Edith admired women travellers of all classes who behaved appropriately and with dignity, no matter what the occasion. Unlike her other female shipmates, the conductress’s unique role allowed her to observe the behaviour and pastimes of unaccompanied women passengers in all three classes, and she would flit between the decks several times a day, keeping an eye on her charges. Edith enjoyed dancing, so often joined the thé dansant, a popular afternoon activity on ships in the 1920s. Sometimes events could take a startling turn:
One afternoon the orchestra of the Arabic was playing for such an occasion when a sedate, elderly man turned to me and said: ‘That girl has just lost her drawers!’ There they were, pale mauve silk, at her feet. The elastic must have slipped its moorings. I have seldom seen anyone so cool. With complete nonchalance and considerable dexterity, the young lady retrieved her panties, folded them up and continued dancing with a completely co-operative partner. It so happened she was destined for a minor post in the Foreign Office abroad. Calm, entirely collected, I felt sure she would do well in her chosen career.1
Some women’s louche behaviour irritated Edith. She was particularly disparaging about those who were keen to attract male interest at any cost:
Old girls, young girls and not so young girls; silly old girls, mutton disguised as lamb, all dressed up to the nines, all out on a big safari to ensnare unsuspecting males. They certainly were grist to the mill of hard-up young men – it was a gigolo’s paradise at times … I met quite old women, complete with face-lift, tummy-lift and breast-lift, married to nasty younger men, purchased with wealth. A sad sight, those travesties of womanhood. They hung onto their young husbands, kept them well on the leash.2
Edith also disapproved of wealthy female passengers fraternising with the men of the ship’s company. On some cruise ships the most handsome waiters were occasionally invited by unescorted lady passengers to accompany them on day trips ashore. The women would pick up any expenses, and have a pleasant, attentive young man as company in return. What used to be – and indeed still is – coyly referred to as ‘romance’ was part of the appeal of travel by liner, and was much vaunted by the shipping lines. Passengers were thrust into physical proximity with strangers for a number of days or even weeks, with ample leisure time to socialise and mingle. They were free of the vigilant observation and possible censure of their own social circles on land, and could reinvent themselves anew, as more charming, witty and better dressed. The environment of the giant ships was subliminally suggestive, with an emphasis on pampering, physical comfort and personal gratification, discreet but attentive service, rich food and wines, the charming dance tunes of the ship’s orchestra, and the proximity of the upper boat deck by moon-light, where quiet corners lent themselves to canoodling couples. For some, there may have been an additional frisson to be had from the small but always present risk of physical danger – icebergs, collisions, storms at sea. Where attraction was mutual, both parties were also aware that they only had a finite time afloat, knowledge that often acted as an accelerant to smouldering shipboard romances.
For those hoping for romantic adventure, travel writer Basil Woon recommended embarking at the earliest opportunity to observe one’s fellow travellers, and scrutinising the passenger list thoroughly. Despite initial disappointment, he noted that enforced idleness often worked its magic and after a few days of an ocean voyage the most unlikely people would find each other strangely more attractive, probably due to the small pool of potential mates. Once back on dry land, he sagely observed, the magic usually evaporated.
In the 1920s card games were all the rage. A convivial pastime for a small group of people could easily become an avid preoccupation, and for people who enjoyed playing competitive games, such as bridge, a transatlantic trip or ocean cruise was an ideal way to spend one’s time. Bridge players would get so involved in the game they would be unaware, or unconcerned, as the ship arrived in some exotic port, only reluctantly leaving the tables to see the delights of Nassau or Havana.
The shipping companies catered for the convenience of serious card players during Prohibition, as many liked to gamble competitively in a comfortable environment, assured of waiter service at the card table. However, one of the hazards of ocean life for keen amateurs was the card-sharp, a professional gambler who made a considerable living by infiltrating gaming tables. Posing as just another passenger, though usually travelling as part of a gang, the card-sharp could be young or old, male or female, elegant or scruffy. They were adept at identifying potential ‘marks’, usually some exuberant high-rollers at a certain stage of inebriation. If invited to join a game of poker, the professional might feign reluctance or inexperience, and play ineptly, losing small sums of money. They would appear to take their losses philosophically, so their fellow players would gain confidence and commit themselves to bigger and bigger bets. Eventually, through skill, by cheating, or with the assistance of one or more accomplices, the card-sharp would invariably ‘scoop the pot’. Seasoned travellers knew to bring their own packs of cards and dice on every voyage, to avoid falling victim to marked packs or weighted dice.
During the early 1920s the Aquitania often carried crooks and card-sharps, with at least one gang aboard every voyage, according to Purser Spedding. These characters were well-known to smoking room stewards, pursers and bartenders, despite their disguises. Notices were prominently displayed, warning unsuspecting people to be on their guard. Steamship lines occasionally employed plainclothes detectives to identify those likely to prey on the gullible, while staff would discreetly tip off unwary passengers if they recognised a familiar face or were wise to a ruse. If the captain was alerted that there was a professional card player on board, he had a number of options. Very few of these ‘professionals’ actually had police records. They were not usually criminals; just extremely good at cards and adept at fooling credulous strangers into thinking they were harmless, until they cleaned them out. The wise captain would invite the suspected card-sharp into his cabin for a friendly chat about inconsequentials, while leaving his large pistol on the desk, unremarked on by both parties. The purser could break up a card game in the public rooms on board ship if bets were being placed, because technically gambling was not allowed there, but it was difficult to police what happened in private staterooms and cabins. Some professional gamblers were tolerated by the steamship lines because they were well-behaved, wouldn’t play against naïve youngsters or drunks, were known to play fairly and were liberal with tips to the crew. Others were actively disliked as they could be violent, resistant to interference with their livelihoods. One card-sharp on the Aquitania in 1923 was confronted with an accusation of cheating during a game of poker. He instantly attacked his accuser with a broken glass, and nearly cost him his sight. The same character had also attacked Purser Spedding years before on the Campania, when he had been exposed as a card-sharp, and had threatened to shoot him.2
Edith Sowerbutts recalled one transatlantic trip where one of her charges, the female accomplice of a card-sharp, had an attack of remorse after her partner in crime won a huge sum from a wealthy but inexperienced young man. Just as they docked in New York, the beauty summoned Edith to her cabin and asked her to deliver a thick envelope to the victim’s stateroom. Edith deduced that it contained a wad of bank notes, probably enough to get him safely back to London. She speculated that the young woman had felt sorry for the victim, who was probably sadder but wiser for the experience.
