Flapper (38 page)

The silent film stars built vast monuments to consumer plenty. Their rambling estates—Cecil B. DeMille’s Paradise, Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon’s Lair, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s Pickfair—represented all that was grand about the prosperous new era. Replete with sprawling master bathrooms, marble ballrooms, private theaters and projection rooms, sun decks, pipe organs, pagodas, and swimming pools—“They build the swimming pools first out here,” observed a journalist, “and if there’s still room on the lot, they build a home!”—
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the Hollywood mansions provided no end of entertainment
to movie fans who faithfully soaked up every last bit of information about their favorite stars.

Colleen Moore later guessed that “we splurged on homes, partly because our intensive work schedules didn’t permit such luxuries as travel, partly because what started out as necessities or conveniences became status symbols, and partly because most of us had more money than sense.”
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The master suite in her own Bel Air home—with its wall-to-ceiling tiled mirrors, marble floors, expensive shag rugs, dark wood-paneled bedroom, and steamroom—was just the kind of shrine to excess that movie fans couldn’t read enough about. It wasn’t just
where
stars lived that interested the fans. It was
how
they lived. Whom they were dating. Whom they were marrying. Whom they were divorcing.

Since 1890, Americans had been led to believe that the frontier was closed. Hollywood suggested otherwise. The frontier was
here
, and the ordinary rules of life that bound shopgirls and factory workers to the clock and the whistle simply didn’t apply.

To be sure, there was something special about Hollywood. It was young: Two-thirds of silent screen performers were under the age of thirty-five (and three-quarters of its female players were under twenty-five).
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It was exotic: All of the moguls were Jewish, and many of the crew were foreign-born. It was emancipated: Somewhere between one-third and one-half of the early screenwriters were women (the kind of women who didn’t mind moving three thousand miles from home to start over). And it was urbane: The silent screen artists were usually city folks who had already cast off the shackles of small-town life. In an era when millions of young men and women were testing the boundaries of personal freedom, Hollywood seemed a haven for social and cultural experimentation—a “land of the future,” as Charlie Chaplin put it, “a paradise of sunshine, orange groves, vineyards, and palm trees.”
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Little wonder that the stars received bottomless sacks of fan mail each day. “I am a girl twelve years of age,” young Martha Meadows of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote to Clara Bow. “I am just wild about you.
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Your mouth, your eyes, and your hair. This craze for blondes never would last I knew.”

“
I bet you have many more admirers on the male side you naughty girl,” one Connie Romero told Bow.
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“But don’t worry we girls think a lot of you.… I like any girl who has personality. She’s the one that stands above the crowd wherever she goes.… Goodness, I hope you don’t get married and retire. If you marry please don’t desert us, you will disappoint all your fans.”

“I’m simply mad about your eyes,” Audrey Ashuru of Brisbane, Australia, wrote to Clara.
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“They are the naughtiest, but most perfect, orbs I’ve yet seen.… I think you are the ‘perfect flapper’ of the screen.”

The young movie fans weren’t just watching; they were imitating. “I believe that watching the actions of people in the movies (the actors I mean) have led me to take up drinking and smoking,” confessed a male undergraduate at the University of Chicago.
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“I sort of got the desire to smoke from watching some actor inhale a cigarette.”

Another undergrad admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give “considerable … attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. … 
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I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.”

It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite on-screen flappers when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a sixteen-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey.
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I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved.… The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” And a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three-quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way on-screen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair.
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“No wonder the girls of older days before the movies were so modest and bashful,” concluded a young coed.
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“They never saw Clara Bow or William Haines. They didn’t know anything else but being modest and sweet. I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ If we didn’t see such examples in the movies where would we get the idea of being ‘hot?’ We wouldn’t.”

She might have been selling her parents’ generation a bit short. But the point was well-taken. The movies were having some effect. Young women reported developing intense crushes on leading men. “When I saw Rudolph Valentino in ‘The Sheik,’ ” admitted one coed, “I could do nothing but think of him for days to follow.
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Several of my girl friends and I sent to Hollywood for the star’s picture.”

Many others were more closely fixated on the flappers themselves. When she watched “collegiate”—or flapper—films, reported a typical undergraduate, “I dreamed of being one of the most collegiate, the girl to be the football captain’s friend.”

“I often sat dreaming, planning what I would do when I got to go away to college,” wrote another. “Oh, what a life!
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To be a popular co-ed, the member of a spiffy sorority! My first formal! What a hit I would be! When I saw these college romances develop before my eyes I wondered what my beau would be like. Of course, he would have to be a tall dark handsome boy; an athlete of repute. What would his first kiss be like? Would it send me to a world unknown, as some authors express it?”

The desire to imitate on-screen flapper heroines also helped enforce the same physical standards that young women encountered in magazine advertisements. For some women, the social pressure to lose weight—to resemble Colleen Moore and Clara Bow—created tremendous anxiety and internal conflict. “Resolved once more to cut down my diet,” wrote Dorothy Dushkin of Smith College.
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“Betty and Fran’s chief topic of conversation is dieting. It is extremely wearisome especially since they are both slender. I shall try once again to use my will power. I’m not going to say a word about it. I’m not going to foolishly cut meals and starve on certain days & relax on others as they do—but attend all meals & refrain from eating between meals.”

