1924 article: Decent Girls Plea for Chance Against Flappers

Came across this clipping while looking through microfilm and thought everyone might enjoy it. The article dates from 1924.

Louise Brooks and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is all the rage. So now might be a good time to look at Louise Brooks' connections with the famous Jazz Age novelist. Brooks, it could be said, shouldn't be on the cover of the three books by Fitzgerald pictured above. But she is. 

Tender is the Night (Penguin, 1999) 

Bernice Bobs Her Hair (Penguin, 1990) 

 Flappers and Philosophers (Penguin 2010)

That's because Fitzgerald was actually smitten with another actress of the silent era, Lois Moran, who served as the basis for a character or two in Fitzgerald's celebrated fiction. It is widely believed that Moran and Fitzgerald had a brief affair during the 1920s, despite their difference in years. (For more on the actress, see Richard Buller's outstanding biography A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran, from 2005.)

Brooks and Fitzgerald did meet at twice, at a couple of parties, but apparently didn't leave much of an impression on each other. Instead, it was the similarly bobbed actress Colleen Moore about which Fitzgerald famously said, "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble." (For more on this actress, see Jeff Codori's fine biography Colleen Moore: A Biography of the Silent Film Star, from 2010.)

Nevertheless, Brooks image has become closely identified with the Jazz Age and its most famous writer. At least three other recent editions of Fitzgerald’s work (including new eBook and print-on-demand editions) depict Louise Brooks on their covers. Why? Because Brooks' image is iconic.

For more on Louise Brooks and F. Scott Fitzgerald, see the May 9th LBS blog, "Louise Brooks and the original Great Gatsby."

Brooks did play a Flapper on the screen on at least a couple of occasions, in Just Another Blonde (1926) and Love Em and Leave Em (1926). Only the latter film survives in tact. Brooks' characters in these two films was never so glamorous as Fitzgerald's flappers, but they did diepict the wild and carefree spirit of the times in plainer garb.

Richmond in Ragtime: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex & Murder

Longtime Louise Brooks Society member and contributor Harry Kollatz, Jr. has a new book out. It's titled Richmond in Ragtime: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex & Murder. The book covers three rambunctious years, 1911 - 1914, in the life of the southern city. It's a narrative, bricolage style, of a Richmond you may not recognize - full of corruption, murder and flying machines. I haven't got a copy yet - I plan to, but from all reports, it looks great. Here is the link to its amazon.com page.



Harry Kollatz Jr., as many of you may know, was the organizer of the Lulupalooza festival in 2006. He loves, film and theater and is a great student of history. We have swapped many an email over the years.

More info on the book can be found on the author's blog. And here is the publisher's description: "The three years from 1909 to 1911 were busy ones in Richmond, what with the misadventures of Adon A. Yoder, a muckraking pamphleteer who gets beaten up, sued and thrown in jail; the organizing of women like Lila Meade Valentine to fight for their right to vote; the art of sculptor Ferruccio Legnaioli; the novels of Ellen Glasgow, Mary Johnston and James Branch Cabell; increased restrictions against African Americans; a public spectacle surrounding the murder trial of Henry Clay Beattie Jr.; exotic flying machines and automobile endurance contests; and the recording of Polk Miller and his Old South Quartette. Join local author Harry Kollatz Jr. (True Richmond Stories) as he revives the city of a century ago for a tour of Richmond in ragtime."

The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age

A remarkable new book,  The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (University Of Chicago Press), has just been released. Its a book every fan of the Roaring Twenties should know about. It is impressive to say the least - and quite stunning to look at.

I don't own a copy (yet), and have only been able to briefly scan this new book. But, as I was flipping through it I quickly spotted a reference to The City Gone Wild (1927), the Chicago-inspired gangster film featuring Louise Brooks.

 

Here is some additional information from the publisher about this new book.

"While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan.  Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles.  He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory.

Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. In its own words, the Chicagoan claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees.” Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, it sought passionately to redeem the Windy City’s unhappy reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest.  Harris’s substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s.  The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features—and even one issue reprinted in its entirety.

Recalling a vivid moment in the life of the Second City, the Chicagoan is a forgotten treasure, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy."

Lily Koppell, "The Red Leather Diary"

I am looking forward to Lily Koppel's author event on Wednesday, September 10th at The Booksmith in San Francisco. Lily will be discussing her new book, The Red Leather Diary. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the 1920's / 1930s.

New York Times journalist Lily Koppel found the inspiration for her book after discovering an old diary in a Manhattan dumpster. The diary recorded the thoughts and feelings of an intelligent, ambitious and creative teenager on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the early 1930s. In the diary, the young author recorded everything from her first kiss (with a boy) to her crush on actress Eva Le Galliene (whom she had met - and which led her to question her sexuality) to her passion for writing and art. There are also numerous observations on daily life in 1930's NYC. Ultimately, the diary acts as a window into a fascinating and privileged world, one that Lily Koppel successfully recreates by telling a story in a novelistic way using no more than snippets of text from the teenager's diary.

Remarkably - and this is a big part of the story - Lily Koppel was able to reunite the long lost diary with it's then 90-year-old author after locating its her in Florida. I am reading The Red Leather Diary now - and enjoying it a great deal. Check out this event if you can.

Fashion Decrees, from Mme Lisbeth

Here is a clipping I ran across while looking through old newspapers on microfilm. As can be seen, Louise Brooks is one of the models included in this syndicated fashion column.

Fashion decrees

Here is a clipping I ran across while looking through old newspapers on microfilm. As can be seen, Louise Brooks is one of the models included in this syndicated fashion column.

Jazz Age Beauties

Today, I got a copy of Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston by Robert Hudovernik. It's a very nifty book - and you'll want to check it out. There are five full page images of Louise Brooks, a few other future silent film stars (nudes of Norma Shearer, portraits of Billie Dove, Mae Murray, etc....), along with a bunch of other lovely portraits of Ziegfeld Follies girls. There is also an image - something I had not ever seen before - of the front of the New Amsterdam Theater (the home of the Follies) in 1925. That's when Brooks was performing there. Wow! That makes me wonder what other sort of unknown images might be out there. There was also a gracious mention of myself and the Louise Brooks Society in the acknowledgements. Thank you Robert, glad to be of help.

Decent Girls Plea for Chance Against Flappers

Came across this clipping while looking through microfilm and thought everyone might enjoy it. The article dates from 1924.

Zelda, Clara and Other Women Gone Wild

Yesterday, Janet Maslin of the New York Times reviewed Flapper, by Joshua Zeitz. Maslin mentioned Louise Brooks . . . "well-known sources like Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks's classic memoir." The review can be found at www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/books/24book.html

Neat magazine for sale on eBay

A copy of Liberator (dating from May, 1923) is for sale on eBay. Liberator was a "radical" political magazine - the successor to the better known publication The Masses. This issue features a striking Louise Brooks-like flapper figure in profile on the cover. The image is NOT Louise Brooks - only a feminine type. (Brooks career as an actress would not start for another two years.) Nevertheless, the use of the flapper figure is interesting. Perhaps identifies the flapper - the modern woman, with progressive politics and modernism? See my earlier entry on LJ.

Among the contributors to this issue was the poet Carl Rakosi. I knew him! Before his death a couple of years ago, I used to see him around San Francisco. He was in his 90's then. I saw him read his work on a couple of occassions. And he used to come to the bookstore where I worked once in a  while. ( I remember he came to the Paul Auster event I hosted.) Rakoski was considered one of the Objectivist poets, and I recall him as a gentle, witty man.

