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

by Joshua Zeitz

  In short, though few women in the 1920s lived like Lois Long, increasing numbers of them encountered her image every day at the office, in magazine advertisements, and on the silver screen. Flapperdom was every bit as much an expression of class aspirations as it was a statement of personal freedom.

  Americans in the 1920s found creative ways to circumvent Prohibition.

  10

  GIRLISH DELIGHT IN BARROOMS

  IF LOIS LONG’S charmed life in Manhattan was at once iconic and unusual, by mid-decade Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were leading an astonishing existence.

  In 1923, Scott earned the whopping sum of $28,754.78—equal to about $300,000 in today’s money—but still managed to overspend by $7,000 (roughly $75,000 in twenty-first-century dollars).1 Despite the high fees he earned for articles like “Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss If the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?” and “Does a Moment of Revolt Come Some Time to Every Married Man?” Scott and Zelda simply couldn’t keep pace with their insatiable appetite for good food, good liquor, and good times.

  In a moment of financial desperation and self-deprecation, Scott even resorted to writing a satirical piece for The Saturday Evening Post entitled “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”

  “Our garage is a large bare room whither I now retired with pencil, paper, and oil stove,” he reported, “emerging the next afternoon at five o’clock with a 7,000-word story. That was something; it would pay the rent and last month’s overdue bills. It took twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class, but within that time we had paid back our debts, and the cause for immediate worry was over.”

  Scott was only half in jest. In a decade that witnessed a virtual explosion in consumer credit and spending, the Fitzgeralds were poster children for material excess and indulgence.

  They didn’t seem too embarrassed by it, either. “I wanted to find out where the $36,000 had gone,” Scott told readers.2 “Thirty-six thousand is not very wealthy—not yacht-and-Palm-Beach wealthy—but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36,000 had bought nothing at all.”

  In fact, Scott knew exactly where the money had gone, since he kept meticulous household budgets. A typical month’s expenses included $80 for “house liquor” and $100 for “wild parties”—together equivalent to almost $2,000 in today’s money—and $276 in “miscellaneous cash.”

  Perhaps out of economic necessity, and surely craving the adventure of a foreign excursion, in the summer of 1924 Scott and Zelda set sail for the French Riviera.

  However high they had climbed the social ladder in the United States, the Fitzgeralds were relative provincials among the more seasoned American expats who converged on France in the interwar years. During their first week in Paris, they accidentally bathed young Scottie in the bidet and got her violently ill on a gin fizz, thinking it was lemonade.3

  Though he and Zelda would spend the better part of five years in France, Scott never bothered to learn anything beyond rudimentary restaurant French and made a point of frequenting American cafés on the Right Bank.4 When he ate at Voisin, a renowned Parisian bistro, he ordered club sandwiches, much to the disgust of the white-jacketed waiters. Largely apathetic about the explosion of experimental art and music that swept the European continent, Scott slaked his literary thirst at Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, read mostly American novelists, and sought out English-language translations whenever he bothered to read French writers like Marcel Proust.

  The Fitzgeralds weren’t sojourning in Europe out of a profound sense of alienation with American culture. They were just looking for the cheapest way to live well. Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, they hoped to profit from France’s deep postwar economic slump. Since the franc had plummeted to an all-time low against the dollar, a good meal with wine could be bought for less than 20 cents. Surely even the Fitzgeralds could survive in such discounted circumstances.

  Upon arriving in Valescure, Scott and Zelda purchased a used Renault for $750 and rented an enormous stone villa that was studded with balconies of blue and white Moorish tiles and surrounded by a fragrant orchard of lemon, olive, and palm trees that gave way to a long gravel road—the only passageway out of their Mediterranean castle.5 An additional $55 per month provided the services of an English nanny for young Scottie and a proper French cook and maid.

  While Scott labored away on his new novel, a short but powerful work he would eventually entitle The Great Gatsby, Zelda found herself courted by a dashing French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan, who lived nearby. Jozan turned aerial stunts above the Fitzgeralds’ villa and lavished considerable attention upon Zelda. It was like 1918 all over again.

