American Fun (35 page)

In his 1923
Love in Greenwich Village,
which recounts young New York’s rampant sexual mores,
Floyd Dell, whose marriage proposal Millay rejected, recalled her “
liv[ing] in that gay poverty which is traditional of the village” and which afforded her and all her fellow
bohemians “the joys of comradeship and play and mere childlike fun.” The erotic content of her early lyrics typified her sybaritic times—as did her smoldering imagery of cigarettes, “
jazzing music,” and her iconic candle:

The flapper conjured up in her poems could be fickle (“
And if I loved you Wednesday … I do not love you Thursday”), unrepentant (“ ‘
I’ve been a wicked girl … I might as well be glad!’ ”), or casually brutal (“I see with single eye … Your ugliness.… I know the imperfection of your face”).

Emasculating wit such as Millay’s was one of the flapper’s most fearsome trademarks. As the
New York Times
warned in 1922, the flapper “
will never make you a hatband or knit you a necktie, but she’ll drive
you from the station hot Summer nights in her own little sports car. She’ll don knickers and go skiing with you…; she’ll dive as well as you, perhaps better.” The flapper was as known for her sexual exploits as for turning the whole thing into a joke. (“
The tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons,” complains Dr. Osterhaus in
Warner Fabian’s
Flaming Youth,
“would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and
double entente
[
sic
] based on sex.”) And the public knew the truth behind Millay’s lines. She moved freely among romantic encounters and refused to choose between
women and men. Her poems traded, with similar caprice, between biting irony and love-struck agony. If her persona looks vulnerable in her most devastated love sonnets, it is because she yields to a sexual pleasure that
racks her wanton frame.

Proof positive that she had fun with this dangerous image are the articles she published in
Vanity Fair,
under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd (read “nancy boy”)—a trickster figure who, in the spirit of
Mark Twain’s Virginia City persona, made a
prank of her celebrated identity. She especially enjoyed her perceived femininity. In one such piece, she masquerades as “
An American Art Student in Paris” and is shocked to see “Edna St. Vincent Millay” sitting next to her at a café “eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages”—when she had “always imagined her so ethereal.”

Firebrands like Zelda and “Vincent”—and Hollywood “It girls” like
Colleen Moore,
Louise Brooks, and
Clara Bow—gave middle-class women exciting new permission to wear their sexuality how they saw fit; to act as bold as, if not bolder than, men;
to
drink
as much as, if not more than, men; to indulge in masquerade—and call it masquerade; and to speak with a frank and silly new language that was neither ladylike nor manly, nor sensible.

Following their examples, of course, was risky.
Paula Fass’s landmark study of 1920s white youth culture suggests the flappers’ most daring ambitions, especially those regarding sexual behavior,
were regularly tempered within college peer groups, which tended to enforce their own limits on sex. But peer groups were far more permissive than parents. While most youth still scorned premarital intercourse, “petting parties,”
a mild prelude to the group sex of later decades, legitimized kissing, necking, and fondling. Women who took the flappers’ lead faced serious consequences from college administrators. In 1925, after Bryn Mawr’s president designated smoking areas for women, many more college administrators redoubled their
prohibitions. Northwestern’s dean of women gave no quarter: “
Any girl I catch smoking anywhere and at any time will not be permitted to remain in college.” Women’s natural resistance to such stifling laws was backed by two ameliorating forces: the press and the markets.
Student newspapers mocked their administrators’ folly, noting women had already made smoking an “art” and supported women’s rights “to indulge her tastes just as men had always done.” One by one, over the course of a decade, women’s “indulgences” cleared traditional hurdles: makeup, hemlines, dancing, kissing. Smoking was one of the last in line, since drinking was forbidden to everybody. And as with many of the New Woman’s rebel props—haircuts, short skirts, dance steps, makeup—this taboo, too, was soon to be monetized. In 1929, the magisterial spin doctor
Edward Bernays spun this fun new vogue (at the behest of tobacco companies) into a national symbol of liberation: he staged an Easter parade in New York City where women were photographed openly smoking their “
torches of freedom.”

