Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  In fact, This Side of Paradise didn’t have a great deal to say about women. It was really a book about a young man. More to the point, Fitzgerald never even used the term flapper in the whole of the text.

  By 1920, it was no longer clear whether Scott Fitzgerald created the flapper or she created him.

  Still, by the year’s end, Scott’s name grew so synonymous with the New Woman that one newspaper paid a toast:

  To Scott Fitzgerald,

  flapper King,

  A Flappy New Year

  do I sing.5

  At Wellesley College, the venerable all-women’s school outside Boston, the student newspaper ran a satirical poem entitled “The Transformation of a Rose,” in which a “winsome lass, a maiden pure and sweet,” falls under the sway of Fitzgerald’s novel.6 By the last few stanzas, she has been thoroughly corrupted:

  … Her fortune went in purchases—

  Cosmetics, clothes and such,

  Her time all went into a line

  She needed one so much.

  Rosemary’s name is not the same

  Nor is her face or form.

  She’s reckless Rose of many beaux

  The envy of her dorm.

  They ask her where she got her pep,

  Her snappy, Frenchy air

  And where she learnt to wear her clothes

  And henna rinse her hair.

  Her answer is—“I bought it all

  And at the cheapest price.

  I bought the book that tells the tricks,

  ‘This Side of Paradise.’ ”

  By later standards, Fitzgerald’s exposé of the flapper was tame. But it was provocative enough for its time. “None of the Victorian mothers … had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed,” opened an oft quoted chapter.

  Perhaps thinking of Zelda, Fitzgerald claimed that the “popular daughter” “becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements [she] has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.”7

  Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald’s protagonist—young Amory Blaine—“saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible.”8 In this new and startling environment, virtually any girl could be found “deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.”

  The young women in Scott’s book whisper lines like “I’m just full of the devil.” They wear “hand-knit, sleeveless” jerseys—which Amory aptly dubs “petting-shirts”—that offer easy access to the forbidden regions of their bodies. They scoff at their parents’ prudery and remind them that “Mother, it’s done—you can’t run everything now the way you did in the early nineties.”9

  As Fitzgerald’s fame grew—and it grew quickly: Within a year, This Side of Paradise had sold forty thousand copies and topped waiting lists at libraries across the nation—journalists took to calling him the premier analyst of the American flapper.10 “Before he started to analyze this young person,” wrote one critic, “to interpret her … to make familiar [her] weird vocabulary and to reveal what even fifteen or twenty years ago would have been considered ‘scandalous goings-on,’ the older generation had had only glimpses of what was doing in ‘flapper’ circles.”11

  Even if he didn’t invent the flapper, it didn’t take Scott long to figure out that writing about her would pay handsome dividends. Eager to cash in on the hullabaloo surrounding This Side of Paradise, in 1920 The Saturday Evening Post began publishing Fitzgerald’s short stories. With a weekly circulation topping 2.75 million and a total readership probably amounting to several times that figure, the magazine was an important arbiter of middle-class culture during the Jazz Age.12 It was also a cash cow for its feature writers.

  In 1920, Scott earned a whopping total of $18,850 for his writing, a sum equivalent in today’s money to about $176,000. Only $6,200 of his income came from royalties on the novel. The rest derived from eleven short stories that he published that year, including $7,425 that Hollywood studios paid for the rights to three of his stories and options on future works.

  In fact, Scott’s short stories—and the movie rights associated with them—would always be the major source of his income. This Side of Paradise was regarded as a great success, but its total sales by the end of 1921—49,075 copies—didn’t earn the book a spot among America’s top ten best-sellers. By comparison, Sinclair Lewis’s runaway success Main Street, also published in 1920, had sold 295,000 copies by the following year.13

  Unlike This Side of Paradise, many of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, which were wildly popular among middle-class readers, featured young women as lead characters. The typical young woman in Scott’s magazine stories—who came, in turn, to represent the typical American flapper—was an explicitly sexual being. “She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of radiant curiosity,” he described one of them. “Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand.”

  Ardita, the flapper heroine of “The Offshore Pirate,” which ran in The Saturday Evening Post in May 1920, was like many of Scott’s lead women.14 She knew the value of her own sex appeal. The calves of her legs, she informs one suitor, are “worth five hundred dollars.” “When a man’s in love with me,” she boasts, “he doesn’t care for other amusements.”

  Another of Scott’s flapper creations, Myra—the lead character in “Myra Meets His Family,” which Fox Studios adapted for the silver screen—was a midwestern debutante “with a becoming pallor and new shadows under her eyes [who] throughout the Armistice year … left the ends of cigarettes all over New York on little china trays marked ‘Midnight Frolic’ and ‘Coconut Grove’; and ‘Palais Royal.’ She was twenty-one now and Cleveland people said that her mother ought to take her back home—that New York was spoiling her.”

