8 8 J. A. ROGERS’S PROMINENT 1925 essay “Jazz at Home” reads like a sporting response to Duffus’s “Age of Play.” Both writers argue for pleasure’s social power, but while Duffus’s “play” involves movies and board games, the raw pleasures Rogers attributes to jazz—“the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum”—pulse with rebellious electricity. “The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow—from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.” Rogers admitted that jazz, like Duffus’s less offensive “play,” had begun to spread throughout American society, but that wasn’t his point. It mattered more that jazz “spontaneity” and “the perfect jazz abandon” came most easily to “the average Negro, particularly of the lower classes,” who “puts rhythm into whatever he does.”
Black writers of the 1920s often expressed this opinion—for better or for worse. Race leader W. E. B. DuBois often regretted lower-class blacks’ open displays of “jazz abandon.” His friend and peer James Weldon Johnson, however, seemed delighted that “an average group of Negroes can in dancing to a good jazz band achieve a delightful state of intoxication that for others would require nothing short of a certain per capita imbibation of synthetic gin.” Rogers, rather resembling Duffus, takes a middle road. A social conservative among young black urbanites, he warned that jazz was a “poison for the weak”—especially for the poor black whose “amusement life is more open to the forces of social vice”—but allows that it also gives “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong.” And for this reason, in spite of “its morally anarchic spirit, jazz has a popular mission to perform.” Echoing his era’s progressive arguments for physical recreation, he sees in jazz a civic virtue that transcends race, class, and gender because it is rooted in a most basic instrument—the human body.
Rogers sees this joy as a poison and a tonic, but unlike Duffus he doesn’t want to interfere. Recklessly, democratically—at least in this essay—Rogers puts his trust in the people: “This new spirit of joy and spontaneity may itself play the role of reformer.” His seemingly utopian vision, in which music and dance cause social reform, was at no time more plausible than in the 1920s, when the rhythms that freed slaves on Congo Square were helping to warm Americans’ chilly attitudes—toward their own bodies and each other’s humanity.
The stakes were much higher for Rogers than for Duffus, nothing lower than political equality for blacks. He hoped that jazz might do the work peaceably. For of course blacks felt more than “joy and spontaneity.” For instance, in 1925, many felt deep reserves of rage. To be sure, the year before, W. E. B. DuBois, while acknowledging African Americans’ “spirit of gayety,” reminded readers that “the first influence of the Negro on American democracy was naturally to oppose by force—revolt, murder, assassination coupled with running away. It was the primitive, ancient effort to avenge blood with blood, to bring good out of evil by opposing evil with evil.” Revolutionary figures like Marcus Garvey kept this violent history in the public eye, lecturing and parading in military dress. But during this highly racist period in American history, when eugenics was a popular academic position and the KKK, in 1925, had five million members nationwide, even the joyous revolt of jazz was an opposition by force: its practitioners stood down their frigid opponents with blatant sexuality and loud racial pride. Under such conditions “democracy” had to be bullish—especially if it was going to be fun.
But jazz wasn’t destructive, jazz was creative. Published in a year when the pages of Crisis were filled with lynchings, evictions, and other evidence of prejudice, Alain Locke’s landmark New Negro anthology, in which Rogers’s essay appears, never ignored such vicious stakes but charted a more constructive heritage of African-American revolt—from spirituals, folk dances, and Brother Rabbit tales to their cultural grandchildren in the Harlem Renaissance. One contributor, the novelist and Crisis editor Jessie Fauset, traces the African-American “gift of laughter” as it comes down from slave culture, through the “jesters” and “clowns” of minstrelsy, to the twentieth-century all-black musicals, where it “radiates good feeling and happiness.” When African-American comedians evolved from playing the “funny man” to what she calls “the state of being purely subjective,” they could enmesh the audience in a common pleasure that acted a lot like a jazz performance—or like antebellum storytelling circles. When black performers can be comical on their terms, she argues, the audience “is infected” by the performer’s “high spirits” and “excessive good will.” “A stream of well-being is projected across the footlights into the consciousness of the beholder.” Here, it seems, was the acme of Harlem Renaissance fun. At its finest moments, a culture born from struggle and trauma shot beyond resistance and mere rebellion. It struck syncopated harmonies of cross-racial experience—laughter, dancing, competition, and the impudent revolt of wild partying.
THE “NEW NEGRO” or “Harlem” Renaissance was a surge in African-American cultural production that culminated in the 1920s. Among its likely causes—black resistance to lynchings and segregation, a rising black middle class with greater access to education, the mainstream popularity of jazz—the widest dispersal was the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to northern cities, some 555,000 in the 1910s alone. The sudden removal of so many rural families brought mixed fortunes—increased economic opportunity in the wartime economy, increased economic privation due to overcrowding, as well as new waves of racial resentment. At its worst, during what James Weldon Johnson famously called the “Red Summer” of 1919—a year of severe labor shortages due in large part to veterans returning home en masse—twenty-five or more major race riots, most of them instigated by whites, erupted from coast to coast and resulted in dozens of lynchings, hundreds of other deaths, thousands of injuries, and an American society in disarray.
But even in the most cramped and impoverished neighborhoods of Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, a new African-American cosmopolitanism was taking shape. And if New York City set the era’s highest standards for rebellious, socially integrated fun, Harlem was its Main Street. This predominantly black uptown neighborhood—whose population by 1925 was denser by a third than anywhere else in all of Manhattan—teemed with conflict. It was nobody’s utopia. “Long before the stock market crash,” writes the historian Jonathan Gill, “black Harlem had become a community in crisis, leading the nation in poverty, crime, overcrowding, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality.” East Harlem, with its largely Latino population, didn’t fare much better. But the runaway popularity of jazz—as well as Caribbean dance music—brought sudden revenue into the district, and while much of it stayed in the hands of white owners (such as the Mafia ownership of racially exclusive venues like Connie’s and the Cotton Club), a lot trickled down to locally operated bars and dance halls. The influx of wealthy and middle-class whites was only New York’s latest wave of slummers. Their presence was naturally galling to many Harlemites, who, while sometimes befriending them, also mocked, exploited, or ignored them.