There were some female passengers who actively used their charms to their financial advantage, by attracting then compromising some well-off male passenger, and threatening him with blackmail. Basil Woon called them ‘sea vamps’, and warned susceptible men to be careful not to fall for their wiles: ‘This is a profession with the numbers of its adherents swelling yearly. Beware of the beauty travelling alone – be she never so helpless, never so innocent! You’d never believe the number of women who make a regular living travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, preying on passengers of first-class liners.’3 He cited a former chorus girl from New York, who at the age of eighteen hooked a wealthy American businessman into a whirlwind romance in Paris, and accompanied him on the voyage home. While at sea, she discovered he had a wife and family back in Chicago and secretly obtained his address. She had collected a few handwritten billets doux, including one compromising note that read ‘Honey, I’ll be waiting in the smoking-room after dinner. Kisses and Love’. She threatened her victim with exposure to his family, and he paid $10,000 for her silence. It was apparent that a little maritime extortion offered a far more lucrative life than high-kicking in the chorus line, and by 1926 she had completed sixteen round trips on the Atlantic, with an estimated average profit of $1,000 per voyage.
Spedding recalled a similar tale of blackmail, perpetrated by a husband and wife working together. A wealthy French gentleman joined the Aquitania at New York, sailing to France in first class. On the second day out, he met an apparently charming married couple. They all had a cocktail together, then the husband made an excuse and left, saying he had to speak to the captain. Gallantly, the Frenchman had another cocktail with the wife; it would have been impolite to leave her on her own, and also she seemed very personable. The trio met before dinner, and again the husband excused himself on some pretext while the Frenchman danced with his wife. After dinner, she boldly suggested they retire to her cabin for some iced champagne, as her husband would stay in the smoking room till the early hours. Inevitably, within minutes the husband burst in, and caught the Frenchman in flagrante with the wife. Outraged, the cuckold brandished a revolver, but calmed down at the mention of compensation. The following morning, the chastened victim appealed to the purser for advice. Spedding suggested he cancel the cheque he had already written, but the Frenchman knew that the couple had his home address and were threatening to write to his wife, so he had no choice but to pay for his gullibility.
The many opportunities for young women to advance their interests and possibly improve their financial situation through ocean travel were immortalised in a tongue-in-cheek comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, which was first published in the USA in 1925 and became a bestseller. It was written as a spoof journal; the narrator, Lorelei, and her best friend Dorothy are pretty and ambitious flappers living in New York, whose hedonistic lifestyle is funded by presents from a succession of naïve, wealthy men. Lorelei, after an early career in the movies, is now kept afloat financially by Mr Eisman, the Button King of Chicago. The women are not professional courtesans, but rather gifted amateurs, who rely on a judicious mixture of personal charm and playing one ‘gentleman’ off against the other. Central to the story is their trip on the liner Majestic, sailing from New York to visit London and Paris. Mr Eisman, alarmed by a serious rival for Lorelei’s affections, has persuaded her to travel to Europe with Dorothy on the grounds that it would be educational, and promises that he will join them in Paris. Lorelei recognises the excellent potential to be found travelling first class on a transatlantic liner. ‘I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship,’ and scrutinises the passenger list for new ‘gentlemen’ whose acquaintance they might like to make.
On board the Majestic (which Lorelei admires, because it reminds her of the Ritz, and does not remotely resemble a ship), she is employed by one of her male admirers to charm some confidential military secrets out of another. She manages this adroitly, and presumably to her financial benefit, in the unlikely setting of the boat deck, while Dorothy amuses herself with a tennis champion. After various romantic and remunerative adventures in Paris, London and Vienna, Lorelei makes a conquest of a very wealthy though dull American called Henry Spoffard. Lorelei and Dorothy are whisked back to New York by Mr Eisner, who is concerned both by this new rival, and the bills he is still paying for the girls’ European shopping. Lorelei has vowed that she will eschew all male admirers on the return voyage, because she is considering Henry’s offer of marriage. However, old habits die hard, and her journal records that she was tipped off about ‘a gentleman on the boat who was quite a dealer in unset diamonds from a town called Amsterdam. So I met the gentleman, and we went around together quite a lot, but we had quite a quarrel the night before we landed, so I did not even bother to look at him when I came down the gangplank, and I put the unset diamonds in my handbag so I did not have to declare them at customs.’
Lorelei was not unusual in attempting to smuggle her newly acquired diamonds past customs. American citizens returning to the United States were required to declare all foreign-bought goods over a certain value, and pay duty on them, but many otherwise respectable passengers saw nothing dishonest in evading duty, and they blithely sought the advice of the ship’s company. Purser Spedding recalled that women often asked him for help, and he always advised them to declare their purchases, especially in the case of jewellery. There were stern notices all over the Aquitania regarding smuggling, and the crew and officers had considerable incentives not to assist in this illegal pursuit. For example, a new diamond necklace bought in Amsterdam for £10,000 would have American duty of £6,000 chargeable on it, bringing the cost to its owner to £16,000. But a passenger might ask a steward or stewardess to help conceal it, and offer them a paltry reward, perhaps a mere £10 or £20. This was a high-risk strategy because, if apprehended, the passenger would be fined three times the value of the goods. In addition, every crew member knew that if they reported the misdemeanour, they would be handsomely rewarded by the Jewellers’ Protection Society. One swift wireless message from the steward and the hapless passenger would be apprehended, prosecuted and punitively fined. In the case of the £10,000 diamond necklace, the smuggler would be fined £48,000, and the steward would receive a cheque for £6,400. This was a life-changing sum in an era when a newly-built three-bedroom house in suburban London could be bought for less than £1,000.
