Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (3 page)

To Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, it was the flapper’s willingness to assert her own desires that made her key not only to feminism but to the larger spirit of the age. Traditional notions of reverence, obligation and prudence had been devalued by the war. As Aldous Huxley wrote to his father in late 1923, it was as though his generation had experienced a ‘violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch’.
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From one perspective that moral disruption left its survivors precariously untethered to any solid sense of principle or place. Gertrude Stein famously described them as ‘the lost generation’. Yet from another perspective this ideological weightlessness felt like liberty. It gave the young permission to turn their back on the past and focus on their own brightly lit present.

The present moment was pretty much all that Zelda Fitzgerald cared about in 1920 as she rode down 5th Avenue on the bonnet of a taxi. That and her determination to be unlike all ‘the little women’ back home in Montgomery.

Seventeen-year-old Tallulah felt much the same as she swaggered around New York, quipping, ‘I’m a lesbian, what do you do?’ So, too, did Nancy as she drank jugs of cheap white wine and courted scandal on the arm of her black lover, or Josephine as she saw her image blazoned across Paris.

All these women lived many of their private moments on the public stage. Having made their names as writers, painters or performers, as well as popular celebrities, the things they said and did, the clothes they wore, were routinely reported in the press and had a widespread impact on other women. Yet stylish, talented and extraordinary as these six were, to imagine their lives now one has to look past the glamour and glare of their fame. Often they feel closest to us when they were struggling and uncertain. None of them had role models to follow as they grappled with the implications of their independence. Their mothers and grandmothers could not advise them how to combine sexual freedom with love, or how to combine their public image with personal happiness. Tallulah and Josephine, who wanted enduring love, were duped time and again by grifters and sensation seekers, interested only in their money and their éclat. Nancy, trying to live as fearlessly and frankly as a man, was dogged with the reputation of a nymphomaniac. And while all six women attempted marriage, only Diana became adept at the compromises involved. Children were even more complicated. Tamara de Lempicka could never shake off accusations from her family that, in her determination to experience everything for the sake of her art, she had become an unnatural, even destructive mother.

By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s all six women were reaching critical points of transition in their lives. This book, too, ends on the cusp of the old and new decade. It was the point at which the experimental party spirit of the Twenties was coming into collision with economic crisis, with the extreme politics of communism and fascism and the gathering clouds of war. And just as this moment heralded the winding down of the jazz age, so too it marked the end of the flapper era. While some of that generation were settling into more traditional lives, others were simply too tired or too damaged to sustain their former momentum.

Short-lived as it seemed, however, the Twenties had created a historic shift for women. So many had tried to flex their freedom in unprecedented ways, so many had stood up against those who judged them. Some of their behaviour was self-promoting and silly – Tallulah turning cartwheels along a London pavement; Zelda throwing herself fully dressed into a fountain; some of it was destructive – Nancy breaking hearts and making herself ill as she experimented with lovers across London and Paris – but it was never less than valiant. In their various attempts to live and die in their own way, the flappers represented a genuinely subversive force. Willing to run the risks of their independence as well as enjoy its pleasures, there were good reasons for them to be perceived as women of a dangerous generation.

Chapter One

DIANA

Two months after Britain went to war against Germany Lady Diana Manners was being chauffeured across London towards Guy’s Hospital and her new vocation as a volunteer nurse. It was barely four miles from her family’s Mayfair home to the hospital in Southwark, yet Diana was conscious that, to her distraught mother sitting in the car beside her, it was a journey into the wilderness.

During tearfully protracted arguments Diana had tried to convince her mother that enlisting as a VAD (member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment) was not a lone, wilful act. Among the thousands of women who were queuing to serve their country, a number were Diana’s own friends, and some were volunteering for much more arduous duties: driving ambulances, working in munitions factories or nursing at the Front.

