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

by Joshua Zeitz

  In many respects, he was a perfect match for Long. He was no prude. In a legendary New Yorker moment, Arno penned a cartoon depicting a young couple who appear before a motorcycle cop carrying a removable automobile seat. The caption reads: “We want to report a stolen car.” Harold Ross thought the cartoon was a side splitter and immediately gave it his approval. A week later, when it was already too late to change the edition, he finally got the joke. He took Arno out for a drink a few days after the magazine hit the stands.

  “So you put something over on me?” he asked with a forlorn expression. Arno shrugged, sipped his cocktail, and asked why Ross had approved a cartoon he didn’t even understand. “Goddamn, I thought it had a kind of Alice in Wonderland quality,” Ross replied. “It would have had the same effect on me if the guy had been holding a steering wheel instead of the back seat!”

  With the exception of Harold Ross, James Thurber quipped, “the cartoon was surely understood by everybody else between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five.”3

  Long and Arno carried on an affair for a year or so before marrying in 1927. Neither courtship nor marriage seemed to have domesticated either partner. Once, they passed out after a long night of drinking at the New Yorker’s staff club. The next morning, according to Long, managing editor Ralph Ingersoll found them “stretched out nude on the sofa and Ross closed the place down. I think he was afraid Mrs. White would hear about it. Arno and I may have been married to one another by then; I can’t remember. Maybe we began drinking and forgot that we were married and had an apartment to go to.”4

  On another occasion, after lending the celebrity couple his town house for the weekend, Harold Ross fired off a terse note to Long. “I just learned that you … copped a lamp from my house that I was going to send back to Wanamaker’s,” he opened.5 “All right, you can have it—as a bridal gift, with my compliments.”

  Especially when clothed, they struck a handsome couple. “She had been a sort of Zelda Fitzgerald figure,” a staff member explained many years later.6 “She was beautiful and witty and [Arno] was handsome and worldly. They had been … the most glamorous couple in New York.”

  Their marriage announcement in the society columns was typically irreverent but also too clever by half, as it effectively blew Lipstick’s cover.7 “Lois Long, who writes under the name ‘Lipstick,’ married Peter Arno, creator of the Whoops sisters, last Friday,” read the notice. “The bride wore some things the department stores give her from time to time, and Mr. Arno wore whatever remained after his having given all his dirty clothes to a man who posed as a laundry driver last week.… Immediately after the wedding the couple left for 25 West 45th Street, where they will spend their honeymoon trying to earn enough money to pay for Mr. Arno’s little automobile.”

  Arno had bought the car, a Packard, on the understanding it could reach one hundred miles per hour on the open road.8 The newlyweds tested it for four thousand miles, couldn’t achieve the promised speed, and sued the automobile company for breach of contract.

  No, Lois Long’s lifestyle was anything but ordinary. As she later summed it up, “All we were saying was, ‘Tomorrow we may die, so let’s get drunk and make love.’ ”9

  Most young women simply never lived as wildly and recklessly as she. For starters, though the urban flapper was popularly known to flout the rules of Prohibition, in fact nationwide alcohol consumption plunged in the 1920s.10 If many young people—particularly city dwellers—found plenty of ways around the law, still, on the whole, the Eighteenth Amendment accomplished just what it set out to do.

  What’s more, though about half of all college-educated women in the 1920s had lost their virginity before the eve of their weddings, most had slept only with their future husbands. To be sure, the younger generation regarded premarital sex and foreplay with a far more liberal eye than their parents. In one study, three-quarters of all college-age men expressed their willingness to marry women with previous sexual experience.11 But most of these Jazz Age youths viewed sex as an appropriate and fulfilling act between two people who loved each other and intended to marry. Although this was a revolutionary view in its time, it paled in comparison with the further unraveling of social customs in the 1950s and 1960s.

  In some ways, the personal feminism of the flapper era even narrowed the romantic and sexual possibilities available to women.

  In the Victorian era, before the latter-day revolution in courtship and dating, women and men had inhabited a world largely segregated by gender. Men worked, women ideally stayed at home. Men socialized at the saloon, the private club, or the fraternal society; women passed their free hours at one another’s homes. In an environment where men and women rarely enjoyed meaningful relationships outside of their families, many women—especially middle-class teenagers who attended finishing schools and colleges—developed intense emotional and physical bonds with one another.

  This was true of Mary Hallock Foote, known as Molly, and Helena DeKay, two young women who met in 1868 as students at the Cooper Union Institution of Design.

  “Imagine yourself kissed a dozen times my darling,” read one of Molly’s typical dispatches.12 “You might find my thanks so expressed rather overpowering. I have that delightful feeling that it doesn’t matter much what I say or how I say it, since we shall meet so soon and forget in that moment that we were ever separated.”

  On another occasion, even as both women looked forward to their imminent marriages, Molly confided that “I wanted to put my arms round my girl of all the girls of the world and tell her … I love her as wives do love their husbands, as friends who have taken each other for life—and believe in her as I believe in my God. … 13”

  Whether Molly and Helena ever sexually consummated their love for each other is unknown and beside the point. Theirs was a typical homosocial relationship in the nineteenth century, the sort that was actually encouraged from the pulpit, in etiquette books, and in medical tracts. In a world where women and men were expected to occupy separate spheres, it was acceptable and even preferable that unmarried women should enjoy close bonds. It was expected that they would kiss, hug, and even sleep together in the same bed.