So rife was the crime that there were customs and excise agents who travelled the Atlantic in disguise, looking out for smugglers. One woman had bought a great many expensive dresses in Paris, and asked a fellow passenger for his advice on how to avoid paying tax on the gowns, not realising he was a customs officer. He advised her to replace the Parisian labels with Made in New York ones; he even provided her with fake labels. Her new clothes were confiscated at customs, and she was fined $12,000. If she hadn’t attempted to deceive and defraud the US government, she could have paid the duty, and kept both the dresses and her good reputation.
Being detained by New York Customs on the basis of a tip-off, especially an anonymous one, could put innocent people to great trouble and inconvenience. It was galling to suffer the indignity of being suspected because some maliciously minded person had given false information to the authorities. One lady, a frequent passenger on the Aquitania, was detained while her entire baggage was minutely examined and she was strip-searched. She was not only delayed on the pier for hours but, later on, her home in New York was also searched by revenue officers. Nothing of an incriminating nature was found, and it was believed that all her trouble was caused by false information given by a jealous ‘friend’.
While the fictional Lorelei and Dorothy were testing the sexual mores of the era aboard the Majestic, in real life the Atlantic Ferry provided transgressive and ambitious women with the opportunity to assert themselves on a foreign shore. The American-born actress Tallulah Bankhead took London by storm in the 1920s. Her reasons for crossing the Atlantic were complex: she was hopelessly in love with an English nobleman, but she was also driven by ambition to succeed on the stage. For a number of years she pushed the boundaries of respectable behaviour, relying on the novelty value of her exotic accent, her physical allure and her larger-than-life personality, and succeeded in both thrilling and scandalising her adopted city, London.
Tallulah started acting on stage in New York in 1918, aged only sixteen. Her father, a US Congressman from Alabama, warned her to avoid men and alcohol; Bankhead later quipped, ‘He didn’t say anything about women and cocaine.’ She quickly gravitated to the Algonquin set, and embarked upon a series of torrid heterosexual and lesbian affairs. She was besotted by an English aristocrat, Napier George Henry Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington, who was studying banking in New York. ‘Naps’ had served in the RAF in the Great War, rising to the rank of captain. In 1919, on the death of his father, he inherited the title, as well as 18,000 acres in Dorset, but he did not fit the stereotype of the English nobility. Living mostly in his New York apartment, which was known as Naps’s Flat to his international coterie of hedonistic friends, he followed a distinctly flamboyant and bohemian lifestyle.
When Naps returned to England, Tallulah was frustrated and restless. She missed him, and though she had been acting on the New York stage for five years, it was a competitive field. A psychic told her that her future lay across the Atlantic; ‘Go if you have to swim’ was the succinct advice offered. Fortunately, theatrical directors from Europe often visited New York looking for talent, and in 1923 Tallulah was contracted by the impresario Charles Cochran to play the part of a Canadian in a new London play called The Dancers. She sailed on the Majestic, a vast and opulently appointed liner, which was particularly popular with performers, actresses and musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. There was always a certain frisson among the more sensitive souls about embarking on this particular vessel, as it was the sister ship of the Titanic and Britannic, both of which had spectacularly come to grief. Perhaps Tallulah Bankhead, who was willing to take life-changing career advice from a self-proclaimed psychic, might have been less sanguine about the voyage if she had known that Violet Jessop, veteran survivor of the sinking of the Majestic’s two sister ships, was now working as a first-class stewardess aboard the last of the trio.
Tallulah arrived in London to star opposite Gerald du Maurier, the leading matinée idol on the British stage. His daughter Daphne exclaimed, the first time she encountered Tallulah, ‘Daddy, that’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.’ With her glorious hair, her unique voice and accent, her unrestrained dancing and acrobatics, Tallulah quickly conquered the West End. She appeared in more than a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, rapidly acquiring a fan club of ‘gallery girls’ who mobbed her at the stage door. One of them, Edie Smith, went to work for her as a personal assistant and stayed in her employment for the next three decades.
She starred in the stage version of The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, playing a character very like her own persona. The radical heroine, Iris Storm, commits suicide by driving her yellow Hispano-Suiza into a tree at 70 mph, an act of defiance against the two-faced society that has cast her out. The drama critic Hannen Swaffer wrote admiringly: ‘She is almost the most modern actress we have.’4
‘Everything you did was headline news in the 1920s,’ observed the presenter Roy Plomley, when interviewing Tallulah in 1964 on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. While living in Mayfair, Bankhead bought a Bentley, which she drove herself. However, accustomed to the logical grid system of New York streets, she was constantly lost in labyrinthine London. Her solution was to engage a local taxi and pay the cabbie to drive his vehicle to her intended destination, while she tailed him in her own car.
Though Tallulah’s relationship with Naps was revived as a result of her moving to London, it was often stormy; on one occasion they met by chance in a nightclub, and he pretended not to know her. (In mitigation, he was escorting his mother; fashionable London nightclubs in the 1920s often attracted clientele of different generations in a way unimaginable nowadays.) Tallulah had her revenge as she swept haughtily past their table: ‘So, Lord Alington, you can’t recognise me with my clothes on?’ she hissed. Their romance eventually foundered, though they remained close friends.
Tallulah’s lifestyle epitomised a certain type of celebrity at the time. She was the ultimate Bright Young Thing and consummate party animal, with a passion for bourbon and cocaine, and an unsettling habit of removing all her clothes in public. She smoked four packs of Craven A cigarettes a day, and consequently had a voice that one critic likened to the sound of ‘a man pulling his foot out of a bucket of yoghourt’.5 Idolised by the theatrical world, and a friend of Noël Coward, she was much in demand on the London scene of the 1920s. Off the leash in London, Tallulah was shockingly outspoken but wickedly witty, and she related stories of her latest sexual conquests to the thrilled party-goers of Mayfair. Her alien beauty, consummate acting ability and, above all, the novelty of her accent made her the toast of the town, and allowances were made for her behaviour; had she behaved in the same manner in New York, it is likely she would have been arrested.