The flapper, for whom fun was a cause in itself, deserves much credit for the New Woman revolution. The flapper knew women weren’t supposed to have fun, and she joined the long American campaign of turning prohibitions into playthings. Not only did she claim this right, she perfected it, and her often arcane talk was as modern as the barrel roll. It boasted the highest critical standards for gaiety, liberty, class, and style. “
A Flapper’s Dictionary,” printed in the July 1922
Flapper,
listed 163 need-to-know terms for the girl “with a jitney body” who also had “a limousine mind.” It distinguished the “Brooksy” (“Classy dresser”) from the “Brush Ape” (“a country Jake”) and the “Fire Bell” (“Married woman”) from the “Fire Alarm” (“Divorced”). While it called the flapper’s father a “Dapper” (he was the one who furnished the “Hush Money”), it was otherwise vicious to the older generation—to “Father Time” (“Any man over 30”), the “Face Stretcher” (“Old maid who tries to look younger”), and all the “Alarm Clocks,” “Fire Extinguishers,” and other chaperones.

The glossary gives a peek into the flapper’s high standards. She liked “Smoke Eaters” (girl smokers) and “Floorflushers” (“dance hounds”), and most certainly “Weeds” (“Flappers who take risks”). These are all “Ducky,” the “Cat’s Particulars.” But she snubbed “Bush Hounds” (“Rustics and others outside the Flapper pale”), warned against killjoys (“Wurps,” “Cancelled Stamps,” “Crepe Hangers,” “Lens Louises”), and called out the worst kinds of men by name: “Gimlets,” “Weasels,” “Oilcans,” “Slimps,” “Monologists,” “Finale Hoppers,” “Airedales,” “Pillow Cases,” “Mustard Plasters,” “Dewdroppers,” “Walk Ins,” “Corn Shredders,” “Rug Hoppers,” “Bell Polishers,” and those “Cellar Smellers” with noses for the cheapest booze. “Whangdoodle” was her racy name for jazz, and her lexicon was warm on all sorts of “Barneymugging” (sex)—whether it happened in a “Petting Pantry” (movie theater), somebody’s “gas wagon,” or any big “Blow” (“Wild Party”) where the “Biscuit” (“pettable flapper”) chose to “Mug” with her “Goof” or “Highjohn.” She was chilly toward that old “Eye Opener,” marriage. She called her fiancé a “Police Dog” and her engagement ring a “Handcuff”—it might as well as have been a “Nut Cracker” (“Policeman’s nightstick”). Her wit in general ran deep: “Dogs” were feet and “Dog Kennels” shoes. “Meringue” was her idea of “personality.” But beneath all the smoke and meringue and makeup was a steely eye for realism. Male gold diggers were “Forty Niners,” bootleggers were “Embalmers,” and undertakers were “Sod Busters.” “Munitions” were the flapper’s “Face powder and rouge.”

Dorothy Parker, the era’s most legendary wit, held the fast-talking flapper in high esteem. She admired her unassuming danger:

The
Times
called Parker’s poetry “flapper verse” for being “
wholesome, engaging, uncorseted and not devoid of grace.” To this extent Parker resembled Millay, whom she worshipped and to whose finer poetry she
aspired. But nobody accused her of being “ethereal.” While Millay played the victim of her own gluttonous heart, Parker, who was as notoriously
promiscuous, flaunted her genuine morbidity, making several attempts on her life and ultimately medicating herself to death with “small sips” of Johnnie Walker neat.

When a bartender once asked her what she was having, she replied, “
Not much fun.” The sundry works of Dorothy Parker—ranging from plays, essays, reviews, and doggerel verse to some of America’s most poignant fiction—were an ongoing meditation on fun, and on its miserable casualties. Throughout the twenties
she was the life of the party, covering the scene from New York’s Algonquin to Paris’s
Les Deux Magots, with frequent stops in the Hamptons at the
Swopes estate, the rumored template for the Gatsby mansion. But for all of her promiscuity and celebrated drinking, Parker’s most reliable fun seems to have come from
jeux de mots
. When asked to use “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker quipped, “
You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” A lingerie caption she proposed to
Vogue
read: “
There was a little girl who had a
little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.” (It was rejected at the last minute.) Her poetry ripples with such irreverent merriment, often erring on the side of the singsong but always with vitriol marring its surface. Her finest work ventures outside the submarine and lingers, dangerously, in the chambers of the sea.
W. Somerset Maugham said her novella “Big Blonde”—which reads like Parker’s own “Eulogy on the Flapper”—had “
all the earmarks of masterpiece.” It’s about an over-the-hill flapper named Hazel Morse. In it, Parker’s mermaid wakes up human and, like Eliot’s Prufrock, drowns.

