American Fun Read online

  THOUGH SHE WAS BORN in 1900 to Alabama bluebloods, Zelda Sayre wasn’t your average southern belle. Mouthy, vandalous, flirty, wild, wearing rouge and lipstick at age fifteen, she was only interested in swimming and boys. “Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything,” said a male companion from those years, “of boys, of being talked about; she was absolutely fearless.… But she did have a bad reputation.” In high school she dated soldiers from Camp Sheridan and Camp Taylor, and she cajoled her entire senior class into skipping school on April Fool’s Day, a prank that got all of them briefly expelled. Two months after graduating, voted “the Prettiest” in her class, she met a handsome first lieutenant from St. Paul, Minnesota, whose affections she would toy with for the next two years.

  Zelda resembled the fiery heroines in Scott Fitzgerald’s undergraduate fiction; Scott better resembled his hesitant heroes, or the eponymous Romantic Egotist of his first unpublished novel. He traveled regularly by bus to see her in Montgomery, and she didn’t hide the fact that he had stiff competition. Her letters described escapades with up to “ten boys,” and when he tried to gall her with stories of pretty girls, she gave him maddening permission to pursue them. Everyone warned him against marrying a “girl who,” as he wrote, “gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more.’ ” But the event happened anyway, on April 3, 1920. This Side of Paradise had been published a week before, and straightaway the newlywed Fitzgeralds kicked off the spree of high jinks, scandals, and nonstop parties with which their generation would identify. That month they chaperoned a party for Princeton undergrads that ended in drunken brawls. (Zelda held court from her bathtub.) Tracked by gossip columnists and autograph hounds, they were evicted from their honeymoon suite at the Biltmore and evicted from the Commodore for more parties and pranks; eventually they escaped to the Connecticut countryside.

  Carl Van Vechten, who was twice their age, befriended the couple during these years and sometimes brought them to Harlem speakeasies, an unlikely destination for the white-supremacist Scott. Carlos, as Zelda liked to call him, seemed unimpressed by Scott, a lightweight drinker who “was nasty” when “drunk.” But Zelda, he declared, “was an original. Scott was not a wisecracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks.… She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.” Scott also mined her diaries for material, quoting them verbatim in his first three books. And while Scott himself was certainly an “original”—the iconic American writer of the 1920s—his own sense of fun wasn’t all that new. American males had been skylarking for centuries. But Zelda’s was revolutionary. When he published Flappers and Philosophers in August 1920, winning sympathy for a girl who bobs her hair, it was Zelda’s philosophy that stole the show.

  “Flapper” was a British term from the 1910s, but its twenties iteration was all-American, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was flapper royalty. She called the first flappers “young anti-puritans” who religiously followed “the flapper creed—to give and get amusement.” She touted the flapper’s defiant performance: “the art of being—being young, being lovely, being an object.” And this reluctant belle from Montgomery, raised in the heart of KKK country, paraded the flapper’s cross-racial curiosity: “The flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva, from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard.” For the flapper, in all her essential whiteness, signaled young women’s freedom from—and theatrical rebellion against—all of the white patriarchal institutions that stood between females and their fun. Buddy Bolden’s racial and sexual language let the flapper speak pleasure to power—if not miscegenistically (though flappers did that too), then culturally and symbolically.

  In 1922—the same year Life featured a full-color “Flapper” as a butterfly in a see-through dress; the year Flapper magazine (“Not for Old Fogies”) declared “Flapper Styles Will Prevail!”—Zelda published her “Eulogy on the Flapper.” It was a pat flapper move: morbidly ironic, reported as if from beyond the grave. Writing for Metropolitan, the same magazine that had just serialized The Beautiful and Damned and elected the Fitzgeralds the first couple of fun, she honored the “deceased” flapper as a young woman of singular integrity. She praised her for keeping “mostly masculine friends,” for wearing “a great deal of audacity and rouge … into the battle,” for flirting “because it was fun to flirt,” and for sporting “a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure.” In short, she described the dangerous young woman who had seduced F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  The flapper, poor thing, had died of popularity. This icon of female urbanity, Zelda mourned, was being imitated by “several million small-town belles.” Flapping had been democratized, and the girl in the crowd didn’t understand its original “philosophy.” Which was? “The desire for unadulterated gaiety.”