Yet to the Duchess of Rutland, the idea of her daughter working in one of London’s public hospitals, making tea and washing patients, was barely less squalid than her volunteering to walk the streets as a prostitute. As the family Rolls-Royce crossed Southwark Bridge and began to nose its way through grimy cobbled streets, jostled by crowds, assailed by smells from the docks and from the piles of festering rubbish, the Duchess’s worst fears seemed justified. Years later Diana could still recall the detail of that stiff, silent drive. The dark drizzle spattering against the car’s windscreen; the stricken expression on her mother’s face; the momentary faltering of her own courage as they pulled up outside the gaunt, grey façade of Guy’s.

It was not a welcoming scene. A huddle of nurses was crossing the wide courtyard, heads bowed against the blustery wind, skirts whipped around their legs. Equally drear was the expression worn by the elderly housekeeper as she opened the door and led the way silently upstairs to the room where Diana was to sleep. There was nothing as frivolous as a full-length mirror among its bare furnishings, yet as she changed into her nurse’s uniform the look in her mother’s eyes told Diana that, to the Duchess at least, she appeared hideous.

She felt guilty at the pain she was causing, but she was exhilarated, too. Even though the collar of her mauve and white striped dress was starched to a punitive stiffness and the coarse, regulation cotton felt harsh after the chiffon and silk to which she was accustomed, these discomforts brought a sense of transformation. When Diana tied her shoelaces and tightened her belt it was with the knowledge that for the first time in twenty-two years she was asserting some control over her life.

Apart from the death of her older brother Haddon when she was two, and the misery of being confined to bed when she was ten by a rare form of muscular atrophy,
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Diana had known little beyond family parties, seaside holidays and servants whilst growing up. But there were constraints as well as privileges. Her family’s expectation that she would marry into money and rank required the dowry of an unblemished reputation, and even when she regarded herself as adult, every hour of her waking life remained, theoretically, under scrutiny. She wasn’t permitted to spend a night away from home, except at the house parties of approved friends; she wasn’t supposed to walk by herself in the street, nor dine alone with a man. She’d developed a hundred ways of dodging her chaperones and keeping certain activities secret, yet such deceit had long ceased to be amusing. It was simply demeaning.

Life at Guy’s would be very hard, with long days of menial drudgery hedged around with dozens of petty restrictions. But still it spelled deliverance. Not only would Diana be living away from home for the first time, but during her precious off-duty hours she would be free to do what she wanted and see whomever she chose.

This hunger for independence was shared by many of the other 46,000 British women who signed up to become VADs,
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and by millions of others around the world. When the European powers declared war they inadvertently held out to women a momentous promise of freedom. The American journalist Mabel Potter Daggett spoke too optimistically and too soon when she declared, ‘We may write it down in history that on August 4, 1914 the door of the Doll’s House opened’, but for many that was the great expectation and the hope.
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In Britain, the flood of recruits to the Volunteer Aid Detachment was a phenomenon of enormous interest to the press, with stories and photographs of the richest and most beautiful regularly featured in society columns. And Diana would rapidly become one of the most prominent. She seemed to the public to be practically a princess, having been born to one of the oldest families in Britain (the Rutland title dated back to 1525, the Crawford title on her mother’s side to 1398), and also to one of the richest. In 1906, when her father, Sir Henry Manners, had inherited his dukedom, he took possession not only of thousands of acres of land, but of country houses, farms, coal mines and dozens of entire villages.

The idea of Diana emerging from this palatial life to nurse the poor and wounded was enormously appealing to the British, and throughout the war she was showcased in many, mistily sentimental press photos. D.W. Griffiths featured her in his 1918 propaganda film
Hearts of the World
because, he said, she was ‘the most beloved woman in England’;
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she was enshrined in a wartime adaptation of the music-hall song ‘Burlington Bertie’ with the lines, ‘I’ll eat a banana/With Lady Diana/Aristocracy working at Guys.’

