Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drove through the Deep South in the early 1920s. They had matching knickerbocker suits made for the journey
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JAZZ WAS A MUSICAL REVOLUTION AND THE PEOPLE MOVING to its rhythms were an entirely new breed. The girl who jumped on to a table at a Harlem nightclub and started swinging her arms wildly above her head as the charleston played was a type of woman America had never seen before. The word “flapper” described a chick desperately flapping her wings as she tried to fly, although she had not yet grown adult feathers; it had come to mean a precocious young woman whose modern appearance, attitudes, values and behavior utterly mystified her parents’ generation.
Zelda Fitzgerald, immortalized as the heroine of the Jazz Age in story after story by her husband, epitomized the Flapper—in all her worst, as well as her best, qualities. She was the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the generic woman to whom the novelist Warner Fabian dedicated his 1923 bestseller, Flaming Youth: “restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age.”
Born in 1900, Zelda was the adored youngest child of a respectable and respected judge of Montgomery, Alabama, and his artistic wife. Their golden-haired baby grew up indulged and fearless, “without a thought for anyone else.” The fairies at her christening, said the literary critic Edmund Wilson, had squandered choice gifts on Zelda “with a minimum of stabilizing qualities.”
When the aspiring writer Scott Fitzgerald arrived at an army training camp in Montgomery, eighteen-year-old Zelda was the most sought-after beauty in the state, as alluring and unpredictable as she was unattainable. She smoked and drank and danced too close and dived off the top board of the local swimming pool in a costume made of flesh-colored fabric that made her look naked. “She, she told herself,” wrote Zelda years later of her youthful self, “would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a heavy one—well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it . . . Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could.”
Less sure of himself than Zelda, Scott was captivated by her self-absorbedness and her absolute confidence in pursuit of what she wanted. Zelda “took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter,” he wrote. After two years of resisting Scott’s proposals—she loved him, but wanted to marry a rich man—Zelda’s arrival in New York to become Mrs. Fitzgerald coincided with the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which would make both of them stars.
People often commented when they met the Fitzgeralds that they were the most beautiful couple they had ever seen. Carl Van Vechten, almost as fascinated by Zelda and Scott as he was by Harlem, made them the protagonists of his 1930 novel, Parties, as Rilda and David Westlake. The writer Dorothy Parker first saw them riding on a taxi, Zelda on the bonnet, Scott on the roof. She knew their behavior was intended to shock, but she couldn’t help thinking that they looked “as if they had both stepped out of the sun.” They were a dazzling pair: Scott with his promise and grace, his ability to make everyone around him feel as if something exciting was just about to happen; Zelda, “caresser of her own dreams,” brave and tragic like a “barbarian princess,” her eyes “full of cool secrets”—all this counterposed by the impression she gave of wearing nothing beneath her dress.
Their celebrity and the fact that their public manners and physical appearance so perfectly matched the fascinating, wanton images projected in Scott’s stories made it natural for the Fitzgeralds’ joint portrait to be used on the cover of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and for them both to be offered starring roles in its movie adaptation and that of This Side of Paradise (which was never made). Just as the Gibson Girl had personified the 1890s, so Scott, and especially Zelda, became the living embodiment of the generation he described and defined. As their actress friend Lillian Gish said, “They didn’t make the twenties; they were the twenties.”
New York was outraged and delighted by them in equal measure. Sober, they jumped into the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel; Zelda got Scott into fights in Harlem’s rough Jungle Club; she danced with Scott’s friends and said things like, “My hips are going wild—you don’t mind, do you?”; they were found at parties curled up like kittens, peacefully asleep in each another’s arms. Soon after they were married Scott and their friend Alec McKaig “argued with Zelda about the notoriety they are getting through being so publicly and spectacularly drunk.”
If one of the social revolutions brought about by Prohibition was the inextricable association of booze and crime, another was the introduction of women (and the young) to drinking in public. No respectable female would have entered a saloon before 1914—the very word conjured up images of sawdust, whisky and uncouth masculine behavior—and she would have been highly unlikely to drink anywhere else. After 1920 the culture changed: illicit drinking was seen as exciting. Speakeasies stimulated a new kind of informal socializing. The New York Times in 1922 said clubs were not “considered a real success unless there is a carefree tendency among the guests to toss remarks to each other from table to table.” The most glamorous college co-eds carried silver flasks tucked into their rolled stocking-tops.