  But by all remaining evidence, by 1922, the average flapper’s “gaiety” was still “unadulterated”—she smoked, swore, danced, drank, strutted her flesh, and petted heavily. She wrung all the fun from her supersaturated moment and generally kept “Old Fogies” on guard, just as Zelda Sayre used to do. Only now the party was out of control. Even rural girls were acting cosmopolitan. Women everywhere were “absolutely fearless.” And in 1927, the year of the It girl, F. Scott knew the flapper wasn’t dead. He updated the term with Clara Bow, calling her “the quintessence of what the term ‘flapper’ signifies … pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly-clad and ‘bard-berled’ as possible. There were hundreds of them, her prototypes. Now, completing the circle, there are thousands more, patterning themselves after her.”

  THE “NEW WOMAN” MOVEMENT, like the “New Negro” Renaissance, gave a variety of new perspectives on the 1920s wild party. Its scofflaw fun, more often than not, was edifying and liberating—and for that reason thrilling, joyful, and scary. Contributing new tactics to their larger constituency of “Wild Wets,” who reignited Merry Mount’s old battle with Plymouth, women reimagined American rebellion according to their out-group identity. Joining forces among themselves, “New Women” took strength from leanings and attributes that had always been dismissed as weaknesses. Much as African-American comedy, music, and sexuality were embraced by younger black artists as sources of distinction, so too did women’s bravado and eroticism, which had been scorned or exploited throughout American history, suddenly become ammunition—and the height of fashion.

  Whether they were sensuous bohemians, emasculating flappers, lightning-tongued hedonists, or the singularly incendiary Mae West, the leonine New Women of the 1920s put the dusty old guard on notice: pleasure was a source of dangerous power, and having fun defined the citizen in ways not unlike the right to vote—it connected the individual to community, it gave groups of citizens bold expression, and it came with weighty responsibility.

  THE POET EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY was the original flapper of 1920s letters. Raised poor in turn-of-the-century rural Maine, she was taught to be bold by a liberated mother who evicted Edna’s no-account father. In 1912, at the age of twenty, she sent a palpitating lyric to a national contest that led to a scholarship at Vassar. Upon graduating, emboldened by her successful first book, Renascence and Other Poems, she moved into a garret in Greenwich Village where they called this classical beauty “Vincent” and made her the toast of thriving bohemia. The avant-garde sniffed at her traditional verse forms—which looked dowdy next to mavericks like Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Stein—but her second collection, A Few Figs from Thistles, earned her acclaim as “the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the Miss America of 1920.” And her third collection won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, the first one ever given to a woman, after which her international renown was secure: she was adored by fashion magazines, mobbed at train stations. Now, for anyone who didn’t already know, Millay was the voice and mind of the New
Woman—not only boasting the flapper’s “unadulterated gaiety” but vividly disclosing her insatiable desires.

  In his 1923 Love in Greenwich Village, which recounts young New York’s rampant sexual mores, Floyd Dell, whose marriage proposal Millay rejected, recalled her “liv[ing] in that gay poverty which is traditional of the village” and which afforded her and all her fellow bohemians “the joys of comradeship and play and mere childlike fun.” The erotic content of her early lyrics typified her sybaritic times—as did her smoldering imagery of cigarettes, “jazzing music,” and her iconic candle:

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light!

  The flapper conjured up in her poems could be fickle (“And if I loved you Wednesday … I do not love you Thursday”), unrepentant (“ ‘I’ve been a wicked girl … I might as well be glad!’ ”), or casually brutal (“I see with single eye … Your ugliness.… I know the imperfection of your face”).

