The Flapper

Part 3: Literature and Beyond

[Herewith, part 3 of my chapter on Flappers from Sounds and Furies (2019)]

Clara Bow: ‘Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It’

If the Flapper’s Dictionary seems now, and perhaps did so even then, somewhat contrived – did any flesh-and-blood young woman, however keen to establish her credentials, really use that many of its terms? – one can look elsewhere for what flappers actually said. The first port of call tends to be Scott Fitzgerald, forever linked to the type, even credited with their creation, but it may be a bum steer. Neither his Flappers nor Philosophers, by which he generously characterizes the earnestly self-important young men who surrounded and pursued them, whether in full-scale novels such as This Side of Paradise (‘A Novel about Flappers, Written for Philosophers’) or its successor The Beautiful and Damned seem especially slangy. After all the latter appeared in 1922 when Zelda Fitzgerald, in the way of all those who ride the peak of a trend, was declaring the whole thing dead – and thus shutting the door on the great mass who were still queuing to jump onto the slowing but far from stationery bandwagon. But Fitzgerald had caught a wave and would dedicate much of his diminishing career to staying afloat. And Scott, in any case, was a man. His ability to delineate the flapper did not imply unalloyed approval. His flapper was a spoiled rich girl with time and cash to spare, and she both fascinated him and regularly broke his heart. The struggle of middle-class mid-Westerners, such as himself, to woo such girls fills his early stories: it was by no means successful and if he was fascinated by the type, he also found her problematic.

Elinor Glyn’s The Flirt and the Flapper (1930), a series of concocted dialogues between a notional Flapper and her 19^th century great-grandmother, the Flirt, barely overlaps with the flapper dictionary. A single term: soaked, drunk, links the two. She is better paired with Fitzgerald, although again the dozen similarities – among them ants in my pants, fall for and stewed (another synonym for drunk) – are hardly plentiful. Glyn was no flapper, born in 1864 she was far too old, but she had form. In 1927 she published a novel, It. The word was a slang veteran, having served as a euphemism for sexual intercourse and the genitals of both sexes for several centuries. In her hands, still essentially euphemistic, it meant sex appeal. She was not the coiner; that honour, somewhat paradoxically, goes to Rudyard Kipling’s fictional marine Emmanuel Pyecraft who in the short story ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904) opined, ‘Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street’. However there might have been a link: according to Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett it was possible that he had picked up the idea from his acquaintance Lord Milner, a one-time pursuer of Glyn’s hand. Whatever the source, Glyn’s novel popularized the word, which would, soon afterwards, expand to describe the It-Girl, originally movie star Clara Bow, but more recently used to describe any (briefly) fashionable young woman, usually best-known for her supposed sexual exploits. Glyn already had her own ‘it’, especially after another, earlier novel, Three Weeks (1907) a tale of decadence and debauchery, in which a European vamp (the flapper’s wicked, sexualized cousin, as it were) seduces and deliberately lets herself be impregnated by a naïve product of Eton and Oxford. The use of a tiger-skin rug as the scene of their (unstated but inescapably obvious) copulations gave rise to the jocular verse;

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err with her

On some other fur?

The Flirt and Flapper appear relatively late: not only had Zelda Fitzgerald disclaimed flappers but so too had most of those who had once bobbed and rolled so enthusiastically. Nonetheless the short book, which offers 99 slang words and phrases, gives a good look at a very recent  lexis. All come from the Flapper, with useful, if faux-naïve questions placed in the Flirt’s mouth so as to allow for explanation.

To cite those for which Glyn can so far claim a first use, they are: ants in one’s pants, to be in a state of nerves or agitation; arteried up, emotionally excited or confused; big idea, a love object; cream in one’s coffee, praise for the ‘perfect’ person, usually a lover; flat tyre or highbrow, a kill-joy or puritan; lighthead, a simpleton; put it over on, to outwit; warm someone up, to pass on (confidential) information. Other terms, already in use, include batty about, obsessed with, back number, one for whom one no longer feels affection, debbie, a debutante (shared with Fitzgerald), dim bulb, a fool, dope and lowdown, inside information,  fast worker, one who is sexually forward (thus in 1918 the teenage Zelda Sayre, temporarily rebuffing a newly met Fitzgerald who had asked to see her after a dance: ‘I never make late dates with fast workers’), heavy, one’s current boyfriend (Glyn and Fitzgerald also use the synonymous crush, applicable to either gender),  helluva, i.e. the intensifier ‘hell of a’, raspberry, a dismissal (coined in the London music hall and ultimate rhyming slang: raspberry tart: fart, and thus the noise involved), scream, an admirable individual, snow, cocaine, and whoopee, which the Flapper explains as ‘when you feel you could beat the band, and are not sure if it’s your own sweetie you’re with or your best girl friend’s — and you don’t care a damn which!’

Wine of Youth (1924): schnockered much?