  By July, America’s most celebrated couple was mired deep in crisis. Zelda fell in love with Jozan and asked Scott for a divorce.

  The record of events is murky, but sometime after July 13 Scott demanded a meeting with Jozan.6 The Frenchman opted instead to salvage Zelda’s honor—and perhaps his own scalp—by leaving town. “That September 1924,” Scott wrote after tempers had cooled, “I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.”

  Seeking solace, and of a mood simply to forget the sting of Zelda’s betrayal, Scott rededicated himself to the novel, reading drafts of the work in progress to John Dos Passos, Donald Ogden Stewart, Maxwell Struthers Burt, and other prominent American literati who stopped by to visit and pass some time on the warm, coarse beaches of southern France. Within the space of a few months, with the novel well on its way to completion and the wound of infidelity on the way to healing, Scott could report back to his stateside correspondents that all was well—or, at least, better—in France. “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married couple I know.”7

  While the Fitzgeralds passed the days bronzing themselves in the late afternoon sun of the Riviera and patched up their sporadically rocky marriage, Lois Long carried their torch back in New York, traipsing from one watering hole and feeding spot to the next.

  For staid occasions, there was her favorite standby, the Colony, at Sixty-first Street and Madison Avenue.8 It was distinctly “the restaurant of the cosmopolite and the connoisseur,” a tourist guide warned. “The rendezvous of the social registrite; the retreat of the Four Hundred rather than the Four Million which emulate them. It is to the Manor born.… Here you’ll find no gold ceilings, no glittering grandeur, no novelties for the nouveau riche. The Colony is quiet, exclusive, expensive, and wholly disinterested in the newest wrinkles in interior decoration.…”

  For more whimsical occasions, there were theme clubs like the Pirate’s Den, owned by Don Dickerman, the flamboyant nightclub impresario who also gave New Yorkers the County Fair.9 At the Pirate’s Den, clientele like Lipstick could enjoy a variety of escapism and voyeurism oddly similar to—but much more expensive than—the Great Chicago Fire or San Francisco Earthquake rides at Coney Island.

  “It is a rather boyish night club,” a patron noted with amusement. “All the waiters are disguised as pirates of the 18th century, and except for their mild eyes and blameless mouths are a fearsome looking crowd.” As customers sipped cider from battered copper mugs and feasted on a variety of fresh seafood in Dickerman’s dimly lit cavern, costumed wait staff performed mock sword fights and ship brawls. To round out the effect, the walls were lined with maps, toy ships, fish skeletons, and seafaring trinkets from Coney Island.

  It was a weird sort of venue, but a popular one among urban folks who had money to spend and an itch for something more spectacular than their own workaday lives. Decades before American suburbanites began flocking to Las Vegas in search of simulated reality, there were the nightclubs of Manhattan, ready to satisfy the same yearning
s of the city’s rising middle class.

  As a rule, The New Yorker didn’t include photographs or sketches, so Long and her colleagues had to develop a deft hand at descriptive narrative. After visiting Chez Fysher, Lipstick reported that “the crowd there (and it is a crowd!)10” thoroughly enjoyed a house act that included “a very tiny little chanteuse, who sang perched up on a high table and later danced a tango; a savage young woman who glowered and sang songs of the Russias; a young ventriloquist who, by painting eyes, nose, and mouth on his clenched fist, and adding to it a dummy about two feet high, managed to create a hilarious little being who kept everybody as amused as if they were at the Palace.” Finally, there was “Yvonne, who is too wonderful to describe.”

