The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

things up, and he hired her. Lois was twenty-three years old, aConnecticut girl and daughter of a minister—hardly the background for a rebelcelebrity. Yet it was because of her background, rather than despite it, that Loisbecame the archetypal flapper of the 1920s. With her white-bread upbringing, she was themost typical of flappers because the flapper was not exclusively an urban sophisticatebut, just as likely (if not more so), a teenage girl from Wichita, Kansas. But the eageryoung girl from Wichita needed to learn how to become a flapper, and this was where Lois“Lipstick” Long stepped in.

Initially writing anonymously, calling herself only“Lipstick,” Lois bounded about Manhattan undisguised; she was tall, pretty,with dark brown bobbed hair, wearing the classic flapper dress that fell in one flat,vertical line from the chest down to just below the knees, and a red-lipsticked smile atall times. She was naughty, ready for fun, and—exactly as Molly Browndisapprovingly noted—not past getting drop-dead drunk (she advised her readersthat it was only good manners to pay two dollars to the cabbie for throwing up in hiscar). Lois Long demonstrated that the 1920s had taken everything from the shadows andrebranded it as white, middle-class, American, decadent and fun: jazz came from the black ghetto, sexual experimentation from Greenwich Village, androuge, powder, and eye shadow from the prostitute’s toolbox. Theflapper, the 1920s’ best-known incarnation of the New Woman, was now at the centerof it all.

At the stroke of midnight on January 16, 1920, the United States wentdry. The purpose was to stop crime and bad behavior, but the very opposite happened.Manhattan, where the flamboyant mayor Jimmy Walker with a stout wife and a string ofchorus girls for his mistresses did not believe drinking was a crime, was transformedinto one big party. Speakeasies—the illegal, illicit, booze-soaked clubs of theProhibition era—began to pop up all over the city, turning young, brashentrepreneurs into millionaires. One bootlegger, barely thirty yearsold, first chartered fleets of ships loaded with imported alcohol to break through thegovernment cordon off Long Island. He became rich almost overnight but soon decidedthere had to be an easier way; he brought together experts, imported materials, andacquired the formula for a famous English gin. Next, he set up a pristine subterraneandistillery beneath the surface of New York’s streets and sold the “Britishgin” to speakeasies, whose bartenders declared they had never tasted a London ginas good as this. When London liquor manufacturers hired a detective to see why theirillegal New York gin sales had dipped so dramatically, they soon figured out his scheme,but there wasn’t a thing they could do: they couldn’t very well call thepolice to complain their illegal sales of British gin to the United States were beingundermined by the illegal manufacture of alcohol underneath New York’sstreets.

Women were also among Prohibition’s new and clever entrepreneurs.One of the best known was Belle Livingstone, actress and showgirl, who claimed to havebeen abandoned as a baby in a backyard in Emporia, Kansas. She wanted to be an actress,but her foster father, publisher of Emporia’s local newspaper,refused to let her onstage as a single woman.

“Fine,” she said, and proposed to thefirst well-dressed man she saw. Strangely, he agreed, and though they parted waysimmediately, stranger still, he left her the enormous sum of $150,000 at his death. Shetook the money and headed across the Atlantic, where, according to her memoirs, she was“the toast of Europe” for a good thirty years. Returning to America in 1927,just as the Barbizon was being built, and with Prohibition well under way, stout andstocky Belle, now in her fifties, saw an opportunity. She called her illegal saloonssalons, as if they were the intellectual gathering places of Paris. And sheplayed cat and mouse with federal agents, who often appeared at her salons in disguiseand then dragged her to court, where reporters and the reading public eagerly hung on toher every word as she expressed her outrage in an outpouring of colorful language. One of her speakeasies was the Country Club, which both highsociety and the Broadway crowd frequented, paying a pricey five-dollar admission. Butonce in, customers could stroll through the grand room that resembled the Gardens ofVersailles or head upstairs to play Ping-Pong or miniature golf. The only requirementwas to keep on buying the dollar drinks.

Then there was Janet of France. Thoroughly French, shehad made a living as a vaudeville and musical-comedy actor in New York until the workdried up and she had nothing more than twenty-nine dollars to her name. Contemplatingher hopeless future, she took a stroll down West Fifty-Second, where she noticed an“ancient house squeezed in between garage buildings.” It was for rent, andwith a hundred borrowed dollars, she took it over and installed a simple wooden bar,cheap curtains, and a few tables and chairs. The first week, the only thing on the menuwas onion soup along with bootleg Scotch, brandy, and rye. The booze was nothingspecial, but the onion soup was sublime. It received enough attention that she soonleased two more floors of the antiquated building. She added some cheapdinners to surround the crowning glory of the meal—the onion soup—and servedup red wines à la France. Celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks,and Lionel Barrymore were soon knocking on the door. Janet of France boasted that theIrish playwright George Bernard Shaw visited her and only her speakeasy—she alwayshad an autograph book on hand to prove it.

Former chorus girl Texas Guinan was another star of New York’sProhibition scene. She was the one who coined the most famous phrase of thetime—“Hello, sucker!” (The rest of her catchphrase, which she holleredat customers as they came in, went: “Come on in and leave your wallet on thebar.”) She was already a well-known stage and film actress—or so shesaid—when the speakeasies lured her in with lucrative singing gigs. That’swhere she learned the trade. She opened her own eventually, the 300 Club, once visitedby the Prince of Wales. Opening-night programming featured the marriage of a well-knownAmerican actress and her lover, a saucy Argentinian dancer.

While the Barbizon’s residents did not open speakeasies, just likethe New Yorker’s Lois “Lipstick”