Early review for "Flapper"

An early, if not entirely praiseworthy, review of Flapper, by Joshua Zeitz, has shown up on-line. Despite the mixed review, I am looking forward to this book. I had exchanged a few emails with the author a while back, and helped with a fact or two. This new book includes a chapter on Louise Brooks and some of the other film personalities of the time. "In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America’s first celebrities - Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate - fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers." Another review describes the book as ". . . an entertaining, well-researched and charmingly illustrated dissection of the 1920s flapper, who flouted conventions and epitomized the naughtiness of the Jazz Age as she 'bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs'." More on this title, which will be released on March 14th, can be found here.

The Damned and the Beautiful

For a change of pace, I thought I would take a break from reading film biographies. Instead, I thought I might read up on the Jazz Age - one of my favorite periods in history. I've had a copy of The Damned and the Beautiful, by Paula Fass, sitting around for sometime. Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1977, this almost 500 page book is a sociological study of American youth in the 1920's. After the first few chapters, I decided I really couldn't finish this book. I found it somewhat dry, though interesting at times. I skimmed over the remaining chapters.



The author did her homework. She quotes from a number of books, magazine articles, and even student newspapers from the time. (Thus, I found the footnotes especially interesting! Fass cited a bunch of university newspapers, some of which I hope to eventually explore for Louise Brooks / Denishawn reviews.) One thing I especially liked about the book were the quotes which prefaced each chapter. Chapter 7 begins with these.

"To me the Jazz Age signifies an age of freedom in thought and action. The average young person of today is not bound by the strict conventions which governed the actions of previous generations." - University of Denver coed

"The word flapper to us means not a female atrocity who smokes, swears, delights in pictures like The Shiek and kisses her gentlemen friends goodnight, although there is no particular harm in any of the foregoing. We always think of the flapper as the independent, 'pally' young woman, a typical American product. Frivolity . . . . is not a crime, and flappers, being young, are naturally frivolous.

Any real girl . . . who has the vitality of young womanhood, who feels pugilistically inclined when called the 'weaker sex,' who resents being put on a pedestal and worshipped from afar, who wants to get into things herself, is a flapper . . . . The flapper is the girl who is responsible for the advancement of woman's condition in the world. The weak, retiring, 'clinging' variety of woman really does nothing in the world but cling." - Letter to the editor, Daily Illini, April 20, 1922

I will probably go back to this book sometimes, at least to pick through the footnotes. I've starting reading another, less academic, book - That Jazz, by Ethan Mordden. Originally published in 1978, this 300-plus page book is subtitled "An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties." I first notice this title in the bibliography of Louise Brooks, by Barry Paris. I am about thirty pages into it - and am liking it.

p.s. Mordden is best known as the author of well-received books on opera, film, and theater. He is also a novelist. In 1988, he published a novel entitled Everybody Loves You: Further Adventures in Gay Manhattan, in which he drops the name of a certain silent film star. . . ."When we gather at the board, I babble, dispersing the attacks. I am like a bag lady in the scattered energy of my references. I speak of Louise Brooks, of The Egoist, of Schubert's song cycles. They nod. They ask intelligent questions."

Travelling radio station

Here is another item I found in the Riverside Daily Press. This 1927 article talks about radio station 6XBR, the "travelling broadcast station of Warner Brothers" (see the truck pictured above), which was to visit Riverside and broadcast live from the sight of a motion picture production (featuring Patsy Ruth Miller and others). In my research, I've come across references to other early radio broadcasts from Hollywood. I wonder if any records exist of such programs? And if the programs themselves still exist ? I wonder if Louise Brooks ever appeared on radio in the 1920's or early 1930's? Any radio buffs out there familiar with these earliest days of radio ?

Roaring '20s Fashions

There is a recently released book out called Roaring '20s Fashions: Deco, by Susan Langley. Published by Schiffer, its a heavily illustrated survey and collectors' guide to clothing and accessories of the Jazz Age. And not surprisingly, the book includes a handful of references to Louise Brooks, as well as a couple of  pictures!