But Tallulah’s determination to flout conventions, both privately and professionally, did eventually bring her into conflict with the British establishment. In 1926 Tallulah appeared in a stage drama called Scotch Mist, playing the promiscuous wife of a British Cabinet minister. The Bishop of London was appalled and complained to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, but as a result of the scandalised press coverage, the play became a box-office success. Unexpectedly finding herself wealthy, Tallulah acquired the lease on a house in Mayfair – No. 1 Farm Street – and engaged fashionable Syrie Maugham to redesign its interiors. There she threw hedonistic parties that lasted for days, where the participants might be found passed out on the floors or draped languidly over the furniture. Cocaine was the drug of choice for many showbusiness figures between the wars; when asked if it was addictive, Tallulah replied: ‘Of course not! I ought to know. I’ve been using it for years.’
Eventually, serious allegations of ‘indecent and unnatural practices’ were made against Tallulah, and a report was presented to the Home Secretary in August 1928. The confidential files, which were only released in 2000 by the Public Record Office, reveal that Special Branch detectives searched for incriminating evidence against her on the grounds of public morality. The central allegation was a serious one, that the actress was in the habit of seducing Eton schoolboys on Sunday afternoons, after providing them with cocaine. The rumour was that five or six Eton pupils were accused of ‘breaking bounds’, being absent without permission from school after being picked up by car, in order to meet the actress at the nearby Hotel de Paris in Bray. While the details are confused, there may have been some truth to this story as other sources claim that the Eton authorities objected to Tallulah providing cocaine to the schoolboys before chapel, as it made them ungovernable during evensong. MI5 had received a copy of a circumspect private letter written by the headmaster of Eton to a number of parents, denying that any boys had recently been expelled, but admitting that two boys had been ‘dismissed’ and a further three ‘disciplined’ on the unlikely grounds of having infringed the school rules about motoring.
But once subject to outside scrutiny, the British establishment quickly closed ranks; the investigators found no witnesses or evidence at either the hotel or the school, and they eventually reported: ‘No information could be obtained at Eton … the headmaster is obviously not prepared to assist the Home Office – he wants to do everything possible to keep Eton out of the scandal.’ They concluded that Tallulah Bankhead was ‘an extremely immoral woman’, but the investigation seems to have gone no further. However, Special Branch missed, or perhaps ignored, an odd and possibly significant coincidence in this story. The highly respectable headmaster of Eton, who had resolutely refused to co-operate with the investigators, thereby stopping the enquiry in its tracks, was Dr Cyril Alington. He was descended from a long line of unimpeachable clerics, but he was also related to Tallulah’s former lover, Naps, the 3rd Baron Alington. In November 1928, three months after Special Branch failed in their attempts to have Tallulah thrown out of Britain as a danger to public morality, Naps married Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, the daughter of the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury.
Tallulah’s reputation for outrageous behaviour was well-founded, and she walked a fine line between being admired for her chutzpah and damned for her conduct. She had been fêted and rewarded in London, but with Naps now married to the daughter of an earl, and the father of a daughter born in 1929, Tallulah realised she had finally run out of road in Britain. She was offered a lucrative Hollywood contract of $5,000 a week by Paramount Pictures, and in January 1931 she sailed back to America. Her sojourn in Britain had brought her public notoriety, largely based on her novelty and ‘otherness’, as well as considerable stage success.
For Josephine Baker, crossing the Atlantic completely transformed her life. As an African-American woman born in poverty in 1906 in St Louis, she had a difficult childhood. She was sent to be a housemaid aged only eight years old, but was badly treated by her employer. She witnessed the horrific violence of the St Louis race riots, and was briefly married at thirteen, then ran away to Harlem in New York, where she started dancing for nickels to entertain queues of people waiting to get into music halls. Entirely self-taught, she turned professional aged fourteen. In New York, aged nineteen, while appearing at the Plantation Club, Josephine was offered a place in a new dance show produced by an American called Caroline Dudley, a wealthy white socialite and frequent visitor to Harlem, who was recruiting black performers and musicians for a show featuring jazz music and dance. The show, La Revue Nègre, was to be staged in Paris. Mainstream France and Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s had an ambivalent attitude to black culture, but Paris was generally much more welcoming than the major US cities, where discrimination was part of the everyday experience. African-American jazz musicians were very popular in the entertainment world of Paris by the mid-1920s, and professional performers flocked to the laissez-faire cosmopolitan nightclubs and music halls of the most sophisticated city in the world. The exuberant style of music and dance embodied the great sense of relief at the end of the war, and the artistes were admired for their creativity and skills rather than judged by the colour of their skin.
Josephine Baker sailed for France on the Berengaria on 15 September 1925, along with twenty-four black musicians. The Berengaria was previously the German flagship Imperator, but had been handed over to Cunard after the Great War as part of the reparations agreement for a discounted fee of £500,000, and was now the largest of the line. The previous year, Cunard had recognised that there was a burgeoning market in American tourist-class passengers from the States, travellers who required comfortable but affordable voyages to Europe. Cunard therefore upgraded the Berengaria’s third-class facilities, providing better victualling for all passengers, refitted cabins and enhanced waiter service in the restaurant. The Cunard company minuted the popularity of this new class of travel for Americans heading east on a restricted budget, and its affordability enabled performers such as Josephine and her fellow musicians, as well as students and teachers, to travel across the Atlantic in relative comfort, and in increasing numbers.
The Berengaria arrived in France after seven days afloat, and rehearsals for the show started immediately. Josephine Baker’s extraordinary style of dancing – a blend of sinuous hip-grinding and energetic gyrating, cakewalking and tap dance – quickly made her a star. Her inaugural performance was on 2 October 1925 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She performed a danse sauvage, bare-breasted and wearing little more than pearls and feathers, to an initially stunned and then rapturous Parisian audience. Josephine Baker was an overnight sensation; within two years of her arrival in Paris she was the acclaimed star of Paris’s legendary cabaret hall, the Folies Bergère, where she became both celebrated and notorious for her ‘Banana Dance’ (performed topless, with a ‘skirt’ of bananas). The French admired her chic appearance, her phenomenal stamina, her inventiveness and humour. Picasso and Hemingway were fans; she was known in the press as the Bronze Venus and admired as an accomplished artiste, a star and a socialite. While some black contemporaries criticised her for perpetuating racial stereotypes, Josephine knowingly used the tropes and imagery of the day in a way that ridiculed prejudices and knocked down the barriers of segregation. Her success on stage allowed her to open her own nightclub in Montmartre, Chez Josephine, which was small, exclusive and very expensive.
