Flapper (8 page)

Second, as America’s industrial economy grew more advanced, a great demand arose for managers, scientists, engineers, clerks, lawyers, salespeople, and other service-sector employees. These jobs required years of education and training.

Parents who took these trends into account had fewer children, which allowed them to invest more time and resources in their small families.

In subtle ways, this trend also helped ignite a sexual revolution. After all, in an emerging industrial society where it paid to have fewer children, men and women were free to redefine sex not merely as something procreative, but as a legitimate and pleasurable activity within marriage. From this discovery, it might take only a small leap of faith to conceive of sex as a legitimate activity
outside
marriage.

At first glance, the declining birthrate should have made young people
less
visible by the 1920s, since the twenty-five-and-under age group accounted for an ever smaller portion of the American population. But the demographic trends had the reverse effect. As the average household size fell, adults were free to lavish more time and attention on their small families. Whereas teenagers were formerly thrown into the world of work at the earliest possible age, now they lived at home into their teens and twenties.
²⁰
Smaller families also created a narrower age gap between first- and last-born children; this trend, in turn, meant that children shared more in common with one another than with their parents.

Contributing to the growing consciousness of youth was the need for a literate and educated workforce, which created a boom in secondary and higher education. Between 1900 and 1930, America’s
college enrollments increased threefold and high school attendance jumped by a whopping 650 percent; this meant that by the 1920s, about 75 percent of teenagers attended at least some high school, while at any given moment 20 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary education.
²¹
The result was the emergence of a vibrant and highly visible youth culture where none had really existed before.

As the Lynds observed of their time in Muncie, “High school, with its athletic clubs, sororities and fraternities, dances and parties, and ‘extracurricular activities,’ is a fairly complete social cosmos in itself.…
²²
 Today the school is becoming not a place to which children go from their homes for a few hours daily but a place from which they go home to eat and sleep.”

As teenagers and twentysomethings spent more time with one another and less time with adults, there emerged a fascination with the new youth culture. One young woman complained that “this tremendous interest in the younger generation is nothing more nor less than a preoccupation with the nature of that generation’s sex life,” and in some respects, she was right.
²³

Now that they were spending so much time together, young men and women were apt to experiment more freely with sex and romance. Back in the old days, one parent remembered, “we all went to parties together and came home together. If any couple did pair off, they were considered rather a joke.”
²⁴
Those days were long gone. In Muncie, nearly half the boys in the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, and about a third of girls,
admitted
to attending “petting parties.”
²⁵
Another study of 177 college women found that 92 percent acknowledged “petting” or “spooning.”
²⁶

However liberating they might have found the new sexual ethic, young women of the twenties found that the old double standard still applied, and it was they who provoked the greater portion of scorn and blame.

“Girls aren’t so modest nowadays; they dress differently,” complained one mother.
²⁷
“It’s the girls clothing,” another agreed. “We can’t keep our boys decent when girls dress that way.” “Last summer six girls organized a party and invited six boys and they never got home
until three in the morning,” a concerned parent told the Lynds. “Girls are always calling my boys up trying to make dates with them.”

Mrs.
²⁸
George Rose, an itinerant evangelist, warned parents in Butte, Montana, that “modern fashions, exposed necks, bare arms, yes, even exposed legs … you say they are worn innocently, with no thought of appeal to the lust of men. I wish I could think that this were so.”

Throughout the early twenties, Scott Fitzgerald proved an avid observer of social trends and a cagey student of marketing strategy. He and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, had cleverly billed
This Side of Paradise
as “A Novel About Flappers Written for Philosophers,” a line that Scribner’s incorporated into its advertisements for the book.
²⁹
Building on this theme, in September 1920 Scribner’s published a collection of Scott’s short stories under the title
Flappers and Philosophers.
Scott confided to Max Perkins that he thought the volume sold well in bookstores because of the “timelessness” of its title.
³⁰

In fact, Scott had it wrong. The title wasn’t timeless. It was timely.

In dozens of well-placed interviews and column items, with titles like “Fitzgerald, Flappers and Fame” and “This Is What Happens to Naughty Flappers,” Scott positioned himself as an expert on young American women.
³¹
Magazine writers could hardly help noting that “insomuch as he is strictly responsible for the introduction into this country of a new and devastating type of girl whose movements, thoughts and actions—to say nothing of deeds—have become matters of international importance … anything Mr. Fitzgerald might have to say on the subject … would be worth hearing.”
³²

“I sometimes wonder whether the flapper made me or I made her,” Scott admitted in a moment of candor.
³³

Later in life, Scott noted with bemusement that he was essentially “pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that movement.” He and Zelda spent the better part of the decade being “quoted on a variety of subjects we knew nothing about.”
³⁴

This was just a little bit disingenuous. Almost everything Scott did or said was calculated to achieve maximum effect—even when he denied any expertise on the flapper. “I wish to state publicly that I
cannot understand why, whenever the word flapper is mentioned, my name should be dragged headlong into the conversation,” he protested halfheartedly.
³⁵
“I know nothing about flappers. The idea that I am in any way interested in the number of knees on exhibition at the Biltmore lobby is extremely distasteful to me. You’d think I invented bobbed knees. I deny it.”