  Emasculating wit such as Millay’s was one of the flapper’s most fearsome trademarks. As the New York Times warned in 1922, the flapper “will never make you a hatband or knit you a necktie, but she’ll drive you from the station hot Summer nights in her own little sports car. She’ll don knickers and go skiing with you…; she’ll dive as well as you, perhaps better.” The flapper was as known for her sexual exploits as for turning the whole thing into a joke. (“The tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons,” complains Dr. Osterhaus in Warner Fabian’s Flaming Youth, “would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and double entente [sic] based on sex.”) And the public knew the truth behind Millay’s lines. She moved freely among romantic encounters and refused to choose between women and men. Her poems traded, with similar caprice, between biting irony and love-struck agony. If her persona looks vulnerable in her most devastated love sonnets, it is because she yields to a sexual pleasure that racks her wanton frame.

  Proof positive that she had fun with this dangerous image are the articles she published in Vanity Fair, under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd (read “nancy boy”)—a trickster figure who, in the spirit of Mark Twain’s Virginia City persona, made a prank of her celebrated identity. She especially enjoyed her perceived femininity. In one such piece, she masquerades as “An American Art Student in Paris” and is shocked to see “Edna St. Vincent Millay” sitting next to her at a café “eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages”—when she had “always imagined her so ethereal.”

  Firebrands like Zelda and “Vincent”—and Hollywood “It girls” like Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks, and Clara Bow—gave middle-class women exciting new permission to wear their sexuality how they saw fit; to act as bold as, if not bolder than, men; to drink as much as, if not more than, men; to indulge in masquerade—and call it masquerade; and to speak with a frank and silly new language that was neither ladylike nor manly, nor sensible.

  Following their examples, of course, was risky. Paula Fass’s landmark study of 1920s white youth culture suggests the flappers’ most daring ambitions, especially those regarding sexual behavior, were regularly tempered within college peer groups, which tended to enforce their own limits on sex. But peer groups were far more permissive than parents. While most youth still scorned premarital intercourse, “petting parties,” a mild prelude to the group sex of later decades, legitimized kissing, necking, and fondling. Women who took the flappers’ lead faced serious consequences from college administrators. In 1925, after Bryn Mawr’s president designated smoking areas for women, many more college administrators redoubled their prohibitions. Northwestern’s dean of women gave no quarter: “Any girl I catch smoking anywhere and at any time will not be permitted to remain in college.” Women’s natural resistance to such stifling laws was backed by two ameliorating forces: the press and the markets. Student newspapers mocked their administrators’ folly, noting women had already made smoking an “art” and supported women’s rights “to indulge her tastes just as men had always done.” One by one, over the course of a decade, women’s “indulgences” cleared traditional hurdles: makeup, hemlines, dancing, kissing. Smoking was one of the last in line, since drinking was forbidden to everybody. And as with many of the New Woman’s rebel props—haircuts, short skirts, dance steps, makeup—this taboo, too, was soon to be monetized. In 1929, the magisterial spin doctor Edward Bernays spun this fun new vogue (at the behest of tobacco companies) into a national symbol of liberation: he staged an Easter parade in New York City where women were photographed openly smoking their “torches of freedom.”

  The flapper, for whom fun was a cause in itself, deserves much credit for the New Woman revolution. The flapper knew women weren’t supposed to have fun, and she joined the long American campaign of turning prohibitions into playthings. Not only did she claim this right, she perfected it, and her often arcane talk was as modern as the barrel roll. It boasted the highest critical standards for gaiety, liberty, class, and style. “A Flapper’s Dictionary,” printed in the July 1922 Flapper, listed 163 need-to-know terms for the girl “with a jitney body” who also had “a limousine mind.” It distinguished the “Brooksy” (“Classy dresser”) from the “Brush Ape” (“a country Jake”) and the “Fire Bell” (“Married woman”) from the “Fire Alarm” (“Divorced”). While it called the flapper’s father a “Dapper” (he was the one who furnished the “Hush Money”), it was otherwise vicious to the older generation—to “Father Time” (“Any man over 30”), the “Face Stretcher” (“Old maid who tries to look younger”), and all the “Alarm Clocks,” “Fire Extinguishers,” and other chaperones.

