Flapper (13 page)

As Zelda Fitzgerald remarked in her “Eulogy on the Flapper,” fashions and manners could be counted on to circulate in a predictable chain reaction.
⁷
The moment an urban sophisticate bored of her flapper attire, she shed her “outer accoutrements … to several hundred girls’ schools throughout the country,” which in turn bequeathed their own discarded wares “to several thousand big-town shop girls, always imitative of the several hundred girls’ schools, and to several million small-town belles always imitative of the big-town shopgirls via the ‘novelty stores’ of their respective small towns.”

The process took some time to run its course. In far-flung places like Butte, Montana, high school yearbooks didn’t record a
widespread popularity of signature flapper styles like bobbed hair until as late as 1924.
⁸
The year before, seniors at Butte High School elected Mary Josephine McGrath as their prom queen. A “true Irish beauty,” McGrath was popular because she wasn’t “the flapper type.” Her long, curly locks were imitative of those of Mary Pickford, not Louise Brooks.

The process of cultural transmission was subtle but continuous, and it often began in New York. There, in the long summer of 1925, when America’s Jazz Age culture wars were just striking their apex, Herman Mankiewicz, assistant theater critic for
The New York Times
, strode into Harold Ross’s ragtag offices on West Forty-fifth Street. Mankiewicz got straight to the point: He wanted Ross to hire one of his girlfriends. She didn’t have much work experience, but she liked to drink, she loved to party, and she wasn’t too bad a writer.

Mankiewicz had come to the right man. As founding editor of the upstart magazine
The New Yorker
, the Colorado-born Ross was quickly emerging as one of America’s most influential arbiters of style and taste. And an unlikely one at that. One of Ross’s more generous friends later remembered him as “a big-boned westerner … who talked in windy gusts that gave a sense of fresh weather to his conversation.
⁹
His face was homely, with a pendant lower lip; his teeth were far apart.” Stiff in demeanor and painfully awkward around women, Ross “wore his butternut-colored thick hair in a high, stiff pompadour, like some wild gamecock’s crest [and] wore anachronistic, old-fashioned, high-laced shoes, because he thought Manhattan men dressed like what he called dudes.”

Already in his early thirties by the time the twenties began to roar, Ross had spent most of his adult life as an editorial drifter. Boasting an education just shy of a high school diploma, he crisscrossed the continent before World War I and worked a series of dead-end writing jobs for second-rate newspapers in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, New Orleans, Sacramento, and Panama. When World War I broke out, he joined the Eighteenth Engineering Regiment, shipped off to France, walked almost one hundred miles to Paris, and somehow managed to talk himself into an editorial post at
Stars and Stripes.
On the plus side, he got to see Europe, and he never heard a shot fired
in anger. But when the army mustered him out in 1919, Ross faced an almost certain return to obscurity and mediocrity.

For the next five years or so, he kicked around New York, where he edited the house journal for the American Legion, a newly formed, archconservative veterans’ outfit. It was an odd vocational choice for a man who would soon be known as the nation’s leading arbiter of sophistication.

But New York was the nerve center of American arts and letters. From virtually every farm town in America, a stream of young, untested writers, artists, and muses was flooding the city: Sinclair Lewis … Edna St. Vincent Millay … John Dos Passos … Jean Toomer … Van Wyck Brooks … F. Scott Fitzgerald … Thomas Wolfe … Cole Porter … Al Jolson. If you were smart, if you were ambitious, if you could write, draw, paint, compose a tune, or spin a good story, New York was the place to be in 1919. Certainly, Harold Ross thought so. The city proved good to him.

In 1920, he married Jane Grant, a reporter and onetime vocalist. Together they bought side-by-side brownstones in Hell’s Kitchen on West Forty-seventh Street, knocked down the adjoining wall, and began hosting all-night fetes that soon attracted some of New York’s most celebrated purveyors of art and literature.

Part of the draw was surely their 625-square-foot living room—larger than some New York apartments and furnished with two working fireplaces and a piano on which George Gershwin publicly tested his composition “Rhapsody in Blue.” More than that, Ross and Grant were popular with the rising smart set because they were exactly like so many other up-and-coming cultural leaders of the 1920s. They weren’t city people by birth or even by temperament. They were from the hinterlands. They were outsiders looking in.

Soon enough, the soirees on West Forty-seventh began making the city’s society pages. Ross’s reputation really soared in 1920 when he and a group of other fledgling writers began lunching together regularly at the Algonquin Hotel.
¹⁰
At the time, they had no idea that the weekly rendezvous would make them famous.

By the time Ross and his friends stumbled across the hotel’s dining room—renowned for its Tokay grape salad, lemon layer cake, and
cherry cobbler—the Algonquin was already a venerable New York institution. Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson had penned the last act of
The Man from Home
in one of its guest rooms; and celebrities as diverse as the Barrymores and Frank Craven were known to frequent its lobby.

Several times each week, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, along with a revolving cast of theater and literary figures, strolled through the Algonquin’s famous antechamber and into one of its two dining rooms. Some members of the circle, like Alexander Woollcott, a popular writer for the
New-York Tribune
, and Franklin Adams, a columnist for the
New York World
, had worked with Ross on
Stars and Stripes.
Others, like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood, were editors for Condé Nast’s
Vanity Fair.
Rounding off the new lunch clique were John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton, two prominent New York “press agents”—a relatively new job category that presaged the modern-day entertainment industry publicist. In mid-1919, the hotel’s manager moved the group to a circular table in the center of the Rose Room, and the famous “Algonquin Round Table” was born.