Ed Small’s Paradise, with its dancing waiters on roller skates, was nearly as posh and expensive as Connie’s, but it was black-owned, color-blind, and popular for late-night Chinese food. As David Levering Lewis points out, Small’s, like the Clam House and other clubs along the Mob-dominated 133rd Street “Jungle,” sought “white clients enthusiastically, sometimes even fawningly,” in hopes of getting a piece of the market. Farther uptown, at the more populist Panama, a large club with pianos and dancing girls, the clientele was deliberately split between “the more of a quiet reserved type of entertainment” downstairs and the “rougher” type upstairs. The enormous Lincoln Gardens, however, traded ceremony for pleasure: one thousand patrons jammed the smoky floor and balcony, drank $2 pints of “licorice-tasting gin,” and were drawn like moths to Louis Armstrong and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. “The whole joint was rocking,” recalled Eddie Condon. “Tables, chairs, walls, people, moved with rhythm.… People in the balcony leaned over and their drinks spilled on the customers below.” Lincoln Gardens better resembled jazz’s natural habitat—the surging throngs in New Orleans’s steamy public halls. The most risqué (and fun) nightclubs such as the “transvestite floor shows, sex circuses, and marijuana parlors along 140th Street” were also least amenable to whites. More notorious white hedonists like Phil Harris, Mae West, and Carl Van Vechten managed to “obtain entry” through “persistence, contacts, and money,” but generally these venues didn’t welcome gawkers. The most famous sex circus on 140th Street was either Hazel Valentine’s The Daisy Chain or 101 Ranch. A jewel in the crown of Harlem’s thriving gay and lesbian scene, celebrated in songs by Fats Waller and Count Basie, Valentine’s show was centered on sex celebrities like Sewing Machine Bertha and the transvestite “Clarenz” who performed acrobatics that “catered to all varieties of sexual tastes.”
Private “rent parties”—“Social Whists”—were the beating heart of 1920s Harlem fun. Neighborhood kids, Harlem celebrities, downtown slummers, and working-class blacks could pay a small fee (ten cents most nights) to stomp and dance to stride-piano maestros like Willie “the Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and Fats Waller. More notorious “buffet flats” also marketed red-light favors, but rent parties were most often just overcrowded blowouts. They were announced with witty flyers, sold soul food and corn liquor, and helped overburdened tenants raise some rent money by packing in just about anybody with a thirst: “ladies’ maids and truck drivers,” recalled Langston Hughes, who hit the rent parties nearly every Saturday night, “laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as the dancers danced.”
Among America’s brightest stars of the 1920s were three African-American women—Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters—who joyfully slaughtered any and all sacred cows: of lyricism, of beauty, of public decency. Bessie Smith, in particular, who trained under Rainey and then paved the way for Waters, earned her title as “Empress of the Blues” through exquisite musicality and thunderous personality. Born poor in Chattanooga in 1894, she was singing for coins by the time she was nine and performing for Rainey at age eighteen, when her voice already was clear enough, strong enough, to captivate audiences without amplification. Deep, rich, conversational, “creamy,” Smith’s voice brought listeners in close and animated her blunt confessions of poverty, promiscuity, and violence, often with a slashing sense of humor. And Smith lived hard. She fired gunshots at her abusive (but beloved) husband, Jack Gee, identified by the biographer Chris Albertson as a “semi-illiterate night watchman.” She was stabbed by a man she’d knocked on his back. She constantly drank, kept a string of female lovers, and enjoyed a buffet flat in Detroit where Coke bottles and “lighted cigarettes” were sex-show props. She strutted out her antics in her hard-stomping blues, as in “Gimme a Pigfoot,” in which she growls in pure exuberance over an illegal Harlem rent party. Wanting “to clown,” wanting to send the piano player a drink because he’s “bringin’ [her] down,” she calls for “a pigfoot and a bottle of beer,” warning other revelers to “check [their] razors and [their] guns” because there’s “gonna be rasslin’ when the wagon comes.” As hearty as any celebrity of her hard-living era, Smith freely mingled her dangers and pleasures. Accordingly, as the song roars to its infamous climax, she keeps on raising the stakes:
We’re gonna shim-sham-shimmy till the risin’ sun
Gimme a reefer and a gang of gin
Slay me ’cause I’m in my sin.
In Harlem, more intimately even than in Hollywood, celebrities like Rainey, Smith, and Waters walked and partied among the people—as the finest examples of the people. Corroborating Negro Digest’s claim that it was “fun to be a Negro” during the 1920s and 1930s, David Levering Lewis describes the common “pleasure” of “seeing celebrities” such as James Weldon Johnson, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Florence Mills, and countless other Harlem dwellers strolling through the “Campus,” the name given to the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Celebrities heightened the frisson of the crowd, and in doing so with fellow feeling, as is evident in their populist songs and stories, they struck a syncopated jazz dynamic—a race, a dance, a competition—between soaring heights of individual freedom and the thumping rhythms of communal belonging. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, for instance, were stars because they honored their racial community. They infused their every note with its heritage and invited the world to come along.
Among Harlem’s celebrities who cherished their community while embracing their hard-won individual freedom was a rising generation of writers and artists. Musicians worked out their differences onstage in lively, showy cutting contests. These young intellectuals duked it out in print. Their poetry, novels, essays, and drama took bold new stances on African-American life. What resulted, among many other innovations, was American literature’s most thorough debate over the harms and health of what this book calls fun—or what J. A. Rogers calls “joyous revolt.” Following a century of blackface minstrelsy and primitivist fantasy, Harlem’s young talents gave their own impressions and at last brought clarity and dignity to a subject—fun, raw fun, African-American fun—that historically had been dismissed as ridiculous.
IN THE MID-1920s, ranks started to form between the older generation of Harlem’s elite—a black professional class whom DuBois identified as African America’s “Talented Tenth”—and the younger generation of writers, artists, actors, and musicians who preferred to look beyond class differences. Much as it had been in revolutionary Boston, when John and Samuel Adams were divided over how the new rising citizens should behave, in Harlem the people’s fun became a bone of contention. DuBois wanted to showcase the highest black achievements. With the influx of slummers and the nightlife boom, blacks were too easily fetishized as primitives—a loathsome stereotype that hung like sandbags on the project of racial uplift. The younger crowd resented this stereotype as well, but they were much more likely, in spite of such popular misperceptions, to look for redemption in the “joyous revolt” of “average” blacks. In it they often saw the vitality of the race.