Now a national celebrity in her adopted country, Josephine accepted lucrative sponsorship deals to endorse beauty products. During her time in France she learned French, Italian and Russian, and how to fly her own two-seater plane and she starred in four movies. Tellingly, she never made a Hollywood film, but in France she became a cultural icon, fêted in a way that could never have happened at that time in the country of her birth. Indeed, it was on a transatlantic voyage back to America in the mid-1930s, where she had been lured by a lucrative offer to appear in the Ziegfeld Follies, that Josephine was reminded of the racial discrimination then inherent in her own country. An unnamed movie actress travelling on the same ship refused to dine at the same table as Josephine Baker, on the grounds of her colour. After fulfilling her professional obligations in America, Josephine Baker was glad to return to France, where her stellar talent was more important than her race, and her achievements brought her acclaim, wealth and instant recognition.
By the 1920s the nature of fame itself was changing. With the arrival of the mass media, illustrated newspapers and newsreel films, a person could become a celebrity almost overnight. In previous eras achieving fame was a slow, almost sedimentary process; people became renowned for what they did, such as winning wars, writing epic poetry or inventing a better mouse-trap. By the 1920s and 1930s, because of the growth of photography, film and popular culture, being famous was a matter of being instantly recognisable, often all over the world. Charlie Chaplin, shortly after making his first silent films in Hollywood, visited New York and was amazed to see his image on giant billboards and posters all over town. In real life he was unrecognisable without his make-up, but his alter ego was everywhere, instantly identifiable by millions of enraptured strangers who were unaware of his very existence just weeks before.
One of the many attractions of transatlantic ocean travel for a certain sort of person was the possibility of rubbing shoulders with the famous. First-class travellers avidly scanned the printed passenger list, a copy of which was supplied to each cabin. Along with those who were household names only to their own relatives, they might find an intoxicating mix of royalties, aristocrats, heads of state, politicians, noted beauties, captains of industry, sporting heroes, millionaires and maharajahs, and stars of the stage and silver screen, all aboard on the same voyage. Second-class passengers’ names were also listed and provided to first-class cabins; there was a certain amount of social permeability between the two superior strata of accommodation. However, no reference was made to the vast majority travelling below in third class; it was assumed that they would be of no interest to their social superiors.
The choice of ship was important too. Smaller vessels tended to be more friendly in atmosphere, and passengers with large but fragile egos often preferred to lord it on more intimate ships, rather than risk being out-gunned by more stellar personalities on the bigger liners. The larger ships had a reputation for attracting cliques, especially in first class. Common interests quickly led to the formation of social groups; there were the sports enthusiasts, bridge players, poker fans, the steady drinkers, the dance fanatics, the seasickness sufferers and the inveterate gossips. ‘The Atlantic is rich in personalities. Most of the great of the earth at some time or another have been seasick on its bosom,’6 remarked Basil Woon. Famous authors, thespians and performers often attracted a coterie of fellow passengers keen to scrape acquaintance. However, star-spotting on an ocean liner was not always plain sailing. While the public areas and deck spaces were designed so that people could mingle, some VIPs preferred to travel in cloistered privacy. Large self-contained suites with individual balconies and high-end, discreet service allowed the reclusive passenger to avoid public scrutiny for the entire voyage, if desired. Enigmatic actress Greta Garbo rarely left her cabin while afloat, and on one occasion managed to avoid the waiting press altogether by disembarking in a borrowed stewardess’s uniform. Film stars needed to be beautifully dressed and coiffed when ‘on duty’; Marlene Dietrich only appeared in public at dinner, though she did time her arrival for maximum effect, taking to heart the advice of her friend Noël Coward: ‘Always be seen, dear, always be seen.’
The better-known liners cultivated their pet celebrities, offering them preferential rates. The fierce commercial tussle between various shipping lines to convey eight glamorous Ziegfeld Follies girls to Europe in 1923 was won by French Line, whose triumphant marketing declared ‘every French boat is a little Paris’. European royalty held an exotic allure for many; Queen Marie of Romania was a frequent Atlantic traveller who was willing and able to ‘play to the gallery’. Hints about their aristocratic fellow passengers were used to attract aspirational potential customers. The shipping companies’ PR departments made the most of well-known personalities, taking photos of their glamorous shipboard life, and issuing images and interviews to the press. Those who had no intention of meeting their fans would travel with a posse of pals to keep interlopers at bay. Disappointed observers could nevertheless closely watch their habits when they did appear in public. One might note that the Prince of Wales had adopted the American fashion of only eating with a fork held in his right hand, that Charlie Chaplin favoured heavyweight reading matter such as Stoddard’s Revolt Against Civilisation, or that Gloria Swanson’s husband, the Marquis Henri de la Falaise, was an accomplished tango dancer. Such small but authentic details, providing proof of proximity to celebrity, were often the cherished highlights of the voyage and would be retailed to their friends and family on the passengers’ return.
Familiar faces often patronised particular shipping lines because they liked being attended by the same stewards, stewardesses and pursers. Gloria Swanson favoured the chic vessels of the French Line. Percy Rockefeller liked the Olympic. The France was a particular favourite with actors, writers, singers and society types, but business travellers tended to prefer the massive Cunard ships such as the Aquitania or Mauretania, or American ships such as the George Washington. Anna Pavlova favoured the Leviathan. The Prince of Wales liked the Berengaria, while his mistress, Thelma Lady Furness, preferred the Majestic. Brigadier-General and Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, the acknowledged leaders of New York society, patronised the Mauretania.
Cunard was the first shipping line to introduce its own on-board photographers in the late 1920s. Casimir Watkins came up with the idea while sharing a mid-Atlantic cocktail with a Cunard director on the Berengaria. Borrowing £500 from an uncle, he set up a photographic company called Ocean Pictures. Their first studio was on the Lancastria, but they later acquired the exclusive rights to provide professional on-board photographic services on the prestigious Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. The company’s professional snappers were briefed to take attractive pictures of the passengers on these prestigious vessels, but they had to behave with decorum and ensure the images flattered the subject. The photographers would work through the night to develop the negatives and make multiple prints in the ship’s darkrooms, so that passengers could order copies for themselves the following morning for a modest fee. The best shots would then be released to the press when the ship docked; a photo-opportunity was the quid pro quo for celebrities, and usually they were happy to co-operate with the company’s press initiatives, seeing it as part of their own publicity. For ordinary passengers the presence of professional photographers on the ship added to the glamour of the experience. The 1920s were a golden age of photography, when people wanted affordable, flattering portraits of themselves, as mementoes of a particular voyage, and as gifts for friends and family.