For the mass, those who had perhaps seen the Flapper  Dictionary in their local paper, there was of course the movies. The industry realized the profitable charms of the sexy, but ultimately light-hearted flapper. Naturally, they showcased the sex (plus lashings of ciggies, cocktails and jazz), with titles such as The Wild Party (1929), Flaming Youth (1923), Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and The Plastic Age (1926). Dancing Mothers (1926) – staid old mum loses her family to ‘jazzmania’ – was a sop to the wrinkles. The genre made stars of two comediennes; Clara Bow and Colleen Moore. The moralizers, the flappers’ crepe hangers (the imagery is of undertakers), saw only corruption and demanded censorship. They were especially exercised by the slang. The industry’s own self-regulator the MPPDA, tried to head off the killjoys. Reading the script for a Clara Bow vehicle, The Fleet’s In (1928), an executive noted possible problems with a dozen ‘colorful’ sub-titles. Local censors would never accept lines such as ‘We gotta greet ’em, grab ’em, goal ’em and go!’ (goal was apparently the culprit and perhaps reminded bluenoses of the synonymous score; the later, and male-created 4-F Club would be much more direct), ‘look hot and keep cool’, the presumed professional slur in ‘most of them are osteopaths – operating without a license’ (although the image was more likely that of roaming hands),  and the derisive ‘that stretches my girdle’ (though surely no real flapper would wear one?). In the event these slipped through, as did the double-entendre title included in Wine of Youth (1924) in a scene in which a boy offers a girl a glass, albeit labeled ‘ginger ale’, and having drunk, she collapses onto his conveniently placed pillow. The title read; ‘A little evening class in home jazzing’ and the flapper, if not her mother, presumably appreciated that jazzing might refer to a very different form of ‘dance’.

Back in print, but low on the cultural scale came a variety of pulp magazines, named for the cheap wood-pulp paper on which they were printed. They lacked in every sense the veneer of the sort of magazines that might host Scott Fitzgerald, but they knew a selling topic and duly promoted their flapper heroines both on their covers and in their texts. Appearing in ‘snappy’ or ‘peppy’ titles (synonyms for slightly sexy) they were pictured as strong, independent figures, challenging social givens and pushing modernity. They promoted physical fitness and proposed a moral system that eschewed the old-school strictures of monotheistic, and far from feminist religion. They were by definition lowbrow but as The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines suggests, titles like Flapper’s Experience (the successor to the Flapper) and Home Brew ( a direct nudge at the need to bypass Prohibition’s ban on breweries) were ‘dedicated to the challenging of old world conventions.’ As such they carried a ‘DIY, underground feel about them, sort of Prohibition-inspired “little magazines”.’ Slang played a lesser role than in the contemporary ‘hard-boiled dick’ pulps, where it was an essential element of the macho, noir appeal, but the stories featured flappers, and the language was always there. Like the movies, they had a nationwide reach: what better way, quite literally, to spread the word.

Flapper Fanny: flapper and philosopher

Then there were cartoons, notably pioneering woman cartoonist Ethel Hays’ Flapper Fanny, a single image plus semi-aphoristic wisecrack (‘At six she wants a candy store, at 16 a box of sweets, at 26 a “sweet papa”.’ Or, accompanying  a picture of a half-clad girl putting on stockings, ‘Silk is the least important thing that goes into hosiery’). Born in 1892 (she would live till 1989) Hays was a perfect age. She knew of what she wrote and drew, and ‘Fanny’, launched in 1925, was appearing in 500 papers within twelve months. It was all rather risqué, almost cosmopolitan by provincial standards, but ultimately safe. Just like the flapper herself. Fanny was soon imitated, notably by Irma Benjamin (writer) and Harry Weinert’s (artist) Rolls Rosie. Rosie, whose fashions were even more obviously ‘flapper’ than Fanny’s, also offered one-liners, with an accent on the jokes rather than the cracker-barrel philosophy. Far less successful than Fanny, she did offer one speciality, like the flappers she was drawn to represent, she had an obsession with automobiles (hence the roll, more likely as in travel than in the luxury marque.) Every cartoon either pictured one or at least mentioned cars in the text. Most famous of all was Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop, launched in 1930 as a caricature of the singer Helen Kane, known as the ‘Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl’ (In 1932 Kane would sue for the imposture: she lost). She began life as a flapper, a full-on Jazz Baby, with short skirt, plunging neckline, garter, shimmying hips, naughtily winking eyes and an over-riding sexuality that ensured that despite her existence as an animated cartoon, her main fans were adults. But the Hollywood Production Code, stultifying a generation’s movies, ensured that Betty’s allure was much diluted. Her image today is associated with the Depression rather than the Jazz Age, and as a forerunner of the UK’s Jane, whose daily strip (literal as well as pictorial) allegedly inspired British troops throughout the Second World War, Betty served as a cheering antidote to the Depression’s economic miseries,

Then suddenly, almost as soon and abruptly as she had appeared, the flapper was gone. The Crash did for her cash flow, or rather her father’s or boyfriend’s, and the playgrounds to spend it in closed down. The Thirties were dour, ‘a low dishonest decade’ wrote Auden, subject to a seemingly endless depression and culminating in a devastating, global war. She had materialised, emboldened by the previous world war’s temporary role reversals, flourished for a season before her butterfly existence, as some would term it, died. She had grown up, she may well, as the Flapper itself had suggested back in 1922, have chosen marriage over solo performance, even if the husband was no more than a ‘boob’.  Like the inevitable and wholly artificial ‘moral’ ending of the 1924 movie The Perfect Flapper, she had become ‘the perfect wife’ and for all her seeming excess, turned out just like another movie title of 1927, to be Naughty But Nice. To what extent she left a social legacy is hard to establish. Her children would be become bobby-soxers and even the first generation, sociologically, of ‘teenagers’. Her language is more easily assessed; its use either persisted or it did not. Certain terms, typically cat’s pyjamas  and its more effective clones, survived, as did many that she had picked up from the past and converted to her own needs. But her coinages were largely as ephemeral as her moment in the sun, there were no more beasels or barlows, no more barneymugging. That vocabulary was as quaint as her rolled stockings, and more speedily forgotten, other perhaps than for the teasing of her daughters.