Flapper (7 page)

The trade-off was even worse for women. Implicit in the exchange was a sexual return, and this took some getting used to. A social investigator named Clara Laughlin reported the story of a young working girl in New York who was puzzled by her inability to keep a boyfriend after the first few dates.
³⁰
“Don’t yeh know there ain’t no feller goin’ t’spend coin on yeh for nothin’?” explained one of her more savvy co-workers. “Yeh gotta be a good Indian, Kid—we all gotta!”

Still, for many women, as for many men, the new system was often exciting. It was complex, it was inherently adversarial, it placed women in a tough spot … but it could be fun. “Smoking, dancing like Voodoo devotees, dressing décolleté, ‘petting’ and drinking,” a coed at Ohio State began.
³¹
“We do these things because
we honestly enjoy the attendant physical sensations.…
The girl with sport in her blood … ‘gets by.’ She kisses the boys, she smokes with them, drinks with them, and why? Because
the feeling of comradeship is running rampant.”

It was a new age, and for millions of young women it offered not only new challenges, but also an unprecedented scale of freedom for personal exploration and self-fulfillment.

Scott Fitzgerald would make his career by describing it all.

4
F
LAPPER
K
ING

F
ROM ALMOST THE
day his first novel hit bookstores in early 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald was anointed “the recognized spokesman of the younger generation—the dancing, flirting, frivoling, lightly philosophizing young America,” as one Hollywood journalist put it.
¹
After all, the semiautobiographical book was a classic coming-of-age tale following the trials and tribulations of one Amory Blaine—a young midwesterner who, like Fitzgerald, attends Princeton, falls in love with a wild and bewitching young woman, and aimlessly seeks fame and fortune in the big city.

This Side of Paradise
was properly credited with opening a portal to the hidden lives of America’s collegiate crowd, a growing portion of the population that many ordinary readers were eager to learn more about.

The irony was that the young author also found himself billed as “F. Scott Fitzgerald, who originated the flapper
²
,” “Flapperdom’s Fiction Ace
³
,” and, only somewhat more modestly, the nation’s “Expert on Flappers.” “He draws with knowledge, with divination,” crowed the
Minneapolis Tribune
shortly after the novel was released. “Mr. Fitzgerald presents more and better than the manners of the girl of the period of jazz and free speech. He really has ‘the eternal feminine’ caught.”
⁴

In fact,
This Side of Paradise
didn’t have a great deal to say about women. It was really a book about a young man. More to the point, Fitzgerald never even used the term
flapper
in the whole of the text.

By 1920, it was no longer clear whether Scott Fitzgerald created the flapper or she created him.

Still, by the year’s end, Scott’s name grew so synonymous with the New Woman that one newspaper paid a toast:

To Scott Fitzgerald
,
flapper King
,
A Flappy New Year
do I sing.
⁵

At Wellesley College, the venerable all-women’s school outside Boston, the student newspaper ran a satirical poem entitled “The Transformation of a Rose,” in which a “winsome lass, a maiden pure and sweet,” falls under the sway of Fitzgerald’s novel.
⁶
By the last few stanzas, she has been thoroughly corrupted:

 … Her fortune went in purchases—
Cosmetics, clothes and such
,
Her time all went into a line
She needed one
so much.

Rosemary’s name is not the same
Nor is her face or form.
She’s reckless Rose of many beaux
The envy of her dorm.

They ask her where she got her pep
,
Her snappy, Frenchy air
And where she learnt to wear her clothes
And henna rinse her hair.

Her answer is—“I bought it all
And at the cheapest price.
I bought the book that tells the tricks
,
‘This Side of Paradise.’ ”

By later standards, Fitzgerald’s exposé of the flapper was tame. But it was provocative enough for its time. “None of the Victorian mothers … had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed,” opened an oft quoted chapter.

Perhaps thinking of Zelda, Fitzgerald claimed that the “popular daughter” “becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements [she] has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.”
⁷

Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald’s protagonist—young Amory Blaine—“saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible.”
⁸
In this new and startling environment, virtually any girl could be found “deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.”