The docking of any prestigious liner always attracted a mob of newsmen and photographers, known as the Gangplank Willies, desperate to get on board to interview celebrities of all types and nationalities. The first-class section of the ship would be besieged by journalists and photographers, swarming on to the ship like pirates seeking their bounty. Hard cash would be offered to hitch a ride on any boat going out to meet an incoming liner, in order to be the first aboard. The New York papers had dedicated news desks covering the arrivals and sailings of the famous on international ships. The journalists’ speciality was to startle a celebrity into providing a revealing quote or piercing aperçu – as one newspaperman remarked, ‘An ocean trip makes people want to talk.’
Shipping companies deliberately cultivated the press in order to garner valuable publicity for their vessels, and the calibre of stars and VIPs to be found on them. With the growth of portable cameras and flashbulbs, photographers were able to take shots of celebrities as they disembarked in Southampton, London or New York, and reporters from the papers could glean a few words from a notable if they met them at the gangway. There was often an unseemly scramble for pole position on the dockside when it was known a particularly photogenic or newsworthy individual was setting foot on dry land, but it was a symbiotic relationship as both the celebrity and the media outlet benefited from the encounter. As Cunard’s Commodore Bisset remarked, ‘Very few celebrities are shy of reporters. That is one reason why they are celebrities.’7 Evelyn Waugh wrote:
The classic ground for the sport is a liner arriving in New York. New Yorkers still retain a friendly curiosity about their foreign visitors – indeed, believe it or not, a bulletin is printed and daily pushed under your door in the chief hotels, telling you just what celebrities are in town, where they are staying, and nominating a Celebrity of the Day.8
To satisfy this human appetite, the reporters come on board with the first officials and have ample time before the ship finally berths to prosecute their quest. They are not got up to please. Indeed, their appearance is … a stark reminder of real life after five days during which one has seen no one who was not either elegantly dressed or neatly uniformed. American papers have at their command most prepossessing creatures of both sexes, but they choose only those who look like murderers to greet visitors. They are elderly and, one supposes, embittered men. They have not advanced far in their profession, and their business is exclusively with the successful. Their revenge is a ruthless professionalism. They look the passengers over, and make their choice, like fish-brokers at a market. One of their number, the grimmest, stalks into the lounge, breaks into a distinguished group, taps an ambassador on the arm and says, ‘The boys want a word with you outside.’9
Of course, the vast majority of transatlantic passengers were not celebrities, and their reasons for travel, no matter how pressing and potentially life-changing to them as individuals, held no interest for the Gangplank Willies, whose natural prey were already household names.
However, transatlantic travel between the wars did provide the means and the opportunity for ambitious but impecunious American women looking for opportunities abroad, and Paris drew them like a magnet. The irrepressible collector of international celebrities, Elsa Maxwell, made a lucrative career as a professional party planner, gossip columnist, press agent and impresario. Her success lay in avidly cultivating the wealthy and introducing them to rising stars, thereby improving her patrons’ social standing and assisting her protégés’ finances. Bumptious, homely-looking and publicity-mad, her living came from ‘gifts’ and ‘loans’ from the rich. For decades Elsa frequently travelled the Atlantic with her British-born lover, the socialite, heiress and classical singer Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, known as ‘Dickie’, forging alliances between the wealthy but socially gauche, and the more decorative but cash-strapped figures of the world of showbusiness.
Paris was the scene of her first great success: shortly after the Armistice, Elsa, who was living in New York with her girlfriend, was asked by Mrs Edward Stotesbury, the American banker’s wife, to accompany her recently divorced daughter, Mrs Louise Brooks, across the Atlantic to Paris. Louise needed relaunching in European society, as there was considerable stigma attached to divorce in the United States. The Stotesburys bankrolled the trip, paying for Elsa’s passage, and they all stayed at their family house in the Rue des Saints-Pères. The scintillating parties that Elsa threw on behalf of her client in Paris established the young woman at the heart of the city’s social life. Louise fell in love with Douglas MacArthur, the youngest brigadier-general in the US Army, and they married in 1922.
Elsa was suddenly in demand everywhere in society, and many wealthy people wanted her to arrange parties of all sorts for them. They imagined that this fat, jolly, bossy woman was important and well-connected. By pretending to be indispensable, Elsa made herself so. She was essentially a self-made woman, a social entrepreneur from a nebulous background, who created a lucrative role for herself as a ‘fixer’ and party planner. Her invention of the novelty party was adopted wholeheartedly by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Treasure hunts organised by Elsa guaranteed the participation of the gilded young, hell-bent on fun, competing to locate the pompom off a sailor’s hat, the hairs from an admiral’s moustache, or the undergarments of a fashionable soubrette. She also created the murder mystery party, a thoroughly British phenomenon that took London society by storm, as it combined snobbery with violence. Her events provided thousands of words of copy for newspaper gossip columnists, helpfully tipped off in advance by Elsa herself, and their printed stories titillated or scandalised the readers.
Elsa found notoriety through novelties such as the ‘Come As You Were’ party in Paris, in 1927. Elsa’s messengers handed an invitation to each of sixty guests at random hours of the day and night. Each recipient was asked to attend dressed exactly as they were when they received their invitation. The Marquis de Polignac cut a dashing figure in full evening attire, except for his missing trousers. Daisy Fellowes had her lace pants in her hand. Bébé Bérard wore a dressing gown, had a telephone attached to his ear, and shaving cream on his face. Several gentlemen who rated honour above vanity attended in hairnets. The party was the sensation of Paris.
