Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  † The short story ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’.

  * Published under his pseudonym Warner Fabian.

  † Founded in 1881, one of its modest demands was that a woman’s underwear, without shoes, should weigh no more than seven pounds.

  * It was probably bulbar paralysis, known then as Erb’s disease.

  * VAD’s weren’t paid until 1916, when the rising toll of casualties necessitated a doubling in the number of nurses, and wages became a necessary inducement to attract working women.

  * Their membership included artists, writers and politicians, including Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton and George Frederic Watts.

  * Much of the castle had been recently rebuilt but to Diana, visiting her grandparents there before it passed on to her father, Belvoir seemed ancient.

  * She also took a short course in Italian and German at the Berlitz language school, to groom her into ‘une petite fille modèle’.

  * Her teacher was Lydia Kyasht.

  † It was postponed to the following year.

  * The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni; it was later bought by Peggy Guggenheim and is now the Venice Guggenheim Museum.

  * At first the war was bad for working women: 14 per cent of those already employed lost their jobs with the closing down of peacetime industries. There was also sentimental resistance to the idea of women tackling men’s work, which was only dispelled when compulsory military service was introduced in 1917 and it was clear the nation couldn’t function without them.

  † When the Endell Street military hospital opened in 1916, it was with an all-female staff of doctors as well as nurses. Even on the front line women proved their remarkable qualities: nurses refused to leave their patients, even under heavy fire; Edith Cavell became a national heroine after being executed by the Germans for helping soldiers escape from German-occupied Brussels to the safety of Holland.

  ‡ The Duchess’s first plan, financially backed by Moore, had been to convert a French chateau into a private hospital, but it had not been approved by the Red Cross.

  * German naval blockades and the diversion of resources and manpower to the war industries produced a shortage of normal peace-time goods.

  * Had Violet known of the nickname ‘Cooper’s clap trap’ given to Sir Alfred’s carriage, she would have been still more horrified.

  * It was the private residence of the Asquiths, left vacant after Asquith became prime minister in 1908.

  * In this she was also more open-minded than Diana and most of the Coterie, who were inclined to mock the more extreme intellectual currents of the avantgarde.

  * This was the ‘Picture Ball’ organized by Lady Muriel Paget at the Albert Hall. Marinetti was much in vogue in London after his series of staged lectures in London, which featured readings of his cacophonous ‘phonetic poem’ on the siege of Adrianople.

  * 1 July 1914.

  * Its theme was the grinding repetition of war, which Nancy expressed in heightened carnivalesque imagery: ‘I sometimes think that all our thoughts are wheels/Rolling forever through the painted world’.

  * She was lucky not to – there were 150,000 British casualties of the Spanish flu, many far more robust than she.

  * By now known by its new and less German-sounding name, Petrograd.

  * The Poles were fighting off both Russian and German efforts to take control of the country.

  * In London, many members of the Society of Women Artists still exhibited under male pseudonyms.

  * Albert Gleizes, a cubist painter of portraits, was another influence, and she shamelessly plundered his smart and sexy use of the Manhattan skyline as the backdrop to his figures.

  * Kees van Dongen’s illustrations for the 1926 edition of La Garçonne represented Monique as a slender almond-eyed beauty, naked in some images, fashionably dressed in others.

  * Although the Wiener Werkstätte studio in Austria had made a pioneering attempt to incorporate fashion into a wider programme of progressive design.

  * Photographs of the Perrot and Lempicki couples together raise interesting but unresolved questions about how much the two husbands knew of their affair.

  * Around this time she temporarily changed her signature to the masculine version of her name, Lempicki, though it fooled few people.

  * In 1927 Barney would launch an unofficial ‘Académie des Femmes’ as a riposte to the French Academy of Literature, whose list of forty ‘immortals’ continued to exclude women.

  † The fervently sapphic imagery of Barney’s poetry – ‘breasts like lotus flowers’, ‘hearts moaning like the sea’ – meant that much of it had to be privately published and distributed.

  * Tallulah was named after her grandmother, who in turn had been named after the beauty spot Tallulah Falls, which her parents had visited around the time of her conception.

  * Prices for nickelodeons were obviously five cents; in 1915 a larger movie house would charge ten cents a ticket.

  * Clara Bow would be offered her own film debut through a competition in Movie Motion, but her brief appearance ended up on the cutting-room floor.

  * Initially inspired by the early nineteenth-century writings of Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, it was popularized worldwide by a growing industry of trance lecturers, hypnotists, hack mediums and holders of séances.

  † She was part of a group of friends attached to the hero, an artist called George.

  ‡ It was part of the Mutual Film Corporation.

  * In 1919 she was temporarily restored to Louise’s care after her aunt returned from Europe. For a few weeks in 1920 she also lodged with her uncle Henry Bankhead, now in military residence on Governor’s Island.

