Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair Read online

  ALSO FROM VANITY FAIR

  Vanity Fair’s Hollywood

  Oscar Night

  Vanity Fair Portraits

  Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood

  Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire

  Vanity Fair’s Presidential Profiles

  The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession

  Vanity Fair 100 Years

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  First published by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Conde Nast

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  The selections in this book appeared in issues of Vanity Fair.

  Frontispiece by Eduardo Garcia Benito © March 1927 Vanity Fair/Condé Nast Publications

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bohemians, bootleggers, flappers, and swells: the best of early Vanity fair / introduction by Graydon Carter; edited by David Friend.

  pages cm

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17009-4

  1. American literature—20th century. 2. Literature, Modern—20th century. 3. United States—Civilization—20th century—Literary collections. I. Friend, David, 1955- editor. II. Carter, Graydon. III. Vanity fair (New York, N.Y.)

  PS536.B595 2014

  810.8'0052—dc23

  2014009783

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also from Vanity Fair

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Note to the Reader

  GRAYDON CARTER: Vanity Fair and the Birth of the New

  1910s

  P. G. WODEHOUSE: The Physical Culture Peril (MAY 1914)

  GEORG BRANDES: August Strindberg (OCTOBER 1914)

  FREDERICK JAMES GREGG: The World’s New Art Centre (JANUARY 1915)

  HYMAN STRUNSKY: Are Odd Women Really Odd? (JUNE 1915)

  ANNE O’HAGAN: New York Women Who Earn $50,000 a Year (AUGUST 1915)

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER): Any Porch (poetry) (SEPTEMBER 1915)

  WALTER CAMP: Football and the New Rules (SEPTEMBER 1915)

  STEPHEN LEACOCK: War Scenes Across the Canadian Border (OCTOBER 1915)

  STEPHEN LEACOCK: Are the Rich Happy? (DECEMBER 1915)

  SYYED SHAYKH ACHMED ABDULLAH: An Afghan in America (FEBRUARY 1916)

  ROBERT C. BENCHLEY: The Art of Being a Bohemian (MARCH 1916)

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER): Why I Haven’t Married (OCTOBER 1916)

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER): Men: A Hate Song (poetry) (FEBRUARY 1917)

  JAMES L. FORD: The Shifting Night Life of New York (FEBRUARY 1917)

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER): Actresses: A Hate Song (poetry) (MAY 1917)

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER): Relatives: A Hate Song (poetry) (AUGUST 1917)

  THE EDITORS: George Jean Nathan (NOVEMBER 1917)

  DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: From Left to Right in the Movies (JANUARY 1918)

  LIEUT. E. M. ROBERTS, R. F. C: Excursions into Hunland (MARCH 1918)

  GERTRUDE STEIN: The Great American Army (poetry) (JUNE 1918)

  ARTHUR SYMONS: The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: The Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared (OCTOBER 1918)

  DOROTHY PARKER: Our Office: A Hate Song (poetry) (MAY 1919)

  1920s

  HUGH WALPOLE: William Somerset Maugham: A Pen Portrait by a Friendly Hand (JANUARY 1920)

  A. A. MILNE: My Autobiography (JANUARY 1920)

  ROBERT E. SHERWOOD: The Higher Education on the Screen (FEBRUARY 1920)

  JOHN JAY CHAPMAN: Mr. Wilson’s Inelastic Intelligence (FEBRUARY 1920)

  THOMAS BURKE: The Lamps of Limehouse (short story) (MARCH 1920)

  RICHARD CONNELL: “Hippocketiquette” (APRIL 1920)

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY: Poems (NOVEMBER 1920)

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: This Is a Magazine (DECEMBER 1920)

  HEYWOOD BROUN: Sport for Art’s Sake (SEPTEMBER 1921)

  NOËL COWARD: Memoirs of Court Favourites (NOVEMBER 1921)

  DJUNA BARNES: James Joyce (MARCH 1922)