It was rumoured that Elsa Maxwell always crossed the Atlantic with fourteen trunks and a hatbox – the trunks for her press clippings, and the hatbox for her other dress. It was true that she had no interest in clothes and always wore either business attire of matching skirts and jackets, or a $20 evening dress picked off the rack of a department store. The reason was simple: her clients and friends were inevitably chic, slim and well-dressed, while she was burly and rather plain. By always wearing the same simple clothes, Elsa did not competence; instead she cultivated a deliberate impression of competency and continuity. However, she did harbour a rakish taste for cross-dressing, and rarely resisted the opportunity to appear as some particularly masculine figure from history, such as Napoleon, at one of the many fancy-dress parties she pioneered. Appropriately enough, fancy-dress events became regular features of shipboard entertainments throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
So famous did Elsa Maxwell become as a publicist and ‘fixer’ that she was offered an unusual commission to liven up the sleepy Italian resort of the Lido of Venice. This sandy strip of large hotels and beach huts, located a short boat-ride from the ancient maritime city of Venice, had long been a summer resort for the Italian middle classes, providing families with a relaxing seaside break, interspersed with occasional cultural excursions across the lagoon to the treasure trove of Venice itself. Elsa accepted the challenge; she greatly valued what she called ‘the hypodermic value of an occasional celebrity’, and was also adept at spotting talent among her showbusiness acquaintances. By calling in some favours from her elite clientele, she threw a very well-attended party in the Venice Lido for the fashionable and popular Queen Marie of Romania in 1921, at the stylish Hotel Excelsior. The following summer, 1922, Elsa further developed the resort’s trend-setting reputation by returning with Dickie, and ‘a young man with an unusual, almost Mongolian countenance’, whom they had met at a party given in Oxford by Sibyl Colefax. The young man was Noël Coward, and he accompanied them as their guest to the Lido where Elsa and Dickie had been commissioned to organise a society party for the Duke of Spoleto. The party was a great success, and thanks to Elsa’s efforts, Venice and the Lido became the fashionable place for the international set to gather in the summer, the romantic haunt of Cole Porter, Emerald Cunard and Lady Diana Cooper.
By constantly flitting between America and Europe, Elsa made herself the doyenne of international society and showbiz. In later years she based herself at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, but she was equally at home in Paris, mingling with the ‘beautiful people’. While aspirational Europeans of all stripes were heading to America hoping to be ‘discovered’, there was a corresponding wave of Americans heading for Europe, often prompted by the much reported activities of social fixers such as Elsa Maxwell and her coterie of the international set. Europe as a fascinating, vibrant destination increasingly appealed to Americans of all ranks and incomes in the mid-1920s.
Writer Basil Woon noted in 1926: ‘Drinks, divorces and dresses are the principal reasons why Americans go to Europe.’10 Transatlantic travel to the Old World attracted the hedonistic, the curious and the newly single. In America there was a renewed general interest in overseas travel. ‘How’re you gonna keep them down on the farm, Now that they’ve seen Paree?’ was a popular vaudeville song in the States, and reflected the desire of ordinary Americans to explore Europe, often – though not necessarily – for the most high-minded reasons. Cities like Paris, London, Berlin and Amsterdam offered ample opportunities for cultural tourism as well as leisure and pleasure, in exchange for hard foreign currency, and a few American dollars went a long way in post-war Europe. The exuberant counter-culture of showbusiness, dance, music and especially avant-garde art particularly attracted Americans to Paris. They read tantalising articles in their newspapers and magazines about the artistic avant-garde, whose aspiring painters and writers could live on a few dollars a day in the more bohemian quarters of Paris, the world’s most beautiful city. There was wonderful cuisine available for a fraction of what it would cost at home, and an artist could be free of the strictures of Prohibition.
In addition, there was the lure of the progressive music scene: African-American musicians were welcomed for their abilities, and jazz, that heady blend of focused discipline and inspired serendipity, was all the rage. It was not surprising that the American composer George Gershwin created ‘An American in Paris’, a jazz-influenced orchestral piece of great verve, whose inaugural performance in 1928 included four Parisian taxi horns. Paris was the magnet for the international wealthy and fashionable elite too in the 1920s and 1930s. During the war years they had been cut off from their beloved Paris. With the return of peace they flocked to the city to buy clothes and accessories, indulging themselves in the fashion houses of Worth, Lanvin and Poiret, their natural habitat. But clothes were also an important aspect of the culture on board the ocean-going ships, as Emilie Grigsby, a Kentucky-born heiress, fashion maven and active international socialite, firmly believed. Emilie frequently sailed on the Olympic and the Aquitania in the 1920s, between her home in New York and Cherbourg, the disembarkation port for Paris, in order to visit the greatest French couturiers such as Jeanne Lanvin and Madeleine Vionnet. Her taste in clothes was daringly advanced for the time. Emilie was petite, and very elegant; she favoured full-length evening gowns in iridescent colours, which gave her a regal appearance. Renowned for her pale-skinned beauty and reddish-golden hair, she instigated the trend for making spectacular entrances on board ship, using the sumptuous surroundings almost as a stage setting to show off her wonderful clothes and jewellery.
Essential to the fashionable woman on board an ocean liner was the opportunity to make a stylish, almost dramatic entrance, and ships’ architects created set-piece staircases and mirrored lobbies where exquisitely dressed passengers could pose in their finery. The grande descente was the dramatic staircase leading down to the public first-class spaces of large liners, particularly the saloon, restaurant or ballroom. It acted like a catwalk, enabling the well-dressed to make a glamorous entrance every evening. Cutting a fashionable figure in front of one’s fellow passengers became part of the experience of high-end transatlantic travel, and so synonymous were fashion and liners that by the 1930s some couturiers chose to stage runway shows with models on board the big ships.