Cocktails became fashionable because bootleg liquor needed to be sweet and highly flavored to mask its venomous ingredients; they appealed just as much to women as to men. Orange Blossoms—gin, orange juice and sugar syrup—were a Fitzgerald favorite; another was the Pink Lady, “a disastrous concoction of bathtub gin, applejack, grenadine and egg white served in fancy, long-stemmed glasses.” By the end of the decade, a poll taken at Yale confirmed that Prohibition was almost completely ignored by America’s young Establishment. Seventy-one percent of its students (and presumably their female companions) admitted to drinking.
This was true of smoking, too. A woman could be arrested for smoking in public in the early 1900s; in 1929 the restrictions against women smoking in railway dining cars were finally lifted. Promoters of Lucky Strike cigarettes deliberately linked smoking with female emancipation, sending photographers to capture attractive young models lighting up what they called “Torches of Liberty” at New York suffragist parades.
Unrestricted and boyish, twenties fashions were another expression of the new freedoms the Flapper was determined to enjoy. It was estimated that between 1913 and 1928 the amount of fabric used to dress a woman fell from 19 1/4 yards to 7: just a thin frock over a brassiere, a pair of knickers and silk stockings.
Before the war women were arrested for not wearing corsets; in the 1920s, girls refused to wear them, protesting, “the men won’t dance with you if you wear a corset.” Bloomers and thick, itchy black stockings were exchanged for loose silk cami-knickers, or step-ins, and translucent stockings rolled beneath the knee. For a time Zelda wore men’s silk jersey underwear.
Flesh-colored feather-light silk and newly developed artificial fabrics like rayon replaced whalebone, heavy wool and starched cotton. Chests were flat—often bound—waistbands and heels low, skirts soared to the knee, fitted cloche hats imitated the cropped hair they covered. Bangles and long strings of beads clattered wildly on the dance-floor.
The most daring accessory was a tiny gold spoon or box containing cocaine worn dangling from a thin necklace. In Noël Coward’s 1924 play, The Vortex, references are made to the dissolute Nicky’s “small gold box.” Caresse Crosby, part of the fast set in Paris, voiced the prevailing view of different drugs: cocaine “sniffers” were “dirty and unkempt, sly and evasive. It gets into one’s clothes, under one’s nails, down one’s back.” Caresse believed that opium was “not habit forming” and was therefore harmless and that hashish, as tried by her and her husband Harry in North Africa, was “wicked.”
Smoking was promoted as a healthful slimming aid, and advertisements showing female smokers featured in women’s magazines for the first time in 1927. Constance Talmadge, the actress Scott Fitzgerald called the “flapper de luxe,” appeared in Lucky Strike ads urging women to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” to keep their figures fashionably slender. The campaign was so successful that sales increased by 300 percent in its first year.
Youthful, androgynous figures were achieved by strict dieting and exercise as well as by drugs and nicotine. Girls struggled to become what one doctor called “pathologically thin,” starving themselves on diets of orange juice, tomatoes and spinach, newly available throughout the country year-round thanks to improvements in refrigeration and food transportation. The waif-like Lillian Gish knew she had to “keep fit for my pictures” and described her regime as “very Spartan.” She swam in the sea every morning, “went once or twice a week to exercise classes, and I watched carefully what I ate and drank.” Zelda Fitzgerald was equally body-conscious, probably at times to the point of anorexia. Alabama Beggs, her fictional self-portrait, “was gladly, savagely proud of . . . [her jutting hip bones], convex as boats in a wood carving. The complete control of her body freed her from all fetid consciousness of it.”
Pregnancy was an unflattering indignity. “I value my body because you think it’s beautiful,” said the heroine of The Beautiful and Damned when she found out she was having a baby. “And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It’s simply intolerable.” Birth control—and illegal abortions, which killed 50,000 women a year and left many more barren; Zelda is thought to have had one—helped to keep the Flapper unencumbered.
The activist Margaret Sanger introduced American women to the diaphragm from 1916 onwards, illegally importing them from Germany and Holland until she helped fund the first U.S. manufacturer in 1925. After 1919, sales of vastly improved latex condoms, thinner and seamless unlike those previously made from rubber cement, soared throughout the decade. Because the 1873 Comstock Act banned the sale and advertising of contraceptive devices as well as pornographic material, these products still had to be procured behind a veil of euphemism. Women bought ambiguous items labeled “feminine hygiene”; men asked their doctors to prescribe condoms for their health.
