Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (78 page)

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His ideas were partly formed by Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
and its thesis of a modern Faustian culture driven by the twin engines of yearning and entitlement.

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Zelda’s biographer Sally Cline points out that the Murphys’ hotel was fifty kilometres away from the Villa Marie, which makes the events of that night problematic, unless they all four happened to be staying the night in the same place. In 1925 the two couples were geographically closer, and it was in August that year that Scott entered the brief note in his ledger, ‘Zelda drugged.’

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Nancy’s friend, the writer Norman Douglas, was also wintering on Capri. He lived principally in Italy, having fled England in 1916, when he was charged for sexual assault on a boy. He, too, was surrounded by a colony of friends and admirers, many of them homosexual.

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When Scott was invited to have tea with Edith Wharton, who lived twelve miles outside Paris, Zelda refused to go, saying she had no interest in being patronized by another ‘grande dame’.

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Picasso also considered Hemingway’s pose as a bullfighting ‘aficionado’ and left-wing radical to be fake. In 1959 he observed Hemingway salute the playing of the ‘Marseillaise’, then, when no one else joined in, stuffing his hand back into his pocket. ‘
Quel con,
’ was Picasso’s verdict.

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This was becoming so iconic a feature of modern French life that in 1924 it inspired a new work by the Ballets Russes, with designs by Coco Chanel.

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Gerald would create a small, but acclaimed, body of work; his coolly objective still life
Razor,
composed of a safety razor, fountain pen and matchbox, was much admired by Léger, who regarded Gerald as the only American ex-patriot painter to respond in depth to the Parisian avant-garde.

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Fitzgerald’s first six years as a full-time writer had been prolific: three novels, a play, forty-one stories and twenty-seven pieces of journalism, but for this one script he would earn $3,500, rising to $12,000 if it was filmed.

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Lois became the model for Rosemary Hoyt, the young starlet in
Tender is the Night.

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It was published in
Harper’s Bazar
in January 1928.

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Philadelphia was one of the few cities in America with a long history of ballet activity, having several schools and a lively ballet audience. Littlefield both directed and performed with the ballet chorus attached to the opera, and in 1934 would elevate it to an independent ballet company – one of the first in America.

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In his memoir
A Moveable Feast
Hemingway recorded a possibly apocryphal incident when Scott expressed his anxiety that ‘he wasn’t big enough’. They went to the men’s urinals, where Hemingway was able to assure Scott that he was ‘perfectly fine’.

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That blow had been followed shortly afterwards by the news of Diaghilev’s sudden death in August, and of the imminent disbanding of his company. For a few days Zelda had been unable to put on her ballet shoes, saying with dumb anguish that there was no point any more.

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It was assumed by many doctors that she suffered from schizophrenia: today Zelda would probably be diagnosed as bipolar.

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The term art deco did not acquire popular currency until the 1960s.

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Just after the war he had led the capture of the disputed territory of Fiume in an attempt to prevent its annexation by Yugoslavia.

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It would be over two decades before it fully recovered (in April 1932 the Dow Jones would slide even further, down to just 41.22 points).

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Josephine’s appearance was also meant to arouse echoes of Fatou-gaye, the bewitching, erotic black girl in Pierre Loti’s popular novel
Le Roman d’un spahi.

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Sidney Bechet would tour Russia with Noble Sissle’s band in the late twenties and early thirties.

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A version of
Chocolate Dandies,
the show in which Josephine had danced in America, had just concluded a triumphant run.

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Pabst’s film, an adaptation of two melodramatic dramas of vice and corruption by Wedekind, famously featured Brooks in one of mainstream cinema’s first lesbian kisses.

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Josephine may not have seen
The Miracle,
but she did incorporate some of the iconography of Diana’s role as the Madonna into her later work, including a Folies Bergère number in 1949.

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He imagined casting her alongside Serge Lifar, the latest beautiful young man to star with the Ballets Russes.

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The idea for this soon-to-become-famous banana skirt was credited to Jean Cocteau.

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In this 1927 fragment she wore a coconut-shell brassiere, in deference to American censors.

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It was previously owned by Maurice Chevalier.

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So bad were her tantrums that Luis Buñuel, who was working as assistant director, quit the film in disgust.

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She spoke a little prematurely. The bananas had become integral to her image whether she liked them or not, and in 1934, when she made the film
Zouzou,
she wore her banana skirt for all the publicity; labels printed with her picture were also offered to the greengrocers of Paris, to fix to the fruit on their shelves.

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Later, during one of Josephine’s recurrent periods of debt, she pawned the choker for $20,000.

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It may even have made an impact on Crown Prince Gustaf given his subsequent, ardent support of the civil rights movement.

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That image may have resonated with an evening she spent with Le Corbusier on the ship bound for France. Dressing up for dinner at the captain’s table, the two of them ‘swapped’ race, Josephine wearing a thick mask of white powder, Le Corbusier blacked up like a minstrel.

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The revue had premiered in Monte Carlo in the winter of 1974.

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It was given an extravagant boost with the publication of
The Secret War of Josephine Baker,
written by Jacques Abtey, her intelligence officer.

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Pepito had died of cancer in 1936: Josephine’s relationship with his much younger replacement, Jean Leon, was brief, and her marriage to Bouillon in 1947 was an arrangement of convenience rather than passion.

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They privately exchanged vows in a church, but didn’t bother with an official ceremony.

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It would be another thirty-five years before
Negro
was recognized as a pioneering feat of documentation and a prime resource for black studies.

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She didn’t, however, refuse her one-third share of her mother’s much dwindled estate. Another third was left to Diana who, although not averse to mocking Lady Cunard, had always remained fond of her, and was perhaps the daughter Maud would have liked.

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Ironically, her assets would be valued at over $120,000 after her death – if she had ever deemed it acceptable to have her finances properly managed she would have been able to live her last few years in far more comfort.

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In fact, Kizette was more like her mother than Tamara acknowledged, and had several extra-marital love affairs.

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The child was passed off as her husband’s and his parentage only made public in 2008.

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Her behaviour, which was considered both funny and scandalous, fed into the early chapters of Nancy Mitford’s 1960 novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred.