Flapper (14 page)

The year before, following a brief stint as a low-level copywriter at
Vogue
and several failed stabs at a stage career, Long had stumbled her way into Dorothy Parker’s old job as theater critic at
Vanity Fair.
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But she was better known as a girl about town. Living in a cramped apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side, Long and her roommate, the actress Kay Francis, threw exclusive soirees and passed their evenings gliding from one smart nightclub to another.

What she had to offer Ross’s magazine was her lifestyle. Like tens of thousands of other single young women in Manhattan, she was living high in the Jazz Age. Unlike most of those women, she was armed with a keen eye for detail, a wicked sense of humor, and razor-sharp prose.

A contemporary described Long as “exceptionally well-constructed, tall, and dark-haired.
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She had striking features embellished by violet-gray eyes.… She had energy in abundance. Her movements and her conversation were supercharged. She could have modeled for Miss Jazz Age.” In an Edward Steichen photograph snapped sometime in the early 1920s, Long struck a fetching pose, with jet black hair bobbed to perfection just above her ears, a thin strand of pearls dangling from her neck, the corners of her mouth turned upward to reveal a wide, toothy grin, a pencil pushed gently to her lips. She smoked; she drank; she stayed out all night. She worked for her own money and made no apologies for her lifestyle. She was the very embodiment of the New Woman. Or so
The New Yorker
would claim.

Long had been earning $35 a week at
Vanity Fair.
Ross hired her away at $50—later raised to $75—to pen a regular column on New York nightlife.
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Essentially, Long would be the magazine’s resident flapper journalist. Writing under the pseudonym “Lipstick,” she continued her long nights of drinking, dining, and dancing—all on the magazine’s expense account—and regaled her captive readers with weekly tales of her adventures on the town. She became one of America’s most insightful chroniclers of the new, middle-class woman who seemed to embody the flapper’s spirit and style.

On a typical evening, just as the late-night crowd began crawling out of the midtown theaters and restaurants, amid the glow of electric streetlights and the steady din of car horns and subway rumbles, Long and her friends would catch a taxicab, “start at ‘21,’ and go on to Tony’s after ‘21’ closed.” Both venues were tucked away on West Fifty-second Street, just minutes from the
New Yorker
’s offices. Occupying an entire mansion, Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns’s “21” skirted the city’s strict curfew laws, which mandated a two a.m. closing time, by incorporating itself as a “private club,” complete with rooms specially fitted for pedestrian delights like Ping-Pong, mah-jongg, and backgammon.

In reality, anyone with the right connections or calling card could breeze past the winding row of live porters and black lawn-jockey statues that stood guard before the heavy, brass-studded doors of “21.” The club advertised “luncheon at twelve” and “tea at four and until closing.” Lois Long and her friends didn’t go for the tea. “Drinks were a dollar twenty-five,” she explained years later.
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“We thought brandy was the only safe thing to drink, because, we were told, a bootlegger couldn’t fake the smell and taste of cognac.”

Like most other club owners, Jack and Charlie paid a small fortune in protection money to the police, but for contingency purposes—in case an overzealous city commissioner decided it was time to crack down on vice just before a round of municipal elections—the club’s rich stock of wine, champagne, and hard liquor was well hidden behind a faux brick wall that sprang open when the owners inserted a specially fitted wire into a certain crack in the mortar.
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After cavorting at “21,” Long and her friends often made their way uptown to Harlem, the storied center of black cultural life in 1920s New York, which was also a popular nighttime draw among middle-class white New Yorkers. Often, Long and her entourage would arrive uptown after three a.m. and stumble home well after the stock exchange bell sounded the opening of business.
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Incredibly, she stuck to this routine almost every night. And she developed a titanium tolerance for liquor. “If you could make it to the ladies’ room before throwing up,” she chortled, you were “thought to be good at holding your liquor.… It was customary to give two
dollars to the cab driver if you threw up in his cab.”
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Which happened from time to time.

At the
New Yorker
’s ragtag headquarters, with papers, magazines, and metal filing cabinets strewn about as if at random, where writers were always coming and going, where confusion reigned supreme, and where staff members habitually pilfered one another’s desks, typewriters, and office supplies, Long quickly emerged as a commanding presence. She wasn’t above sauntering into work at three or four in the morning when, remarkably, even at that late (or early) hour there were always editors still laboring away over their manuscripts.

Fresh from a night on the town, dressed to the nines, and flush from hours of heavy drinking, Long managed consistently to leave the key to her enclosed cubicle at home and amused her colleagues by kicking off her heels, climbing in stocking feet onto the doorknob of her workstation, and hoisting herself over the demipartition wall.
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In hot weather, she’d casually strip down to her slip and clack away at her typewriter.

Because its offices were interspersed among several levels of a building owned by Raoul Fleischmann, Ross’s wealthy friend and founding publisher of
The New Yorker
, Long and her assistant were initially installed at opposite ends of the floor. After weeks of collaborating by telephone, to the amusement of everyone but Harold Ross, they donned roller skates and whirled back and forth between their desks, bobbing and weaving between overstuffed trash cans, abandoned cigarette stubs, and small mounds of stray pencil shavings. Finally, out of pure exasperation, Ross moved them both to a vacant restroom.

