Eddie Carson, a drummer who worked in the bars of St Louis.* But Carrie had gone with many men, and while Carson would become very eager to assert his paternity once Josephine’s career took off, others doubted he’d had any hand in her making. His skin was very dark, while Carrie’s was almost black, and according to the gossips, Josephine’s creamier colour had surely come from elsewhere.

  During Josephine’s childhood she learned to feel ashamed of her uncertain origins, to believe that there was something ‘humiliating and dishonorable about my birth’.3 But as she grew older she turned it to her advantage. She invented different fathers for herself – a Washington lawyer, a Spanish dancer, a Jewish tailor – depending on the audience she was playing to. She also switched between different surnames to cover her increasingly chaotic official status: sometimes using Carrie’s maiden name, Macdonald, when she filled in a form; sometimes the surname of her stepfather, Arthur Martin; sometimes that of her first husband, Willie Wells. When she decided to stick with Baker, it would be because she felt she had made the name her own.

  Reinventing herself was also Josephine’s way of dodging the hurt of feeling not merely obscure, but also unwanted – especially by her mother. Carrie had been an unusual child, graceful and tall, with slanting aristocratic features. She had been bright, too, the first in her family to read and write, and her adoptive parents had assumed that someday she would lift herself out of the ghetto to a better life, working in one of the city’s new department stores or even becoming a schoolteacher. But Carrie developed a wild streak. She began to go out dancing and to run around with men, and when she got herself pregnant at the age of twenty-one the family were mortified. Even though Josephine was taken care of by her grandmother and her great-aunt she was, from the start, an unwanted baby, a misfit, a burden to Carrie and a symbol of the family’s disappointed hopes.

  Sixteen months later, when Carrie got pregnant again, Josephine’s situation did not improve. The new baby was illegitimate as well, but at least the identity of his father (Alexander Perkins) was known, and his skin was the same dark colour as Carrie’s. As Josephine grew a little older she was made painfully aware of how much more acceptable her brother Richard was to the family: ‘He had black skin … he was the welcome one.’4

  And so it remained. When Josephine was four Carrie finally settled down with a husband. Arthur Martin was a big, slow-moving, si
mple man, but he was fundamentally decent, and happy to be a father to Carrie’s two illegitimate babies. Over Carrie, however, and her increasingly volatile treatment of her children, he had no control. On good days, Carrie could be affectionate and lively, showing glimpses of the gay laughing girl who had racketed around St Louis. She could even be sweet to Josephine. But the daily grind of ghetto life made those days increasingly infrequent. Often Carrie would be driven to fury by the lumbering presence of her husband and by the noise of her four children (two more had followed in quick succession: Margaret in December 1908 and Willy Mae in July 1910). She sought refuge in drink and occasionally disappeared for a day or two on the arm of another man, but mostly she vented her rages on her children, shouting and slapping them with a terrifyingly abrupt violence.

  It was Josephine who Carrie saw as the source of her frustration – the baby who had first closed the door on her freedom. If there was a child to blame, a child to be beaten, it was her oldest daughter; if there were jobs to be done around the house, it was Josephine who was required to work the hardest. From an early age she was expected to wash the dishes and mind the smallest children; she was sent out with Arthur at dawn to forage for fallen fruit and vegetables in the wholesale market. Perhaps the worst moment of Josephine’s early life was the Christmas Day that Carrie got ragingly drunk and gave Josephine one of the harshest beatings of her childhood. The blows left welts and bruises, but far more terrible were the words that Carrie shouted – that she hated her daughter and wished she was dead. Josephine was only nine.

  Later, she could understand how trapped Carrie felt. Her mother worked long hours as a laundress, but the wages were low, and even though Arthur struggled hard with his own trade, hauling gravel with his pony and cart, jobs were in short supply. The best he could do for his family was a two-room apartment on Gratiot Street, in a row of tenement houses that ran parallel to the two dozen train tracks leading into nearby Union Station.