Complicating matters was Carl Van Vechten. This white, gangly, forty-something Iowan threw some of the era’s wildest parties and floated among the intercontinental elite—literary, artistic, theatrical, musical, cinematic. He and his wife, Fania Marinoff (whom Bessie Smith once decked for kissing her goodnight), were close friends with Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge. Their celebrity acquaintances included Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst. And at some point in 1922, Van Vechten became, in his own words, “violently interested in Negroes,” an “addiction” that would lead him to spend the rest of the decade promoting black writers, musicians, and artists and giving distinguished white visitors “tours” of “authentic” Harlem.
It was right in Van Vechten’s line to exploit Harlem’s pleasures, as he did most infamously in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926), whose crude title and sensationalistic, salacious content caused an uptown uproar and made this onetime Harlem celebrity persona non grata. Despite its showy arguments against racism, the novel’s fascination with Harlem’s “Coney Island” thrills and its fantasy of gaily primitive Africans only gave readers more complex caricatures than had appeared in recent white American literature—than “the fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo” (1915), than the “glistening African god of pleasure” who plays ragtime piano in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918). Despite its attempts at psychological accuracy, many of Nigger Heaven’s characters, especially the lascivious Scarlet Creeper and the sex-starved Lasca Sartoris, are astonishing cartoons of black hedonism.
W. E. B. DuBois called the novel “a blow in the face” and “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white.” He took special umbrage at the novel’s “caricature” of Harlem life, “the wildly, barbaric drunken orgy in whose details Van Vechten revels.” But he, too, played an avuncular role to younger artists and was careful not to dismiss Harlem fun outright. He admitted “there is laughter, color, and spontaneity at Harlem’s core” but wished that someone of Van Vechten’s credibility would celebrate “the average colored man”—who attended church and was “as conservative and as conventional as ordinary working folk everywhere.”
The younger generation voiced their own ideas of “the average colored man”—and they were neither Van Vechten’s nor DuBois’s. Two months prior to Nigger Heaven’s publication, the twenty-four-year-old poet Langston Hughes, a Columbia University dropout, tossed a firebomb in support of black-cultural art. He called in The Nation for revolt against the “race toward whiteness”—against petit-bourgeois black artists and their “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Taking implicit aim at their darling Countee Cullen, a gay poet who would marry DuBois’s daughter in the most elite black social event of the 1920s, Hughes (probably also gay) rejected the “smug, contented, respectable folk” (like Cullen’s parents) who scold their children not to “be like niggers.” Mocking the black middle class for their “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and … Episcopal Heaven,” he urged young black writers to celebrate the “low-down folks” who are in the “majority—may the Lord be praised!” The black urban poor—who were not at all “conservative,” by Hughes’s description—enjoyed “their nip of gin on Saturday nights” and lived by their sometimes dangerous whims. “Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy.… Play awhile. Sing awhile. Oh, let’s dance!” Even “their religion soars to a shout,” since “these common folk are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”
Hughes had a personal investment in the subject. The people he praised resembled his easygoing mother and stepfather, who made their “money to spend” and “for fun”—as opposed to his racist and stingy father who scoffed at “Fun!” and “was interested in making money to keep.” Hughes believed the people’s fun told a truth all its own. Despite its risks and indiscretions, the fun of profligate, low-down folk revealed a vitality in black—and larger American—culture, if only the upper classes would listen: “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Many of Hughes’s peers heeded the call, and their writings of the 1920s and 1930s have deepened our knowledge of American fun.
The A-list of these peers—Arna Bontemps, Richard Bruce, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, and others—appeared that year in the sole issue of Fire!!, a journal “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists” that challenged Harlem’s literary establishment—namely, Charles Johnson’s Opportunity and W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis. Its only editorial was a review of Nigger Heaven, in which Wallace Thurman, the journal’s notoriously hard-living editor, took pains to protect Van Vechten, a friend whose patronage is acknowledged on the journal’s masthead. Thurman predicted that “Harlem Negroes, once their aversion to the ‘nigger’ in the title was forgotten, would erect a statue on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, and dedicate it to this ultra-sophisticated Iowa New Yorker.” (Van Vechten had recently been lynched there in effigy.) At the same time, asserting the magazine’s autonomy, Thurman slams the novel’s “effusions about Harlem” for being “pseudo-sophisticated, semi-serious,” and “semi-ludicrous.” He also scoffs at “ignoramuses” who put any stock in the veracity of Nigger Heaven. Against both prudery and sensationalism, Fire!! defended verisimilitude—the artist’s duty to “delve into deep pots of raw life.” The magazine’s office was engulfed in flames, ironically incinerating most of Fire!!’s only issue and plunging Thurman deep in debt, but its brief flame illumined a fearless new aesthetic with which W. E. B. DuBois parted company, and whose scene he called the “debauched tenth.”
THE FREEWHEELING SPIRIT of jazz kept Langston Hughes moving in the twenties and thirties. He had an irrepressible sense of fun. Mae Sullivan recalls Hughes being “adorable” and “always a little boy.” He was born in Missouri and often relocated with his mother and stepfather—to Lawrence, Kansas; Lincoln, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio. He spent two high school summers with his father in Mexico City, where he lowered a loaded gun he aimed at his own head because didn’t want to “miss something”—such as the “top of a volcano” or local bullfights, which he later discovered “must be smelt” for their “dust and tobacco and animals and leather.” Hughes survived to miss very little: he smelled, tasted, drank, and devoured the 1920s scene.
When he first arrived in Harlem, he wanted “to shake hands” with the “hundreds of colored people,” but Columbia University, where he was racially shunned by his fellow students, was definitely “not fun.” Having enrolled to please his father, he dropped out after a year. Working as a mess boy on a boat off Staten Island, he rebuffed an invitation from the famous Alain Locke, who had read his poems and wanted to meet him; Hughes preferred the company of his fellow Jack Tars. At twenty-one, pulling out on a boat bound for Africa, he cut himself loose from academia and his father by dumping all his books in the sea. In the years to come, his life was his own. Whether admiring his fellow crewmembers’ “gaily mutinous state,” enduring hunger and racism in Paris, scorning the segregation within Washington’s black community, or losing the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason for declaring he was not a “primitive,” Hughes stayed cheerful in the face of adversity and took inspiration from a defiant working class.