Many years later, another staff member evoked a disparaging image of Lois Long, seated before her typewriter “in her Lilly Daché hats, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, laughing at her own jokes as she banged them out for her column.”
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The problem with this picture—one that probably held as true for 1925 as for 1968, when Long was closing her lengthy career at
The New Yorker—
is that her writing
was
funny.

“I always miss all the real excitement,” she typically complained, “
and it isn’t fair.
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Here I go plodding around, in my conscientious, girlish way, to all kinds of places at all hours of the night with escorts only reasonably adept at the art of bar-room fighting, and nothing ever happens to me.… I was at the Owl on Saturday and on Tuesday, and what did the nasty gunmen do but hold the place up on Monday night. It simply isn’t fair.… All in all, I feel very badly about the whole thing.”

Laced with precisely this sort of dry humor, the typical installment of “Tables for Two,” Long’s weekly column, brilliantly captured the distinctive sound and feel of the Jazz Age in all its frivolity, bluster, and melodrama.

“Just before staging a complete collapse, with definite indications of rigor mortis, galloping Charleston, and the chronic mirages of a home in the country,” Long wrote in one of her early columns, “I wish to go on record as saying that, everything considered, this HAS been a week!
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”

From attending the debut of County Fair—a popular theme club on East Ninth Street, decorated in gold and scarlet and featuring authentic grandstand boxes doubling for booths, a dance floor encircled by a white picket fence, and kiddie cars drawn straight from an honest-to-God state fairgrounds—to the opening on election night of the Nineteenth Hole Club—another theme venue, fashioned after a golf course—to afternoon tea dancing at the Lorraine Grill—an old standard, but a disappointment, as “the old place is not the same,” too many “middle-aged businessmen amusing themselves between leaving the office and catching the 6:35 for New Rochelle”—Lipstick gave her readers a bird’s-eye view of a week in the life of the New Woman.

Or did she? As a magazine writer earning upward of $3,900 per year, Long fell comfortably in the upper middle class and belonged to an elite 14 percent of women workers who were professionals. Hers was an uncommon experience.

Most working women in the 1920s toiled at less glamorous and remunerative jobs—nearly a third as domestic servants, the rest as clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks, and farmers.
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They sweated behind department store counters, typewriters, and sewing
machines; they earned lower wages than men who did the same work (saleswomen earned less than half of what salesmen brought home); and they faced grim prospects for career advancement.
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Yet by the end of the 1920s, almost four of every ten working women qualified as white-collar. Their jobs demanded that they dress fashionably, groom themselves carefully, and stay abreast of aesthetic and cultural trends. At ornate department stores, downtown law firms, advertising agencies, and government offices, they brushed shoulders with professional men (and some professional women) and learned to identify as middle class, even when the cost of a middle-class lifestyle far outstripped their salaries.

In short, though few women in the 1920s lived like Lois Long, increasing numbers of them encountered her image every day at the office, in magazine advertisements, and on the silver screen. Flapperdom was every bit as much an expression of class aspirations as it was a statement of personal freedom.

Americans in the 1920s found creative ways to circumvent Prohibition.

10
G
IRLISH
D
ELIGHT
IN
B
ARROOMS

I
F
L
OIS
L
ONG’S
charmed life in Manhattan was at once iconic and unusual, by mid-decade Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were leading an astonishing existence.

In 1923, Scott earned the whopping sum of $28,754.78—equal to about $300,000 in today’s money—but still managed to overspend by $7,000 (roughly $75,000 in twenty-first-century dollars).
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Despite the high fees he earned for articles like “Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss If the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?” and “Does a Moment of Revolt Come Some Time to Every Married Man?” Scott and Zelda simply couldn’t keep pace with their insatiable appetite for good food, good liquor, and good times.

In a moment of financial desperation and self-deprecation, Scott even resorted to writing a satirical piece for
The Saturday Evening Post
entitled “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”

“Our garage is a large bare room whither I now retired with pencil, paper, and oil stove,” he reported, “emerging the next afternoon at five o’clock with a 7,000-word story. That was something; it would pay the rent and last month’s overdue bills. It took twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class, but within that time we had paid back our debts, and the cause for immediate worry was over.”

Scott was only half in jest. In a decade that witnessed a virtual explosion
in consumer credit and spending, the Fitzgeralds were poster children for material excess and indulgence.

They didn’t seem too embarrassed by it, either. “I wanted to find out where the $36,000 had gone,” Scott told readers.
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“Thirty-six thousand is not very wealthy—not yacht-and-Palm-Beach wealthy—but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36,000 had bought nothing at all.”

In fact, Scott knew exactly where the money had gone, since he kept meticulous household budgets. A typical month’s expenses included $80 for “house liquor” and $100 for “wild parties”—together equivalent to almost $2,000 in today’s money—and $276 in “miscellaneous cash.”

Perhaps out of economic necessity, and surely craving the adventure of a foreign excursion, in the summer of 1924 Scott and Zelda set sail for the French Riviera.

However high they had climbed the social ladder in the United States, the Fitzgeralds were relative provincials among the more seasoned American expats who converged on France in the interwar years. During their first week in Paris, they accidentally bathed young Scottie in the bidet and got her violently ill on a gin fizz, thinking it was lemonade.
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