Even years later, Marjorie still felt how hard it was to absorb the series of personal and national shocks that upended those years and opened a chasm between her old life and the unknown future. “It ended,” she later wrote, “not all in a moment, but with sufficient rapidity to leave me shaken and to make a new start difficult.” 43 The Hillis sisters didn’t embrace their all-female enclave for long—in fact, it didn’t last the winter. Just three months after Annie’s funeral, Nathalie married again. Her new husband was a local banker fourteen years her senior, twice widowed and raising two teenage daughters alone. The wedding was small and efficient, taking place at the Bronxville house on a Saturday morning, and unlike at Nathalie’s first wedding, there were no bridesmaids or flower girls, and no guests except close family. Soon afterward, the newlyweds and their blended family moved to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania—more than a hundred miles away from Bronxville. Marjorie suddenly found herself alone in the big, empty house.
But she was not a Live-Aloner yet. Around the corner from her brother’s growing family, she saw what lay ahead: the dismal life of a maiden aunt, with nothing to do but “moon around as a spare part that could easily be spared.” She wanted no part of it, and promptly booked a trip to Venezuela, the newly oil-rich nation that was welcoming American tourists to grand hotels along its Caribbean coastline. Travel, as much as possible and as far afield as you could afford, was something she considered a necessity. At some point during her vacation, Marjorie came to a decision: She was never going to fit in “with the bridge-players of the suburbs,” so after she sailed home in April 1931, she packed up the Bronxville house and made her escape to Manhattan. Her period of exile had shown her the value of city society, and she offered a daily prayer of gratitude as she bathed and dressed for dinner: “the train for Bronxville is just pulling out now and thanks be to all there is, I’m not on it.” 44 Instead of joining the commuting crowds, she could fill her evenings with cocktail parties, concerts, dinners, movies, and the theater—everything she wanted, and nothing she didn’t. After a tumultuous three years, she found herself unexpectedly liberated from family obligations, rising high in a job she loved, and living exactly where and how she liked.
The city, however, was still bruised from the impact of the crash. Its newest skyscraper, the Empire State Building, was completed in 1931, rising “lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx” out of the “echoing tomb” that was once-roaring Manhattan, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in his 1932 essay “My Lost City,” around the time he decamped for Hollywood, and Marjorie Hillis settled into Tudor City. From the top of the city’s newest, tallest building, the urban romantic could suddenly see all the way to the outer limit of New York, which is to say, to the end of the world. Fitzgerald set the nostalgic tone for a story that would be repeated over and over until it crystallized into myth: the Wall Street crash marking the sudden end to the long party of the 1920s, and the beginning of a decade-long hangover. Yet for single, working women like Marjorie Hillis, the 1930s were a time of possibility and promise. New ideas about happiness, and new ways of finding it, were opening up in the space left by the collapse of old certainties. Who, after all, had anything left to lose?
2
“SOMETHING TO GET YOUR TEETH INTO”
Going out to work was not a new experience for Marjorie Hillis, which made her something of a rarity among women of her class once the Depression hit. Since 1907, when she first took a job as a caption writer at the biweekly Vogue magazine, work had been a defining part of her life. Perhaps in the early years she still expected to leave when she got married, but as a husband proved elusive and the years passed, her career became more and more central to her identity.
Marjorie did not grow up in a world of fashion—far from it. Her family had “all the right books, but wore all the wrong clothes,” and as a minister’s daughter she dressed, as she put it, “TERRIBLY.”1 At Vogue she gradually learned to respect an industry she’d been raised to think was worse than frivolous, and she saw her colleagues as offering a public service. In her books, she firmly laid down the rule that there was no sense or virtue in thinking oneself “above” fashion for moral or intellectual reasons. There was also no reason for women to feel that dressing well was a mystery—it took only a little study, and it was an obstinate and self-defeating woman who ignored the lessons of the magazine editors whose job it was to unravel that mystery.