During his year bussing tables in Washington, D.C., Hughes met Van Vechten and Vachel Lindsay, both of whom supported his writing and facilitated his celebrated return to New York. Downtown, he frequented parties of influential whites: Florine Stettheimer, Alfred A. Knopf, and Jack Baker (one of whose parties never took off because the black crowd was “hunched over” his vast erotic library, “trying to find out what white folks say about love when they really come to the point”). He was right at home chez Joel and Amy Spingarn and, naturally, chez Carl Van Vechten, who, Hughes wrote, never spoke “grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism” and never made “a fetish of those qualities” but rather “live[d] them with sincerity—and humor.” Uptown, Hughes attended anything and everything: the spectacular (but doomed) Cullen-DuBois wedding, the magnificent jazz funeral of A’Lelia Walker (“very much like a party”), the sober and sophisticated parties at Jessie Fauset’s, and all the “good-time gatherings” that he preferred—gumbo suppers at James Weldon Johnson’s, bohemian gatherings at Wallace Thurman’s. He excoriated the Cotton Club and its “Jim Crow policy in the very heart of [Harlem’s] dark community”; like the majority of Harlemites, he hated the “vogue” of being black among the “influx of whites” who were “given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in the zoo.” But he loved the “ball” to be had at Small’s Paradise and the “gaudy” drag balls at the Hamilton and the Savoy. Above all, he loved rent parties, where the hosts were usually anonymous and which were “more amusing than any night club.”
Many of his poems, moreover, like Bessie Smith’s songs, were inspired by rent parties and cabarets, especially those published in his acclaimed first volume, The Weary Blues (1925), and in his generally despised (and unfortunately titled) second one, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His earliest influences were Sandburg and Whitman, whose raw enthusiasm and populist voices suited his desire to reach a large public; also influential were the rhythms and phrasings of jazz and the blues, which helped him to express, as he put it, “the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” The first volume aestheticized “the Negro soul,” depicting even “low-down folk” with an elegance and purity that was well received by the African-American press; the second volume looked unblinkingly at their pain, pleasures, violence, and vitality. In both books the commoner’s daily abjection is soothed by rhythm and peaks of joy, but in the second, his rancor—and his candor—were called shameful, amoral, and disrespectful to the race. Time has told a different story. Fine Clothes to the Jew, writes the biographer Arnold Rampersad, “marked the height of his creative originality as a poet” and “remains one of the most significant single bodies of poetry ever published in the United States.”
In the humblest and roughest ghetto scenes that make up Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes looked so intimately into average black people’s private lives (as he felt he understood them), and into their psychology and sexuality, that the critics spat back, J. A. Rogers (the advocate of jazz’s “joyous revolt”) calling the book “piffling trash”—“unsanitary, insipid, and repulsive”; others calling Hughes a “SEWER DWELLER” and the “poet ‘low-rate’ of Harlem,” and excoriating the “literary gutter-rat” Van Vechten, to whom the collection is dedicated, for being just the kind of reader to “revel in the lecherous, lust-seeking characters that Hughes finds time to poeticize about.” (Notably, however, amid this firestorm, DuBois’s Crisis published an appreciative review.) The book’s proximity to the Nigger Heaven scandal, and its association with Fire!!, where two of its poems had been previously published, drew close attention to its depiction of fun and its intimate look at poor urban blacks, although neither can be reduced to sensationalism.
In contrast to all of the volume’s portraits of abjection—of the “Bad Man” who says “I beats ma wife” and “beats ma side gal too” or of “Gin Mary,” who regrets her prison sentence because she’ll miss her gin—is the hot-handed banter of poems like “Crap Game”:
Lemme roll ’em, boy.
I got ma tail curled!
If a seven don’t come
’Leven ain’t far away.
An’ if I craps,
Dark baby,
Trouble
Don’t last all de time.
Hit em’, bones!
Here Hughes plays “hot” like a jazz soloist, ripping off riffs of casual street talk, capturing the sexy fun of the game while keeping the “Trouble” of its context. But when the poem pans back and takes in the crowd, more constructive pleasures emerge—Rogers’s “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong”: people are drawn into random contact by humor, music, and robust sexuality, revealing a Savoy Ballroom–style democracy that originates for Hughes in ghetto culture. This volume’s “Laughers,” a seeming nod to Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” catalogues and rejoices in the poet’s “people”—a catalogue that ranges from “Dish-washers” and “Crap-shooters” to “Nursers of babies”—for their hilarity “in the hands of Fate.”
Dancers—
God! What dancers!
Singers—
God! What singers!
Singers and dancers
Dancers and laughers.
Yes, laughers … laughers … laughers—
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands
Of Fate.
“Laughers” praises the people’s audacity, and “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”—urging the band to “Play that thing!”—praises jazz for spreading that audacity into all corners of humanity: “Play it,” says the poem,
for the lords and ladies,
For the dukes and counts,
For the whores and gigolos,
For the American millionaires,
And the school teachers
Out for a spree.
Hughes recognized a deep grammar in jazz. He saw the force in its folksy brilliance, in its polyglottal pleasures. It could lift a crowd above its differences to a common level of erotic pleasure:
May I?
Mais oui.
Mein Gott!
Parece una rhumba.
Play it, jazz band!
You’ve got seven languages to speak in
And then some,
Even if you do come from Georgia.
Can I go home wid yuh, sweetie?
Sure.
The “joyous revolt” that Hughes and his peers observed in twenties America—the “joy” that ran “bang! into ecstasy”—sprang from a range of sources. For the “Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate” who migrated by the thousands from the violent Jim Crow South to the overcrowded and rioting northern cities, jazz and jazz dance and folk humor and partying were mutual forms of racial affirmation—forms of what Chaplin called the “defiance” of “ridicule.” For more affluent African Americans, especially those who were torn between racial identification and European-American class distinction, nightclubs and rent parties were weekend havens where Protestant rules were eased or suspended. For white slummers touring inner-city neighborhoods in hopes of experiencing “genuine” black fun, teeming dance floors were as close as most could get to losing themselves in the melting pot. And for the regular working-class denizens (whom J. A. Rogers called the “average Negro”), the years when “Harlem was in vogue” brought exposure, often overexposure, to pleasures their communities had known for centuries. These various groups were at odds. The dancers on these dance floors had cause for fearing, even hating, one another. And yet writers like Hughes and many of his peers, bearing witness to these parties, saw an eros that actually gained momentum from such cross-societal purposes. Its friction was exciting, part of the fun. In a decade when America’s public sphere was threatened by political and racial conflict, the jazz band emerged like old King Charles as a radically civil rabble-rouser. It urged wallflowers to jump to their feet and stomp and swing in amicable collision. The fun it demanded wasn’t for the timid, but those who acquired a taste for the fray were converts for the public good.