  * The 1873 Cornstock laws barred distribution of contraceptive information by mail, but this was sufficient for the prosecution of campaigners like Margaret Sanger. Condoms went on sale publicly in 1918 partly due to high rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea among soldiers returning from the war.

  * Later she would joke over the missed opportunity. Admiring a picture of Barrymore, posed nude and clearly ‘well endowed’, she said she would have liked to have notched him onto her, by then, extensive list of lovers.

  † There was a powerful, self-selecting and mutually supporting network of women in the American film and theatre industries. In Hollywood, Alla Nazi-mova held her own female court, much like Natalie Barney’s. In New York, actresses, writers and even producers were generous in supporting each other’s careers.

  * It didn’t serve Crothers so well. Normally admired for the serious social commentary of her works, Nice People was regarded as a sop to commercial taste.

  * These included another young actress, Blythe Daley, who in 1925 would be momentarily notorious for biting Charlie Chaplin on the mouth when he tried to seduce her.

  * Tallulah played a young idealistic woman, torn between her arranged marriage to a corrupt businessman and her love for an impoverished artist. Variety noted that ‘Miss Bankhead looks ravishing and has a dramatic quiver in her larynx that should be worth a fortune in a reasonable play.’

  * This was their second, albeit voluntary, severance, although Eugenia and Morton were nothing if not stubborn, and would attempt marriage for a third, again unsuccessful, time.

  * John Peale Bishop.

  * By the end of 1921 it had sold nearly half a million copies.

  * In 1926, the young writer Katharine Bush advertised her own literary style as a fusion of ‘jazz, bobbed hair, petting and necking, flivvers, Flaming Youth, and Mr Scott Fitzgerald’.

  * Probably taken from Jane Howard’s Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony, or Zelda’s Fortune by Robert Edward Francillon.

  * The word had been coined two decades earlier, but to many it was still considered sufficiently disturbing to require quotation marks.

  † Equivalent to $10,000 in today’s money.

  * A near fatal accident put a stop to this.

  * He would be paid $2,500.

  * Scott was very struck b
y the expression and gave it to Gloria Gilbert, the heroine of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned.

  * Millay’s 1920 poem ‘A Few Figs from Thistles’ had become celebrated as an anthem to flapper recklessness: ‘My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/But ah my foes, and oh my friends/It gives a lovely light.’

  * US research had only just begun to deliver accurate information about ovulation.

  * His prejudices against foreigners were also infused with the unexamined racism of his childhood. Europe had grown degenerate, Scott argued in one letter home: ‘a negroid spirit had defiled the Nordic race’ and the Italians had ‘the souls of blackamoors’.

  * Scott would transpose aspects of Sandy to Jordon Baker, the professional golfer in The Great Gatsy.

  † They havered a little. For a while the baby was called Pat (short for Patricia), then briefly Scotty, spelled with a ‘y’.

  * Britain had similarly strict laws, as did France, although the latter maintained a more pragmatic approach to abortions, turning a blind eye to a proportion of them as necessary ‘family planning’.

  * After the early years, Carrie refused to discuss the issue of Josephine’s father with anyone, neither confirming nor denying Eddie Carson.

  * Early French settlers had brought a philosophy of relatively enlightened pragmatism, offering education to their slaves and opportunities to buy back their freedom. Josephine’s grandparents and great-aunt were among the wave of immigrants to St Louis.

  * Back in 1908 Arthur had ‘adopted’ Josephine and Richard simply by signing his name on a piece of paper.

  * When Dyer eventually disassociated herself from the Jones family band, she became a well-known trumpeter on the black vaudeville circuit. Josephine would meet her again in Philadelphia in 1921.

  * The best theatres on the vaudeville circuit, like the Keith, were only open to white performers.

  * Maude would leave her own husband, Sam Russell, to join the Shuffle Along tour at the last moment. But her own longstanding marriage was unhappy, and Sam was frequently violent.

  * Under her later stage name Caterina Jarboro, she would become the first black singer to perform in a white opera production.

  * While she sent Billy money from time to time, she began divorce proceedings against him in 1925, though the case was abandoned by the American courts in 1928.

  * Re-packaged yet again as the Chocolate Kiddies it was then sent out to Europe, where it had a better reception. Its success would in fact be critical for Josephine, paving the way for the Revue Nègre, which made her a star.

  † Also to navigate the hopeless confusion of their definitions of colour. In music hall, white singers and comedians still blacked up their faces to perform minstrel numbers, with the consequence that some black performers painted their skins even darker, in order to pass as whites in ‘black face’.

  * Around 200,000 black soldiers served during the 1914–18 war, including the all-black 369th infantry, aka the Harlem Hellfighters.