The young women in Scott’s book whisper lines like “I’m just full of the devil.” They wear “hand-knit, sleeveless” jerseys—which Amory aptly dubs “petting-shirts”—that offer easy access to the forbidden regions of their bodies. They scoff at their parents’ prudery and remind them that “Mother, it’s done—you can’t run everything now the way you did in the early nineties.”
⁹

As Fitzgerald’s fame grew—and it grew quickly: Within a year,
This Side of Paradise
had sold forty thousand copies and topped waiting lists at libraries across the nation—journalists took to calling him the premier analyst of the American flapper.
¹⁰
“Before he started to analyze this young person,” wrote one critic, “to interpret her … to make familiar [her] weird vocabulary and to reveal what even fifteen or twenty years ago would have been considered ‘scandalous goings-on,’ the older generation had had only glimpses of what was doing in ‘flapper’ circles.”
¹¹

Even if he didn’t invent the flapper, it didn’t take Scott long to figure out that writing about her would pay handsome dividends. Eager to cash in on the hullabaloo surrounding
This Side of Paradise
, in 1920
The Saturday Evening Post
began publishing Fitzgerald’s short stories.
With a weekly circulation topping 2.75 million and a total readership probably amounting to several times that figure, the magazine was an important arbiter of middle-class culture during the Jazz Age.
¹²
It was also a cash cow for its feature writers.

In 1920, Scott earned a whopping total of $18,850 for his writing, a sum equivalent in today’s money to about $176,000. Only $6,200 of his income came from royalties on the novel. The rest derived from eleven short stories that he published that year, including $7,425 that Hollywood studios paid for the rights to three of his stories and options on future works.

In fact, Scott’s short stories—and the movie rights associated with them—would always be the major source of his income.
This Side of Paradise
was regarded as a great success, but its total sales by the end of 1921—49,075 copies—didn’t earn the book a spot among America’s top ten best-sellers. By comparison, Sinclair Lewis’s runaway success
Main Street
, also published in 1920, had sold 295,000 copies by the following year.
¹³

Unlike
This Side of Paradise
, many of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, which were wildly popular among middle-class readers, featured young women as lead characters. The typical young woman in Scott’s magazine stories—who came, in turn, to represent the typical American flapper—was an explicitly sexual being. “She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of radiant curiosity,” he described one of them. “Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand.”

Ardita, the flapper heroine of “The Offshore Pirate,” which ran in
The Saturday Evening Post
in May 1920, was like many of Scott’s lead women.
¹⁴
She knew the value of her own sex appeal. The calves of her legs, she informs one suitor, are “worth five hundred dollars.” “When a man’s in love with me,” she boasts, “he doesn’t care for other amusements.”

Another of Scott’s flapper creations, Myra—the lead character in
“Myra Meets His Family,” which Fox Studios adapted for the silver screen—was a midwestern debutante “with a becoming pallor and new shadows under her eyes [who] throughout the Armistice year … left the ends of cigarettes all over New York on little china trays marked ‘Midnight Frolic’ and ‘Coconut Grove’; and ‘Palais Royal.’ She was twenty-one now and Cleveland people said that her mother ought to take her back home—that New York was spoiling her.”

In a typical moment of candor, Myra admits that she’s “played around so much that even while I’m kissing the man I just wonder how soon I’ll get tired of him.”
¹⁵
Like all of Scott’s flappers, Myra knows that she “may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.”

In these and other stories, Fitzgerald taught his readers about the rituals of 1920s youth culture, from joyrides in shiny new automobiles to necking sessions and petting parties in the dark crooks of hotel lobbies and country club verandas. Scott’s female characters smoked, rouged their cheeks and lips, cut their hair short, and took swigs from the hip flasks of their world-weary boyfriends.

Not just among the big-city literary crowds, but in Middle American towns like Muncie, Indiana, where one in every five households subscribed to
The Saturday Evening Post
, Fitzgerald quickly developed a reputation as the nation’s expert on flappers and their boyfriends.
¹⁶
In this regard, he was the beneficiary of considerable dumb luck.

American youth were more visible and excited more popular interest in the 1920s than at any earlier moment in history.
¹⁷
Magazines like
The Atlantic Monthly
pondered whether the “Younger Generation [Is] in Peril,” while popular tracts like George Coe’s
What Ails Our Youth?
and Ben Lindsey’s
The Revolt of Modern Youth
became essential reading for anyone who wanted to be in the know.

In part, this fascination with teenagers and twenty-somethings stemmed from long-term trends. Between 1800 and 1920, the number of children borne by the average American woman fell from roughly seven to three.
¹⁸
This didn’t mean Americans were having less sex. On the contrary, women increasingly turned to a variety of birth control techniques, including coitus interruptus, the rhythm method, prophylactics, and abortion.

First, though birthrates fell across the board, as a general rule urbanites and white-collar professionals were more likely to practice family planning than rural folk and blue-collar workers.
¹⁹
This made perfect sense. Urban, middle-class parents—a growing portion of the population—no longer needed small armies of children to tend the family farm. In fact, extra children were often an added expense rather than an economic asset in the cities. They cost money to feed, clothe, and shelter.