  Many female college students found themselves “smashed” on other women. “When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another,” explained a student in 1873, “she straightaway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridley’s Mixed Candies,’ locks of hair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her attentions is captured, the two become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as—smashed.”14

  For young people like Molly and Helena, marriage and child rearing could interrupt, if not destroy, long-standing emotional and physical relationships. Others simply couldn’t bring themselves to accept this new order of things. From the 1870s to the 1920s, roughly half of all female college graduates opted out of marriage entirely, compared with only a tenth of American women on the whole.15

  Many of these educated women surely rejected matrimony because they weren’t interested in sacrificing their careers. But others might have been reluctant to forfeit the deep-felt bonds they forged with other women. In these years, it was common for educated middle-class women, particularly professionals and social activists, to forge so-called Boston marriages—long-term domestic partnerships that were acknowledged openly but lacked any real legal standing.16 Such was the case for the settlement house founder Jane Addams and her life partner, Mary Rozet Smith; Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College, and her former student Jeanette Marks; and Vida Scudder and Florence Converse, both professors at Wellesley College.

  The Victorians didn’t feel particularly threatened by these domestic partnerships or by more casual romantic ties between unmarried women. For one, few medical or scientific experts envisioned rigid distinctions like homosexuality and heterosexuality until the late nineteenth century—the age of eugenics, social Darwin
ism, scientific management, and taxonomy—when all the natural world suddenly seemed fodder for rigorous study and classification. More important, unmarried women forming close bonds with other unmarried women didn’t pose a fundamental threat to the Victorian gender code; married women in the workplace did.

  The same forces that revolutionized sex, romance, and courtship in the early twentieth century shattered this Victorian world in which women could openly nurture emotional and physical ties with one another. By the 1920s, it was completely normal for girls and boys to disappear with each other in the dark recesses of parked cars and movie theater balconies. It had become abnormal for two women to do these things together.

  Social scientists, physicians, and political leaders suddenly discovered the “problem” of female homosexuality. Many of these professionals, like England’s noted sexologist Havelock Ellis, thought of themselves as distinctly progressive for their advocacy of a more candid and open approach to sexual pleasure. But their tolerance knew limits. Lesbians—women who didn’t need men, who bucked the larger system of heterosexual romance and intimacy—were an open threat to new social arrangements like modern dating and companionate marriage. In a world that was “hip on Freud,” as one of Scott Fitzgerald’s characters boasted, but where most people fundamentally misinterpreted Freudian theory as a mandate for unleashing repressed sexual desire, it just didn’t make sense for women to reject the pleasures of heterosexual intimacy.

  Institutions that allegedly encouraged lesbian relationships, like women’s colleges, came in for a terrific drubbing by the 1920s, and for one reason or another, most women—particularly those middle-class collegians who had once been likely to reject heterosexual partnerships—seemed to internalize the new order. Whereas more than half of all women who graduated from Bryn Mawr College between 1889 and 1908 remained single, by 1918 roughly two-thirds eventually married.17 Overall, the marriage rate in the United States rose in the 1910s and 1920s, while the average age of married couples continued to plummet. Whereas women in 1890 married at the average age of 22 years, by 1920 that average had dropped to 21.3.18

  Maybe young women took up marriage because it was no longer quite as shocking to juggle a career with family. Maybe they did so because the new sexual and romantic climate encouraged and even fostered relationships between men and women. Or perhaps they embraced heterosexuality because same-sex intimacy was no longer regarded as a legitimate outlet for romance and desire. Either way, the new sexual freedom of the 1920s came with a price. It meant that women could no longer turn to one another as freely for sexual and romantic intimacy.

  For men, things might have been somewhat different. Although male homosexuality was widely regarded as deviant, gay men subtly profited from the steady maturation of an urban economy where the family farm or business was no longer a cornerstone of the economy. In this new setting, wage earners lived alone and negotiated the workplace as individuals rather than continuing to live in the bosom of their families. This made it possible and even acceptable for men to live outside traditional households and to forge relationships that weren’t oriented toward the time-honored pattern of courtship, matrimony, and procreation. New opportunities arose for closer romantic and physical bonds between unmarried, unattached men.

  It’s little coincidence that the early decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of subterranean gay subcultures in big cities like New York, Washington, D.C.19, and St. Louis, but also in smaller urban centers like Worcester, Massachusetts; Des Moines, Iowa; and Columbia, South Carolina.

  Not so for those women who harbored romantic or sexual longings for other women. They wouldn’t enjoy an equal degree of social freedom until their earnings kept pace with men’s. For the typical working girl, living outside the bounds of heterosexual institutions was a luxury she simply couldn’t afford.