This growing awareness of contraceptive methods freed women in a multitude of ways. In the first place, it allowed the very daring to experiment with sex before marriage without fear of an unwanted pregnancy. One of Scott’s principal insecurities about Zelda was that she had made love to other men before she married him. The flip side of this was that marriage was no longer seen as the price men paid for sex, and that women, as well as men, began to view sexual desire as an essential element of a fulfilled relationship.
Within marriage, contraception meant women had fewer children, and having fewer children transformed a woman’s role from that of primarily mother, to that of primarily wife—or even allowed her to feel like an individual in her own right. Women with one or two children, as opposed to five or six, could have lives of their own, perhaps even jobs; their family’s standard of living tended to be higher; they could indulge their own needs— for an independent social life, to remain youthful and attractive —as well as those of their children and husband.
Smaller families also helped change how parents brought up their children. Ideas derived from the new science of psychology—especially those of Sigmund Freud and John Watson, whose 1913 article on what he called “Behaviorism” was hugely influential in the 1920s—prompted parents to be more demonstrative and permissive with their offspring. Children were given more attention and affection and were encouraged to express their personalities. Increasingly, independence was valued more highly than obedience. But children, when they came, were no less a hindrance than pregnancy to the true Flapper. In Paris in 1924, when their three-year-old daughter Scottie wouldn’t sleep, Zelda fed her a mixture of gin and sugar-water so that she and Scott could leave her at the hotel while they went to a party.
Dyed hair and make-up, like smoking and drinking, no longer marked out the fallen woman—or perhaps women no longer cared about flaunting their descent from respectability. Being deliberately provocative was the height of chic. Scott described Zelda as Gloria, heroine of The Beautiful and Damned, earnestly explaining that she had worn a fur trimmed grey suit on her first date with Anthony Patch, “because with grey you have to wear a lot of paint.”
When cosmetics began to be seen as an “affordable indulgence,” beauty became a multimillion-dollar industry. In 1920 there were only 750 beauty salons in New York; that number had risen to 3,000 in 1925, and by 1930 there were 40,000 nationwide. Madame C. J. Walker had made a fortune with her hair “de-kinker” in Harlem; downtown, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein were launching flourishing business empires capitalizing on the Flapper’s obsession with her looks. Far from liberating women, bobbed and bleached hair necessitated frequent visits to the coiffeur; nail varnish was considered delightfully daring; lipstick, rouge and powder had become everyday essentials.
A powder compact hidden in a shoe-buckle was aimed at the modern party girl, dancing too uninhibitedly to carry a handbag. Movie stars and society beauties appeared in aspirational advertisements promoting face creams, soap and make-up. The message was that women were constantly on display—and it was their responsibility to make the best of themselves by using the best products they could afford. The beauty industry had invested $1.5 million a year in advertising in 1915; by 1930, it was spending over ten times that amount.
Successful advertising campaigns of the twenties capitalized on popular worries about fat, body odor, constipation and bad breath as well as the desire to be beautiful, using new techniques based on psychology. The idea of consumer sovereignty had been vanquished by research that established that human beings were motivated less by reason than by instinctive drives—vanity, fear, sex, the desires to conform and impress. Increasingly buyers were seen by advertisers as a manipulable mass: admen had realized that selling was no longer about need, but about choice. A 1917 article in Harper’s declared that the advertisers’ object was to “make each reader dissatisfied with himself, until he follows your suggestion.”
“I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get,” cries Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s overblown mistress, in The Great Gatsby. “A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow that’ll last all summer for mother’s grave. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do.”
Recklessness, frivolity and self-indulgence were the Flapper’s watchwords. “I can’t be bothered resisting things I want,” declared Zelda, as Gloria Patch. Adoring being the center of attention, she thought nothing of seizing the limelight by tossing her knickers into somebody’s lap at dinner or stripping off at a party. She boasted of being unfit for anything but “useless pleasure-giving pursuits.” The scriptwriter Anita Loos, bored by her antics, commented tartly that although her face was extraordinary “she really should have kept her bosom under wraps.”
Flaunting herself, as Loos said, because she thought she was “delectable,” was intended as invitation. Zelda drove Scott mad, especially at the start of their marriage, by making passes at his friends (none known to have been successful), kissing them, bursting into their bathrooms and demanding to be given a bath, all the while telling Scott that sleeping with other men wouldn’t affect her feelings for him. Fidelity was just a sign of puritanical repression.