Dorothy Dushkin wasn’t writing in a vacuum. Immersed as they were in media images, young women couldn’t help but notice that flappers were slim, angular, and sleek. John Held said so in his art. Gordon Conway said so in hers. Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, though not especially tall in real life, looked the part on-screen.

How many of the Smith girls knew that Colleen Moore’s lucrative
studio contract included a weight clause? Surely those who read the fan magazines knew that Clara Bow—who stood somewhere between five feet two and five feet four inches tall and whose weight in the 1920s fluctuated between a gaunt 100 pounds and a “plump” 132 pounds—suffered from chronic “curve trouble.”
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In 1931, when Clara’s new film,
No Limit
, premiered in Los Angeles, reviewers “thought Clara too plump” and speculated that her weight problem might cut short an otherwise brilliant career.
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Such musings couldn’t have been lost on Clara’s fans.

“Diet!
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” announced a writer for
Photoplay.
“It has put one world famous star in her grave [Barbara La Marr], has caused the illness of many others, has wrecked careers and has become, largely through its practice in Hollywood, the Great American Menace! For as Hollywood does so does the rest of the world.… The stars have set the styles in slim figures. The correct weight for a girl five feet two inches tall is 119 pounds. The average screen player of this height weighs only 108 pounds.”

At Smith College and across the nation, young women subjected themselves to the “Hollywood Eighteen-Day Diet”—a strict regimen of five hundred calories per day in the form of toast, oranges, grapefruit, and eggs.
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It worked like a charm for Ethel Barrymore. Why not for everyone else? “Restaurants all over the country have bowed their heads before the Mayo-Hollywood 18-day diet,” quipped
Photoplay.
“ … It is running neck and neck with Lindbergh—and Lindbergh better look to his laurels.”

“The slim figure is in the ascendant,” observed a prewar writer.
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“Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion, and almost a crime.… Yet within living memory it was no disgrace to depress the scales to the extent of twenty stone [280 pounds] or more.… Fat … was indulgently tolerated, and even respected.” In a world swollen with buying opportunities (home appliances, motorcars, clever copies of Parisian hats) and ways to indulge oneself (amusement parks, nightclubs, collegiate movies), it seemed that men and women were expected—or expected themselves—to show some restraint in how much they ate and how much they weighed. And in a world where
individuals felt their vote counted little either in the political arena or the workplace, they could at least demonstrate authority over their own bodies.

On some level, the extra pressure that women faced to slim down might also have represented an attempt on the part of men to rein in a sex that was coming to enjoy more political, economic, and sexual autonomy. With the corset banished, women were free of the most crude, physical manifestation of social control. But they were still corseted—psychologically now—by the slender ideal.

Reinforced on the silver screen and in countless print advertisements, the expectation that they starve themselves in the interest of achieving flapperdom posed a real dilemma for many young women in the 1920s. “ ‘It’s easy to be slender,’ ” announced the fan magazine
Picture Show
in 1924.
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“That’s what Colleen Moore will tell you, anyway. When you see her on the screen she is generally moving too swiftly for you to do more than gather a general impression of youth and vivacity, but when you meet her you realize that the chief factor responsible for the impression is one of the most perfect figures ever seen. She has the lithe, youthful slenderness that all French designers seem to have in mind when they make their best models, slim, straight frocks that every woman wishes to wear and not one in a thousand can.”

Readers learned that there was simply no “short cut to anything so desirable” as a Colleen Moore–like figure—that “no Turkish baths, medicines or reducing fluids will ‘do the trick.’ ” Instead, would-be starlets were advised to follow Colleen’s regimen—to avoid “too much white bread, potatoes, pastry, sweets, butter, oil, and fat” and to get “at least an hour’s exercise, vigorous enough to stimulate the circulation, and to cause deep inhalations of air,” each day.

For a nation still unaccustomed to the new worship of slenderness, this was a tough ideal to achieve. Still, most moviegoers were blind to the coercive potential of the flapper phenomenon. Young women still read the fan magazines religiously, taking note of informational articles, like “What It Costs to Be a Well-Dressed Flapper,” which featured Clara Bow modeling
a $25 silk blouse, doeskin gloves retailing at $8.50, rose beige chiffon stockings selling for $4.50, and a $30 lizard-skin pocketbook.
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They still lined up to buy Colleen Moore perfume, distributed by the Owl Drug Company.
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And they followed in great detail the subtle changes in Louise Brooks’s bob.

By the late 1920s, the flapper craze had extended well past the white, middle-class neighborhoods where it began. Even if the media imagery was lily white, young black women, no less than their white peers, aspired to flapperdom. On campus at Spelman College, an all-black women’s institution in Georgia, they donned imitation Chanel dresses, bobbed their hair, applied lipstick and eye shadow, and dangled strings of fake pearls from their necks.

The same was true of young Mexican women in Los Angeles, who frequented the movies, read the Hollywood fan magazines, and adopted the trappings of flapperdom as the most obvious means to acculturate to the Anglo world. “I was going to be Clara Bow,” recalled Adele Hernández Milligan with a smile.
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There were even Asian flappers like Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s only Chinese flapper, and Flora Belle Jan, a young essayist and short-story writer for the
San Francisco Examiner
whose exploits and adventures, but for their ethnic twist, could have substituted any day of the week for Lois Long’s.
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