  In a typical moment of candor, Myra admits that she’s “played around so much that even while I’m kissing the man I just wonder how soon I’ll get tired of him.”15 Like all of Scott’s flappers, Myra knows that she “may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.”

  In these and other stories, Fitzgerald taught his readers about the rituals of 1920s youth culture, from joyrides in shiny new automobiles to necking sessions and petting parties in the dark crooks of hotel lobbies and country club verandas. Scott’s female characters smoked, rouged their cheeks and lips, cut their hair short, and took swigs from the hip flasks of their world-weary boyfriends.

  Not just among the big-city literary crowds, but in Middle American towns like Muncie, Indiana, where one in every five households subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post, Fitzgerald quickly developed a reputation as the nation’s expert on flappers and their boyfriends.16 In this regard, he was the beneficiary of considerable dumb luck.

  American youth were more visible and excited more popular interest in the 1920s than at any earlier moment in history.17 Magazines like The Atlantic Monthly pondered whether the “Younger Generation [Is] in Peril,” while popular tracts like George Coe’s What Ails Our Youth? and Ben Lindsey’s The Revolt of Modern Youth became essential reading for anyone who wanted to be in the know.

  In part, this fascination with teenagers and twenty-somethings stemmed from long-term trends. Between 1800 and 1920, the number of children borne by the average American woman fell from roughly seven to three.18 This didn’t mean Americans were having less sex. On the contrary, women increasingly turned to a variety of birth control techniques, including coitus interruptus,
the rhythm method, prophylactics, and abortion.

  First, though birthrates fell across the board, as a general rule urbanites and white-collar professionals were more likely to practice family planning than rural folk and blue-collar workers.19 This made perfect sense. Urban, middle-class parents—a growing portion of the population—no longer needed small armies of children to tend the family farm. In fact, extra children were often an added expense rather than an economic asset in the cities. They cost money to feed, clothe, and shelter.

  Second, as America’s industrial economy grew more advanced, a great demand arose for managers, scientists, engineers, clerks, lawyers, salespeople, and other service-sector employees. These jobs required years of education and training.

  Parents who took these trends into account had fewer children, which allowed them to invest more time and resources in their small families.

  In subtle ways, this trend also helped ignite a sexual revolution. After all, in an emerging industrial society where it paid to have fewer children, men and women were free to redefine sex not merely as something procreative, but as a legitimate and pleasurable activity within marriage. From this discovery, it might take only a small leap of faith to conceive of sex as a legitimate activity outside marriage.

  At first glance, the declining birthrate should have made young people less visible by the 1920s, since the twenty-five-and-under age group accounted for an ever smaller portion of the American population. But the demographic trends had the reverse effect. As the average household size fell, adults were free to lavish more time and attention on their small families. Whereas teenagers were formerly thrown into the world of work at the earliest possible age, now they lived at home into their teens and twenties.20 Smaller families also created a narrower age gap between first- and last-born children; this trend, in turn, meant that children shared more in common with one another than with their parents.

  Contributing to the growing consciousness of youth was the need for a literate and educated workforce, which created a boom in secondary and higher education. Between 1900 and 1930, America’s college enrollments increased threefold and high school attendance jumped by a whopping 650 percent; this meant that by the 1920s, about 75 percent of teenagers attended at least some high school, while at any given moment 20 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary education.21 The result was the emergence of a vibrant and highly visible youth culture where none had really existed before.

  As the Lynds observed of their time in Muncie, “High school, with its athletic clubs, sororities and fraternities, dances and parties, and ‘extracurricular activities,’ is a fairly complete social cosmos in itself.…22 Today the school is becoming not a place to which children go from their homes for a few hours daily but a place from which they go home to eat and sleep.”

  As teenagers and twentysomethings spent more time with one another and less time with adults, there emerged a fascination with the new youth culture. One young woman complained that “this tremendous interest in the younger generation is nothing more nor less than a preoccupation with the nature of that generation’s sex life,” and in some respects, she was right.23

  Now that they were spending so much time together, young men and women were apt to experiment more freely with sex and romance. Back in the old days, one parent remembered, “we all went to parties together and came home together. If any couple did pair off, they were considered rather a joke.”24 Those days were long gone. In Muncie, nearly half the boys in the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, and about a third of girls, admitted to attending “petting parties.”25 Another study of 177 college women found that 92 percent acknowledged “petting” or “spooning.”26

  However liberating they might have found the new sexual ethic, young women of the twenties found that the old double standard still applied, and it was they who provoked the greater portion of scorn and blame.

  “Girls aren’t so modest nowadays; they dress differently,” complained one mother.27 “It’s the girls clothing,” another agreed. “We can’t keep our boys decent when girls dress that way.” “Last summer six girls organized a party and invited six boys and they never got home until three in the morning,” a concerned parent told the Lynds. “Girls are always calling my boys up trying to make dates with them.”