Flappers and their college-boy consorts were the first generation to be on easy terms with the ideas of Sigmund Freud. The psychiatrist had delivered a series of lectures outlining his theories at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909 and they were published in the United States the following year. A decade later words like repression, taboo and the unconscious rolled casually off co-eds’ lips. All over the country, commented the writer Malcolm Cowley, young women “were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions.”
It was typical of the younger generation’s impulsiveness, though, that their understanding of Freud’s work was largely superficial. As the commentator Frederick Allen remembered, Freudianism was simply taken to mean, “If you want to be well and happy, you must obey your libido.” Psychology seemed to provide a scientific reason why social convention and personal inhibition ought to be challenged and why self-gratification was the ultimate human endeavor.
Social anthropology, another rapidly developing discipline, provided a further incentive to rebel against the constraints of “civilized” society. In 1925 the young anthropologist Margaret Mead spent several months studying teenage girls in Samoa whom she found to be sexually experimental and unrestrained by Western morals and inhibitions (her research has since been partially discredited). She believed that concepts of celibacy, monogamy and fidelity were “meaningless” to Samoans and had been largely created by modern society.
The conclusion of Mead’s best-selling book of 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa, was that man is shaped more by society than by biology. Implicit in her work was a critique of the repressive tendencies of American society—against which Mead herself would struggle in order to live out the sexually liberated life she desired. Contemporaries interpreted her book to mean that the troubles American teenagers endured on their path to adulthood were related to the inhibitions society inflicted upon them. Freeing oneself from civilization’s constraints was thus the route to happiness. The Flapper, with her devil-may-care attitude, epitomized this defiance of convention and consequence.
Literature reinforced science’s arguments. In 1920, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay famously summed up her appetite for life and adventure in “A Few Figs from Thistles”:
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.
Millay’s hedonistic philosophy was an imperative for the young in the twenties: living in the present, as intensely as possible, was all that mattered.
Like Millay and Fitzgerald, the heroines of best-selling twenties novels were untamed and unsentimental. Yvonne, the flame-haired beauty in Kay Brush’s Glitter, says that if she were a man she would be a racing-driver and announces her intention of living—and dying—“sensationally.” In The Sheik, by Edith Hull, spoiled Diana Mayo declares with some pride that she hasn’t a heart. Their code was Zelda’s: “Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.”
Partly because of Scott’s portrayals of Zelda as the 1920s ideal, being called fast became almost a compliment, rather than a slur on a girl’s character. Journalists wrote in shocked tones about the prevalence of “petting parties.” It was well known that cars provided unchaperoned young couples with a boudoir on wheels. Magazines featured “sex adventure stories” called “Indolent Kisses” or “Watch Your Step-Ins”; movies advertised “things you’ve always wanted to do and never DARED.”
Although the Flapper was the product primarily of a youth movement, middle-aged women were also attracted by the lure of abandoned pleasure-seeking. Evalyn McLean, a generation older than Zelda, described the new morals to her friend Florence Harding, the First Lady, from a vacation in Florida in 1923. One was nobody there without a beau, she said: “You must never be seen with your husband, and never go to bed until morning!” According to Malcolm Cowley, the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village had died by the late 1920s “because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown”—in other words, because every woman in America had become a Flapper.
It was not so easy for the prototype. The Fitzgeralds’ friends had long predicted that disaster would be the result of their excessive lifestyle. Soon after they were married Alec McKaig lamented Zelda’s desire “to live the life of an ‘extravagant.’ No thought of what the world will think or of the future. I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate.” Even Fitzgerald recognized that increasingly their hedonism was just “despair turned inside out.” As the years wore on, Zelda found her life with Scott frustrating and meaningless, despite the glamour she had longed for as a girl. While other women of her generation had taken real advantage of the new freedoms available to them, she felt she had never been able to create an identity for herself as anything other than Scott’s wife—the outrageous and desirable Flapper incarnate. By her late twenties she was desperate to use her talents, to have something of her own, not to be merely what she called a “complementary intelligence.” She “felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment . . . she felt she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away.”