THOUGH SHE WAS BORN in 1900 to Alabama bluebloods, Zelda Sayre wasn’t your average southern belle. Mouthy, vandalous, flirty, wild, wearing rouge and lipstick at age fifteen, she was only interested in swimming and boys. “Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything,” said a male companion from those years, “of boys, of being talked about; she was absolutely fearless.… But she did have a bad reputation.” In high school she dated soldiers from Camp Sheridan and Camp Taylor, and she cajoled her entire senior class into skipping school on April Fool’s Day, a prank that got all of them briefly expelled. Two months after graduating, voted “the Prettiest” in her class, she met a handsome first lieutenant from St. Paul, Minnesota, whose affections she would toy with for the next two years.
Zelda resembled the fiery heroines in Scott Fitzgerald’s undergraduate fiction; Scott better resembled his hesitant heroes, or the eponymous Romantic Egotist of his first unpublished novel. He traveled regularly by bus to see her in Montgomery, and she didn’t hide the fact that he had stiff competition. Her letters described escapades with up to “ten boys,” and when he tried to gall her with stories of pretty girls, she gave him maddening permission to pursue them. Everyone warned him against marrying a “girl who,” as he wrote, “gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more.’ ” But the event happened anyway, on April 3, 1920. This Side of Paradise had been published a week before, and straightaway the newlywed Fitzgeralds kicked off the spree of high jinks, scandals, and nonstop parties with which their generation would identify. That month they chaperoned a party for Princeton undergrads that ended in drunken brawls. (Zelda held court from her bathtub.) Tracked by gossip columnists and autograph hounds, they were evicted from their honeymoon suite at the Biltmore and evicted from the Commodore for more parties and pranks; eventually they escaped to the Connecticut countryside.
Carl Van Vechten, who was twice their age, befriended the couple during these years and sometimes brought them to Harlem speakeasies, an unlikely destination for the white-supremacist Scott. Carlos, as Zelda liked to call him, seemed unimpressed by Scott, a lightweight drinker who “was nasty” when “drunk.” But Zelda, he declared, “was an original. Scott was not a wisecracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks.… She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.” Scott also mined her diaries for material, quoting them verbatim in his first three books. And while Scott himself was certainly an “original”—the iconic American writer of the 1920s—his own sense of fun wasn’t all that new. American males had been skylarking for centuries. But Zelda’s was revolutionary. When he published Flappers and Philosophers in August 1920, winning sympathy for a girl who bobs her hair, it was Zelda’s philosophy that stole the show.
“Flapper” was a British term from the 1910s, but its twenties iteration was all-American, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was flapper royalty. She called the first flappers “young anti-puritans” who religiously followed “the flapper creed—to give and get amusement.” She touted the flapper’s defiant performance: “the art of being—being young, being lovely, being an object.” And this reluctant belle from Montgomery, raised in the heart of KKK country, paraded the flapper’s cross-racial curiosity: “The flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva, from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard.” For the flapper, in all her essential whiteness, signaled young women’s freedom from—and theatrical rebellion against—all of the white patriarchal institutions that stood between females and their fun. Buddy Bolden’s racial and sexual language let the flapper speak pleasure to power—if not miscegenistically (though flappers did that too), then culturally and symbolically.
In 1922—the same year Life featured a full-color “Flapper” as a butterfly in a see-through dress; the year Flapper magazine (“Not for Old Fogies”) declared “Flapper Styles Will Prevail!”—Zelda published her “Eulogy on the Flapper.” It was a pat flapper move: morbidly ironic, reported as if from beyond the grave. Writing for Metropolitan, the same magazine that had just serialized The Beautiful and Damned and elected the Fitzgeralds the first couple of fun, she honored the “deceased” flapper as a young woman of singular integrity. She praised her for keeping “mostly masculine friends,” for wearing “a great deal of audacity and rouge … into the battle,” for flirting “because it was fun to flirt,” and for sporting “a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure.” In short, she described the dangerous young woman who had seduced F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The flapper, poor thing, had died of popularity. This icon of female urbanity, Zelda mourned, was being imitated by “several million small-town belles.” Flapping had been democratized, and the girl in the crowd didn’t understand its original “philosophy.” Which was? “The desire for unadulterated gaiety.”
But by all remaining evidence, by 1922, the average flapper’s “gaiety” was still “unadulterated”—she smoked, swore, danced, drank, strutted her flesh, and petted heavily. She wrung all the fun from her supersaturated moment and generally kept “Old Fogies” on guard, just as Zelda Sayre used to do. Only now the party was out of control. Even rural girls were acting cosmopolitan. Women everywhere were “absolutely fearless.” And in 1927, the year of the It girl, F. Scott knew the flapper wasn’t dead. He updated the term with Clara Bow, calling her “the quintessence of what the term ‘flapper’ signifies … pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly-clad and ‘bard-berled’ as possible. There were hundreds of them, her prototypes. Now, completing the circle, there are thousands more, patterning themselves after her.”
THE “NEW WOMAN” MOVEMENT, like the “New Negro” Renaissance, gave a variety of new perspectives on the 1920s wild party. Its scofflaw fun, more often than not, was edifying and liberating—and for that reason thrilling, joyful, and scary. Contributing new tactics to their larger constituency of “Wild Wets,” who reignited Merry Mount’s old battle with Plymouth, women reimagined American rebellion according to their out-group identity. Joining forces among themselves, “New Women” took strength from leanings and attributes that had always been dismissed as weaknesses. Much as African-American comedy, music, and sexuality were embraced by younger black artists as sources of distinction, so too did women’s bravado and eroticism, which had been scorned or exploited throughout American history, suddenly become ammunition—and the height of fashion.