In later years, the Round Table was commonly remembered as a venue for highbrow discussions of highbrow ideas—the intellectual nerve center of 1920s America.
¹¹
It wasn’t so. As Ross admitted to the notorious Baltimore wit H. L. Mencken, “I never heard any literary discussion or any discussion of any other art—just the usual personalities of some people getting together, and a lot of wisecracks, and quoting of further wisecracks.”

Scott Fitzgerald’s close friend from Princeton, Edmund Wilson, who began his distinguished literary career at Harold Ross’s
New Yorker
, was dismissive of the Round Table. Its participants “all came from the suburbs and ‘provinces,’ and a sort of tone was set … deriving from the provincial upbringing of people who had been taught a certain kind of gentility, who had played the same games and who had read the same children’s books—all of which they were now able to mock from a level of New York sophistication.”

Wilson’s dissent notwithstanding, the endless string of ripostes emanating from the Rose Room often
was
clever—especially those
jibes popularly attributed to Dorothy Parker, who at age twenty-seven had just finished a stint as theater critic for
Vanity Fair
and was about to embark on a broader career as a poet, pundit, humorist, and essayist.
¹²
Routinely, she slid into her seat at the Round Table, ordered a dish that she let go cold, and fired off an endless string of one-liners designed to dazzle her male colleagues. “If all those sweet young things present at the Yale prom were laid end to end,” went one of her famous quips, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

Clever friends telling clever—and self-referential—jokes over lunch would never have caught fire had not the key players all been connected in some way or another to the press. New York in the 1920s was at the center of a nationwide information revolution. It was home to Madison Avenue, the advertising industry’s informal headquarters; it boasted twelve daily newspapers and dozens of magazines that reached regional as well as national audiences; it had just recently displaced Boston as the capital of American publishing and was home to every major literary house from Doubleday, Harper, and Scribner’s to Knopf and Viking. By the end of the decade, it would also surface as the hub of American radio broadcasting.

In such a thoroughly wired city, any journalist with enough cunning and the right contacts could bend America’s news cycle to his own will. Which was exactly what the Algonquin Round Table did. Fame didn’t find them per se. They hunted it down.

Ross and his friends were skilled promoters. Within a few weeks of their first lunch, Adams and Woollcott began reporting the Round Table’s wit in their own gossip columns; Toohey and Pemberton fed still more tales, particularly of Dorothy Parker’s quick repartee, to friends in various editorial departments. Frank Case, the Algonquin’s manager and part owner, quietly paid off city columnists to publish “overheard” witticisms from within the cavernous reach of his own hotel.

This almost shameless promotional collaboration quickly transformed the Round Table participants into parlor-set headliners. By the mid-1920s, tourists were dropping by the Algonquin around lunchtime just to steal a glimpse of New York’s allegedly sharpest minds.

Ross and Grant understood how capricious and fleeting was their fame.
Building on their reputation, in 1924 they raised $45,000 to start a new magazine,
The New Yorker.
Their advertising prospectus announced that the
New Yorker
’s “general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire”—similar to the climate of the Round Table. “It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical,” the pamphlet continued, setting the magazine apart from venerable publications like
Harper’s
and
The Nation
but placing it within the broader currents of 1920s culture. “It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of the reader.” Above all,
“The New Yorker
will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.
¹³
It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in any disrespect, but
The New Yorker
is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience.…”

In February 1925, the first issue of Ross’s bold new magazine hit the stands. By the summer, with advertising sales plummeting and circulation figures at a standstill, the magazine came close to folding. It was around that time that Herman Mankiewicz told Ross about Lois Long.

9
M
ISS
J
AZZ
A
GE

L
OIS LONG WAS
just twenty-three years old and barely three years out of Vassar when Harold Ross called her up to arrange a job interview. She was from the placid suburb of Stanford, Connecticut, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister who moonlighted as a lithographer. Long grew up in a quiet neighborhood where fathers caught the seven o’clock train into the city and the six thirty-five back each night and mothers clipped articles from
Good Housekeeping.

Despite her quiet upbringing, nothing about Lois Long was domesticated. Peering over the heaps of copy that were strewn over Ross’s desk at the frenzied office on West Forty-fifth Street, she could only break into a sly grin when the famously misogynistic editor asked, with no small measure of condescension, “What can you do for this magazine?”

Ross might have been a male chauvinist, but he was also a brilliant judge of talent. It didn’t take him more than a few minutes to realize that Lois Long was an asset. She could give
The New Yorker
a pulse.

Brendan Gill, who served on the magazine’s editorial staff for many years, remembered her as “the most dashing figure on
The New Yorker
in the early days.
¹
Ross was often uncertain of what he wanted the magazine to be … but [he] never doubted that the ideal
New Yorker
writer, to say nothing of the ideal
New Yorker
reader, would be someone as like Lois Long as possible. He felt himself an outsider in New York and something of a hayseed, and in his eyes Miss Long was the embodiment of the glamorous insider.”

One of her colleagues wrote that Lois Long was “the most dashing figure on
The New Yorker
in the early days.”