Lacking the career which both advertised Scott’s worth and provided his retreat from the world, in her late twenties Zelda rejected their past intemperance and took up ballet, her childhood ambition. She became consumed by the dream of becoming a professional dancer even though, aged twenty-seven when she began, her chances of success were virtually non-existent. But she refused to be persuaded, practicing up to eight agonizing hours a day for over two years, relishing discipline for the first time in her life, pushing herself harder and harder to achieve the impossible.
Zelda’s furious obsession with ballet was not just a desire for order, it was also a futile attempt to stop time. She and Scott had always held that youth and beauty were the altars on which any considerations of the future must be sacrificed. Fear of losing the looks and attitude which had set her apart haunted Zelda. Like Nicky in Noel Coward’s The Vortex, she was straining “every nerve to keep young.”
More and more in the late 1920s there was the sense with Zelda that something wasn’t right. The novelist John Dos Passos said that looking into her eyes during this period was “like peering into a dark abyss.” In the spring of 1930 Zelda had her first breakdown and that summer was institutionalized and later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In 1932, during a six-week period of feverish lucidity, Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz, a barely-fictionalized account of her relationship with Scott, her brief affair with another man and her failing struggle against mental illness set against their shared backdrop of literary life in New York and as prosperous Americans in Europe. Hardly coincidentally, much of it was similar to Tender Is the Night, the novel Scott was working on at the same time. Knowing this, Zelda deliberately provoked Scott’s fury by sending her manuscript to his editor without showing it to him first. This was her account of the shared experiences that had made them both rich, famous, envied and unhappy—her defense against being made into just another flawed character in one of her husband’s books—and she was determined to tell it to the world.
During their life together Zelda had provided Scott with inspiration and living material for his female characters—he had lifted long passages straight from her diary for The Beautiful and Damned—and written occasional articles and short stories which they had published either jointly or under Scott’s name. “I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole world to myself if I didn’t like living in Daddy’s better,” says Zelda’s self-portrait, Alabama, to her daughter. Since Scott was the literary celebrity, it made sense to capitalize on his fame; Zelda writing alone could command a fraction of the sum a Scott Fitzgerald piece might bring in. Reading her book, it is hard not to feel that at last—and too late—Zelda had decided that her life was her own material, not her husband’s.
Zelda spent her remaining years, on and off, in asylums, still fueled by the urge to create. She had always had a striking and highly unusual visual sense, but when her schizophrenia set in it became ever more hallucinatory and intense. “There was a new significance to everything,” she wrote in Save Me the Waltz. “Stations and streets and façades of buildings—colors were infinite, part of the air, and not restricted by the lines that encompassed them and lines were free of the masses they held.” During her last years she painted these strange visions.
As a girl, Zelda had identified with the heroine of Owen Johnson’s best-selling novel and movie of the 1910s, The Salamander, its title taken from the lizard thought in classical times to be able to pass untouched through fire: “I am in the world to do something unusual, extraordinary. I’m not like every other little woman.” Looking back on her life, Zelda sadly acknowledged that her “story is the fault of nobody but me. I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.” In 1948 a fire razed her sanatorium to the ground and she died in the blaze—no salamander, after all. She was forty-eight years old.
For most women of Zelda’s generation, being a Flapper was a stage rather than a Faustian pact. Even in literature and the movies, however wildly they danced or however many cigarettes they smoked, most Flappers ended up choosing love and conventional marriages—they wanted happy endings, not tragic ones. The heroine of The Sheik, independent Diana Mayo, discovers that she loves the macho Bedouin who has kidnapped her and meekly submits to his will; Glitter’s glamorous but fallen heroine, Yvonne, forces herself to abandon her lover to ensure that he marries a “nice” girl; the British romantic novelist Elinor Glyn’s smoking, cocktail-drinking Flapper insists she’s only marrying for the alimony, to cover up the shameful fact that she’s in love. The defeat of romance and morality was only ever temporary.
A more enduring social change can be seen in twenties women’s attitudes to work. On one hand, the technological advances of the period freed women from heavy housework. Electric stoves, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines appeared; new houses were built with central heating, running water and modern plumbing. Clothes could be bought ready-made, laundry sent out, bread and ice-cream brought home from the shops. As standards of living rose, the time a woman needed to devote to keeping house fell.
But these modern conveniences did not come cheap, and the desire to contribute to the household income and give their family the best start in life led many women, married as well as single, to take up jobs outside the home. The twenties were a time when social and financial aspirations seemed achievable. “I’ve always wanted my girls to do something other than housework,” said one working-class Middletown mother. “I don’t want them to be house drudges like me!”
