Flapper (41 page)

Others had tried and failed. Who would have thought it would be those Warner Brothers—Harry, Sam, Jack, and Albert—who would figure out how to synchronize sound and film? The Warner brothers were about as dysfunctional a family as ever existed. Harry had once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, threatening to kill him. They were anything but professionals. But they’d just rendered every other studio obsolete. Overnight.

Thousands of nervous film stars lined up to take voice tests. Would they pass muster? Were they washed up, finished, kaput? Clara Bow and Colleen Moore soldiered on. They made a few talkies—and not bad ones at that. Clara even starred in a film with Kay Francis, Lois Long’s former New York City roommate.

But their careers never survived into the new decade. It wasn’t so much that the talkies killed them. More likely, the 1930s killed the public’s taste for actresses typecast as flappers.

Facing more sober times, as well as mounting pressure from the
decency lobby, the big film studios voluntarily cleaned up their act, adopted Will Hays’s Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, and banished sexual themes and imagery from the silver screen. It would be another thirty years before Hollywood would so freely depict carnal desire.

C
LARA’S GOOD LUCK
ran out early on.
¹
Too trusting, too eager for affirmation, she lavished much of her income on hangers-on, including her father, who squandered more than his share on a string of bad business deals. Her affair with a married man ended in an embarrassing public scandal when his wife sued Clara for damages. Clara settled out of court, but Paramount seized her escrow account of $55,000 and counting, citing noncompliance with the morality clause in her contract.

Things got worse in 1931 when her former secretary, Daisy De Voe, went on trial for stealing large sums of Clara’s jewelry and cash. As a parting shot, De Voe published a book chronicling Clara’s alleged sexual exploits. All of Hollywood was agog. Rumor even had it that the flapper queen had entertained the entire University of Southern California football team in her bedroom. It wasn’t true. But it didn’t matter. B. P. Schulberg called her “crisis-a-day Clara” and fired her from Paramount.

Troubles at work meant troubles at home. A series of well-publicized mental breakdowns ensued. With a mother and grandmother who had died in an insane asylum, Clara feared that she, too, would end her days in an institution.

Things improved in 1931 when she married Rex Bell, a cowboy film star who treated her well and fathered her two children. They lived in seclusion on a ranch in Nevada. Rex became the state’s lieutenant governor. Though she tried several times to make a comeback on the silver screen, Clara Bow’s career finally came to a halt in the mid-thirties. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Clara battled severe depression and began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia.

In the late 1940s, she began an intense course of psychotherapy at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. There she unbottled a number of long-repressed childhood memories, including the knowledge
that her father raped her repeatedly when she was a young girl. In the years that followed, Clara withdrew from therapy and moved to a small two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles. She rarely left the house.

Rex died on the ranch in Nevada, alone. A few years later, in 1965, Clara passed away at her small hideaway in Culver City.

“Miss Bow,” someone once asked her, “when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”

Clara could only shrug. “I ain’t real sure.”

C
OLLEEN
M
OORE’S LIFE
took a happier turn. Though she continued to make films until 1934—even playing opposite Spencer Tracy in
The Power and the Glory
, which she regarded as the best film she ever made—Colleen’s public wanted her “to go on being a wide-eyed, innocent little girl.”

“I was too old for that,” she later wrote, “—and too tired of it in any case.”

Colleen’s marriage to John McCormick—unsteady from the start because of John’s tendency to disappear on two-week benders—ended in divorce. A second marriage also fell apart.

The punishing routine she had kept for over ten years in the film industry—eighteen-hour workdays, constant travel, a fish-bowl existence—left her exhausted and yearning for a simpler life. In the late 1930s, Colleen married Homer Hargrave, a wealthy Chicago financier. She invested her film earnings in the market and made a killing. Then she wrote a book that instructed ordinary people on how to do the same. She rented out her Hollywood mansion and later sold it, preferring to reinvent herself as a devoted Chicago wife and stepmother to Hargrave’s children.

