Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (76 page)

Spanish Civil War

Spanish flu

Spiess, Irene

spiritualism

Squab Farm, The

Stanislavsky

Stein, Gertrude

Stewart, Patrick Shaw

Stifter, Maurice

Stifter, Stefa

Stopes, Marie

Stulik, Rudolph

suffragettes

Sunday Express

surrealist movement

Swanson, H.N.

Symonds, Arthur

T

Talmadge, Constance

Tamarra
(play)

Taos

Tashman, Lilyan

Tearle, Godfrey

Theater Owners Booking Association

Théatre des Champs-Elysées (Paris)

They Knew What They Wanted

39 East

This Marriage

Thomas, Olive

Times, The

Toklas, Alice B.

Trap, The

Tree, Herbert Beerbohm

Tree, Iris

Tree, Maud Beebohm

Tree, Viola

Trefusis, Violet

Tribune

Triolet, Elsa

Troubridge, Una

Turpin, Tom

Twenties

Tzara, Tristan

V

VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment)

Valadon, Suzanne

van Dongen, Kees

Venice

Venning, Una

Vernon, George

Victoria, Queen

virginity, losing of

Vilmorin, Louise de

Vionnet, Madelaine

Virgin Queen,
The

Vision of Salome,
The

Vollmoeller, Karl Gustav

W

Wales, Prince of

Wall Street Crash (1929)

Wanger, Walter

Wardell, Michael

Warrender, Dollie

Waters, Ethel

Waugh, Evelyn

Scoop

Unconditional Surrender

Vile Bodies

Weil, Colette

Wells, H.G.

Anne Veronica

Wells, Willie

Who Loved Him Best?

Wilde, Dolly

Wilde, Oscar

Williams, William Carlos

Wilson, Edmund

Wilson, Tony

Windsor, Duke and Duchess of

Winwood, Estelle

women

and employment

in France

and the vote

Woolf, Leonard

Woollcott, Alexander

Wyndham, Diana

Y

Yarborough, Katherine

Yusopov, Prince

ALSO BY JUDITH MACKRELL

Out of Line: The Story of British Dance

Reading Dance

Bloomsbury Ballerina

The Oxford Dictionary of Dance
(with Debra Craine)

Sarah Crichton Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2013 by Judith Mackrell

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2013 by Macmillan, Great Britain

Published in the United States by Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mackrell, Judith.

        Flappers: six women of a dangerous generation / Judith Mackrell. — 1st American Edition.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-374-15608-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4299-4294-2 (ebook)

    1.  Cooper, Diana, 1892–1986.   2.  Cunard, Nancy, 1896–1965.   3.  Bankhead, Tallulah, 1902–1968.   4.  Fitzgerald, Zelda, 1900–1948.   5.  Baker, Josephine, 1906–1975.   6.  Lempicka, Tamara de, 1898–1980.   7.  Women—United States—Biography.   8.  Celebrities—United States—Biography.   9.  Artists—United States—Biography.   10.  Women—United States—Social life and customs—20th century.   11.  Sex customs—United States—History—20th century.   12.  Sex role—United States—History—20th century.   13.  Popular culture—United States—History—20th century.   I.  Title.

HQ1412 .M1633 2014

920.72—dc23

[B]

2013035397

www.fsgbooks.com

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eISBN 9781429942942

*
Sears in America, Freemans in Britain and La Redoute in France all did big business.

^†
The short story ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’.

*
Published under his pseudonym Warner Fabian.

^†
Founded in 1881, one of its modest demands was that a woman’s underwear, without shoes, should weigh no more than seven pounds.

*
It was probably bulbar paralysis, known then as Erb’s disease.

*
VAD’s weren’t paid until 1916, when the rising toll of casualties necessitated a doubling in the number of nurses, and wages became a necessary inducement to attract working women.

*
Their membership included artists, writers and politicians, including Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton and George Frederic Watts.

*
Much of the castle had been recently rebuilt but to Diana, visiting her grandparents there before it passed on to her father, Belvoir seemed ancient.

*
She also took a short course in Italian and German at the Berlitz language school, to groom her into ‘une petite fille modèle’.

*
Her teacher was Lydia Kyasht.

^†
It was postponed to the following year.

*
The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni; it was later bought by Peggy Guggenheim and is now the Venice Guggenheim Museum.

*
At first the war was bad for working women: 14 per cent of those already employed lost their jobs with the closing down of peacetime industries. There was also sentimental resistance to the idea of women tackling men’s work, which was only dispelled when compulsory military service was introduced in 1917 and it was clear the nation couldn’t function without them.

