Shipping heiress Nancy Cunard was a cultural icon in the 1920s and 1930s.
‘The flapper is au naturale below the neck. Above the neck she is the most artificially and entertainingly painted creature that has graced society since Queen Elizabeth.’
– Helen Bullitt Lowry, writing for Nonsenseorship, 1922.
David seriously considered bringing an umbrella. It was pouring with rain and bound to be chilly before dawn. But weather was passé, an old-fashioned concern for his parents’ generation. He was determined to be one of the Bright Young People even though he was on the wrong side of thirty. And so in the early hours of 2 August 1924, he paid a sovereign ‘fee’ into the pool and took the wheel.
This was how the best treasure hunts always started, or so he had heard, with dozens of smart motorcars roaring off in pursuit of clues. This particular chase began at Claridge’s Hotel just after midnight. The cars were full of spirited society girls, gallant officers of the Guards and louche young bucks bored with the clubs. It was David’s first hunt.
Someone shouted, ‘Go!’ and the game was on. Exhaust smoke trailed them down the empty London streets as they puzzled out one clue after another. Policemen looked the other way. From the Adelphi Theatre to the Bank of England, Fleet Street and Kensington, then on to Norfolk House, St James, where a decadent champagne breakfast awaited. But first there was one final challenge.
One by one the cars purred up to the finish line, a chalk mark in a back alley. The treasure hunters, giddy with exhaustion, were ordered to crawl on all fours. Dresses were ruined in the rain, hair came unpinned and trousers were torn at the knees. Disoriented by the filthy surroundings, David hesitated. For the first time all night, His Royal Highness Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Prince of Wales – David to his family – was having second thoughts.
This was the ferment of London’s privileged youth in the 1920s, the first decade of the interwar period. The public was appalled and fascinated by the young hedonists of the upper crust and their bohemian friends. The city’s tabloids feasted on tales of debauchery and jazz, led by frivolous young people such as the socialite Elizabeth Ponsonby. Evelyn Waugh’s book, Vile Bodies, would describe the wasted lives with painful accuracy.
A ten-hour Red and White Party turned out to be the last straw of extravagance for the British public. Hosted by art gallery owner Arthur Jeffress on 21 November 1931, it was attended by nearly 400 of London’s social elite in red or white fancy dress. The guests dined on red and white foods in rooms draped in red velvet and white silk at Holford House in Regent’s Park.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was the start of the Great Slump of the British economy, when the unemployment rate was in the range of fifteen to twenty per cent – worse in the North and Wales. Unemployment benefits were essentially non-existent; the loss of a job almost always meant absolute poverty.
Shortly after the backlash of the Red and White Party, the Bright Young People began to wind down or self-destruct. A new kind of ‘what does it all matter’ mood settled over Britain with the sinking economy. Desperate fun had run its course, but for a handful of champagne-soaked years, the Bright Young People’s carpe diem behaviour flew in the face of the interwar return to order.
Something else grew from those seeds of notoriety. A transatlantic cultural phenomenon took shape in London and Hollywood: the birth of the It Girl. The It Girl was famous for being famous. It was an idea fostered by the Bright Young People and propelled by the popularity of novelist and screenwriter Elinor Glyn and the actress Clara Bow.
Glyn would never be touted as a great novelist, but she was the first writer to use the term It Girl in the sense of ‘It’ being an indefinable magnetism (not merely beauty or sex). She cemented the concept in popular culture by writing a novella entitled, appropriately, It. This was adapted for a silent film of the same name in 1927–1928. The film established Clara Bow as Hollywood’s reigning star.
Both the Bright Young People and the It Girls that followed were flawed as cultural icons, but their time had come. In tamping down decadence, London created space for a new culture of public celebrity.
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Among those caught up in the heyday of the Bright Young People were two young artists who found their way onto gallery walls with surprising speed. Edward Burra and John Banting had friends in common. Burra was born into a centuries-old Westmorland family and suffered from crippling arthritis. He trained at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and was given his first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1930. Banting was from a middle-class family. He studied at the Westminster School of Art and was briefly associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Initially a Vorticist, Banting became influenced by Surrealism in 1930.
The two men were products of different upbringings and training, but they shared something important – an aversion to racial prejudice. This was unusual in their social circles. Burra and Banting were emblematic of a certain faction of the English social scene that felt prejudice was abhorrent. Both artists used Negro models in their art, and Banting in particular was close to the inimitable Nancy Cunard.
Cunard was an interwar It Girl with a fierce sense of social justice. Had she lived in the eighteenth century, she would have been called a woman of parts. She was an English shipping heiress until her entitlement was stripped away – disinherited by her family for her lengthy relationship with the black jazz musician Henry Crowder.