Late in life, she wrote a lively account of her years in Hollywood.

If the crash ruined the fortunes of many a famous flapper, Colleen weathered the storm with anonymity and good cheer. “You just can’t live comfortably on less than $2 million,” she told an acquaintance.

She died in 1988, a wealthy and content woman.

U
NLIKE
C
OLLEEN
M
OORE
, Louise Brooks despised Hollywood from the start. She had never intended to be an actress, much less a
film star. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked.
²
“And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.”

This wasn’t the sort of attitude that was going to help Louise win friends and influence people in the rough-and-tumble world of studio politics. Still, when Paramount geared up in 1928 to make the transition to talkies and renegotiated the contracts of its major stars, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary. No raise, but no pay cut, either. “You can stay on at $750 per week or leave,” he told her.

Louise stunned Schulberg—and the entire film industry—by walking away. She was tired of Hollywood and of making less than Clara Bow and Colleen Moore.

Instead, she traveled to Berlin, where the German director G. W. Pabst recruited her to play the lead role in his pioneering work,
Pandora’s Box.
It was arguably the last great film of the silent era, and it was her finest part ever. But the critics panned it. Louise stayed in Europe to shoot another film with Pabst and several more in England. Then she ran out of money. She crawled back to California on her knees.

But by the time she returned to Hollywood in 1930, Louise was persona non grata. Paramount blacklisted her on the grounds that she still owed the studio a film. For a time, there was talk of a contract with Columbia Pictures, but nothing ever came of it. Friends helped her secure a few minor parts here and there. By 1938, however, it was obvious that her film career was over. She moved back to Wichita and operated a dance studio for a few years. Then she returned to New York and worked behind the sales counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, picking up occasional voice-over work for radio soap operas.

Finally, she got desperate. For a time in the 1940s, she worked on
and off for a high-priced escort service. For solace, she turned to liquor and pills.

Salvation came in the 1950s when film buffs, now inured to the talkies and in search of the industry’s avant-garde past, rediscovered the silent era. In 1955, Cinémathèque Française featured Brooks in an exhibit entitled “Sixty Years of Cinema.” The following year, with few other prospects, she accepted an invitation to move to Rochester, New York, where she began a new career as a film historian at the Eastman House. Her writing appeared in several important journals and earned acclaim for its brisk style and trenchant analysis of old Hollywood.

By 1979, when Kenneth Tynan revisited her early career in the pages of
The New Yorker—
his article was entitled, simply, “The Girl in the Black Helmet”—Louise had been canonized as one of the most brilliant and sexually alluring figures of the silent film era. Yet personal happiness eluded her. Louise’s two marriages ended in divorce. A born loner, she retreated from old friends and family in later years as her health faded.

Louise Brooks died alone at her house in Rochester in 1985. She was seventy-eight years old.

L
IFE TREATED
L
OIS
Long somewhat more kindly. Harold Ross’s bad-girl columnist carried on as the
New Yorker
’s in-house fashion columnist until 1970, when she retired to a farm in Pennsylvania.

Her work continued to set new standards for fashion commentary. William Shawn, who followed Harold Ross as editor of the magazine, believed that Long was “the first American fashion critic to approach fashion as an art and to criticize women’s clothes with independence, intelligence, humor, and literary style.” All of which was true. Yet after the 1920s, Long lost her place in the elite circle of
New Yorker
staff writers.

The magazine matured slowly from its origins as a lighthearted journal of urban “sophistication” and humor into a serious outlet for political discourse, biography, poetry, and cultural commentary. Lois Long never made the parallel journey. Her writing was still crisp and
irreverent, but it was eclipsed by works of greater and more lasting import.

Lois Long and Peter Arno had a daughter together but divorced in 1931. Other staff members couldn’t help but notice that Lois sometimes came to work with black-and-blue marks on her arms and bruises on her face. She never discussed the matter, but few of her colleagues were surprised. Arno’s temper was as famous as his wit.