  * Post-war inflation, hikes in wages and taxes, and a fall in the value of agricultural land were hitting the gentry hard. Many estates were being split up and many town houses sold and demolished, as families like the Rutlands struggled in the difficult post-war economy.

  * Moore had originally offered Diana an allowance of £6,000 a year, but reluctantly she had decided it would be bad form to accept.

  * By 1922 Duff was earning £450 a year, having been promoted to secretary to Ronald McNeill, the Under Secretary of State. Combined with the £600 allowance he received from his mother, and Diana’s own allowance, that gave them around £1,400 per annum.

  * In America there were 7.5 million cars in 1920, and 27 million by the end of the decade, which meant one in five Americans owned a car.

  † Duff’s romantic old-fashioned version of Toryism was not popular with the currently modernizing Conservatives; having few influential friends within the party, he was also without financial or professional guarantees.

  * The publishers had wrongly assumed that much of the content could simply be translated and transposed from the French edition to the British.

  * The opera house had been temporarily leased out to the American film producer Walter Wanger – one of several strategies to avert bankruptcy. Wanger was eager to raise the cultural profile of the film industry in the UK, and was running hand-picked programmes of high-quality films, combining them with performances of live music and ballet.

  * Another film was made of it in 1924, directed by Marshall Neilan and starring Mary Pickford.

  * Duff, too, would always claim that it was only ‘filthiness, not unfaithfulness’ of which he was guilty.

  * A few years later she would pay a vast sum to hire Josephine Baker to dance at one of her parties, requesting that Josephine perform naked except for a coating of gold paint.

  * Only occasionally would she draw a line. In August 1924 the Prince of Wales came to New York for a state visit, and Diana was offered thousands of dollars by journalists and editors begging for insider stories. Regretfully, she considered it bad form to comply.

  * Duff was far less docile. When Diana tried to organize a relatively cheap crossing for his return visit to New York, he called her a ‘nasty cold-hearted girl’ and insisted on his own ‘outside cabin’ on the Berengaria.

  † The Conservative Association also contributed most of the costs of his campaign, thus easing some of Diana’s financial burden.

  * This was titled Love, the later, more famous version was filmed in 1935.

  * The touring production had 500 performers and crew, with additional extras hired at each town.

  * Under the terms of her contract, Dix would stay on full pay for the length of the play’s run.

  * She took ballet classes, too, with the Diaghilev dancer and choreographer Léonid Massine.

  * Olga always rented a house for the London season, having both her living as a singer to earn and her reputation as an essential guest at any smart party to maintain. She took in guests to amuse her, such as Idina Sackville, who was visiting London from her new home in Kenya.

  * She is also referred to by her maiden name, Iris March.

  * There would also be a marked similarity between Tallulah and Ysabel, the American actress in Arlen’s 1927 novel Young Men in Love, who cuts a swathe in London as the protégée of an older woman with more than a passing resemblance to Olga Lynn.

  * This was a criticism applied to several actors by the late 1920s as a modern style of naturalism overtook the old English classicism.

  * Also on the list were Lady Astor, Diana Cooper, Olga Lynn, Edith Sitwell and, of course, the Queen.

  * It was her second operation.

  * He’s Mine, 1929.

  * In Arlen’s description, Iris had ‘outlawed herself … she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society”, “county”, upper, middle and lower class. She was, you see, some invention … of her own.’

  * By this point he had yet to switch from his birth name, Dikran Kouyoumdjian to his English pseudonym. Nancy was told that his nickname, the Baron, was connected to an actual title, but in fact it was merely an anglicization of Baaron, the Armenian for ‘Mister’.

  * It was compiled and printed in the Little Review, 1929.

  * Literally ‘full of sap’.

  * The details of their relationship don’t appear in Nancy or Aldous’s surviving correspondence, but were circulated by friends like the writer Sybille Bedford.

  * Hilda Doolittle, for a while Pound’s lover, felt her own voice overwhelmed by his influence.

  * James J. Wilhelm’s research into Pound’s years in Paris provides the basis for this account.

  † It was also published by the same publishers as The Waste Land, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press.

  * A pun on the French pronunciation of her name.

  * In Djuna Barnes’s thinly disguised portrait of the salon in Ladies Almanack, Janet and Solita appeared a
s the admirable couple, Nip and Tuck.

  * Aragon tolerated Nancy’s devotion to fashion, but he resented it when Paris began appropriating surrealist art as a new style trend. When Ernst and Miro created designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1926, it was Aragon who organized a group of comrades to heckle the first performance.

  * In some ways Nancy overestimated Henry’s talent. In 1930 she persuaded him to compose the music for a series of poems written by herself and others, which she published. Henry, however, had only ever aspired to improvising in clubs, and after he left Nancy and returned to America, he gave up the piano completely.