Shades of Young Girls among the Flummery

Only an ass, and a knavish one at that, would have the temerity to compare himself with Boswell, the brothers Goncourt, Rainer Maria Rilke, or any of the world’s other great diarists, but after thirty-­three years of standing around on one foot waiting for a crumb of recognition, I trust I may be pardoned for blowing my own horn. Way back in 1920, while in statu pupillari at a Rhode Island lyceum, I kept a journal, briefly, wherein I recorded certain ideals and aspirations, judgments on books and movies that had impressed me, and appraisals of teachers and relatives who had not. It is hardly my purpose to dwell here on how trenchant and shrewd were these comments, how utterly devastating and yet how accurate; enough to say that if some perceptive critic like James Gibbons Huneker had been prowling around my bureau and discovered the diary under the porous-­knit union suits where it lay hidden, he would have unhesitatingly pronounced it a minor classic. Unfortunately, Huneker seldom got up to New England in those days and never learned of the existence of the diary prior to his death. (Whether he learned of it afterward I have, of course, no way of knowing.) In any case, looking it over a while ago, I ran across an estimate of a movie I had seen called The Flapper, produced by Lewis J. Selznick and starring Olive Thomas. “Coruscating entertainment,” I said of it. “Adult fare, replete with Frenchy situations and rib-­tickling persiflage. With this production, Hollywood dons long pants. A few more of these, and there is no telling what might happen.” Events proved me right. Selznick went bust—the ordinary filmgoer was too crass to appreciate caviar—but his sons vindicated him and made celluloid history. Had I wished to capitalize on my foresight, I, too, might have prospered. Alas, I was a brilliant dreamer, a Mycroft Holmes content to view everything as a chess problem.

Quite recently, in the course of a medical checkup, I was alarmed to find that my masochism count had dropped below the safety level and that I was becoming impervious to cinema flapdoodle. Sure-­shot emetics like Kirk Douglas had lost their potency, and even the sight of José Ferrer in Moulin Rouge, foreshortened and busily polluting the memory of Toulouse-­Lautrec, had aroused no more than the collywobbles one experiences broadside of an oily swell. Faced with such inescapable danger signals, I quickly repaired to the film library of the Museum of Modern Art and outlined my symptoms.

The curator’s answer was unequivocal. “This is no time for half measures,” he said, his fingertips beating a tattoo on the desk top. From underneath it, where his factotum was quartered, came an answering tattoo. The curator stubbed out his cigarette. “Clear all projection rooms!” he bawled down. “Break out that print of The Flapper, produced by Lewis J. Selznick and starring Olive Thomas!” Off in the background, diminuendo, I heard the strident voices of half a dozen Sarah Lawrence graduates relaying the command to the storage vaults. A quarter of an hour later, I was semi-­recumbent in a darkened auditorium, my stomach fluttering auspiciously and perspiration mantling my forehead. It was a slow, uphill fight, but by the end of the sixth reel I was as panicky as a tenor with a fish-­bone in his throat.

Chronologically, the flapper of Olive Thomas antedated by several years that of Clara Bow; the freewheeling galosh and the Stutz Bearcat, the coonskin coat and the débutante slouch were still to emerge as symbols of the Jazz Age, and the theme of Selznick’s opus, if it had any, was the rebellion ostensibly fermenting in the somewhat younger generation. Casting Miss Thomas as its teen-­aged protagonist was, incidentally, sheer dramatic license, for her middy blouse was strained like a balloon jib. The same was true of her schoolmates, a clutch of zestful little breastfuls who must have been recruited from a corset showroom. The fact that they wore Peter Thomsons and hair ribbons and bombarded each other with snowballs didn’t upset anyone at the time the picture was current; indeed, it heightened the aura of naughtiness, of Gallic spice, that clung to everything surrounding the nickelodeon. Corinne Calvet in a Bikini, nowadays, doesn’t have one-­third the sizzle of Elaine Hammerstein in a pinafore. Oh, well, two-­thirds.