  The glossary gives a peek into the flapper’s high standards. She liked “Smoke Eaters” (girl smokers) and “Floorflushers” (“dance hounds”), and most certainly “Weeds” (“Flappers who take risks”). These are all “Ducky,” the “Cat’s Particulars.” But she snubbed “Bush Hounds” (“Rustics and others outside the Flapper pale”), warned against killjoys (“Wurps,” “Cancelled Stamps,” “Crepe Hangers,” “Lens Louises”), and called out the worst kinds of men by name: “Gimlets,” “Weasels,” “Oilcans,” “Slimps,” “Monologists,” “Finale Hoppers,” “Airedales,” “Pillow Cases,” “Mustard Plasters,” “Dewdroppers,” “Walk Ins,” “Corn Shredders,” “Rug Hoppers,” “Bell Polishers,” and those “Cellar Smellers” with noses for the cheapest booze. “Whangdoodle” was her racy name for jazz, and her lexicon was warm on all sorts of “Barneymugging” (sex)—whether it happened in a “Petting Pantry” (movie theater), somebody’s “gas wagon,” or any big “Blow” (“Wild Party”) where the “Biscuit” (“pettable flapper”) chose to “Mug” with her “Goof” or “Highjohn.” She was chilly toward that old “Eye Opener,” marriage. She called her fiancé a “Police Dog” and her engagement ring a “Handcuff”—it might as well as have been a “Nut Cracker” (“Policeman’s nightstick”). Her wit in general ran deep: “Dogs” were feet and “Dog Kennels” shoes. “Meringue” was her idea of “personality.” But beneath all the smoke and meringue and makeup was a steely eye for realism. Male gold diggers were “Forty Niners,” bootleggers were “Embalmers,” and undertakers were “Sod Busters.” “Munitions” were the flapper’s “Face powder and rouge.”

  Dorothy Parker, the era’s most legendary wit, held the fast-talking flapper in high esteem. She admired her unassuming danger:

  Her girlish ways may make a stir,

  Her manners cause a scene,

  But there is no more harm in her

  Than in a submarine.

  The Times called Parker’s poetry “flapper verse” for being “wholesome, engaging, uncorseted and not devoid of grace.” To this extent Parker resembled Millay, whom she worshipped and to whose finer poetry she aspired. But nobody accused her of being “ethereal.” While Millay played the victim of her own gluttonous heart, Parker, who
was as notoriously promiscuous, flaunted her genuine morbidity, making several attempts on her life and ultimately medicating herself to death with “small sips” of Johnnie Walker neat.

  When a bartender once asked her what she was having, she replied, “Not much fun.” The sundry works of Dorothy Parker—ranging from plays, essays, reviews, and doggerel verse to some of America’s most poignant fiction—were an ongoing meditation on fun, and on its miserable casualties. Throughout the twenties she was the life of the party, covering the scene from New York’s Algonquin to Paris’s Les Deux Magots, with frequent stops in the Hamptons at the Swopes estate, the rumored template for the Gatsby mansion. But for all of her promiscuity and celebrated drinking, Parker’s most reliable fun seems to have come from jeux de mots. When asked to use “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker quipped, “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” A lingerie caption she proposed to Vogue read: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.” (It was rejected at the last minute.) Her poetry ripples with such irreverent merriment, often erring on the side of the singsong but always with vitriol marring its surface. Her finest work ventures outside the submarine and lingers, dangerously, in the chambers of the sea. W. Somerset Maugham said her novella “Big Blonde”—which reads like Parker’s own “Eulogy on the Flapper”—had “all the earmarks of masterpiece.” It’s about an over-the-hill flapper named Hazel Morse. In it, Parker’s mermaid wakes up human and, like Eliot’s Prufrock, drowns.