Whether they were sensuous bohemians, emasculating flappers, lightning-tongued hedonists, or the singularly incendiary Mae West, the leonine New Women of the 1920s put the dusty old guard on notice: pleasure was a source of dangerous power, and having fun defined the citizen in ways not unlike the right to vote—it connected the individual to community, it gave groups of citizens bold expression, and it came with weighty responsibility.
THE POET EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY was the original flapper of 1920s letters. Raised poor in turn-of-the-century rural Maine, she was taught to be bold by a liberated mother who evicted Edna’s no-account father. In 1912, at the age of twenty, she sent a palpitating lyric to a national contest that led to a scholarship at Vassar. Upon graduating, emboldened by her successful first book, Renascence and Other Poems, she moved into a garret in Greenwich Village where they called this classical beauty “Vincent” and made her the toast of thriving bohemia. The avant-garde sniffed at her traditional verse forms—which looked dowdy next to mavericks like Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Stein—but her second collection, A Few Figs from Thistles, earned her acclaim as “the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the Miss America of 1920.” And her third collection won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, the first one ever given to a woman, after which her international renown was secure: she was adored by fashion magazines, mobbed at train stations. Now, for anyone who didn’t already know, Millay was the voice and mind of the New Woman—not only boasting the flapper’s “unadulterated gaiety” but vividly disclosing her insatiable desires.
In his 1923 Love in Greenwich Village, which recounts young New York’s rampant sexual mores, Floyd Dell, whose marriage proposal Millay rejected, recalled her “liv[ing] in that gay poverty which is traditional of the village” and which afforded her and all her fellow bohemians “the joys of comradeship and play and mere childlike fun.” The erotic content of her early lyrics typified her sybaritic times—as did her smoldering imagery of cigarettes, “jazzing music,” and her iconic candle:
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
The flapper conjured up in her poems could be fickle (“And if I loved you Wednesday … I do not love you Thursday”), unrepentant (“ ‘I’ve been a wicked girl … I might as well be glad!’ ”), or casually brutal (“I see with single eye … Your ugliness.… I know the imperfection of your face”).
Emasculating wit such as Millay’s was one of the flapper’s most fearsome trademarks. As the New York Times warned in 1922, the flapper “will never make you a hatband or knit you a necktie, but she’ll drive you from the station hot Summer nights in her own little sports car. She’ll don knickers and go skiing with you…; she’ll dive as well as you, perhaps better.” The flapper was as known for her sexual exploits as for turning the whole thing into a joke. (“The tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons,” complains Dr. Osterhaus in Warner Fabian’s Flaming Youth, “would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and double entente [sic] based on sex.”) And the public knew the truth behind Millay’s lines. She moved freely among romantic encounters and refused to choose between women and men. Her poems traded, with similar caprice, between biting irony and love-struck agony. If her persona looks vulnerable in her most devastated love sonnets, it is because she yields to a sexual pleasure that racks her wanton frame.
Proof positive that she had fun with this dangerous image are the articles she published in Vanity Fair, under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd (read “nancy boy”)—a trickster figure who, in the spirit of Mark Twain’s Virginia City persona, made a prank of her celebrated identity. She especially enjoyed her perceived femininity. In one such piece, she masquerades as “An American Art Student in Paris” and is shocked to see “Edna St. Vincent Millay” sitting next to her at a café “eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages”—when she had “always imagined her so ethereal.”
Firebrands like Zelda and “Vincent”—and Hollywood “It girls” like Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks, and Clara Bow—gave middle-class women exciting new permission to wear their sexuality how they saw fit; to act as bold as, if not bolder than, men; to drink as much as, if not more than, men; to indulge in masquerade—and call it masquerade; and to speak with a frank and silly new language that was neither ladylike nor manly, nor sensible.
Following their examples, of course, was risky. Paula Fass’s landmark study of 1920s white youth culture suggests the flappers’ most daring ambitions, especially those regarding sexual behavior, were regularly tempered within college peer groups, which tended to enforce their own limits on sex. But peer groups were far more permissive than parents. While most youth still scorned premarital intercourse, “petting parties,” a mild prelude to the group sex of later decades, legitimized kissing, necking, and fondling. Women who took the flappers’ lead faced serious consequences from college administrators. In 1925, after Bryn Mawr’s president designated smoking areas for women, many more college administrators redoubled their prohibitions. Northwestern’s dean of women gave no quarter: “Any girl I catch smoking anywhere and at any time will not be permitted to remain in college.” Women’s natural resistance to such stifling laws was backed by two ameliorating forces: the press and the markets. Student newspapers mocked their administrators’ folly, noting women had already made smoking an “art” and supported women’s rights “to indulge her tastes just as men had always done.” One by one, over the course of a decade, women’s “indulgences” cleared traditional hurdles: makeup, hemlines, dancing, kissing. Smoking was one of the last in line, since drinking was forbidden to everybody. And as with many of the New Woman’s rebel props—haircuts, short skirts, dance steps, makeup—this taboo, too, was soon to be monetized. In 1929, the magisterial spin doctor Edward Bernays spun this fun new vogue (at the behest of tobacco companies) into a national symbol of liberation: he staged an Easter parade in New York City where women were photographed openly smoking their “torches of freedom.”
The flapper, for whom fun was a cause in itself, deserves much credit for the New Woman revolution. The flapper knew women weren’t supposed to have fun, and she joined the long American campaign of turning prohibitions into playthings. Not only did she claim this right, she perfected it, and her often arcane talk was as modern as the barrel roll. It boasted the highest critical standards for gaiety, liberty, class, and style. “A Flapper’s Dictionary,” printed in the July 1922 Flapper, listed 163 need-to-know terms for the girl “with a jitney body” who also had “a limousine mind.” It distinguished the “Brooksy” (“Classy dresser”) from the “Brush Ape” (“a country Jake”) and the “Fire Bell” (“Married woman”) from the “Fire Alarm” (“Divorced”). While it called the flapper’s father a “Dapper” (he was the one who furnished the “Hush Money”), it was otherwise vicious to the older generation—to “Father Time” (“Any man over 30”), the “Face Stretcher” (“Old maid who tries to look younger”), and all the “Alarm Clocks,” “Fire Extinguishers,” and other chaperones.