The dramatis personae of The Flapper plummet into the opening reel with such velocity that the proceedings make little sense at first, but a design presently emerges. Ginger (Olive Thomas), the madcap daughter of Senator King (Warren Cook), has been perturbing everyone in the hamlet of Orange Springs, Florida, with her boisterous antics. Familial patience ends when she takes French leave of some youngsters assigned to her care and goes speedboating with a vacationing freshman from a Northern military academy, Billy Forbes (Theodore Westman, Jr.). The Senator thereupon packs her off to a misses’ seminary—adjoining Billy’s school, for plot purposes—whose students are slyly characterized as “limbs of Satan from old family trees.” The only evidence of wanton conduct I could detect, however, was a piggish overindulgence in fudge and an occasional typhoon of giggles; on the face of it, Ginger’s cronies are as torpid as a moatful of carp, and to alleviate the monotony she breaches the rules and fraternizes with Billy next door. Concurrently, she develops a pash for a mysterious young man named Richard Channing (William P. Carlton, Jr.), who roams the grounds daily on his saddle horse and whom the girls romantically conjecture to be an English lord, a professional gambler, or an actor. (I saw no external evidence to support the last of these, by the way.) “Don’t you think he looks like a Greek god?” Ginger observes rapturously to Billy as the stranger canters by. Billy’s retort is a squelcher. “He looks like a fried egg to me,” he ripostes. Badinage of this stripe has gone out of fashion of late, or possibly I don’t know the right teen-agers. It must be two or three years since I’ve heard anybody declare, “I’m the guy who put salt in the ocean,” or “You tell ’em, whalebone, you’ve been around the ladies.”

By maneuvering Billy into a sleigh ride and a consequent upset in the snow, a scene that would prostrate anyone with its antics if he were not already horizontal, Ginger scrapes acquaintance with her idol, falsifies her age, and gets him to invite her to a hop at the local country club. The other bimbos are, of course, oxidized with envy as she struts about waving ostrich fans and bragging of her conquests, and her reputation as a femme du monde soars. Unluckily, the headmistress learns of the proposed exploit. She turns up at the dance just as our heroine is holding court around the punch bowl; Channing, miffed at his public embarrassment, refers to Ginger in her hearing as a pinfeathered saphead, which compounds the debacle; and on being haled back to school, she theatrically presses a cluster of lilies to her bosom and prepares to hang herself from a chandelier. Meanwhile, the plot—to employ a courtly synonym—has been proliferating in another and more melodramatic direction. A student named Hortense (Katherine Johnston), described as “a moth among the butterflies,” has been in league with one Tom Morran, alias the Eel (Arthur Johnston), to rob the school safe. The valuables contained there—as far as I could see, a string of beads and some women’s dresses—hardly warrant being kept under lock and key, but anyway Ginger spies the couple descending a ladder with two suitcases and forgets her suicidal impulse. Despite Hortense’s disappearance, the premise is advanced that nobody links her with the caper; the headmistress, clearly someone who lives in a world of fantasy if she keeps clothing in a safe, hushes up the affair on understandable grounds, and her charges start packing for their midterm vacation. Just as the picture showed every sign of being moribund, and I was massaging my knee to obviate the nut-­cracking sound so embarrassing in a projection room, the story shuddered convulsively and lumbered off again. I would have followed suit if I could have got my knee back into its socket.