  CARL SANDBURG: Without the Cane and the Derby (poetry) (MAY 1922)

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (PSEUDONYM NANCY BOYD): I Like Americans—They Are So Ridiculous (poetry) (AUGUST 1922)

  JEAN COCTEAU: The Public and the Artist (OCTOBER 1922)

  RANDOLPH DINWIDDIE: The High-Low Controversy (JANUARY 1923)

  MAX JACOB: The Early Days of Pablo Picasso (MAY 1923)

  SAMUEL CHOTZINOFF: Jazz: A Brief History (JUNE 1923)

  T. S. ELIOT: Poems (JULY 1923)

  BERTRAND RUSSELL: An Essay on Behaviorism (OCTOBER 1923)

  COLETTE: The Woman Behind the Mask (short story) (NOVEMBER 1924)

  E. E. CUMMINGS: When Calvin Coolidge Laughed (APRIL 1925)

  ALDOUS HUXLEY: What, Exactly, Is Modern? (MAY 1925)

  LANGSTON HUGHES: Poems (SEPTEMBER 1925)

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT: The Education of Harpo Marx (MARCH 1926)

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON: Hello, Big Boy (JULY 1926)

  GEOFFREY KERR: A Western Reunion (short story, in telegrams) (AUGUST 1926)

  CLARENCE DARROW: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (DECEMBER 1926)

  FORD MADOX FORD: Some American Expatriates (APRIL 1927)

  WALTER LIPPMANN: Blazing Publicity (SEPTEMBER 1927)

  WALTER WINCHELL: A Primer of Broadway Slang

  (NOVEMBER 1927)

  THEODORE DREISER: Russia: The Great Experiment (JUNE 1928)

  D. H. LAWRENCE: Do Women Change? (APRIL 1929)

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT: If You Are Going to Antibes (JULY 1929)

  ALFRED H. BARR JR.: An American Museum of Modern Art (NOVEMBER 1929)

  THOMAS MANN: The Extremely Moving Pictures (DECEMBER 1929)

  1930s

  DAVID CORT: A Stock Market Post-Mortem (JANUARY 1930)

  DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR.: A Portrait of Joan Crawford (JULY 1930)

  CHARLES G. SHAW: A Close-up of Cole Porter (FEBRUARY 1931)

  JAY FRANKLIN: Twilight of the Economic Gods (APRIL 1931)

  J. M. KEYNES: Banks and the Collapse of Money Values (JANUARY 1932)

  PAUL GALLICO: The Babe (MAY 1932)

  DALTON TRUMBO: Bootlegging for Junior (JUNE 1932)

  ALVA JOHNSTON: The Jimmy Walker Era (DECEMBER 1932)

  HELEN BROWN NORDEN: When Lovely Women Stooped to the Follies (FEBRUARY 1933)

  STANLEY WALKER: The Moll in Our Midst (AUGUST 1934)

  WILLIAM SAROYAN: Little Caruso (short story) (OCTOBER 1934)

  DARWIN L. TEILHET: Tarzan—Ape-man into Industry (JANUARY 1935)

  JANET FLANNER: The Grand Guillotiner
of Paris (MAY 1935)

  THOMAS WOLFE: The Bums at Sunset (short story) (OCTOBER 1935)

  ALLENE TALMEY: Golden Swank (FEBRUARY 1936)

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  To the reader: For historical accuracy, these articles, stories, and poems retain the spellings and punctuation that appeared at the time of their initial publication in Vanity Fair.

  VANITY FAIR AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW

  GRAYDON CARTER

  When the dreariness, the madness, and, oh, the sheer tackiness of modern life get to you, isn’t it tempting to imagine a different life in a different place and period? The places and periods I go to in my mind—and I have no rational explanation for this—are invariably set in big cities in the last century: San Francisco in the sixties, Paris in the fifties, London between the wars, Los Angeles in the thirties. And for the purposes of this introduction: the New York of the twenties. New York back in those days was the fizzy incubator of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. It was the big room: Jimmy Walker was mayor; Wall Street and bootlegging were booming; jazz, modern art, and talkies were the rage; everyone—from statesmen to sandhogs—was trying to get their head around the latest theories of Freud and Einstein; and the bible for the smart set was Vanity Fair.

