American Fun (62 page)

62.
“
And if I loved you Wednesday
”: Ibid., 129.

63.
“
I’ve been a wicked girl
,” “
I see with single eye
”: Edna St. Vincent Millay,
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 55.

64.
“
will never make you a hatband
”: “Flapping Not Repented Of,”
New York Times,
July 16, 1922, reprinted in Mowry,
The Twenties,
173.

65.
“
The tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons
”: Warner Fabian,
Flaming Youth
(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 129.

66.
racks her wanton frame
: At times her persona’s wayward id rages like a house party:

At others, she welcomes it like death:

At others it jails her like a drug addiction:

Millay,
Collected Poems,
658, 646, 647.

67.
“
An American Art Student
”: Quoted in Gilbert and Gubar,
Letters from the Front,
vol. 3, 76–78. Millay rewrote the romantic script to the female party’s advantage. Gilbert and Gubar note her manipulation of the “femme fatale/
flapper” persona, how she uses it “to expose the artifice and absurdity of romance” while at the same time flipping “conventional love scenes” to make them “fatal to male rather than female lovers.”

68.
to
drink
as much
: For an excellent account of “New Women” and drink, see Lerner,
Dry Manhattan,
171–98.

69.
were regularly tempered
: Paula S. Fass,
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the
1920s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 262–65.

70.
“
Any girl I catch smoking anywhere
”: Ibid., 299.

71.
“
torches of freedom
”: Burton St. John,
Press Professionalism and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalistic Double-Mindedness,
1917–1941
(Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), 30.

72.
“
A Flapper’s Dictionary
”:
The Flapper,
July 1922, cited in Jim Lewin,
Book Flaps
(blog) at
bookflaps.blogspot.com
, April 10, 2011; accessed August 25, 2012.

73.
“
Her girlish ways
”:
Dorothy Parker,
Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker,
ed. Stuart Y. Silverstein (New York: Scribner, 1996), 105.

74.
“
wholesome, engaging, uncorseted
”: Stuart Y. Silverstein, “Introduction,” in Parker,
Not Much Fun,
35.

75.
“
Not much fun
”: Ibid., 23.

76.
she was the life of the party
: It seems Parker only had a taste for the wilder variety of party. As is evident from her “Hymn of Hate” called “Parties,” her festive nature was hard to please, hating “clean, home games” like “guess[ing] the number of seeds in a cucumber,” hating days in the country with their dozens of hard-boiled eggs, and above all hating the “informal little Dinner Party,” which she considered “the lowest form of taking nourishment.” Parker,
Not Much Fun,
219–21.

77.
“
You can lead a horticulture
”: Silverstein, “Introduction,” 27
n.

78.
“
There was a little girl
”: Ibid., 14
n.

79.
“
all the earmarks of masterpiece
”: W. Somerset Maugham, “Variations on a Theme,” in Dorothy Parker,
The Portable Dorothy Parker
(New York: Viking, 1954), 601.

80.
“
send me a saw
”: Parker,
Not Much Fun,
29.

81.
“
the quick excitement
”: Parker,
Portable Dorothy Parker,
293.

82.
“
by the time she was a teenager
”: Lillian Schlissel, “Introduction,” in
Three Plays by Mae West
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

83.
“
wildly uninhibited antics
”: George Eels and Stanley Musgrove,
Mae West
(New York: William Morrow, 1982), 34.

84.
“
make a better wife and mother
”: Mae West,
Sex,
in
Three Plays,
74.

85.
“
shimmy shawabble
”: Schlissel, “Introduction,” 10.

86.
“
vulgar
”: Reviews cited ibid.

87.
“
degenerate
”: Mae West,
The Drag,
in
Three Plays,
107.

88.
“
happier
”: Ibid., 102.

89.
“
born homosexual
”: Ibid., 108.

90.
“
people like that
”: Ibid., 107.

91.
“
they like me
”: Ibid., 118.

92.
“
It must be the wagon
”: Ibid., 133–34.

93.
“
a restraining order
”: Schlissel, “Introduction,” 15.

94.
“
Let’s see some other son of a bitch do that
”: Ibid., 23.

1.
“
a whole race
”: This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the
Jazz Age,” in
The Crack Up,
ed. Edmund Wilson (1931; New York: New Directions, 1945), 15, 20, 19, 18. The
Complete Works
of Scott Fitzgerald (who said he coined the term “Jazz Age”) reads like a saga of 1920s fun. The stories get woollier as they go: from the early stories and wisecracking first novel that taught young Americans how to read their own antics; to the glamorous recasting of his and Zelda’s bad behavior in
The Beautiful and Damned;
to his 1925 masterpiece whose antihero observes his own wild parties with a forlorn sense of disengagement; to Fitzgerald’s later period of failed recovery, when the zest of his youth has a foul aftertaste—the period of “Babylon Revisited” and
Tender Is the Night,
in which dashing Dick Diver, a figure of worldly merriment, fails three times at a waterskiing stunt and seals his fate as a post-fun grotesque. A master of self-aggrandizement, Fitzgerald projected his trials and triumphs onto an entire era. He had his fun—had it more glamorously and vigorously than most—and in the final analysis he didn’t recommend it.