On other occasions, when asked to comment on whether the “flapper craze [was] passing,” Scott eagerly reassumed his familiar role of cultural savant and insisted, “I don’t think it is.… The flapper is growing stronger than ever; she gets wilder all the time. …
³⁶
 She is continuously seeking for something new to increase her store of experience. She still is looking for new conventions to break—for new thrills, for sensations to add zest to life, and she is growing more and more terrible.”

When asked whether his books had created the flapper phenomenon, Scott “smiled a bit ruefully” and slipped into a long discourse on women’s suffrage, women in English literature, Sigmund Freud, and regional differences among American girls.

“The younger generation has been changing all thru the last twenty years,” he told an interviewer. “Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm, and piquant cleverness.” With every bit of confidence he could muster as a twenty-four-year-old connoisseur, Scott explained that “all, or nearly all, the famous men and women of history—the kind who left a lasting mark—were, let us say, of broad moral views.
³⁷
Our generation has absorbed all this.”

Within two years of his first major publication, Scott’s role in popular culture was so well-defined that readers of
Life
magazine surely got a knowing chuckle out of Dorothy Parker’s whimsical poem “The Flapper.”
³⁸

She nightly knocks for many a goal
The usual dancing men.
Her speed is great, but her control
Is something else again.
All spotlights focus on her pranks.
All tongues her prowess herald.
For which she may well render thanks
to God and Scott Fitzgerald.

Appropriately, Scott Fitzgerald and America were both still in their early twenties when his star was on the rise. All that remained was to win the one prize that still eluded him. In his greatest deed of literary license, Scott would turn Zelda into the prototype of the American flapper, all in the service of wedding her future to his.

Lillian Gish observed that the Fitzgeralds “didn’t make the twenties; they were the twenties.”

5
D
OING
I
T
FOR
E
FFECT

L
OOKING BACK ON
that momentous afternoon in September 1919, Scott Fitzgerald would remember that he “ran along the streets, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it—my novel
This Side of Paradise
was accepted for publication. That week the postman rang, I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise.”
¹

The dispatch that changed Scott’s life read, simply, “I am very glad, personally, to be able to write you that we are all for publishing your book.… [It] is so different that it is hard to prophesy how it will sell but we are all for taking a chance. …
²
”

In his early letters to “Mr. Perkins”—F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, the most celebrated writer-editor team in American history, wouldn’t graduate to “Scott” and “Max” for some time—Fitzgerald betrayed a sense of urgency about seeing the book to print. “Terms, etc.
³
, I leave to you,” he told Perkins after receiving his acceptance letter, “but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book by Xmas—or, say, by February? I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl.…”

It had been months since Scott and Zelda had exchanged words. “During a long summer of despair,” he later explained, “I wrote a novel instead of letters.”
⁴
Confined by his own will to the makeshift
den in his parents’ attic on Summit Avenue, gazing out the window at the tops of the trees, Scott surely let his vivid imagination run wild as the months slipped by. Zelda had a casual enough relationship with fidelity in good times; now, with their engagement broken and a thousand miles of Middle America separating them, God only knew what she was up to.

When at last he wrote with his good news and they resumed their correspondence, Zelda once again showed her deft hand at provocation. “I’m mighty glad you’re coming,” she assured him, “—I’ve been wanting to see you (which you probably knew) but I couldn’t
ask
you.”
⁵
Scott’s timing was impeccable, in fact, since she was “just recovering from a wholesome amour with Auburn’s ‘starting quarter-back,’ so my disposition is excellent as well as my health.” Zelda asked Scott to pick up a quart of gin on his way to Montgomery, as she professed to have been on the wagon all summer. In any event, Scott was “already
ruined
along alcoholic lines with Mrs. Sayre.”

Scott waited until November, when he had sold some short stories for publication, before visiting Zelda in Montgomery. The combination of old passion and new success proved a winning formula, as the couple reaffirmed their engagement and reconsummated their affair.

January found Scott renting a small room in a New Orleans boardinghouse, where he continued to churn out material for
The Saturday Evening Post
and make weekend visits to Alabama. When Metro Pictures optioned “Head and Shoulders” for $2,500—it was an O’Henry-like tale of a serious young scholar who marries a sexually adventurous chorus girl, only to find his own intellectual career in shambles and his wife transformed overnight into a literary sensation—Scott used part of the windfall to buy a $600 platinum-and-diamond watch for Zelda. “O, Scott, it’s so be-au-ti-ful,” she crowed, “—and the back’s just as pretty as the front.… 
⁶
 I’ve turned it over four hundred times to see ‘from Scott to Zelda.’ ”