  If there were real limits to the first sexual revolution—particularly for women—many Americans found the changing social landscape jarring. In speaking of Harold Ross, who was hardly an old-guard Victorian, Lois Long remembered that “he was one of those Protestant Westerners who was certain no woman who drank, smoked and cursed could be truly respectable.20 One night I took him with me on my nightclub tour and he never got over the shock. You never knew what you were drinking and who you’d wake up with, and in Ross’s Western outlook if you slept with a girl you compromised her, and ought to marry her. There was an obligation.”

  On other occasions, Long seemed to relish her capacity to offend guardians of feminine virtue and chasteness. “Once, I found myself drinking beside a priest who gave me the blazing-eye treatment and tried to convert me.” She chuckled. “I promised him I’d slash my wrists before I had the chance to die a natural death.”

  With Harold Ross at its helm, The New Yorker was neither quite so bold nor so tasteless as to print that caliber of story. But Long had a keen eye for cultural currents and an acid tongue. In living and recording the adventures of the New Woman, she brought a gust of candor and lighthearted wit to the popular discussion about sexuality.

  In her report on the opening of the Nineteenth Hole, a new theme club, Long noted with delight the “informality achieved by tricky putting greens [situated] on either side of the dance floor. What with the girls’ skirts short as they are nowadays, and the additional uplift contingent upon the position required for putting, the evening was not without humor. Really and truly,” she ribbed, “something ought to be done about the lingerie shortage in this country.”21

  “Turn about is fair play,” she acknowledged on another occasion, “and the only way I could persuade a particularly adventurous youth to take me to Phil Baker’s Rue de la Paix after the theatre was by a solemn promise I would accompany him downtown afterwards to gaze on the wonder of the Club Caravan, for reasons which he did not disclose at the time.”22 It soon became clear to Lipstick that her escort was motivated chiefly by “an artistic mission to investigate first-night reports of a young woman strolling about clad in a single red rose—a real one!” And only a red rose. Whether out of legal concerns or to avoid giving customers too much of a good thing, “what had they gone and done but draped her in a green chiffon by the time we got there!” Her young date was “so upset by his tardiness in seeing the sights of the town that it completely ruined his evening. You might have thought I had dragged him there, the way he carried on.”

  As Lois Long, creator of the droll and devil-may-care Lipstick, well knew, the “flapper” was always a caricature—one part fiction, one part reality, with a splash of melodrama for good measure. Much like her cultural heirs—the teenybopper, the sweater girl, the hippie chick, the Valley girl, the punk girl, the queen bee—she was a broad and sometimes overdrawn social category. People who were in the know, like Lois Long, often objected to being labeled flappers, if only to avoid being rigidly compartmentalized.

  Long’s literary persona, Lipstick, certainly demurred on this question, though never too strenuously. While she detested downtown Manhattan during the summertime, “if you must be a sightseer or a flapper, whatever the cost,” she informed her readers, “the perennial Greenwich Village Inn, at Sheridan Square, and the Blue Horse are about the safest bets in warm weather.”23 On other occasions, she might preface a remark, “Without being flapper about it …”

  Her columns suggested an important point: Most Americans could recognize a flapper.24 But why? Clearly the flapper could be recognized by her style, not just her behavior.

  Just months after joining The New Yorker, Lois Long sailed for France, where she chronicled the work of a small number of fashion elites who were redefining how the world thought about feminine beauty and form. She saw at once that the American flapper was no isolated phenomenon. Now that clothing and cosmetics could be mass-marketed, the lines were suddenly blurred among people of different regions and classes. The flapper was a role that every young woman could play.

  That story begins in a small couturier’s shop in Paris.

 
PART TWO

  Coco Chanel, ca. 1926, outfitted the New Woman for the modern age.

  13

  A MIND FULL OF FABULATIONS

  SITTING IN HER rambling town house on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with its army of uniformed footmen, maids, and chefs, its grand piano, striking geometric furniture, and haute epoque chairs draped in a fine, beige-colored satin, Coco Chanel had considerable cause to celebrate.1 Queen of Paris couture, supreme architect of the feminine form, artisan of jersey and tweed and rayon, creator of Chanel No. 5 and the “little black dress,” she had overcome the disadvantages of an unfortunate childhood spent deep in the wilderness of rural France. Her admirers naturally wanted to know how she did it—how she had landed on top having started so low down.

  Though she would always prove strangely reticent about her past, journalists pried at least this much from the tight-lipped Mademoiselle Chanel:

  She was born in 1893 to a poor but upstanding family of traveling merchants. Her mother, a frail woman only thirty-two years of age, contracted pneumonia and died when Coco was a child. Her father, an affable but unreliable drifter, couldn’t own up to the responsibility of raising three young daughters and two sons. He did what any good wanderer would do: He abandoned them and sailed for fortune and freedom in America, leaving his family destitute and at the mercy of private charity.

  The boys, Alphonse and Lucien, were packed off to a work farm. Her sisters, Julia and Antoinette, went to live with distant relatives.

  And little Coco, all of six years old, was taken in by two aging spinster aunts in Auvergne.

  Living “at the farthest corner of that backward province,” young Coco—her real name was Gabrielle—was provided for but not loved.2 Later in life, she told an acquaintance, “My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness.… I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.”