  Neither her fans nor New York’s many nightclub owners and restaurateurs knew who she was or what she looked like. And that was half the fun. As her column caught on, any number of impostors were spotted around town claiming to be Lipstick, hoping to buck a reservation list or score a better table. Long only encouraged the sense of intrigue, variously claiming to be “a short, squat maiden of forty who wears steel-rimmed spectacles, makes her son pay her dinner checks, and habitually carries a straw suitcase filled with Aquizone” or closing her column as “the kindly, old, bearded gentleman who signs himself—LIPSTICK.”11

  Readers knew only that Lipstick was probably young and that she was a woman. At least so they would have discerned when she complained in late 1925 that her “escort’s snappy little roadster sobbed gently and died in the middle of Park Avenue. … 12 There was a lot of rushing around in the rain to find a taxi, and more scurrying in search of a garage, and then just as we started again toward the Century cellar”—a popular East Side nightspot—“one of the taxi windows fell out and smashed sweetly on the pavement, and the deluge finished off what was left of a perfectly good evening dress.”

  But such clues were few and far between. Lipstick’s devotees were free to imagine her as they wished—as a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead, as tall or short, as the girl next door or a glamorous big-screen starlet. And Long indulged them, playing to the public’s fascination with that new species of woman who seemed wholly in command of her life and fortune.

  Long also used her column to flaunt the drinking habits and adventures of young women like herself who no longer felt bound by Victorian notions of feminine propriety. What reader could forget the week she stayed out until dawn, realized that her copy was due at The New Yorker by noon, rushed to the office still decked out in a backless evening dress, “threw up a few times” in the bathroom, and still managed to bang out her column before the deadline?13

  Her position on Prohibition was nothing short of heretical. “About the spectacular dry raids of last week,” she once wrote, “there is nothing special to be said except that a number of naughty cabaret owners just won’t be allowed to sell liquor any more.14 And, by the time you read this fifty or more clubs will be on the verge of closing, and fifty-seven others will be on the verge of opening.” All in all, it was a hollow victory for the “cause of Enforcement,” even if it was likely to drive up cover charges at the city’s many notorious watering holes.

  Of course, few if any restaurant and speakeasy owners knew that the young, raven-haired flapper clutching the brandy snifter was actually Lipstick, the influential columnist for The New Yorker. So “it was nothing out of the ordinary to get thrown out of those clubs,” she later recalled.15 “People were frequently brawling, and the proprietor usually made an arbitrary decision to put out a chronic offender from time to time just to show the other patrons that there was an intention of good order, even if it didn’t in fact exist.”

  All of this was a source of endless concern for Harold Ross, who by the late 1920s could claim to edit one of America’s most cosmopolitan magazines but never quite prevailed over his old-fashioned notions of propriety. So, like a distressed parent who realizes that the kids are going to drink no matter what, Ross opened his own New Yorker bar—open only to editors and contributors—in the basement of one of Fleischmann’s buildings. As Long understood it, “He hoped we could drink and stimulate one another to come up with good ideas for the magazine.16 He thought if the magazine had its own speakeasy it would be safer for us and that the same general decorum could be kept that Mrs. White”—Katharine White, the New Yorker’s fiction editor and unofficial chief of staff—“inspired at the office.”

  But Long’s job was to prowl the streets, not to cloister herself in the magazine’s offices. Her lifestyle was outrageous and frivolous, and she knew it. “I shall not write about restaurants,” she began one column, “because I haven’t been to any and I am tired about writing about eating anyway. I shall write about drinking, because it is high time that somebody approached this subject in a specific, constructive way.”

  With her trademark flair for satire, Long blamed the “Youth of America” for the nation’s drinking dilemma.17 Prohibition would never have been a necessity, Lipstick claimed, had young people learned “to drink with aplomb” rather than excessive debauchery. “The answer,” she proposed, “lies in the nursery and the classroom.… We will teach the young to drink. There would not be so many embarrassing incidents of young men falling asleep under the nearest potted palm or playing ping-pong with Ming china if little Johnny, at the age of six, had been kept in regularly at recess to make up his work because he had failed to manage his pint in Scotch class.…

  “Besides all this,” Long concluded, “we should have a new type of baccalaureate sermon.”

