Flapper (28 page)

Through associates in New York, Gordon managed to snare an appointment with Campbell in September 1915. Something about her style, which captured the vibrant colors, modernist flair, and energy of Parisian couture, meshed with the cultural project under way at Nast headquarters, and within a month, she was a regular freelance contributor to their magazines. Over the next ten years, Conway worked with ease to convey to millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic the outline of the New Woman: elegant and lean, tall and linear, alluring yet remote. It was a hard act to follow.

Strange, then, that neither Conway’s name nor her work ever stuck in the public mind quite as tenaciously as that of her chief rival, John Held.
⁴
Though their designs would go a long way in determining how Americans in the 1920s and long after would “see” the flapper, Gordon Conway and John Held couldn’t have been more different. Graceful and chic, Conway was to the manor born—an urbanite and a sophisticate who drew the flapper with an air of profound elegance. Held, on the other hand, was a wrangler. Born and bred in Utah, he was a westerner and a maverick.

An early friend of Harold Ross’s—the two men attended high school together; Ross edited the school newspaper, and Held was its staff cartoonist—Held learned the crude art of sketching and
woodblock printing from his father, John Held Sr., an eclectic musician who imbued in his namesake a love of regional crafts and art.

In 1910, Held—all of twenty-one years old, with little more than a high school education and $4 to his name—struck out for New York City, where, like so many young artists and writers converging on Gotham, he paid his rent by working in the advertising business. Cranking out artwork for the Collier’s Street Railway Advertising Company, Held labored away at night on his own humorous sketches and drawings. He soon earned enough money to send for Myrtle Jennings, the dashing former society editor of the
Salt Lake City Tribune
, whom Held had married shortly before his venture to New York.

It was a good move. Where Held was talented but quixotic, Myrtle was canny and ambitious. She hawked some of his drawings around town, selling a few here and there, until 1912, when Crowninshield began snapping them up for
Vanity Fair.
He particularly liked Held’s humorous renderings of society women. Soon the renderings were bringing in solid money, and Held was able to leave his advertising job. The only problem was that Crowninshield thought Myrtle was the artist. When the famous editor held a party in 1916 to honor the talented women who contributed to Condé Nast’s publications, Myrtle—who couldn’t draw so much as a stick figure—went so far as to bandage her hand and feign a broken wrist, lest someone ask her to sketch a cartoon frame on the spot.

The ruse lasted only so long, and by the time World War I engulfed America, “Jack” Held was widely recognized as the genius behind the artwork that appeared widely in Condé Nast magazines, but also in
Judge, Puck
, and
Life.

Even before the war, Held claimed a specialty in drawing bold young women who flouted prevailing standards of dress, style, and comportment. An early cartoon for
Judge
depicts a tall woman elegantly attired in riding gear. “Do you like motoring sports?” inquires a young man standing beside a topless car. “Yes,” she replies, “—all that I’ve seen.” It was typical Held—dry and understated, yet hinging on a corny double entendre that seemed more Salt Lake City than West Village.

By the early twenties, Held’s renderings of American youth—flappers and sheiks, collegians and the younger married set—featured prominently on the covers of the leading humor and literary journals. His flapper drawings especially were all the rage. Whereas Gordon Conway offered up sleek, graceful silhouettes, Held brought his cartoonist’s sensibility to bear. His flappers were all bare legs and bare arms, short dresses flailing in the wind, round heads with beady eyes. His characters were always suspended in a midair Charleston maneuver or caught in some unenviable—often embarrassing—situation.

His young sheiks were no less frivolous. Clad in white dinner jackets and bow ties, with round, anonymous faces, they seemed always intent on working their hands up the skirt of a credulous young flapper or looking for a quick way to dispose of yet another empty champagne bottle.

Conway was interested in the clothing and style of the twenties. Held was interested in the era’s freedom and frivolity. He claimed to have “no method, no name, no laws, no philosophy, no purpose, no message, no nothing.”
⁵
“When I draw a caricature,” he claimed, “it’s like writing. I simply pick out the characteristics of a person. I try to make the picture look like them more than they are like themselves. It usually shows something the person does not want shown. The caricaturist, if he does anything, wars upon the individual for the benefit of society.”

It was an approach to art that won Held more than a few laughs. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published
Flappers and Philosophers
, the top brass at Scribner’s knew exactly where to look for the cover art: John Held. When the Hearst newspaper empire was looking for a new syndicated cartoonist, it knew exactly where to look: John Held. His weekly strip,
Oh! Margy!
, regaled millions of readers nationwide with the rollicking adventures of a charming young flapper with a penchant for trouble.

Not surprisingly, when Harold Ross wanted to lend illustration to Lois Long’s columns, he turned to his old high school chum John Held. Held’s contribution—a map of Manhattan nightclubs, as
reported by Lipstick—was but another example of how small and interconnected, yet vast and eclectic, was the world of Harold Ross.

Drawing the New Woman and illustrating the Jazz Age proved a lucrative business. Held, a onetime westerner, took to wearing expensive English tweed suits and at one point owned no fewer than four houses, including an estate in Weston, Connecticut, at which he employed upward of twenty servants. For fun he ran for town warden, and won. For more fun he ran for Congress, and lost.

As the mid-1920s approached, Held’s flappers grew a little less whimsical. Unlike his sheiks, who retained their comic-strip bubble heads, his flappers took on more human characteristics. They still embodied the spirit and restlessness of Jazz Age youth, but with time, their creator lent them more dignity and poise.