^†
When the Endell Street military hospital opened in 1916, it was with an all-female staff of doctors as well as nurses. Even on the front line women proved their remarkable qualities: nurses refused to leave their patients, even under heavy fire; Edith Cavell became a national heroine after being executed by the Germans for helping soldiers escape from German-occupied Brussels to the safety of Holland.

^‡
The Duchess’s first plan, financially backed by Moore, had been to convert a French chateau into a private hospital, but it had not been approved by the Red Cross.

*
German naval blockades and the diversion of resources and manpower to the war industries produced a shortage of normal peace-time goods.

*
Had Violet known of the nickname ‘Cooper’s clap trap’ given to Sir Alfred’s carriage, she would have been still more horrified.

*
It was the private residence of the Asquiths, left vacant after Asquith became prime minister in 1908.

*
In this she was also more open-minded than Diana and most of the Coterie, who were inclined to mock the more extreme intellectual currents of the avantgarde.

*
This was the ‘Picture Ball’ organized by Lady Muriel Paget at the Albert Hall. Marinetti was much in vogue in London after his series of staged lectures in London, which featured readings of his cacophonous ‘phonetic poem’ on the siege of Adrianople.

*
1 July 1914.

*
Its theme was the grinding repetition of war, which Nancy expressed in heightened carnivalesque imagery: ‘I sometimes think that all our thoughts are wheels/Rolling forever through the painted world’.

*
She was lucky not to – there were 150,000 British casualties of the Spanish flu, many far more robust than she.

*
By now known by its new and less German-sounding name, Petrograd.

*
The Poles were fighting off both Russian and German efforts to take control of the country.

*
In London, many members of the Society of Women Artists still exhibited under male pseudonyms.

*
Albert Gleizes, a cubist painter of portraits, was another influence, and she shamelessly plundered his smart and sexy use of the Manhattan skyline as the backdrop to his figures.

*
Kees van Dongen’s illustrations for the 1926 edition of
La Garçonne
represented Monique as a slender almond-eyed beauty, naked in some images, fashionably dressed in others.

*
Although the Wiener Werkstätte studio in Austria had made a pioneering attempt to incorporate fashion into a wider programme of progressive design.

*
Photographs of the Perrot and Lempicki couples together raise interesting but unresolved questions about how much the two husbands knew of their affair.

*
Around this time she temporarily changed her signature to the masculine version of her name, Lempicki, though it fooled few people.

*
In 1927 Barney would launch an unofficial ‘Académie des Femmes’ as a riposte to the French Academy of Literature, whose list of forty ‘immortals’ continued to exclude women.

^†
The fervently sapphic imagery of Barney’s poetry – ‘breasts like lotus flowers’, ‘hearts moaning like the sea’ – meant that much of it had to be privately published and distributed.

*
Tallulah was named after her grandmother, who in turn had been named after the beauty spot Tallulah Falls, which her parents had visited around the time of her conception.

*
Prices for nickelodeons were obviously five cents; in 1915 a larger movie house would charge ten cents a ticket.

*
Clara Bow would be offered her own film debut through a competition in
Movie Motion,
but her brief appearance ended up on the cutting-room floor.

*
Initially inspired by the early nineteenth-century writings of Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, it was popularized worldwide by a growing industry of trance lecturers, hypnotists, hack mediums and holders of séances.

^†
She was part of a group of friends attached to the hero, an artist called George.

^‡
It was part of the Mutual Film Corporation.

*
In 1919 she was temporarily restored to Louise’s care after her aunt returned from Europe. For a few weeks in 1920 she also lodged with her uncle Henry Bankhead, now in military residence on Governor’s Island.

*
The 1873 Cornstock laws barred distribution of contraceptive information by mail, but this was sufficient for the prosecution of campaigners like Margaret Sanger. Condoms went on sale publicly in 1918 partly due to high rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea among soldiers returning from the war.

*
Later she would joke over the missed opportunity. Admiring a picture of Barrymore, posed nude and clearly ‘well endowed’, she said she would have liked to have notched him onto her, by then, extensive list of lovers.

^†
There was a powerful, self-selecting and mutually supporting network of women in the American film and theatre industries. In Hollywood, Alla Nazi-mova held her own female court, much like Natalie Barney’s. In New York, actresses, writers and even producers were generous in supporting each other’s careers.