  Mrs.28 George Rose, an itinerant evangelist, warned parents in Butte, Montana, that “modern fashions, exposed necks, bare arms, yes, even exposed legs … you say they are worn innocently, with no thought of appeal to the lust of men. I wish I could think that this were so.”

  Throughout the early twenties, Scott Fitzgerald proved an avid observer of social trends and a cagey student of marketing strategy. He and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, had cleverly billed This Side of Paradise as “A Novel About Flappers Written for Philosophers,” a line that Scribner’s incorporated into its advertisements for the book.29 Building on this theme, in September 1920 Scribner’s published a collection of Scott’s short stories under the title Flappers and Philosophers. Scott confided to Max Perkins that he thought the volume sold well in bookstores because of the “timelessness” of its title.30

  In fact, Scott had it wrong. The title wasn’t timeless. It was timely.

  In dozens of well-placed interviews and column items, with titles like “Fitzgerald, Flappers and Fame” and “This Is What Happens to Naughty Flappers,” Scott positioned himself as an expert on young American women.31 Magazine writers could hardly help noting that “insomuch as he is strictly responsible for the introduction into this country of a new and devastating type of girl whose movements, thoughts and actions—to say nothing of deeds—have become matters of international importance … anything Mr. Fitzgerald might have to say on the subject … would be worth hearing.”32

  “I sometimes wonder whether the flapper made me or I made her,” Scott admitted in a moment of candor.33

  Later in life, Scott noted with bemusement that he was essentially “pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that movement.” He and Zelda spent the better part of the decade being “quoted on a variety of subjects we knew nothing about.”34

  This was just a little bit disingenuous. Almost everything Scott did or said was calculated to achieve maximum effect—even when he denied any expertise on the flapper. “I wish to state publicly that I cannot understand why, whenever the word flapper is mentioned, my name should be dragged headlong into the conversation,” he protested halfheartedly.35 “I know nothing about flappers. The idea that I am in any way interested in the number of knees on exhibition at the Biltmore lobby is extremely distasteful to me. You’d think I invented bobbed knees. I deny it.”

  On other occasions, when asked to comment on whether the “flapper craze [was] passing,” Scott eagerly reassumed his familiar role of cultural savant and insisted, “I don’t think it is.… The flapper is growing stronger than ever; she gets wilder all the time. …36 She is continuously seeking for something new to increase her store of experience. She still is looking for new conventions to break—for new thrills, for sensations to add zest to life, and she is growing more and more terrible.”

  When asked whether his books had created the flapper phenomenon, Scott “smiled a bit ruefully” and slipped into a long discourse on women’s suffrage, women in English literature, Sigmund Freud, and regional differences among American girls.

  “The younger generation has been changing all thru the last twenty years,” he told an interviewer. “Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm, and piquant cleverness.” With every bit of confidence he could muster as a twenty-four-year-old connoisseur, Scott explained that “all, or nearly all, the famous men and women of history—the kind who left a lasting mark—were, let us say, of broad moral views.37 Our generation has absorbed all this.”

  Within two years of his first major publication, Scott’s role in popular cult
ure was so well-defined that readers of Life magazine surely got a knowing chuckle out of Dorothy Parker’s whimsical poem “The Flapper.”38

  She nightly knocks for many a goal

  The usual dancing men.

  Her speed is great, but her control

  Is something else again.

  All spotlights focus on her pranks.

  All tongues her prowess herald.

  For which she may well render thanks

  to God and Scott Fitzgerald.

  Appropriately, Scott Fitzgerald and America were both still in their early twenties when his star was on the rise. All that remained was to win the one prize that still eluded him. In his greatest deed of literary license, Scott would turn Zelda into the prototype of the American flapper, all in the service of wedding her future to his.

  Lillian Gish observed that the Fitzgeralds “didn’t make the twenties; they were the twenties.”

  5

  DOING IT FOR EFFECT

  LOOKING BACK ON that momentous afternoon in September 1919, Scott Fitzgerald would remember that he “ran along the streets, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it—my novel This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication. That week the postman rang, I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise.”1

  The dispatch that changed Scott’s life read, simply, “I am very glad, personally, to be able to write you that we are all for publishing your book.… [It] is so different that it is hard to prophesy how it will sell but we are all for taking a chance. …2”

  In his early letters to “Mr. Perkins”—F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, the most celebrated writer-editor team in American history, wouldn’t graduate to “Scott” and “Max” for some time—Fitzgerald betrayed a sense of urgency about seeing the book to print. “Terms, etc.3, I leave to you,” he told Perkins after receiving his acceptance letter, “but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book by Xmas—or, say, by February? I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl.…”