Risk-loving flappers dance the Charleston—in high heels—on the ledge of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel, December 11, 1926. (Courtesy of Underwood & Underwood, CORBIS images.)

As so many twenties writers would have it, under all the booze, whangdoodle, and fun was a sneaking insecurity that belied both the sheik’s and the flapper’s confidence: fun was a cover-up that made matters worse. The deep distractions of the 1920s seemed to lead death-driven wild partiers, like Parker and
Harry Crosby, ever farther from, not “nearer to,” the “frank and full enjoyment of life” identified by
Robert L. Duffus. Most likely, it was the Parkers and Crosbys whom reformers like Duffus had hoped to “guide.” The wild-spinning fun, like Tilyou’s Human Roulette, tossed weakly clutching citizens into the ditch. Throughout the story “Big Blonde,” for instance, people clamber together in pursuit of reckless fun; in the end, the damaged ones—like Hazel, the eponymous Big Blonde herself—seek “drowsy cheer” in the sweet and absolute slackening of death.

The way Parker represents it, indeed the way she seems to have lived it, these two communities—the partygoers and the
suicides—were on a continuum of risky pleasure that characterized Jazz Age extremity. At the era’s illegal and extralegal wild parties, where only cops and parents weren’t welcome, citizens were not only exposed to risk; they welcomed it, pursued it, demanded it. They laughed at tedious common sense. They flouted laws, civil and social, and tested the limits of decency and safety. It took resilience under such conditions for the average citizen to keep it together—to keep from succumbing to addiction and violence; to keep from knuckling under to tyrants.

The streetwise flapper put a premium on resilience. She tested her
mettle in this risky age, and she expected other women to do the same. But as Parker demonstrates in “Big Blonde” and elsewhere, fun for fun’s sake had special dangers for women, who lacked advantage in the world of men. Whether she was valued for her sex, her wits, or her fun, the woman’s role at the party was often to entertain, even when what she wanted was only to amuse herself.

Dorothy Parker would die of a heart attack, but until then she was chronically suicidal. Like her Big Blonde, Hazel Morse, she once took an overdose of the sedative
Veronal. Another time she consumed a bottle of shoe polish. It was in her character to turn even her suicide attempts into stunts and practical jokes. Having slashed herself with her husband’s razor, she greeted bedside visitors with blue ribbons tied to her bandaged wrists. After an overdose of sleeping powders, she sent a telegram from the country estate where she was recovering: “
send me a saw
INSIDE A LOAF OF BREAD.
”

Gallows humor sets the tone for the Big Blonde’s failed suicide. Approaching her beloved vials of Veronal, Hazel feels “
the quick excitement of one who is about to receive an anticipated gift.” Drinking down the pills she intones once more, “Here’s mud in your eye.”

But of course she doesn’t die. That would have been a happy ending. “You couldn’t kill her with an ax,” is her doctor’s diagnosis. Like Parker’s, Hazel’s fate is to keep on drinking.

MAE WEST
, for her part, had nerves of steel. She stuck up for society’s most despised citizens (prostitutes, gays, cross-dressers) and always managed to come out on top. Born in 1893, raised poor and tough in Bushwick, Brooklyn, she learned from her mother, a corset model, to market her sex appeal for a self-respecting profit. She learned from her father—a livery stableman who may have been a two-bit boxer—how to pump iron and judge a good prizefight. She hit the boards at six, and “
by the time she was a teenager,”
Lillian Schlissel writes, “she was all strut and swagger, moving around the stage like a bantam-weight fighter”—a strut she would fashion into the pugilistic saunter that shook the 1930s silver screen. It was in her teens, in
Coney Island’s saloons and theaters, that
she earned an Ivy League acting education. Having dumped her first husband at age nineteen, she acted with
Jimmy Durante on the boardwalk, took comic cues from
Bert Williams (the slinky half of Williams and Walker), conned songs from
JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy, modeled her style on the “
wildly uninhibited antics” of
Eva Tanguay, and studied the rapid-fire comic banter of
Jay Brennan and of the unapologetically gay
Bert Savoy, who impressed her with his repertoire of heroines (in drag) and his dangerously irreverent zingers. This coterie of mismatched male, female, and female-impersonating influences—a boxer, a cakewalker, a circus oddity; comedians both gay and straight—inspired a fearless new fun in her stagecraft that could make even the
flapper blush. And West’s love of sex wasn’t an act—she claimed to have had it nearly every day of her life.