Shipping heiress Nancy Cunard was a cultural icon in the 1920s and 1930s.
Cunard easily could have lost her young self in absinthe or champagne (that would come later). Instead she rebelled by becoming an activist, model, muse, publisher, poet, editor and newspaper correspondent, all while raising a glass. In between trips to Venice, London and New York from her base in France, she found the energy for a legendary number of paramours, including many prominent writers who immortalised her in their works.
A precocious child, Cunard began devouring books at an early age to fill the hours of parental neglect. At 11 she was caught reading Elinor Glyn’s erotic novella Three Weeks with its tiger-skin sex scene. By the time Cunard was 31 years old she had set up The Hours Press in Normandy to encourage experimental young writers.
Cunard was born to be a muse. Modernism, Surrealism, Dadaism, no ism was off-limits to the enigmatic young Englishwoman who turned her back on privilege. Fiercely individualistic, she would pile on her trademark ivory bangles and enhance her penetrating gaze with kohl – an effect made more dramatic by mannishly short hair.
The creative community embraced Nancy Cunard. Man Ray photographed her over and over again. Cecil Beaton posed her against polka dots that would have overpowered a lesser presence. Alvaro Guevara painted her as an imperious young woman, red turban blazing. Constantin Brâncusi sculpted her and Wyndham Lewis drew her ramrod straight, hand on hip, in front of an upper window.
Cunard was not alone in championing racial equality, although she was in somewhat limited company. In the art world, Jacob Epstein was the most prominent sculptor to use black models in Britain at the time. John Banting, who travelled with Cunard to Harlem in America, interpreted African motifs with a surrealist’s eye. Edward Burra painted compelling dark-skinned figures in urban settings, and the Jamaican-born Ronald Moody used sculpture to explore his heritage. Ronald was the brother of Harold Arundel Moody, a London physician and civil rights activist who established the League of Coloured Peoples. They were the exceptions, not the norm.
Of the anonymous sitters of colour used by British artists in the interwar period, few would attain any kind of public recognition. Many were amateurs trying to pick up extra money during a dock strike or solve other impediments to employment. The art schools were a source of income for those willing to pose in life classes, but again the work was largely anonymous.
Rebecca and Esther were dark-skinned sisters who sat for Jacob Epstein in the 1930s. Esther reportedly performed in nightclubs and worked as a professional model. Despite posing for artists of note, the sisters’ surname is lost to time. It didn’t help that Epstein’s portrait bust of Esther would eventually become known as Betty (Esther) – a label that was intended to avoid confusion with other Epstein busts of the artist’s daughter Esther. Unfortunately, this only served to further obliterate the model Esther’s identity by confusing her with another Epstein model, Betty Peters.
Amina Peerbhoy (née Devi) was an Indian immigrant and one of the few escapees from anonymity. Epstein met Peerbhoy in 1924 at the International Exhibition at Wembley where she was selling exotic items with her son Enver and her sister Miriam Patel. Both women had left their husbands and were working in London.
Before long all three were living in Epstein’s house, where Amina and Miriam were answering to the names Sunita and Anita and modelling for Epstein. Sunita became one of the most celebrated models of 1920s and early 1930s Britain – not exactly an It Girl, but a celebrity sitter who transcended anonymity despite the prejudices of the day.
Fanny Eaton’s work as a Pre-Raphaelite model paved the way for other models of colour.
It is possible that none of these women would have been accepted into studios if not for the inroads made by a Jamaican-born, Pre-Raphaelite beauty that modelled from 1859 to 1867. Fanny Eaton (née Antwistle) came to England with her mother in the mid-nineteenth century at the age of 16. She found work as a domestic servant and married a horse cab driver from Shoreditch. They had ten children together, and the near impossibility of putting food on the table convinced Eaton to try modelling in her twenties as a way to make ends meet.
Eaton made a large impression in a short time as a model, beginning with work as a portrait sitter at the Royal Academy. She rapidly came to the attention of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Simeon Solomon. Rossetti was married to his muse, Lizzie Siddal, and he knew a thing or two about beauty. When an artist of Rossetti’s stature praised Eaton’s pulchritude people took note, because dark-skinned women were generally not considered beautiful enough to be depicted in Western art.
Eaton stopped modelling before the twentieth century. However, she was undeniably important to women of colour as London’s most celebrated Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite sitter of African descent. Sunita, Anita, Rebecca, Esther and other women of colour who worked as models in the twentieth century were walking the path that Fanny Eaton had cleared.
