by Joshua Zeitz
Ultimately, Bliven ventured that there was “a good deal more smoke than fire” in the flapper’s general conduct. Rather than evidence of a great unloosening of morals, she was proof positive that “women today are shaking off the shreds and patches of their age-old servitude. ‘Feminism’ has won a victory so nearly complete that we have even forgotten the fierce challenge that once inhered in the very word.
“Women have highly resolved that they are just as good as men,” Bliven continued, “and intend to be treated so. They don’t mean to have any more unwanted children. They do not intend to be barred from any profession or occupation which they choose to enter.… If they should elect to go naked nothing is more certain than that naked they will go, while from the sidelines to which he has been relegated mere man is vouchsafed permission only to pipe a feeble Hurrah!”
To which, the editor concluded, “Hurrah!”
STRIP AWAY THE sensational headlines and popular warnings of moral calamity and decay, even look past the coolheaded assessments of progressive writers like Bruce Bliven, and the flapper was a complex figure.
She was distinctly real, the product of compelling social and political forces that converged in the years between the two world wars. Gainfully employed and earning her own keep, free from family and community surveillance, a participant in a burgeoning consumer culture that counseled indulgence and pleasure over restraint and asceticism, the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work, to own her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation.
Growing up in an urban environment that afforded Americans opportunities for anonymity and leisure, born in the era of mass production and mass reproduction, the flapper experimented openly with sex and with style. She redefined romance and courtship in ways that expanded and—sometimes unknowingly—contracted her autonomy. She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.
But if the flapper faithfully represented millions of young women in the Jazz Age, she was also a character type, fully contrived by the nation’s first “merchants of cool.” These artists, advertisers, writers, designers, film starlets, and media gurus fashioned her sense of style, her taste in clothing and music, the brand of cigarettes she smoked, and the kind of liquor she drank—even the shape of her body and the placement of her curves. Their power over the nation’s increasingly centralized print and motion picture media, and their mastery of new developments in group psychology and the behavioral sciences, lent them unusual sway over millions of young women who were eager to assert their autonomy but still looked to cultural authorities for cues about consumption and body image. Like so many successor movements in the twentieth century, the flapper phenomenon emphasized individuality, even as it expressed itself in conformity.
The pioneer merchants of cool invented the flapper for fun, for profit, and for fame. In branding and selling her, they inaugurated that curious, modern cycle by which popular culture imitates life and life imitates popular culture.
By the mid-1920s, few flappers knew whether they were a grassroots or elite invention. Neither could they appreciate the steep price they paid for their new freedoms. In return for measuring the good life in material terms, they forfeited a degree of political and social power; in return for new romantic, heterosexual liberties, they lost some of the intimacy that women once shared with one another.
Above all, the history of the flapper isn’t just about America’s first sexual revolution, though certainly the New Women of the 1920s represented a dramatic break with traditional American values and ethics. Indeed, the flapper’s importance ranged far beyond the bedroom or the dance hall. Her story is the story of America in the 1920s—the first “modern” decade, when everyday life came under the full sway of mass media, celebrity, and consumerism, when public rights gave way to private entitlements, and when people as far and wide as Muncie, Indiana, and Somerset, Pennsylvania, came to share a national standard of tastes and habits.
The people who made and embodied the flapper were a diverse lot.
There was Coco Chanel, the French orphan who built a fashion empire and singularly redefined the feminine form and silhouette.
Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a Connecticut clergyman, emerged as one of the most insightful observers of sex and style in Jazz Age America.
In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairy-tale mansions, Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate, fired the imagination of millions of filmgoers with their distinct variations on the New Woman.
Gordon Conway, a Texas-born fashion artist, and John Held, a Utah-born cartoonist, designed magazine covers that gave visual expression to the social revolution sweeping the United States.
In New York, Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, pioneers in the new art of advertising and public relations, taught big business how to harness the dreams and anxieties of a growing industrial nation.
Their story—a tale of the fascinating characters who were present for America’s rendezvous with modernity—begins in the most unlikely of places: at a small country club in the summer of 1918, where a young army officer is mustering up the courage to ask someone to dance.
PART ONE
Zelda Sayre, shortly before she caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1
THE MOST POPULAR GIRL
FOR ALL INTENTS and purposes, and purely by virtue of chance, America’s Jazz Age began in July 1918 on a warm and sultry evening in Montgomery, Alabama. There, at the Montgomery Country Club—“a rambling brown-shingled building,” as one contemporary later remembered it, “discreetly screened from the public eye by an impenetrable hedge of mock oranges”—a strikingly beautiful woman named Zelda Sayre sauntered onto the clubhouse veranda and caught the eye of First Lieutenant Francis Scott Fitzgerald.1
At seventeen, Zelda was “sophisticated for her age,” recalled one of her friends, but “she still had the charm of an uninhibited, imaginative child.”2
As she stood outside the clubhouse amid the dull murmur of the brass dance music emanating from within, bathed by the Alabama moonlight, her “summer tan gave her skin the color of a rose petal dripped in cream. Her hair had the sheen of spun gold. Wide and dark-lashed, her eyes seemed to change color with her prismatic moods; though in reality they were deep blue, at times they appeared to be green or even a dark Confederate gray.” Just one month out of high school, Zelda was “slender and well-proportioned,” “lithe,” and “extraordinarily graceful.”
