Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (77 page)

*
It didn’t serve Crothers so well. Normally admired for the serious social commentary of her works,
Nice People
was regarded as a sop to commercial taste.

*
These included another young actress, Blythe Daley, who in 1925 would be momentarily notorious for biting Charlie Chaplin on the mouth when he tried to seduce her.

*
Tallulah played a young idealistic woman, torn between her arranged marriage to a corrupt businessman and her love for an impoverished artist.
Variety
noted that ‘Miss Bankhead looks ravishing and has a dramatic quiver in her larynx that should be worth a fortune in a reasonable play.’

*
This was their second, albeit voluntary, severance, although Eugenia and Morton were nothing if not stubborn, and would attempt marriage for a third, again unsuccessful, time.

*
John Peale Bishop.

*
By the end of 1921 it had sold nearly half a million copies.

*
In 1926, the young writer Katharine Bush advertised her own literary style as a fusion of ‘jazz, bobbed hair, petting and necking, flivvers,
Flaming Youth,
and Mr Scott Fitzgerald’.

*
Probably taken from Jane Howard’s
Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony,
or
Zelda’s Fortune
by Robert Edward Francillon.

*
The word had been coined two decades earlier, but to many it was still considered sufficiently disturbing to require quotation marks.

^†
Equivalent to $10,000 in today’s money.

*
A near fatal accident put a stop to this.

*
He would be paid $2,500.

*
Scott was very struck by the expression and gave it to Gloria Gilbert, the heroine of his second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned.

*
Millay’s 1920 poem ‘A Few Figs from Thistles’ had become celebrated as an anthem to flapper recklessness: ‘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.’

*
US research had only just begun to deliver accurate information about ovulation.

*
His prejudices against foreigners were also infused with the unexamined racism of his childhood. Europe had grown degenerate, Scott argued in one letter home: ‘a negroid spirit had defiled the Nordic race’ and the Italians had ‘the souls of blackamoors’.

*
Scott would transpose aspects of Sandy to Jordon Baker, the professional golfer in
The Great Gatsy.

^†
They havered a little. For a while the baby was called Pat (short for Patricia), then briefly Scotty, spelled with a ‘y’.

*
Britain had similarly strict laws, as did France, although the latter maintained a more pragmatic approach to abortions, turning a blind eye to a proportion of them as necessary ‘family planning’.

*
After the early years, Carrie refused to discuss the issue of Josephine’s father with anyone, neither confirming nor denying Eddie Carson.

*
Early French settlers had brought a philosophy of relatively enlightened pragmatism, offering education to their slaves and opportunities to buy back their freedom. Josephine’s grandparents and great-aunt were among the wave of immigrants to St Louis.

*
Back in 1908 Arthur had ‘adopted’ Josephine and Richard simply by signing his name on a piece of paper.

*
When Dyer eventually disassociated herself from the Jones family band, she became a well-known trumpeter on the black vaudeville circuit. Josephine would meet her again in Philadelphia in 1921.

*
The best theatres on the vaudeville circuit, like the Keith, were only open to white performers.

*
Maude would leave her own husband, Sam Russell, to join the
Shuffle Along
tour at the last moment. But her own longstanding marriage was unhappy, and Sam was frequently violent.

*
Under her later stage name Caterina Jarboro, she would become the first black singer to perform in a white opera production.

*
While she sent Billy money from time to time, she began divorce proceedings against him in 1925, though the case was abandoned by the American courts in 1928.

*
Re-packaged yet again as the
Chocolate Kiddies
it was then sent out to Europe, where it had a better reception. Its success would in fact be critical for Josephine, paving the way for the
Revue Nègre,
which made her a star.

^†
Also to navigate the hopeless confusion of their definitions of colour. In music hall, white singers and comedians still blacked up their faces to perform minstrel numbers, with the consequence that some black performers painted their skins even darker, in order to pass as whites in ‘black face’.

*
Around 200,000 black soldiers served during the 1914–18 war, including the all-black 369th infantry, aka the Harlem Hellfighters.

*
Post-war inflation, hikes in wages and taxes, and a fall in the value of agricultural land were hitting the gentry hard. Many estates were being split up and many town houses sold and demolished, as families like the Rutlands struggled in the difficult post-war economy.

*
Moore had originally offered Diana an allowance of £6,000 a year, but reluctantly she had decided it would be bad form to accept.

*
By 1922 Duff was earning £450 a year, having been promoted to secretary to Ronald McNeill, the Under Secretary of State. Combined with the £600 allowance he received from his mother, and Diana’s own allowance, that gave them around £1,400 per annum.

*
In America there were 7.5 million cars in 1920, and 27 million by the end of the decade, which meant one in five Americans owned a car.

