In 1923 a young American actor named Tallulah Bankhead became the most sensational star of the London stage. Having persuaded the actor and manager Gerald du Maurier to give her a leading role in his new production, The Dancers, she quickly attracted a devoted following of young female fans. These "gallery girls" saw the independent, smart-talking, cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking Bankhead as the epitome of the new sort of modern woman. And when, to du Maurier's horror, the actor shingled her long hair, her admirers followed suit. Some even cut off their long locks during the performance, flinging the shorn curls down from the gallery as Bankhead took her curtain call. When she appeared on stage, they'd cry, "Hallelujah Tallulah, our wonderful Tallulah!" Bankhead was the ultimate flapper, and her fans adored her for it.
Judith Mackrell's hugely entertaining, sometimes frustrating new book tells not only Bankhead's story but also those of five other women who epitomised the spirit of the 1920s. There's Bankhead's equally outrageous childhood friend Zelda FitzGerald, whose own dreams of self-expression were never really fulfilled. There's the rebellious heiress Nancy Cunard, who became a champion of the avant-garde. There's the socialite turned actor Diana Manners, whose beauty and aristocratic background made her a celebrity before her marriage to the future politician Duff Cooper. There's the Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka, who fled revolutionary Russia for France, where her lifestyle was just as luxurious and glamorous as her painting. And, last but not least, there is Josephine Baker, the girl from the St Louis ghetto whose astonishing dancing and cheeky charm made her the toast of Paris.
These six women led lives that would have been unimaginable for women of their mothers' generation. Dorothy Parker's satirical 1922 poem The Flapper began with a reminder of the dramatic new generation gap: "The playful flapper here we see / The fairest of the fair / She's not what Grandma used to be / You might say, au contraire."
The rule-breaking, jazz-loving, giddily apolitical flapper was a product of her era. She was an archetype created by consumerism, mass media, women’s suffrage, changes in fashion, technological developments and, most of all, the rapid social change caused by the war, including women’s increased economic independence.
And as such, as Mackrell points out in her insightful introduction, the flapper was a subversive force. “Given the terrible decimation of Britain’s young men during the war, newspapers also bristled with warnings of the destabilising effect these flappers might have on the country, as an unprecedented generation of unmarried and independent women appeared to be hell-bent on having their own way.”
Mackrell’s subjects managed to have their own way, up to a point, and their stories make for gripping reading. Mackrell vividly re-creates the heady, exciting atmosphere in which they lived, a world of new sexual and emotional possibilities. As well as embarking on extramarital relationships with men, many of these women also had affairs with women; the teenage Bankhead would introduce herself at parties with the words, “I’m a lesbian. What do you do?”
Josephine Baker, meanwhile, discovered a new freedom once she left the segregated US – though, as Mackrell shows, even in relatively liberated Paris black women and men were fetishised by their white peers.
When asked about her hopes for her daughter’s future, Zelda FitzGerald declared that she didn’t want little Scottie to be a genius. “I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful.”
But in the end that wasn’t enough for FitzGerald herself, and the book shows that despite the many new freedoms of this generation they were still limited by their gender and the time in which they lived. As Mackrell points out, their freedom from precedent might have been liberating, but it also meant that these pioneers lacked role models and support as they attempted to create a new way of living. Nancy Cunard ended up estranged from her family as a result of her rebellion; FitzGerald died in a mental hospital.
Despite the book's title it's not clear how all of Mackrell's subjects fit the flapper archetype that she describes in her introduction. Does Diana Manners, a woman born in 1892, and who was at her most rebellious and flamboyant before and during the first World War, count as a flapper? Not really, unless a flapper is any vaguely rebellious woman under the age of 40 who drank a cocktail in the 1920s. Cunard was surely more intellectual than flapper, contributing to poetry anthologies edited by Edith Sitwell, publishing Beckett and Pound in her own small press and, ultimately, becoming a political activist. And although she may have been a sexual rebel and a serious contributor to the visual iconography of the age, Tamara de Lempicka's heavy glamour was at odds with the giddy spirit of flapperdom.
While all the women in the book are products of their time, not all 1920s women were flappers. The book’s title feels a little tacked on, as if in an attempt to fit a recognisably 1920s brand. And Mackrell doesn’t always manage her large cast of characters as well as she might, with some people being introduced with so little explanation that I had to check the index in case I’d somehow missed their first appearance. But Mackrell has some fascinating stories to tell, and she tells them with compassion and skill. And in bringing these fascinating, often maddening women back to life, she reminds today’s women that our own lives would be very different without the trails their generation blazed. Hallellujah, Tallulah!
Anna Carey's debut novel, The Real Rebecca, won the senior children's book prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. Her third book, Rebecca Rocks, will be published in August.