When she died in July 1974 at the age of seventy-three,
The New York Times
accidentally ran a picture of the wrong person next to her obituary. The last laugh was on Lois Long. She would have approved.

O
VER THE COURSE
of her long career as a fashion journalist, Long had plenty of occasion to cover the new spring lines at the House of Chanel. As she could have testified, Coco’s reputation as a leading innovator of women’s couture and accessories hardly diminished. In 1922, she launched Chanel No. 5—known as much for its distinctive bottle as for its scent. The thirties saw her refine the signature Chanel style: Hemlines dropped and waistlines crept up. But the fundamental idea behind Chanel’s designs—comfort and elegance for the New Woman—remained the same.

In 1939, the House of Chanel turned out an evening dress in ivory cotton organdy, with red, white, and blue embroidery—part of her “tricolor” collection celebrating French nationalism. The piece was uncharacteristically mawkish, but with Western Europe besieged by the Axis threat, the times seemed to call for such a design.

Two years later, with Nazi Germany firmly in control of northern France and a puppet government installed in the south, Coco did as she always did—she cozied up to power. Indeed, shortly after the war, when a British MI6 agent interrogated Walter Schellenberg, an SS officer and top aide to Heinrich Himmler, the resulting interrogation report revealed that Coco, who was then in her late fifties, and Schellenberg, who was in his early thirties, spent the war years as lovers. Chanel used her connection to Schellenberg to keep her residence at the Ritz, which housed ranking Nazi officials stationed in Paris. Schellenberg, in turn, used Chanel in an ill-fated effort to reach a détente with the British government.

Because Coco enjoyed close ties to Winston Churchill and to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, both of whom harbored pro-Nazi sympathies, Schellenberg hoped she might be useful in forcing a regime change in London and drawing Britain out of the war. At the behest of her Nazi patrons, Coco even embarked on a bizarre and unsuccessful peace mission to England.

In the days following the liberation of Paris, Coco was arrested and released by French gendarmes. She fled the country before she could be subjected to formal charges and trial—and before she could be rounded up with hundreds of other “horizontal collaborators,” shaved bald, and paraded through the streets. Instead, she spent the better part of ten years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland.

Exile, however, did not suit Coco. In 1954, she staged a dramatic comeback, reclaiming her place as the world’s leading designer of haute couture. Much as she had given the New Woman jersey and tweed, she now gave the New Woman’s granddaughter pea jackets and bell-bottoms.

Coco was in her studio, hard at work, when she died in 1971. She never married.

Shortly after World War I, Boy Capel—the great love of Coco’s life—wed another woman. Months later, he died in a car crash in southern France. Coco drove to the site of the accident and wept.

In 1926, she introduced the “little black dress.” She told close friends that she had put the whole world in mourning for Boy.

T
HE OTHERS GOT
on with their lives, too. John Held lost a fortune on the stock market and several wives to his own weird capriciousness.

Oh! Margy!
didn’t make much sense in the postflapper world, but still he managed to scratch out a respectable living as a gentleman farmer in New Jersey and an occasional contributor to magazines and newspapers.

He died in 1958 of throat cancer, just as he was on the verge of being rediscovered by a generation of art critics who had been too young to appreciate his work when it first appeared.

Gordon Conway married and divorced. Then, strangely, for reasons no one ever really understood, she withdrew in the 1930s from
the world of commercial art. After a long but happy retirement, she died on her farm in Virginia in 1956, at the age of sixty-one.

In 1937, Bruce Barton, the adman who gave new meaning to the works of Jesus Christ, won a special election to Congress from New York’s silk stocking district. He served three years in Washington before going down to defeat in an ill-fated U.S. Senate race in 1940. Along with his House colleagues Joseph Martin and Hamilton Fish, his outspoken opposition to American involvement in World War II earned him the opprobrium of Franklin Roosevelt, who delighted crowds with scathing references to the apocryphal firm of “Martin, Barton & Fish.”