By the time she began to write Live Alone and Like It, Marjorie had worked her way up from fashion reporter to features editor and was a trusted deputy to the editor in chief, Edna Woolman Chase. Edna and Marjorie were cut from the same cloth: outwardly conservative women who harbored progressive sentiments for their time and milieu, and, most importantly, thoroughly loved and lived their work. Edna Chase had been with Vogue since 1895 and was the person responsible for establishing it as the world’s preeminent fashion bible. When she joined the magazine, it was an illustrated weekly paper filled with high-society gossip, fashion notes, and weak jokes, aimed at those who frequented the balls and parties of New York’s elite, or wanted to pretend they did. Its most popular column, “As Seen by Him,” was written by an anonymous snob who instructed readers—men as well as women—in etiquette and social distinctions. In 1905, a young publishing impresario from St. Louis named Condé Montrose Nast bought Vogue and reconceived it as a fashion magazine for women. At first, it was essentially a catalogue, showcasing a mind-numbing parade of anonymously captioned illustrations of gowns, frills, and furs, but it gradually developed a distinctive editorial identity. In 1914, Nast appointed the loyal, hardworking Chase, then thirty-seven, as the magazine’s editor in chief, a role she would fill for an astonishing thirty-four years.
Unlike most of the magazine’s staff, Chase didn’t come from money. She was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and after her father “drifted out” of their lives, her mother settled in New York with her second husband—leaving Edna to be raised by Quaker grandparents who addressed each other with “thee” and “thou,” and whose rural lives couldn’t have been further removed, cultutrally speaking, from Gilded Age Manhattan. As soon as she was old enough, Edna followed her mother to the city where, as a young, single woman, she lived in a boarding house and lucked into a job at the fledgling Vogue after a friend working there left to get married. She began by addressing envelopes in the mailroom, and soon found that her work ethic far outpaced that of her upper-class colleagues. “As we were staffed by ladies and gentlemen no one worked very hard and anyone who wanted extra duties was welcome to them,” she noted drily in her 1954 autobiography.2 Young Edna fell immediately and lastingly in love with the hard work, long hours, and camaraderie that went into editorial production. Even after she married her first husband in 1899, she kept her job—an unusual arrangement that divided her from most of her female friends, whose lives and conversations were dominated by “the beaux and the babies, the servant troubles, and the social aspirations” that bored her intensely. “I was professional,” she recalled, palpably proud even after half a century. “I could earn my own money, or I could be fired if I were inefficient. It was something to get your teeth into. It was living.”3
Over her years as editor in chief, Edna Chase not only reinvented Vogue but was at the forefront of the creation of the modern American fashion industry. The first runway show was an event that she dreamed up after the outbreak of World War I, in order to support the struggling French design houses. She oversaw the founding of the British edition of Vogue in 1916 and its Italian and French counterparts in 1920, and spent her time traveling between London, Paris, Milan, and New York to monitor the progress of her European fledglings. Through two world wars and a slow revolution in women’s lives, the indefatigable Chase and her staff, including Marjorie Hillis, made Vogue an international authority on style and society.
During the early years of Edna Chase’s leadership, however, the magazine was a stuffy, spinsterly place. Dorothy Parker, while she was still unmarried Dorot
hy Rothschild, worked briefly at Vogue until Frank Crowninshield poached her in 1917 to write acerbic theater reviews for Vanity Fair. “They were plain women working at Vogue, not chic,” Parker later recalled. “They were decent, nice women—the nicest women I ever met—but they had no business on such a magazine.”4 Edna Chase, for her part, remembered Parker as “a small, dark-haired pixie, treacle-sweet of tongue, but vinegar-witted.”5 While there, she wrote mostly anonymous fashion captions, including her famous (unpublished) quip, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” It benefited her rebellious image to look back on Vogue as a bastion of “niceness” that could not contain her.