The glossary gives a peek into the flapper’s high standards. She liked “Smoke Eaters” (girl smokers) and “Floorflushers” (“dance hounds”), and most certainly “Weeds” (“Flappers who take risks”). These are all “Ducky,” the “Cat’s Particulars.” But she snubbed “Bush Hounds” (“Rustics and others outside the Flapper pale”), warned against killjoys (“Wurps,” “Cancelled Stamps,” “Crepe Hangers,” “Lens Louises”), and called out the worst kinds of men by name: “Gimlets,” “Weasels,” “Oilcans,” “Slimps,” “Monologists,” “Finale Hoppers,” “Airedales,” “Pillow Cases,” “Mustard Plasters,” “Dewdroppers,” “Walk Ins,” “Corn Shredders,” “Rug Hoppers,” “Bell Polishers,” and those “Cellar Smellers” with noses for the cheapest booze. “Whangdoodle” was her racy name for jazz, and her lexicon was warm on all sorts of “Barneymugging” (sex)—whether it happened in a “Petting Pantry” (movie theater), somebody’s “gas wagon,” or any big “Blow” (“Wild Party”) where the “Biscuit” (“pettable flapper”) chose to “Mug” with her “Goof” or “Highjohn.” She was chilly toward that old “Eye Opener,” marriage. She called her fiancé a “Police Dog” and her engagement ring a “Handcuff”—it might as well as have been a “Nut Cracker” (“Policeman’s nightstick”). Her wit in general ran deep: “Dogs” were feet and “Dog Kennels” shoes. “Meringue” was her idea of “personality.” But beneath all the smoke and meringue and makeup was a steely eye for realism. Male gold diggers were “Forty Niners,” bootleggers were “Embalmers,” and undertakers were “Sod Busters.” “Munitions” were the flapper’s “Face powder and rouge.”
Dorothy Parker, the era’s most legendary wit, held the fast-talking flapper in high esteem. She admired her unassuming danger:
Her girlish ways may make a stir,
Her manners cause a scene,
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.
The Times called Parker’s poetry “flapper verse” for being “wholesome, engaging, uncorseted and not devoid of grace.” To this extent Parker resembled Millay, whom she worshipped and to whose finer poetry she aspired. But nobody accused her of being “ethereal.” While Millay played the victim of her own gluttonous heart, Parker, who was as notoriously promiscuous, flaunted her genuine morbidity, making several attempts on her life and ultimately medicating herself to death with “small sips” of Johnnie Walker neat.
When a bartender once asked her what she was having, she replied, “Not much fun.” The sundry works of Dorothy Parker—ranging from plays, essays, reviews, and doggerel verse to some of America’s most poignant fiction—were an ongoing meditation on fun, and on its miserable casualties. Throughout the twenties she was the life of the party, covering the scene from New York’s Algonquin to Paris’s Les Deux Magots, with frequent stops in the Hamptons at the Swopes estate, the rumored template for the Gatsby mansion. But for all of her promiscuity and celebrated drinking, Parker’s most reliable fun seems to have come from jeux de mots. When asked to use “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker quipped, “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” A lingerie caption she proposed to Vogue read: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.” (It was rejected at the last minute.) Her poetry ripples with such irreverent merriment, often erring on the side of the singsong but always with vitriol marring its surface. Her finest work ventures outside the submarine and lingers, dangerously, in the chambers of the sea. W. Somerset Maugham said her novella “Big Blonde”—which reads like Parker’s own “Eulogy on the Flapper”—had “all the earmarks of masterpiece.” It’s about an over-the-hill flapper named Hazel Morse. In it, Parker’s mermaid wakes up human and, like Eliot’s Prufrock, drowns.
Risk-loving flappers dance the Charleston—in high heels—on the ledge of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel, December 11, 1926. (Courtesy of Underwood & Underwood, CORBIS images.)
As so many twenties writers would have it, under all the booze, whangdoodle, and fun was a sneaking insecurity that belied both the sheik’s and the flapper’s confidence: fun was a cover-up that made matters worse. The deep distractions of the 1920s seemed to lead death-driven wild partiers, like Parker and Harry Crosby, ever farther from, not “nearer to,” the “frank and full enjoyment of life” identified by Robert L. Duffus. Most likely, it was the Parkers and Crosbys whom reformers like Duffus had hoped to “guide.” The wild-spinning fun, like Tilyou’s Human Roulette, tossed weakly clutching citizens into the ditch. Throughout the story “Big Blonde,” for instance, people clamber together in pursuit of reckless fun; in the end, the damaged ones—like Hazel, the eponymous Big Blonde herself—seek “drowsy cheer” in the sweet and absolute slackening of death.
The way Parker represents it, indeed the way she seems to have lived it, these two communities—the partygoers and the suicides—were on a continuum of risky pleasure that characterized Jazz Age extremity. At the era’s illegal and extralegal wild parties, where only cops and parents weren’t welcome, citizens were not only exposed to risk; they welcomed it, pursued it, demanded it. They laughed at tedious common sense. They flouted laws, civil and social, and tested the limits of decency and safety. It took resilience under such conditions for the average citizen to keep it together—to keep from succumbing to addiction and violence; to keep from knuckling under to tyrants.
The streetwise flapper put a premium on resilience. She tested her mettle in this risky age, and she expected other women to do the same. But as Parker demonstrates in “Big Blonde” and elsewhere, fun for fun’s sake had special dangers for women, who lacked advantage in the world of men. Whether she was valued for her sex, her wits, or her fun, the woman’s role at the party was often to entertain, even when what she wanted was only to amuse herself.
Dorothy Parker would die of a heart attack, but until then she was chronically suicidal. Like her Big Blonde, Hazel Morse, she once took an overdose of the sedative Veronal. Another time she consumed a bottle of shoe polish. It was in her character to turn even her suicide attempts into stunts and practical jokes. Having slashed herself with her husband’s razor, she greeted bedside visitors with blue ribbons tied to her bandaged wrists. After an overdose of sleeping powders, she sent a telegram from the country estate where she was recovering: “send me a saw INSIDE A LOAF OF BREAD.”
Gallows humor sets the tone for the Big Blonde’s failed suicide. Approaching her beloved vials of Veronal, Hazel feels “the quick excitement of one who is about to receive an anticipated gift.” Drinking down the pills she intones once more, “Here’s mud in your eye.”