  It was the modern magazine during that early incarnation, from 1913 to 1936. And everybody, but everybody, wrote for it, including, in no particular order, P. G. Wodehouse, Alexander Woollcott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Noël Coward, Gertrude Stein, A. A. Milne, Stephen Leacock, Thomas Mann, Djuna Barnes, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, Walter Lippmann, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Colette, John Maynard Keynes, Ford Madox Ford, Clarence Darrow, Janet Flanner, Paul Gallico, Dalton Trumbo, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, Walter Winchell, and Douglas Fairbanks (both Sr. and Jr.).

  They were drawn to Vanity Fair by a decent word rate and by the magazine’s editor, Frank Crowninshield. He was known as Crownie to his intimates, who recognized him for his skills as a cultural clairvoyant and a taste maker. He helped launch the seminal Armory Show in 1913, which introduced avant-garde painting to America, and was a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. He would also play a significant role in the birth of what came to be known as café society, cohosting small get-togethers with Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair and Vogue. Their parties brought together the era’s brightest minds, talents, and wits, and were staged at the thirty-room penthouse apartment at 1040 Park Avenue that Crowninshield and Nast shared. (Same-sex domesticity was not uncommon back then.)

  • • •

  For twenty-two roller-coaster years, Crowninshield reveled in his singular cultural perch atop the masthead of what became the quintessential Jazz Age magazine. His Vanity Fair brimmed with groundbreaking photography and bold illustration and design. But just as important—in ample evidence here—were its sparkling essays, commentary, profiles, poetry, and fiction from many of the most forward-thinking writers of the day. Some contributors were public intellectuals (Huxley, Russell, H. L. Mencken). Others were experts in what was then experimental art and music (Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Gertrude Stein, George Jean Nathan, Virgil Thompson, Tristan Tzara, Carl Van Vechten). Still others, such as Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, John Emerson, and Donald Ogden Stewart, would go west to seek their fortune in the movie trade.

  The offices of the magazine in those days—first on fabled West Forty-fourth Street and later in the new Graybar Building, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal—reflected its editor’s eclectic tastes. Crowninshield, who had a soft spot for sleight of hand, kept a deck of cards ready for the amusement of staffers or for guests who would often pop in—Harry Houdini, say, or Charlie Chaplin. Editorial lunches with his three rising staff members, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood, consisted of eggs Benedict, kippered herring, chocolate éclairs, and café spécial.

  According to Condé Nast’s biographer Caroline Seebohm, Crownie would run the office “with the greatest informality. Actresses, models, photographers, and writers were always milling about in the reception room, under the impression that he had invited them to a personal interview. (He often had.)” On many Saturday nights, Crowninshield could be found gambling in the basement of a brownstone on East Thirty-seventh Street, where friends like Woollcott would place wagers on tiny mechanical horses that would zip around a tabletop racetrack, the random victor determined by what they called a “chance machine.”

  • • •

  Crowninshield both sought and attracted excellence. The senior editors who would pass through Vanity Fair’s doors were a storied lot: not only Parker, Benchley, and Sherwood, but also Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Clare Boothe Brokaw, a brash, young dynamo who would eventually sleep her way through much of the masthead. (She also wrote the play The Women, married Henry Luce, and became a congresswoman and a U.S. ambassador to Italy.)