2.
“
exciting story millions lost in an hour
”: Crosby,
Shadows of the Sun,
284.

3.
“
only one and a half million people
”: John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Great Crash,
1929
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 78.

4.
“
decorated them with pretty girls
”: Fan-dancer Sally Rand quoted in Studs Terkel,
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
(1970; New York: New Press, 2005), 170.

5.
“
as hot an issue as Hitler
”: Cited in Marybeth Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It: Censoring Mae West,” in
Movie Censorship and American Culture,
2nd ed., ed. Francis J. Couvares (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 187.

6.
“
West’s acting style
”: Ibid., 193.

7.
“
young Negro high-school girl
”: This and subsequent quotations from Henry James Forman,
Our Movie-Made Children
(New York: Macmillan, 1933), 141, 143–45, 147.

8.
“
The very man who will guffaw
”: The Hays Office’s Ray Norr quoted in Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It,” 202.

9.
“
humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness
”:
Modern Times,
dir. and prod. Charles Chaplin, Charles Chaplin Productions, USA, 1936.

10.
“
the terrific kick
”: Zora Neale Hurston, “To Lawrence Jordan,” February 18, 1927, The Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Zora Neale Hurston Collection, MG 130, Box 1, one of three unnumbered folders. Until they broke up over a plagiarism rhubarb, Hughes and Hurston were the life of a
Harlem Renaissance party whose fun, as they knew, was based on conflict. As
Wallace Thurman depicts them in his roman à clef,
Infants
of the Spring
(1932), Langston Hughes is the “mischievous boy” Tony Crews and Zora Neale Hurston is Sweetie May Carr, “noted for her ribald wit.” When Dr. Parkes (
Alain Locke) hosts a salon for Harlem’s brightest writers, Tony and Sweetie May—unlike the morose DeWitt Clinton (
Countee Cullen) and the testy Cedric Williams (
Claude McKay)—contribute only winks and giggles. Sweetie interrupts a race debate to boast, “I can do the
Charleston better than any white person.” And when the evening bursts into an intellectual brawl over Marx, DuBois, and “the Negro Problem,” Tony and Sweetie May trade “original verses to the St. James Infirmary.” Wallace Thurman,
Infants of the Spring
(New York: Random House, 1999), 141–43, 149, 151.

11.
“
Queen of the Niggerati
”: Robert F. Hemenway,
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 44.

12.
“a city,” as she characterized it
: Zora Neale Hurston,
Mules and Men
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 20.

13.
“
too much spirit
,” “
jump at de sun
,” “
God, Devil, Brer Rabbit
”: Zora Neale Hurston,
Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography,
2nd ed., ed. Robert E. Hemenway (1942; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 63–64.

14.
“
most amusing
”: Hughes,
The Big Sea,
238–39.

15.
“
feather-bed of resistance
”: Hurston,
Mules and Men,
3.

16.
“
carefully accented Barnardese
”: Hurston,
Dust Tracks,
175.

17.
“
poets of the swinging blade
”: Ibid., 179.

18.
“
singing, laughing, cursing
”: Ibid., 180.

19.
“
balling
”: Zora Neale Hurston, “Glossary of Harlem Slang,”
http://aalbc.com/authors/harlemslang.htm
. Accessed July 17, 2013.

20.
“
Dancing the square dance
,” “
risky pleasure
”: Hurston,
Dust Tracks,
182.

21.
“
emotional strength
”: Clarence Major,
Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang
(New York: Viking, 1994), 138. In his superlative
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Henry Louis Gates Jr. speculates that the word “
dozens” “quite probably derives from an eighteenth-century meaning of the verb
dozen,
‘to stun, stupefy, daze,’ in the black sense, through language” (71). It also belongs under the rubric of “Signifying,” the variety of wordplay and
verbal competition (a sort of “making fun”—though not fun
of
—through language [68]) that Gates believes should be part of standard home curriculum in the education of young African Americans—a social skill and rite of passage that children and adolescents learn from their parents: “Teaching one’s children the fine art of Signifyin(g) is to teach them about this mode of linguistic circumnavigation, to teach them a second language they can share with other black people” (76).

22.
“
If you have no faith
”: Hurston,
Dust Tracks,
187.

23.
“
contest[s] in hyperbole
”: Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 59.

24.
“
the thing that Saul’s daughter had done
”: Ibid., 75.

25.
“
permanent transients with no attachments
”: Ibid., 125.

26.
“
the Lindy off the ground
”: Stearns and Stearns,
Jazz Dance,
324–27.

27.
“
I just about went wild!
”:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
quoted in Luis Alvarez,
The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 147.

28.
“
Many zoot suiters
”: Ibid., 134; see also 142, 145.

29.
“
every couple, almost
”: Dizzy Gillespie quoted in Alvarez,
Power of the Zoot,
121.

30.
“
juvenile delinquency
,” “
revolt of callow youth
”: White and White,
Stylin’,
259–60.

31.
“
role in facilitating
,” “
Mixed Dancing Closed Savoy Ballroom
,” “
Christian youth center
”: The
Amsterdam News
and the
People’s Voice
cited in Alvarez,
Power of the Zoot,
120–24.

32.
Later that same month
: Alvarez,
Power of the Zoot,
168–82.