Among the younger set, Zelda Sayre was commonly acknowledged as something of a wild child. She particularly delighted in scandalizing her father, Judge Anthony Sayre, a staid Victorian who, in his capacity as an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was one of Montgomery’s leading citizens.
Given her family’s standing in the community, Zelda’s frequent exploits were sure fodder for gossip. There was the day she climbed to the roof of her house, kicked away the ladder, and compelled the fire company to rescue her from certain injury and disgrace.3 Or the time she borrowed her friend’s snappy little Stutz Bearcat to drive down to Boodler’s Bend, a local lover’s lane concealed by a thick orchard of pecan trees, and shone a spotlight on those of her schoolmates who were necking in the backseats of parked cars.4 Or those other occasions when she repeated the same trick, but at the front entrance to Madam Helen St. Clair’s notorious city brothel.
Most disturbing to Judge Sayre was Zelda’s well-earned reputation for violating the time-honored codes of sexual propriety that seemed everywhere under attack by the time the opening shots were fired in World War I. Already a veritable legend among hundreds of well-heeled fraternity brothers as far and wide as the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Georgia Tech, Zelda was “the most popular girl at every dance,” as a would-be suitor remembered years later.5
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sp; Part of Zelda’s renown surely was owed to her habit of sneaking out of country club dances—and sometimes her bedroom window—to join Montgomery’s most eligible bachelors for a few hours of necking, petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues. On more than a few occasions, the inviting aroma of pear trees, the dim glow of a half-moon, and the tentative sound of a boyfriend’s car horn were all the inspiration Zelda needed to walk quietly across her plain whitewashed room, draw open the curtains, and creep down to the tin roof that protected the Sayre family’s front porch.6
After that, she was gone into the night.
During her four years at Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda was an average student, but she was well ahead of the learning curve in most other matters. She habitually rouged her cheeks and stenciled her eyes with mascara, giving her friends’ parents great cause for concern.
A regular at the local soda fountain, she alternated between double banana splits (innocuous) and a “dopes” (not so innocuous), a combination of Coca-Cola and aromatic spirits.
When the entire senior class cut school on April 1, it was Zelda who pooled everyone’s money and flirted with the nice agent at the Empire Theatre, who happily granted the students admission at a cut rate.7 And it was Zelda who triumphantly organized a group photo in front of the ticket box.
When her English teacher assigned a poetry-writing exercise for homework, Zelda immediately volunteered to read her original composition—scratched out the next morning in homeroom—aloud.
I do love my Charlie so.8
It nearly drives me wild.
I’m so glad that he’s my beau
And I’m his baby child!
It was a big hit with her classmates, but not exactly what the teacher was looking for.
For all of Zelda’s purported daring, Sara Mayfield, her loyal childhood friend, averred that she was no better or worse than most young women of her time. “Zelda would have been the last to deny that she danced cheek to cheek and did the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom,” Mayfield admitted.9 But “if she gave a demonstration of the Hula at a midterm dance at the University of Alabama, had not Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, been similarly criticized for doing the same thing …?”
To be sure, Zelda “rode behind her admirers … on their motorcycles with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye.” But this sort of “flirtation was an old Southern custom; ‘going the limit’ was not. Zelda was a reigning beauty and ‘a knockout’ in the paleolithic slang of the day, far too popular to have ‘put out’ for her beaux, far too shrewd in the tactics and strategy of popularity to grant her favors to one suitor and thereby alienate a regiment of them.”
Maybe so, maybe not. But Zelda did her best to cultivate a scandalous reputation. She encouraged reports of skinny-dipping excursions and multiple romantic entanglements.10 During the summer, when it got too hot, she slipped out of her underwear and asked her date to hold it for the evening in his coat pocket. And at a legendary Christmas bop, when a chaperone reproached her for dancing too closely and too wantonly with her date, Zelda retaliated by swiping a band of mistletoe and pinning it to her backside.11
Long after the last chords of the Jazz Age had been struck, Zelda admitted in her own autobiographical novel that “I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”12
Scott Fitzgerald certainly thought so.
Just shy of his twenty-first birthday, the young army lieutenant was stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan, where he spent most of his time devouring novels and cavorting with the sons and daughters of Montgomery’s first citizens. Smartly clad in a new dress uniform, Fitzgerald cut an impressive figure. Shortly after the war, when Scott’s first book became a best-seller, an interviewer described him as bearing “the agreeable countenance of a young person who cheerfully regards himself as the center of everything.”13 His eyes were “blue and domineering,” his nose “Grecian and pleasantly snippy; mouth, ‘spoiled and alluring,’ like one of his own yellow-haired heroines; and he parts his wavy fair hair in the middle, as Amory Blaine”—the fictional hero of Fitzgerald’s first novel—“decided that all ‘slickers’ should do.”