But those nice, plain women in their “funny little bonnets” might not in fact have been so different from Parker—especially Marjorie Hillis, who had been Dorothy’s classmate at the refined and exclusive Miss Dana’s School in New Jersey. Indeed, Marjorie was frequently compared with Parker, directly or indirectly, when reviewers praised her witty writing style, which they said might have leaped from the pages of The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. One effusive male writer in the Philadelphia Record wrote that her second book placed her in the ranks with “the great and kindly satirists of your sex, with Dorothy Parker, with Colette, with Jane Austen, with E. M. Delafield.”6 Early in her career, Marjorie had contributed to Condé Nast’s other title, Vanity Fair, whose editor Frank Crowninshield, a mentor to Parker, provided the introduction to Live Alone and Like It. But Vogue itself did not set out to satirize, and took its subjects and its audience more seriously than perhaps they deserved—or than its writers might have wanted.
Vogue’s formality in print did not mean that there wasn’t fun to be found behind the scenes—especially in the vanity of the men who graced its pages. Early on in her Vogue career, in 1910, Marjorie supervised a photo session with Mikhail Mordkin, lead dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet and a bona fide international celebrity, who had decided at the last minute that “his personality would be more dynamic if he wore only a cotton fig leaf.” Twenty-one-year-old Marjorie didn’t bat an eyelash at this change of plan and “breezed through the sitting without a qualm.” But when her current beau arrived to pick her up “and spied all that Mordkin,” he was shocked. “ ‘I think you should remember, Marjorie,’ he said coldly, ‘that you are a minister’s daughter.’ ”7 Edna Chase’s telling of this anecdote shows Marjorie to be unflappably professional and pragmatic, as she deals in quick succession with a prima donna and a prig.
Live Alone and Like It was further proof that an education at Edna Chase’s white-gloved Vogue did not turn a girl into a buttoned-up old maid. The book frankly addresses the question of “affairs,” taking an approach that was more pragmatic than moralizing. Marjorie advised against taking a lover before the age of thirty, believing that a woman needed time to discover who she was and what she wanted. After that it was a question of cost-benefit analysis—Was the man worth the risk? “A Woman’s Honor is no longer mentioned with bated breath and protected by her father, her brother and the community,” she wrote boldly. “It is now her own affair.”8
Edna Chase was no modernist trailblazer, but during her tenure at Vogue the magazine evolved with the times, and by the 1920s was holding up a racy, jet-setting ideal of “chic.” Slender models were sketched or posed in motor cars, waving cigarettes in long holders, dressed in outfits tailored for adventure: “streamlined” was the adjective of the moment, applied to everything from cars to coats to undergarments. A new generation of “smart” magazines—including Condé Nast’s own Vanity Fair and the new New Yorker—was nudging Vogue to become a sharper, snappier product. Like “cool” a few decades later, “smart” was the watchword of the 1920s and ’30s, meaning bright and quick, stylish and fresh. It was everything that New Yorker editor Harold Ross meant when he declared that his magazine was for “a metropolitan audience,” and not “the old lady in Dubuque.” The smart reader, male or female, urban and urbane, prized the clever quip over the close embrace.9
If the 1920s saw magazines setting the cultural standard for what was chic and modern, during the 1930s they moved into a golden age of popularity, as printing costs fell and readers embraced cheap, entertaining escapism. A crowd of new or revived publications jostled Vogue on the newsstands: celebrity magazines (Hollywood, Modern Screen, Silver Screen), general-interest weeklies (Newsweek, Life, and photo-heavy Look), fashion and lifestyle titles for young women (Glamour, Mademoiselle), and for men (Esquire). Woman’s Day and Family Circle appealed to the older, married sisters of Mademoiselle readers and flew off supermarket shelves. Vogue’s response to the competition was to set itself apart. Its version of high fashion reached ever higher, far beyond the budgets and lifestyles of any but the wealthiest readers, to become the stuff of pure fantasy. The celebrated photographer Edward Steichen, hired by Condé Nast in 1923, filled the magazine’s pages with arresting photographs that spelled the end of the era of fashion illustration. He played with light, shadow, and scale to dramatic effect, displaying the lines of a woman’s back against the curvature of a grand piano or the railings of a cruise liner, and draping the slender bodies of models and movie stars in shimmering gowns by Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret. Through Steichen’s lens, in the pages of Vogue, fashion photography became fine art.