  The magazine regularly predicted which cultural forces would leave a lasting mark. (To that end, I recommend the stories in this volume on Picasso, Chaplin, James Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham, Joan Crawford, Cole Porter, and Babe Ruth.) They took the pulse of the period—in real time—with an unrivaled sense of taste. The writing in Vanity Fair pushed boundaries with its muscular and often experimental prose. In examining the daunting shape of things to come, the magazine’s writers wrote about men’s rites and women’s rights, the intrusive media and exclusive bastions of the well-to-do. They questioned our destructive fascination with the entertainment industry and our addiction to organized sports. They used satire to criticize ostentation, Prohibition, marital duplicity, and the grinding new “publicity machine.” Social historian Cleveland Amory would later observe that the magazine was “as accurate a social barometer of its time as exists.” The finest pieces in the Jazz Age Vanity Fair, seventy-two of which are collected here, focus more often than not on how Americans, especially New Yorkers, in confronting the Machine Age, radical art, urbanization, Communism, Fascism, globalization (epitomized by a World War), and the battle of the sexes, were coping with the growing pains of a new phenomenon: modern life.

  1910s

  THE PHYSICAL CULTURE PERIL

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  FROM MAY 1914

  Physical culture is in the air just now. Where, a few years ago, the average man sprang from bed to bath and from bath to breakfast-table, he now postpones his onslaught on the boiled egg for a matter of fifteen minutes. These fifteen minutes he devotes to a series of bendings and stretchings which in the course of time are guaranteed to turn him into a demi-god. The advertisement pages of the magazines are congested with portraits of stern-looking, semi-nude individuals with bulging muscles and fifty-inch chests, who urge the reader to write to them for an illustrated booklet. Weedy persons, hitherto in the Chippendale class, are developing all sort of unsuspected thews, and the moderately muscular citizen (provided he has written for and obtained the small illustrated booklet) begins to have grave doubts as to whether he will be able, if he goes on at this rate, to get the sleeves of his overcoat over his biceps.

  To the superficial thinker this is all very splendid. The vapid and irreflective observer looks with approval on the growing band of village blacksmiths in our midst. But you and I, reader, shake our heads. We are uneasy. We go deeper into the matter, and we are not happy in our minds. We realize that all this physical improvement must have its effect on the soul.

  • • •

  A man who does anything regularly is practically certain to become a bore. Man is by nature so irregular that, if he takes a cold bath every day or keeps a diary every day or does physical exercises every day, he is sure to be too proud of himself to keep quiet about it. He cannot help gloating over the weaker vessels who turn on the hot tap, forget to enter anything after January the fifth, and shirk the matutinal development of their sinews. He will drag the subject into any conversation in which h
e happens to be engaged. And especially is this so as regards physical culture.

  The monotony of doing these exercises every morning is so appalling that it is practically an impossibility not to boast of having gone through with them. Many a man who has been completely reticent on the topic of his business successes and his social achievements has become a mere babbler after completing a month of physical culture without missing a day. It is the same spirit which led Vikings in the old days to burst into song when they had succeeded in cleaving some tough foeman to the chine.

  • • •

  Again, it is alleged by scientists that it is impossible for the physical culturist to keep himself from becoming hearty, especially at breakfast, in other words a pest. Take my own case. Once upon a time I was the most delightful person you ever met. I would totter in to breakfast of a morning with dull eyes, and sink wearily into a chair. There I would remain, silent and consequently inoffensive, the model breakfaster. No lively conversation from me. No quips. No cranks. No speeches beginning “I see by the paper that . . .” Nothing but silence, a soggy, soothing silence. If I wanted anything, I pointed. If spoken to, I grunted. You had to look at me to be sure that I was there. Those were the days when my nickname in the home was Little Sunshine.

  Then one day some officious friend, who would not leave well alone, suggested that I should start those exercises which you see advertised everywhere. I weakly consented. I wrote for the small illustrated booklet. And now I am a different man. Little by little I have become just like that offensive young man you see in the advertisements of the give-you-new-life kind of medicines—the young man who stands by the bedside of his sleepy friend, and says, “What! Still in bed, old man! Why, I have been out with the hounds a good two hours. Nothing tires me since I tried Peabody and Finklestein’s Liquid Radium.” At breakfast I am hearty and talkative. Throughout the day I breeze about with my chest expanded, a nuisance to all whom I encounter. I slap backs. My handshake is like the bite of a horse.