But no matter how her image evolved, and no matter whether it was Held’s interpretation of her or Conway’s, the flapper was always long, slender, graceful, and in constant motion. It was this image of the female body—omnipresent and entirely new—that young women now aspired to. The pressure to slenderize was on.

At Smith College, most students between 1875 and 1910 aspired to
gain
weight, not lose it. Their letters home brimmed with descriptions of college food, pleas for care packages, and tales of succulent “spreads” they shared with friends and roommates.

“We had two kinds of crackers, chocolate, pine-apple cake, candy and nuts,” one young woman reported, “such fun as we had.”
⁶

“It is my ambition to weigh 150 pounds,” Charlotte Wilkinson wrote to her parents in 1892. “I have never had so much going on in my life as this last month,” she informed them later in the year. “But don’t be afraid that I shall get tired out for I am bouncingly well. I weighed 137 pounds the other day.”

By the 1920s, all this had changed. “I had the worst scare the other day, when I came down,” Lucy Kendrew informed her family. “I weighed 119 or 122, Wednesday I weighed myself on the gym scales, & weighed 136½! Friday I got weighed on them in the same clothes & had lost 2½ pounds.”

Now, freshmen orientation booklets went out of their way to advise new students, “Don’t consider it necessary to diet before your
first vacation.
⁷
Your family will be just as glad to see you if you look familiar.”

Clearly, some of the women needed to be reminded.
TO DIET OR NOT TO DIE YET?
⁸
read the headline of a college newspaper op-ed. “If preventative measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon,” the authors warned, “Smith College will be notorious, not just for the sylph-like forms but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her students.”

And there was more. Flappers weren’t supposed to look only slim; they were supposed to look white. No less than anyone else, Lois Long was guilty of reinforcing this racial standard. Reporting on one of her nighttime excursions to Harlem, she made the preposterous observation that “most of the Negro girls entertaining along Lenox Avenue would do well, either to take Charleston lessons from one of the five thousand flowers of American womanhood adorning our [downtown] choruses, or to invent a new dance.”
⁹
Never mind that African Americans had pioneered the Charleston.

In order to appropriate black culture for the flapper, she worked overtime to denigrate African Americans. In some of her most vicious prose, Long described the scene at Club Cabaret on Lenox Avenue and 130th Street in Harlem. “The entertainer there,” she wrote with loaded admiration, “a girl whose name turned out to be Retta [was] one of the most vigorous animals that I have ever seen turned loose in public. … 
¹⁰
Never could I have believed that coon shouting could be as noisy, or that dancing could so completely engross the anatomy as hers did. The lady has no inhibitions and is proud of it. She is simply swell, and like the tattooed lady, worth going miles to see.”

Lipstick’s argument was slick and invidious all at once. It was okay to slum it in Harlem, she told readers, as long as they understood that the Charleston was a white woman’s dance. Black women, by definition, could never be “flowers of American womanhood.” At best, they could aspire to being exhibits in a freak show. Long revisited this theme again and again, reserving her most cutting invective for black women. Black men, after all, posed no status threat to the flapper.

When an irate bandleader from Harlem took exception to Long’s critique of black women—no white girl could dance “the REAL
Charleston,” he announced—Lipstick conceded only that “negro men are supreme at this dance … but as for the girls—I will just have to be shown.
¹¹
The ones I have seen get a certain curious swing that the white ones don’t, but they are very self-conscious as regards the feet. And just for that I promise never to mention the name of Charleston again.”

Lois Long’s concerted effort to write African Americans out of flapper culture placed her squarely within the mainstream in the 1920s. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, advertisers initiated millions of new city dwellers to the wonders of mass consumption, often calling upon docile, grinning black “spokeservants” like Aunt Jemima, the Gold Dust Twins, and the Cream of Wheat Uncle to get their message across.

The logic was impeccable. Flappers were consumers, and they were white. Black women were servants; thus, they couldn’t possibly be flappers. And they couldn’t possibly dance the Charleston.

The same message was rigidly reinforced in places of leisure.
¹²
Other than in the “colored” balconies, the only black face one was likely to encounter at the movies was a white actor smeared from forehead to neck in burnt cork, crudely misrepresenting African American characters on the silver screen. Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, and Colleen Moore, the great flapper triumvirate of 1920s Hollywood, had no black counterpart, and certainly no one ever encountered a black John Held flapper or a black Gordon Conway flapper on the cover of
The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue
, or
McCall’s.
At fun parks like Coney Island, the only place for blacks was behind popular concessions that offered visitors a chance to “hit the Nigger—Three Balls for Five.”

The message behind these advertisements and concessions was unmistakable: White Americans were citizens. Black Americans weren’t.

The long, lean, white flapper, perfect in every way, without so much as a blemish on her skin, equipped with a new outfit for every occasion, was an ideal that many women hoped to achieve, but it came at a price. After all, could a John Held flapper or a Gordon Conway girl possibly survive on so few calories? Could young women be
expected to sculpt their bodies into this unnatural form? How could real women really banish every last imperfection from their faces? Could anyone actually afford to keep pace with the latest in couture and fashion?

Madison Avenue had an answer to all these questions. Emphatically, yes.

A cigarette advertisement in 1929 exploits the new national obsession with personal appearance.

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