Yet even more fascinating to the public than Diana’s ancestry was her life as a socialite. Ever since she had come out as a debutante in 1910, the suppers and nightclubs she attended, the outfits she wore and the amusing chitchat attributed to her were regularly reported in magazines like
The Lady
and in the gossip columns of the press. Her reputation extended far beyond London: the
Aberdeen Journal
confidently informed its readers that ‘no fancy dress ball was complete without the presence of Lady Diana’ and across the Atlantic, the
New York American
described her as a necessary embellishment to smart and artistic circles.
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Diana’s originality, her perceived cleverness and beauty were all that her mother Violet had hoped for. Despite her public commitment to family tradition, the Duchess had artistic, almost bohemian instincts, which she had passed on to her daughters. If Diana, in 1914, was restless for a life beyond her allotted destiny, it was her mother who was partly responsible.

As a young woman Violet had been a willowy beauty, the dark, pooling intensity of eyes and the pale auburn cloud of her hair lending her a dreamy, otherworldly distinction. She was sympathetic to the Aesthetic movement in dress, disdaining the elaboration of bustles and puffed sleeves for a simpler style of gown, and affecting a Romantic spontaneity, with lace scarves fluttering at her neck and wrists, posies of wild flowers pinned to her waist, the family tiara worn back to front to hold up her mass of hair. She was clever about the things that concerned her. As a key member of a group of late nineteenth-century intellectuals, nicknamed ‘the Souls’
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, Violet talked about art and berated the philistinism of the Victorian age. She was also much admired for her own amateur gifts, with several of her busts and her silver-point and pencil portraits exhibited in London galleries.

A reputation for being different, even mildly rebellious, had attached itself to her. While Violet deferred to the formal duties of a Duke’s wife, she clearly preferred intimate suppers to grand dinners and court events. More subversively still she counted actors like Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife Maud among her intimate friends. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, this was odd behaviour for a duchess. However elevated the Trees might be within their profession, they were still theatre people, whose circle had included the scandalous Oscar Wilde. Lord and Lady Salisbury, who lived one door away from the Manners’ London home, in Arlington Street, were certainly wary of moral contagion. They refused to let their children visit the house, because of the ‘foreign actresses and people like that’ who might be encountered there.
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In the raising of her three daughters – Marjorie, Violet (Letty) and Diana – Violet also raised eyebrows: she took the girls on regular trips to the London theatre and encouraged in them a precocious independence of spirit. Diana, the youngest, had been born in August 1892 and for several years had been a plain, but interestingly fanciful child. She’d imagined herself a ‘necromancer’, filling her bedroom with bottles that were ‘coloured and crusted with incandescent sediment from elixiral experiments’,
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and because her mother liked ‘only the beautiful in everything’
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she’d been encouraged in her fancies. The governesses who’d educated Diana and her sisters (their brother John was sent off to boarding school) had been instructed to skip over ‘commonplace’ subjects like mathematics and geography and focus instead on poetry, singing, embroidery and art.

History was also favoured, especially family history, and from childhood Diana’s imagination had been shaped by stories of her ancestral past and by the imposing enchantment of Belvoir Castle, the Rutland family home. From early childhood she had played among its castellated towers and labyrinthine passage-ways, its vaulted roomfuls of Gobelin tapestries and Dutch paintings.
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She had grown up inside a privileged kingdom, buffered by centuries of entitlement. And despite the romantic informality of Violet’s influence, the amateur theatricals she organized, the artistic guests she entertained, Diana and her siblings knew both the glamour and the burden of feeling themselves to be a breed apart.

By the time she approached her fourteenth birthday Diana had developed into a pretty, spirited teenager, and the clarity of her pale skin and large blue eyes promised she might even become beautiful. That summer she was invited to holiday in Norfolk with the Beerbohm Trees and their three daughters; to her joy, a group of Oxford students were also staying in the same village. Maud and Herbert tolerantly gave permission for shared suppers and picnics, and for three weeks Diana revelled in the company of these clever, good-looking boys. There were games, quizzes and flirtations, during which she ‘showed off madly’, and she slipped out to the chemist for a bottle of peroxide to bleach her hair a silvery gold. Even though she felt she was ‘spinning plates’ in her desperate need to impress, she knew that among these boys she had found her métier.