^†
Duff’s romantic old-fashioned version of Toryism was not popular with the currently modernizing Conservatives; having few influential friends within the party, he was also without financial or professional guarantees.

*
The publishers had wrongly assumed that much of the content could simply be translated and transposed from the French edition to the British.

*
The opera house had been temporarily leased out to the American film producer Walter Wanger – one of several strategies to avert bankruptcy. Wanger was eager to raise the cultural profile of the film industry in the UK, and was running hand-picked programmes of high-quality films, combining them with performances of live music and ballet.

*
Another film was made of it in 1924, directed by Marshall Neilan and starring Mary Pickford.

*
Duff, too, would always claim that it was only ‘filthiness, not unfaithfulness’ of which he was guilty.

*
A few years later she would pay a vast sum to hire Josephine Baker to dance at one of her parties, requesting that Josephine perform naked except for a coating of gold paint.

*
Only occasionally would she draw a line. In August 1924 the Prince of Wales came to New York for a state visit, and Diana was offered thousands of dollars by journalists and editors begging for insider stories. Regretfully, she considered it bad form to comply.

*
Duff was far less docile. When Diana tried to organize a relatively cheap crossing for his return visit to New York, he called her a ‘nasty cold-hearted girl’ and insisted on his own ‘outside cabin’ on the
Berengaria.

^†
The Conservative Association also contributed most of the costs of his campaign, thus easing some of Diana’s financial burden.

*
This was titled
Love,
the later, more famous version was filmed in 1935.

*
The touring production had 500 performers and crew, with additional extras hired at each town.

*
Under the terms of her contract, Dix would stay on full pay for the length of the play’s run.

*
She took ballet classes, too, with the Diaghilev dancer and choreographer Léonid Massine.

*
Olga always rented a house for the London season, having both her living as a singer to earn and her reputation as an essential guest at any smart party to maintain. She took in guests to amuse her, such as Idina Sackville, who was visiting London from her new home in Kenya.

*
She is also referred to by her maiden name, Iris March.

*
There would also be a marked similarity between Tallulah and Ysabel, the American actress in Arlen’s 1927 novel
Young Men in Love,
who cuts a swathe in London as the protégée of an older woman with more than a passing resemblance to Olga Lynn.

*
This was a criticism applied to several actors by the late 1920s as a modern style of naturalism overtook the old English classicism.

*
Also on the list were Lady Astor, Diana Cooper, Olga Lynn, Edith Sitwell and, of course, the Queen.

*
It was her second operation.

*
He’s Mine,
1929.

*
In Arlen’s description, Iris had ‘outlawed herself … she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society”, “county”, upper, middle and lower class. She was, you see, some invention … of her own.’

*
By this point he had yet to switch from his birth name, Dikran Kouyoumdjian to his English pseudonym. Nancy was told that his nickname, the Baron, was connected to an actual title, but in fact it was merely an anglicization of Baaron, the Armenian for ‘Mister’.

*
It was compiled and printed in the
Little Review,
1929.

*
Literally ‘full of sap’.

*
The details of their relationship don’t appear in Nancy or Aldous’s surviving correspondence, but were circulated by friends like the writer Sybille Bedford.

*
Hilda Doolittle, for a while Pound’s lover, felt her own voice overwhelmed by his influence.

*
James J. Wilhelm’s research into Pound’s years in Paris provides the basis for this account.

^†
It was also published by the same publishers as
The Waste Land,
Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press.

*
A pun on the French pronunciation of her name.

*
In Djuna Barnes’s thinly disguised portrait of the salon in
Ladies Almanack,
Janet and Solita appeared as the admirable couple, Nip and Tuck.

*
Aragon tolerated Nancy’s devotion to fashion, but he resented it when Paris began appropriating surrealist art as a new style trend. When Ernst and Miro created designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1926, it was Aragon who organized a group of comrades to heckle the first performance.

*
In some ways Nancy overestimated Henry’s talent. In 1930 she persuaded him to compose the music for a series of poems written by herself and others, which she published. Henry, however, had only ever aspired to improvising in clubs, and after he left Nancy and returned to America, he gave up the piano completely.

*
It was published in
Crisis
magazine, September 1931.

*
The French Riviera had not yet become the spoilt summer playground of the rich. Its traditional season was late winter and early spring, when people came to take the sea air and, like Tamara’s grandmother, to gamble at the casinos. The Murphys themselves had been told about the area by Cole Porter, whom Gerald knew from their student years at Yale and who was well known for his ‘great originality in finding new places’.

^†
In
The Great Gatsby,
the narrator Nick Carraway pays $80 a month for the ‘simple cottage’ that huddles in the shadow of Gatsby’s enormous mansion itself boasting a rental price of $15,000.