  Whether to acknowledge her flamboyant disdain for Prohibition, or in general recognition of her libertine sensibilities, the noted New York City socialite Barney Gallant invented a new cocktail, “the Lipstick,” popularly advertised as “sweet but with a wallop.”18 Long’s signature combination called for two parts champagne, one part gin, one part orange juice, a dash of grapefruit juice, and a trickle of cherry brandy.

  Lipstick lived up to her reputation, ever ready with useful advice about which speakeasy to visit or what brand of drinking paraphernalia to procure. “[As] an accompaniment to grown-up sport of any kind,” she recommended “the following drinking accessories” by Abercrombie and Fitch: “a quart cocktail shaker, four glasses, a bottle opener and corkscrew, strainer and squeezer, all fitting into a suede bag 4½ × 3 inches in size.”19 As any self-respecting subscriber to The New Yorker surely knew, the Volstead Act penalized the manufacture, sale, and distribution of liquor—but not its purchase or consumption.

  Lipstick also provided instruction on the upkeep and maintenance of drinking kits. “Remedy for a dented flask, demonstrated to me when I expressed incredulity,” she wrote under the subheading “Little Hostess Department.”20 “Fill a flask with ginger ale or carbonated water, put the stopper in, and shake. Really! All right, try it yourself. Flasks, like humans, become better and more beautiful when filled with innocuous beverages.” The following week: “Two infuriated experimenters report that their flasks split in half when they tried my dent remedy of filling them with ginger ale and shaking them. Go easy.”

  On another occasion, Long expressed shock and dismay that, “incredible as it may seem—there are still many people who are completely at a loss before a tightly corked bottle without a corkscrew in sight.”21 The solution, Lipstick informed readers, was certainly not to drive a rusty penknife into the cork in vain hopes of liberating the bottle. “The answer, of course, is to pound the bottle against a padding (bath towel, napkin, odd pieces of lingerie, or what have you?) against the wall. The cork, honestly, emerges slowly and surely to a point where you can simply lift it out with the fingers.” Or so she had heard.

  “My girlish delight in barrooms … which serve the best beefsteaks in New York,” she opened an early column, “received a serious setback a week or so ago in a place which shall, not to say should, be nameless.22 The cause was a good, old-fashioned raid.” Writing in the heyday of Prohibition, Long made the event seem almost common, informing her loya
l fans that “it wasn’t one of those refined, modern things, where gentlemen in evening dress arise suavely from ringside tables and depart, arm in arm, with head waiters no less correctly clad, towards the waiting patrol wagons. It was one of those movie affairs, where burly cops kick down the doors, and women fall fainting on the tables, and strong men crawl under them and waiters shriek and start throwing bottles out of windows.”

  Lipstick reported that the entire event was “very exciting” until a “big Irish cop regarded me with a sad eye and remarked, ‘Kid, you’re too good for this dump,’ and politely opened a window leading to the fire escape. I made a graceful exit.”

  It was vintage Lois Long. And her readers loved every word of it.

  First-wave feminists marching for women’s suffrage in New York City, May 6, 1912.

  11

  THESE MODERN WOMEN

  IRONICALLY, the 1920s flapper sustained some of her fiercest criticism not from the Christian moralists or spokesmen for the older generation, not from politically conservative men, but from hard-line feminists. Whereas once the women’s rights movement had mobilized millions of activists around important issues like suffrage, occupational health and safety, income equality, and legal rights, the New Woman of the 1920s—women like Lois Long and Zelda Fitzgerald—struck many veteran feminists as an apolitical creature interested only in romantic and sexual frivolities.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the celebrated author and activist, scored younger women for their “licentiousness.”1 And Lillian Symes, another old hand in the women’s movement, found that her “own generation of feminists in the pre-war days had as little in common with the flat-heeled, unpowdered, pioneer suffragette” of the nineteenth century “as it has with the post-war, spike-heeled, over-rouged flapper of to-day.2 We grew up before the post-war disillusionment engulfed the youth of the land and created futilitarian literature, gin parties, and jazz babies.”