As for celebrated beauties of the purely Caucasian variety, the American Evelyn Nesbit held pride of place as the first It Girl of the early 1900s. She became ubiquitous as an artists’ model, a chorus girl and an actress. By the interwar period Nesbit had survived a national scandal and retired to California with her three cats, Stumpy, Alley Kahn and Weirdie. Along the way she inspired women of other nationalities to strive for celebrity.
The It Girl baton was picked up in England by some women who had ties to America, including the British actress Dorothy Mackaill, the photographer and model Lee Miller, muse of Man Ray, and the bewitching American socialite Henrietta Worth Bingham, paramour of Dora Carrington. Bingham was irresistible to both men and women and happily obliged both. When she modelled for artist Stephen Tomlin, another of her bisexual Bloomsbury lovers, he confessed that a mere letter from Bingham let loose ‘the dogs of longing’ inside him.
London produced its own brand of It Girls, such as the melodramatic Dolores. Dolores was the rare model that Jacob Epstein didn’t rename. Her face and form obviously enthralled the sculptor, who described her as the Phryne of modern times. One has to wonder whether Epstein referred to Dolores as Phryne, an ancient Greek courtesan, when he informed his wife that the model would move in with them in 1922, a year after he met her.
Dolores became a staple of the bohemian scene, sitting for C.R.W. Nevinson, Jacob Kramer and others. According to Epstein she tended to strut around when posing, arms folded protectively across her body, looking both tragic and aloof. Her dedication to modelling helped her transition to the stage in 1922 and then to fashion in 1924, when she created a stir by wearing gold shoes and no stockings. Epstein would stay in touch with her throughout her life.
Madame Dolores, as she liked to be called, was not without controversy. In 1926 she secretly married the African-American lawyer and sports manager George Lattimore. Three years later she became entangled in the suicide of a young artist and admirer. The proceedings surrounding the death did nothing to elevate Dolores’s reputation, as it came to light that the artist, Frederick Atkinson, had gassed himself when Dolores left him after his money was spent.
An art dealer by the name of Mabel Fredericke had introduced the pair. She gave testimony at the inquest that Atkinson lost all interest in his work after being deserted by his love, and that she believed the model was living with two artists at one time. Fredericke suggested that when Atkinson ‘became alive to this state of things’ the revelation tipped the scales.
Dolores lived just forty years, dying of cancer in a Paddington basement. In later years, Epstein admitted to being annoyed by the way Dolores had used his name as an attention-grabber (‘she married a coloured gentleman and sent the invitations to the reception in my own name’), but he and the girl from Doughty Street had a true fondness for each other. Without Epstein, Dolores may never have been an It Girl of la vie de bohème and she knew it. She called him her shield against the world.
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For every It Girl of 1920s Britain, there were hundreds that reached for the golden ring and failed. One curious instance took place in 1924, when the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester served up a literal take on neoclassicism. The gallery sponsored a competition to find a ‘Modern Venus’ in London to promote the British launch of The Temple of Venus, an American silent film.
A call went out for young women with measurements that closely matched those of the Greek sculpture of Aphrodite known as the Venus de Milo, housed at the Louvre Museum. The thirty finalists had their measurements checked by a panel of female judges. The judging was led by Dolores and championed by Jacob Epstein.
Stella Pierres emerged victorious with the winning measurements. Pierres was an aspiring model and actress from Southampton with pretty Irish features. Her victory launched her as a beauty queen. She posed in a soundproofed glass room in the Pears Palace of Beauty at the British Empire Exhibition, which ran through October 1925 at Wembley. She was joined by models dressed as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and other beauties, including the Spirit of Purity. It was a living display meant to associate cleanliness with a pure life for the 750,000 potential soap buyers who filed by.42
Despite being lauded by Epstein, Pierres failed to achieve enduring fame as a model or actress. Most of her parades and revues took place from 1924 to 1930. She did parlay her title into on-going appearances, serving as a fashion mannequin in Nottingham in 1933, and as a judge at a Hendon dog show in 1937, where she was assigned the canine category of Most Soulful Eyes.
Pierres became used to having her measurements displayed side by side with those of the Venus de Milo for the world to see. In addition to the typical metrics of waist, bust and hip, she won with half a dozen other body parts, including a wrist of just under six inches that was slightly smaller than the Venus de Milo’s.
Even Epstein would be hard-pressed to explain how an armless statue produced a wrist measurement, but the public loved the competition too much to quibble. Stella Pierres joined the ranks of pretty, vivacious young women who made a bid for fame and landed somewhere between It Girl and anonymous.