Hortense and the Eel, a dissolve reveals, are bivouacked in a New York hotel, in whose lobby they accidentally see Channing, and they now originate the notion of making Ginger the goat for the robbery. Since Channing does not know them, and since, moreover, the theft has been hushed up, there isn’t the slightest trace of logic in any of this; I’m merely repeating what danced across the screen. The heavies dispatch a telegram luring Ginger to their suite, where Hortense confides that she and the Eel were eloping when her schoolmate last saw them. Reassured, Ginger is persuaded to tarry the night, and shortly meets Channing in the dining room. He is also bound for Orange Springs, by a rare coincidence, and paternally tries to induce her to take the same train, but nothing happens, just as it has been happening with dizzying regularity all along. In the middle of the night Ginger is awakened at gun point by the confederates, given the suitcases containing the boodle, and ordered to hide them in Orange Springs until they reclaim them. You or I might regard this as rather eccentric behavior; Ginger, however, treats it with aplomb and, after they bolt, settles down, fascinated, to examine the suitcases. Hidden in the clothing is a packet of sultry love letters from the Eel to Hortense, which, announces a succession of titles, give Ginger a delicious idea: “A complete outfit for a woman of experience . . . She might borrow it and vamp Channing . . . She would go home with a manufactured past.”

Well, sir, if you think the foregoing is a wee bit daft, the rest of it is more Surrealist than Le Chien Andalou or one of those comic-­strip nightmares Little Nemo used to get from eating Welsh rabbits. Down in Orange Springs, a staid party of townswomen is convened at the King home, buzzing over the teacups, when Ginger draws up in a calash, sporting a Duchess of Devonshire hat trimmed with osprey feathers, a hobble skirt, and opera-­length gloves, and flaunting a court chamberlain’s baton. How this finery had found its way into the school safe, unless the headmistress was in the habit of impersonating Lady Teazle after lights-­out, is the only suspenseful element I saw anywhere in The Flapper. “Howdy, Gushy, old top,” Ginger drawls to a neighbor. “How’s everything in the little old town?” To their intense alarm—and when those early screen actors registered alarm, the camera tripod shook—the ladies hear the girl confess that she has been leading a double life in New York, gallivanting around till 4 a.m., etc. etc. To intensify the atmosphere of dementia, Billy Forbes rockets in, reacts in horror to the metamorphosis, and races off to berate Channing for having led his sweetheart astray. As the whole thing deteriorates into bedlam, with Senator King distractedly vowing to kill Ginger’s seducer, the brat restores the clothes to the valises and endeavors to ship them by railway express to the New York police. The freight agent, suspicious, fetches a detective, who promptly arrests her. (It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least, by then, if she had arrested him.) A mighty hue and cry ensues in the King household when she is brought back, everyone bellowing and fainting like sixty, but eventually the plainclothesman recognizes the handwriting in the love letters as that of the Eel—am I going too fast for you?—and the mystery is solved. To round matters off neatly, the Eel and Hortense show up to retrieve their swag and are whisked off to pokey, and the last shot, prefaced by a newspaper headline reading, “orange springs social welfare workers horrified over soft drink dissipation,” shows Ginger and Billy devouring sodas and cooing to each other.

It was in a state of acute vertigo, as though I had been rotated in a cocktail shaker, that I left the Museum to buy a stirrup cup at Schrafft’s for my daughter, herself a student at a New England academy and entraining that afternoon for the fall semester. Over the parfaits, I listened to a breathless recapitulation of her day. She had picked up a bargain autograph of Marlon Brando at a Sixth Avenue pornographer’s, priced a star sapphire at Tiffany’s and given the salesperson my phone number, and, cannily sensing that prices were at their peak, charged several thousand dollars’ worth of gowns suitable for embassy functions. “And what did you do today?” she asked solicitously, sponging a tiny bead of fudge from my cravat. On the theory that Ginger’s misadventures might furnish a moral lesson, I began recounting the plot of The Flapper. Halfway through, she broke in nervously. “Look, I won’t hear of you coming to the train,” she said. “You’re going home to bed this second.” With the aid of a mysterious bystander who could have been an English lord, a professional gambler, or an actor but who turned out to be the manager, I was loaded into a calash and sent home. She must have got back to school safely, unless she took off for Orange Springs. You never know which way these modern kids’ll jump. Why, when I was her age, I already kept a journal that frankly— But there I go, blowing my own horn.