Fitzgerald was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had spent four years at Princeton without earning his undergraduate degree. An indifferent student, he received poor marks from his professors and made little contribution to classroom discussion. To his credit, Fitzgerald was an accomplished amateur playwright and a frequent contributor to the university literary magazine. But on balance, his academic career fell far short of even his expectations.
Lazy in all things but reading and writing, vaguely ambitious but hopelessly lacking direction, Fitzgerald escaped the indignity of a fifth year at Princeton by enlisting in the army in late 1917. First stationed at Fort Leavenworth for officer’s training, he made a poor impression on his platoon captain, a serious young West Point man named Dwight D. Eisenhower. Scott’s attention simply wasn’t on soldiering, and it showed. He fully expected that he would be sent to the European front, and fearing that he might return in a pine box, he accelerated work on his first novel, The Romantic Egotist. It consumed much of his time and all of his energy.
On short leave from the army in early 1918, Scott enjoyed a brief hiatus in Princeton, where he managed to finish the novel and send it off to an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons.14 After reporting back for duty in March, he was transferred to the Forty-fifth Infantry Regiment at Camp Alexander in Kentucky. Though he was trained to lead a platoon, his commanding officers found Scott so deficient as a soldier that they consigned him to stateside duty—first at Camp Gordon in Georgia and then, in June 1918, at Camp Sheridan.
With his novel under review and combat service safely at bay, Fitzgerald was free to immerse himself in local revelries. Almost from the start, he began working his way through a list of Montgomery’s most eligible debutantes, generously supplied by Lawton Campbell, a local boy he had known at Princeton.15 In a more candid moment years later, Fitzgerald admitted that he had been naturally endowed with neither “great animal magnetism nor money,” two certain keys to success among the well-bred collegiate circles in which he moved back in the early days.16 Still, he knew that he had “good looks and intelligence,” qualities that generally helped him get the “top girl” wherever he went.
Lawton Campbell was several years older than Zelda Sayre and had left Montgomery before she entered high school; consequently, he didn’t include her on Scott’s roster of southern belles. It was purely by chance that she and Scott Fitzgerald happened upon each other that evening in July.
The moment his eyes locked on her, Scott was taken by Zelda’s beauty. Had he asked around, he would have learned of her dangerous reputation. As one contemporary remembered, “There were two kinds of girls, those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t.17 But Zelda didn’t seem to give a damn.”
At the first opportunity, Scott elbowed his way to her side and, finding that her dance card was full for the evening, asked if he might take her out after the country club festivities wound down. The faux East Coast drawl that he studiously cultivated at Princeton just barely concealed his flat Minnesota burr.
“I never make late dates with fast workers,” she replied sharply in the most properly southern of southern accents.18
Nevertheless, she gave Scott her telephone number and subtly encouraged him to ply his charms another time.
Scott called Zelda at home the next day—and the next day after that, and again every day for the better part of two weeks until she relented. Not that it took a great deal of convincing. Scott was “a blond Adonis in a Brooks Brothers uniform,” one of their contemporaries remarked. He was, by Lawton Campbell’s estimation, “the handsomest boy I’d ever seen.19 He had yellow hair and lavender eyes” and a confident swagger that won over even his deepest skeptics.
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br /> In her autobiographical novel, Zelda evoked the sensation of dancing with Scott on one of their first dates. “[H]e smelled like new goods,” she wrote all those years later.20 “Being close to him, [my] face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.” Zelda was jealous of Scott’s “pale aloofness,” and when she watched him stroll arm in arm off the dance floor with other women, she felt a dull pang of resentment that he was “leading others than [me] into those cooler regions which he inhabited alone.”
To be fair, Zelda saw to it that Scott did most of the chasing. As one of Montgomery’s most popular debutantes, she already enjoyed scores of romantic opportunities from the usual college and business crowds. In normal times, Scott would have faced stiff competition from the likes of Dan Cody, the dashing young scion of a prominent Montgomery banking family, or Lloyd Hooper, an even wealthier son of an even wealthier Alabama line. Now, with America fully mobilized for war and thousands of doughboys in starched uniforms flooding Camp Sheridan, Zelda found herself one of the mostly hotly pursued belles in the state. Army aviators stationed at Camp Taylor honored her with elaborate aerial stunts and flyovers above the Sayre household, until an unfortunate pilot crashed his plane and died in a futile attempt to win Zelda’s affections. Army regulars staged a ceremonial drill on Pleasant Avenue in Zelda’s honor. Sara Mayfield claimed that when the war ended and all of Montgomery celebrated with a grand parade, “the military police had to break up the stag lines that crowded around her.”21
By her own admission, Zelda’s attention wasn’t on school that year.22 There were too many “soldiers in town [and] I passed my time going to dances—always in love with somebody, dancing all night, and carrying on my school work just with [the] idea of finishing it.”