Part of this new attitude was the legacy of the Great War. While men were away training or at the front, women had taken their places in offices and factories. Despite being paid dramatically lower wages than their male counterparts, many found that they did not want to give up their newly discovered salaries and independence when peace was declared.
In Middletown in 1924, 89 percent of girls in the last three years of high school said that they planned to get jobs after they graduated—although most would give them up when they married. Women may have been willing to work, but many men were ambivalent about permitting them to do so. A 1923 poll showed that 90 percent of students from Vassar College were prepared to put marriage before a career. Still, by 1928, five times as many women had jobs as in 1918.
Increasingly, these jobs were white collar, rather than in factories or as domestic servants. Women became librarians, teachers, nurses, clerks, telephone operators, secretaries, stenographers, shop assistants. A few women blazed trails in areas hitherto dominated by men, as journalists, artists, advertising copywriters or scriptwriters, social workers, sociologists, photographers, doctors and lawyers.
Film was one of the first industries in which women competed on roughly equal terms with men, directing, producing and writing as well as acting. Like many best-selling authors of her day, Elinor Glyn was offered handsome terms to come to Hollywood to write and develop film scenarios. She arrived in 1920 to take up an offer of $10,000 per picture and ended up staying seven years, both writing and directing. “I wanted,” she wrote later of her time in Los Angeles, “to stir up in the cold hearts of the thousands of little fluffy, gold-digging American girls a desire for greater joy in love than is to be found in candy-boxes and car rides and fur coats.” Glyn named perhaps the most enduring marketing concept in movie history: “It,” or sex appeal, as embodied by Clara Bow in the 1926 film of the same name. When asked what “It” was, a bemused Bow is said to have replied, “I ain’t real sure.”
Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was another female writer who helped shape early Hollywood. A child actor, she knew the industry inside out by the time she started writing for the director D.W. Griffith in 1912, aged twenty-four; Mary Pickford, the greatest female star of the silent movie era, starred in her first screenplay. Loos would write over two hundred movies and claimed that her scripts made Douglas Fairbanks famous. Petite, determined, talented and self-reliant, Loos was the opposite of her most famous creation, the statuesque gold-digger Lorelei Lee—although she shared with her a taste for serious frocks. “I’ve had my best times when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor,” Loos once said, in true Flapper style. “I’ve always loved high style in low company.”
Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite actress, the ethereal Lillian Gish, was another protégée of D.W. Griffith’s and star of the first modern blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation of 1915. Griffith offered her the chance to direct Remodelling Her Husband in 1920, but Gish was unimpressed by the experience. She told reporters afterwards that directing was a man’s job.
Gish had been introduced to Griffith by Mary Pickford. Perennially typecast as an innocent girl because of her ringlets and childlike body, she was known as America’s Sweetheart but behind the scenes wielded immense influence in 1920s Hollywood and was the first actress to earn over a million dollars a year. In 1919, she, Chaplin, her lover Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith set up United Artists, which would allow artists for the first time to produce and distribute their own work, and to be properly credited for their role in creating it. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” quipped one of their former bosses; but their success confounded the doubters.
The gravest threat to Mary Pickford’s hold on American hearts came not from another actress, but from her personal life. Unhappily married to an alcoholic actor, Owen Moore, who was jealous of her fame, when she met swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 the attraction between them was immediate. Fairbanks wanted to divorce his wife and marry Pickford, but she was terrified of the damage a scandal would do to her wholesome reputation and hard-won career. Being a Catholic, she was also reluctant to divorce on religious grounds.
As women became more emancipated, divorce became more common and more socially acceptable. There were 100,000 divorces in 1914 and 205,000 in 1929. Once they could support themselves, fewer women were willing to remain in unhappy marriages. “The reason there are more divorces is that people are demanding more of life than they used to,” a female journalist from Middletown explained. A divorced woman used to be disgraced, but now, “We see that no good purpose is achieved by keeping together two people who have come to hate each other.”
Fairbanks and Pickford married in March 1920—two years after his divorce and just a month after hers. At first Mary was pilloried by the scandal-sheets of the day, but public opinion swung to her defense when the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Owen Moore was revealed. The fairy-tale nature of her match with Fairbanks—America’s Sweetheart married to its most dashing screen idol—was another factor that contributed to her rehabilitation, although conservatives continued to frown upon the Pickford-Fairbanks match for making divorce acceptable for “respectable” people.