But of course she doesn’t die. That would have been a happy ending. “You couldn’t kill her with an ax,” is her doctor’s diagnosis. Like Parker’s, Hazel’s fate is to keep on drinking.
MAE WEST, for her part, had nerves of steel. She stuck up for society’s most despised citizens (prostitutes, gays, cross-dressers) and always managed to come out on top. Born in 1893, raised poor and tough in Bushwick, Brooklyn, she learned from her mother, a corset model, to market her sex appeal for a self-respecting profit. She learned from her father—a livery stableman who may have been a two-bit boxer—how to pump iron and judge a good prizefight. She hit the boards at six, and “by the time she was a teenager,” Lillian Schlissel writes, “she was all strut and swagger, moving around the stage like a bantam-weight fighter”—a strut she would fashion into the pugilistic saunter that shook the 1930s silver screen. It was in her teens, in Coney Island’s saloons and theaters, that she earned an Ivy League acting education. Having dumped her first husband at age nineteen, she acted with Jimmy Durante on the boardwalk, took comic cues from Bert Williams (the slinky half of Williams and Walker), conned songs from JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy, modeled her style on the “wildly uninhibited antics” of Eva Tanguay, and studied the rapid-fire comic banter of Jay Brennan and of the unapologetically gay Bert Savoy, who impressed her with his repertoire of heroines (in drag) and his dangerously irreverent zingers. This coterie of mismatched male, female, and female-impersonating influences—a boxer, a cakewalker, a circus oddity; comedians both gay and straight—inspired a fearless new fun in her stagecraft that could make even the flapper blush. And West’s love of sex wasn’t an act—she claimed to have had it nearly every day of her life.
She cast herself as a “jazz baby” in her first play, The Ruby Ring (1921), and in the title role of her co-written second, The Hussy (1922), but by the mid-1920s, when she had entered her thirties, she dropped the flapper dress for a whore’s lingerie. Piqued by young Clara Bow’s The Fleet’s In, she adapted a low sex comedy called Following the Fleet (in which Montreal prostitutes do just that) into a morally shocking play called Sex (1926). Sex featured West as her heroine, Margy, a slang-slinging prostitute who proves, in the end, to be more upstanding than Clara, a Connecticut socialite who slums at Margy’s brothel. What made Sex unforgivable was that, of all the sex comedies playing off-Broadway, this one gave moral high ground to the whore, even stating Margy would “make a better wife and mother than” Clara. The production featured sailors dancing an all-male jig. West herself did a “shimmy shawabble” that she claimed to have learned on Chicago’s South Side. The critics, siding with high society, greeted Sex with a collective Bronx cheer: “vulgar,” “nasty,” “infantile,” and “as bad a play as these inquiring eyes have gazed upon in three seasons.” But the theatergoing public held a different opinion, making it off-Broadway’s most successful play of the season.
Her next year’s production joined the recent gay-comedy vogue and cashed in on a new, leering interest in drag balls. The play, The Drag (1927), drew in part upon West’s circle of gay men and went beyond its potentially salacious subject matter to give a sympathetic and jubilant look at gay culture. Her great risk, once again, lay in her sympathy, this time with a sexual orientation that, as her play acknowledges, was scorned as “degenerate” and “criminal.” Much as Sex ennobles prostitutes by society’s highest standards, The Drag describes a gay couple as being “happier” than any “normally married couple.” The story hinges on two contentious old friends, a doctor who speaks generously of the “born homosexual” and a judge who believes “people like that should be herded together on some desert island.” The doctor’s daughter is unhappily married to the judge’s elusive son, Rolly, who, predictably, is secretively gay. Mae West’s own melodramatic typecasting suggests that, against the play’s defense of homosexuals, Rolly and other gays have questionable morals (he freely deceives his wife, he is killed by his rejected ex-lover), but The Drag’s dominant picture presents the gay community as close-knit, witty, and defiantly fun. A drag queen, Duchess, defending herself for powdering up in front of the cops, says that “they like me,” and then with innuendo: “They all know me from Central Park.”
West’s cops are stand-ins for the 1920s vice squads that came down hard on sexual deviance and put special heat on West herself. In The Drag they’re also the peak of excitement. In the culminating drag party—the dance spectacle that made the play’s money—cross-dressers boast about previous jail time and burst into excitement when the joint is raided: “It must be the wagon, let me in first!” “I had to stand the last time!” “I don’t care, I had a gay time!” “I had a grand time!” “I had a gorgeous time!”
On February 9, 1927, trying to forestall The Drag from ever opening in New York City, the Society for the Prevention of Vice raided Sex and two other racy plays. (The lenient “jazz mayor,” Jimmy Walker, was on vacation.) West and her cast were hauled away in a van and released on $14,000 bail. She and her two producers, refusing a plea bargain, reopened the show with “a restraining order against police interference” and enjoyed several months of lavish profits while awaiting their obscenity trial. Each of the three was found guilty, fined $1,500, and sentenced to ten days behind bars—a high-profile incarceration with which Mae West, like P. T. Barnum some seventy years earlier, had a lot of fun. She reported in a limo, dined with the warden, and bragged of having done her time in a silk negligee.
She rewrote The Drag as The Pleasure Man, making changes to evade the censors but keeping its big draw, the drag ball, intact. The Pleasure Man was raided right away, and West and her producers were forced to bail out a cast of fifty-nine. The obscenity trial lasted fourteen days, but after the media had had their fill, the case was thrown out. In the end the trial was just another wild party. Having scored this major free-speech victory, though to the tune of $60,000, West summed it up: “Let’s see some other son of a bitch do that.”
Mae West came from tough American stock. She didn’t shrink from the fight—she courted it. In the heat of battle—onstage, in court—West was at the top of her game, dropping her foes with delicious rejoinders, losing herself in a shimmy shawabble. Not just a writer, actor, or producer, West was an impresaria, a force. And she wasn’t just in it for herself. Unlike Zelda, she was no elitist. Like Bessie Smith and Clara Bow, she was loyal to her people and eager to spread their fun around. She harnessed the power of despised Americans and made it desirable even to the middle class. Critics scoffed and censors pounced, but the people kept coming back for more. For her fun wasn’t meant to please the elite. Her fun was at home down among the crowd. It was the fun of outcasts, rebels, and commoners, and it was open country for any citizen who was unafraid, unashamed, unflappable.