Elegance and style, in this era, did not belong exclusively to the young. During her season of notoriety in the late 1930s, forty-year-old divorcée Wallis Simpson was among the most famous and photographed women in the world, setting the fashion for hairstyles and clothes on both sides of the Atlantic. In December, a week before King Edward announced his abdication, one newspaper printed his paramour’s portrait above a caption comparing her to Helen of Troy—a connection that highlighted both her beauty and the political tumult it had unleashed.10 Simpson was a fixture in women’s pages, gossip columns, and magazines—and later, as the Duchess of Windsor, she and the former king exploited their glamorous image for fame and money, when the generosity of the royal family faltered. Although some commentators painted her as young and flighty, “the sparkling-mooded American girl,” bored by her husband and seduced by the glitz of royalty, many were fascinated with the prospect of a mature, independent woman as a style icon.11 The gossip columnist Sheilah Graham argued that thanks to Simpson, who was “over forty but youthful and soignée,” the reigning queens of Hollywood felt free to reveal the shocking fact that some of them were out of their twenties. Joan Crawford, “thirtyish,” was “def[ying] Father Time” by adopting the era’s solipsistic self-help mood, and refusing to worry about anything “except herself and how to improve, mentally and physically,” Graham wrote. Kay Francis, thirty-seven, could thank her studio for paying as much attention to her hair, hands, and nails as would be given an “expensive race horse.” Other stars claimed that they stayed young by avoiding nightclubs and going to bed early. All but the reliable rebel Mae West, then forty-three, who continued to keep her age a secret: “I’ll stay just as long as the men want to come up and see my pictures.”12
Although her professional life followed the fluctuations of high fashion, Marjorie Hillis herself swore by the importance of style, a more timeless and individualistic quality. She believed that the confidence necessary to forge an independent life began with a well-cut dress. In Live Alone and Like It, an ageless line-drawn figure flits through the pages in a variety of elegant outfits—whether mixing up cocktails, smoking in bed, or raking leaves in dungarees and a wide-brimmed hat. She was the visual embodiment of the Live-Aloner’s self-reliant, can-do spirit. The illustrations were the creation of another trailblazer, Marjorie’s friend and Vogue colleague Cipe Pineles, an Austrian-born graphic designer who in 1942 became the first female art director of an American magazine, at Glamour.13
The era that gave birth to the Live-Aloner is remarkable for the paradoxes it contained. In the pages of Vogue, the lavish stage sets of Hollywood musicals, and the polished dance floors of Manhattan nightclubs, it was a period of unmatched glamour. The sparkle was all the bri
ghter for the darkness around it: For most Americans, economic misery dragged on throughout the 1930s. At Condé Nast, Marjorie Hillis learned the power of fantasy and aspiration to conquer or soften grim reality, and she never forgot that lesson. She urged her readers to study fashion magazines and never to discount the importance of keeping up appearances. But the pleasures of fantasy were not to be confused with self-delusion, whether in matters of money or romance. A single woman needed to see the world, and her place in it, with clear eyes.
Give Yourself a Chance!
The Depression taxed the resources of ordinary people to the utmost, even if they were not entirely desperate or destitute. An atmosphere of uncertainty and fear dominated the decade’s public discourse, memorably articulated in President Roosevelt’s March 1933 inaugural address, in which he told citizens that they had nothing to fear but “fear itself.” In this famous speech, which argued that the national crisis was as much in people’s heads as in their pocketbooks, the president echoed the message of many contemporary self-help writers who tried to convince readers that success was a question of attitude. FDR’s pep talk went on to claim that true happiness lay “in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort,” rather than “in the mere possession of money.” Although the New Deal policies that FDR’s administration championed throughout the 1930s rested on a spirit of “we’re all in this together,” the self-help writers of the time encouraged readers to see their own individual, indomitable will as the essence of their identity as Americans, and key to their success.
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