Mary Pickford knew that her plucky, childlike screen persona was the key to her success and, apart from her divorce, she was reluctant to jeopardize her image. Not until 1929 did she dare to cut off the golden curls that had made her name. “I am a servant of the public,” she once said. “I’ve never forgotten that.” But although she continued to make successful movies and held on tightly to her position as uncrowned queen of Hollywood, as the twenties wore on, Pickford—who was twenty-eight in 1920—was gradually eclipsed by younger and more daring actresses whose Flapperish reputations were more in keeping with the mood of the age.
For a time Zelda Fitzgerald hoped that a movie director would discover her and make her a star, but her beauty was not unusual in Hollywood and there were plenty of eager starlets hoping to embody the Flapper on the silver screen. Some had the right attitude, but lacked focus. Constance Talmadge, known as Dutch, was the ultimate party girl, a “sparkling blond clown” who was always getting engaged “but never to less than two men at the same time.” For Dutch, fun was the main aim in life; she looked on her film career as a means to an end—a way out of poverty. Having made her money and secured her future, she retired in 1929 aged just thirty-two.
Gloria Swanson possessed none of Talmadge’s reticence or Pickford’s innocence: she was hungry for fame and all the delights success would bring her. Her big break came in 1919 when Cecil B. deMille cast her as his heroine in Don’t Change Your Husband. Soon afterwards, the twenty-year-old Gloria gave an interview to Motion Picture Magazine, cementing her image as a modern sophisticate. “I not only believe in divorce, but I sometimes think I don’t believe in marriage at all,” she declared, and would prove her sincerity by going on to divorce five husbands. In 1923, fearing scandal would affect her popularity, Paramount forced Swanson to settle her second divorce out of court because her estranged husband was accusing her of committing adultery with fourteen men. Her popularity was unaffected, or perhaps enhanced, by these allegations. In the same year, she was receiving ten thousand fan letters a week.
Glamour and extravagance were essential parts of her persona. On screen, Swanson was usually shown in magnificent gowns, often with trains, wearing turbans or feathered headdresses, draped in fur and jewelry. She deliberately cultivated her image as a magnetic, mysterious star. In her hands a cigarette holder became the most dramatic of accessories. As deMille said, “She knew how to lean against a door.”
Mary Pickford may have been the first woman to have made a million in Hollywood, but (so the saying went) Gloria Swanson was the first to spend it. Photoplay reported that her annual expenditure in 1924 included nearly $10,000 on silk stockings, $6,000 on perfume, $50,000 on dresses . . . and an unspecified amount on jewels. “In those days they wanted us to live like kings and queens . . . so we did,” Swanson remembered. “And why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed, and there was no reason to believe that it would ever stop.”
Like Pickford, Swanson had ambitions as a businesswoman. If she was to be packaged as a commodity, she wanted to reap the rewards herself. In early 1928, having made a disastrous attempt to set up her own production company under the aegis of United Artists, her lover Joseph Kennedy helped her form Gloria Productions (still in association with United Artists). Kennedy was one of the major forces behind the transition to sound in movies. Swanson was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (her second) for her role in the first talkie they produced together, The Trespasser, but the end of her affair with Kennedy and the financial strain of producing her own films took their toll on her career in the 1930s.
Swanson’s great rival in the femme fatale stakes was Pola Negri, billed by her studio as a “wildcat.” Negri adored the trappings of celebrity and played up to her image as an exotic bird of paradise whom men could not resist. Each day the floor of her dressing room was strewn with orchid petals. She wore only black or white, always with scarlet nails. Chinchilla was her fur of choice. She could often be seen on Sunset Boulevard taking her pet tiger for a walk, or being driven around flanked by two white wolfhounds. At the funeral of her lover, Rudolph Valentino, in 1926 Negri appeared heavily veiled and fainted several times over his coffin.
Like Swanson, Negri made a virtue out of being single. “I do not believe in marriage. It is not for me. I am selfish, no, not selfish, for I have sacrificed everything for love. I am independent. Freedom comes before anything. I am a gypsy . . .” This brand of intensely independent, highly sexualized glamour looked to many women like emancipation. With their gaze fixed on the immense profits to be made, Hollywood studio bosses were only too glad to sell women liberation and modernity for the price of a movie ticket.