By the mid-1920s many independent professional women crossed the Atlantic in order to enhance their careers, particularly in the fields of the fashion and textiles industries. British and American businesswomen especially benefited from the frequency, ease and convenience of the Atlantic Ferry, and the common language was an advantage for those seeking new areas of commerce and trade. Frequent transatlantic travellers to Europe included American buyers, the merchandise selectors engaged by the large department stores in major cities in the USA. They were employed to source and negotiate to buy luxury European goods, principally high-end fashions for men and women, and their buying power was considerable. These overseas buyers descended on London and Paris in their hundreds several times a year, often travelling together to attend trade fairs and fashion shows. There was a huge market for French fashions and English tailoring among the American elite: both France and Britain were seen as chic in the US, and the strength of the dollar made luxury goods saleable in the American market, even after the imposition of import taxes. France was considered the best source of clothes for women and children, and related products such as millinery, accessories, lingerie, shoes, jewellery, tableware, upholstery fabrics, household linens and indeed textiles of all sorts were in high demand. Men’s wear for the fashionable American tended to be a combination of French and English styles, tailoring fabrics, tweeds, flannels, neckties.
About one-third of fashion and textiles buyers making these regular transatlantic trips were women, travelling on behalf of American department stores, or for their own retail businesses. They tended to be well-paid, resourceful and hardworking. As it was a competitive business, each buyer jealously guarded her industry contacts. Fashion cycles meant that buyers picked the styles they wanted for future seasons, three, six, nine or twelve months ahead of delivery. They would view a designer’s collection, select those items ideal for their clients, and place their orders accordingly. Buyers could request particular modifications to suit American tastes, and they needed confidence and a thorough knowledge of their own market before committing thousands of dollars to buying future stock. Making the wrong choice about colours, silhouettes or fabrics could be financially disastrous, but getting the right collection was immensely profitable. The buyer’s role in acquiring French and English fashions was highly influential on the development of the American fashion and textiles market, as the cut-price garment industry was quick to copy and mass-produce more affordable versions of ‘Paris modes’.
American fashion and textiles buyers would descend on London and Paris in two particular seasons, usually January, and late July to early August. Making at least two buying trips a year made certain transatlantic ships a sort of floating business hotel – a place to sleep, eat, read, gossip, play cards and plan one’s buying strategy. Card games included pinochle and poker, and buyers often liked taking part in the pool, the betting game based on guessing the distance covered by the ship every day. They tended to be sociable and liked congregating in the smoking rooms. Buyers were popular with the crew – they were realistic in their expectations, often coming themselves from more humble backgrounds, but appreciative of good service and consequently good tippers.
Interestingly, many of the women crossing the Atlantic on buying trips were not in the first flush of youth: experience and commercial ability counted for far more than youthful charm. One veteran American traveller was Mrs Mary Jane McShane, who was lauded in White Star Magazine in October 1928. She was seventy-four years old, and had crossed from New York to Southampton on the Olympic the previous month. Described as an ‘energetic old lady’, this was Mrs McShane’s fiftieth voyage on White Star, and she was on the perennial hunt for British stock for her antiques shop, which she had been running for fifty-four years.
Transatlantic travel also enabled British businesswomen to expand their professional horizons. London society hostess Sibyl Colefax first sailed to America in November 1926 at the age of fifty-two. Her primary aim was to visit her son, Peter, who was working in New York. However, she was also nurturing ambitions to set up an interior design business that she could run profitably, as her husband Arthur, a London barrister, was growing deaf and struggling to earn enough to fund her ambitious programme of entertaining. Months earlier, while visiting Paris, Sibyl had met Elsie de Wolfe, a highly successful decorator and interior designer in her sixties. Elsie had ‘a shop full of beautiful things’, and an exclusive and impressive client list, many of whom were already part of Sibyl’s social circle. Sibyl also had excellent taste, and had created an exquisite family home out of a miniature eighteenth-century manor house on the King’s Road, in Chelsea. It was full of antiques, subtle textiles, venerable ceramics, lacquered Oriental furniture, reclaimed panelling and a historic staircase, with subtle but effective modern lighting, all achieved on a restricted budget. Following her renewed acquaintance with Elsie in New York, Sibyl planned her own future as an interior designer.
Sibyl lunched with her friend Noël Coward, visited the opera and theatre, and spent Thanksgiving with the Cole Porters. Taking the train to the west coast, she made influential new friends in the Hollywood film industry, including Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and British-born Charlie Chaplin. Her return to the east coast brought her into contact with some extremely wealthy American owners of Old Master paintings (those executed before 1800), through the auspices of the London-based art dealer Joseph Duveen. Sibyl had an excellent visual memory, and on her next trip to New York, in 1928, she was asked by the Royal Academy in London if she would act as their go-between, approaching American collectors to persuade them to lend their precious paintings. She had met a number of influential museum curators and private collectors on her previous visit, and her knowledge of their holdings was invaluable to the curators of the exhibition on great Italian masters, which was held at the Royal Academy in 1929. As a result of her two successful transatlantic trips, Sibyl gained confidence in her commercial knowledge and aesthetic judgement. She resolved to forge a new career in the American manner, preparing the ground and using her newly-acquired contacts in the antiques and fine arts trade. She opened her London business, Sibyl Colefax Ltd, and quickly established herself as a professional interior decorator, catering for the wealthiest clients in her social milieu.
Women’s experience of transatlantic travel in the mid-1920s is often depicted as fun and frivolity, an impression often reinforced by popular writers of the time, such as Anita Loos and P.G. Wodehouse. Certainly, the publicity images commissioned by many of the major shipping companies at this time depict the pleasure and enjoyment to be had from the experience. Simultaneously, the growth of photography and the new media invested the business of transatlantic travel with a scintillating element of glamour, thanks to the co-operation and collusion of international stars from stage and screen, who travelled on the great ships as a necessary element of their careers. Celebrities and the achingly fashionable naturally saw their shipboard appearances as just another aspect of their lives lived partly in the admiring gaze of the public. But the ships also provided the means by which ambitious, restless women could slip the bonds of their old lives and strike out towards an independent future. Tallulah Bankhead and Josephine Baker crossed the ocean in order to reinvent themselves professionally and personally in other countries, using their talents and their unique abilities to achieve public acclaim. Elsa Maxwell closely observed and exploited the restless, migratory habits of the international wealthy elite, and established herself as their quintessential social fixer on two continents. Sibyl Colefax learned by example from encountering dynamic, pioneering businesswomen in America, and returned to Britain to launch an interior design company in her late fifties. As the 1920s drew to a close, the booming business of frequent, fast and reliable ocean travel between Europe and North America, and the many businesswomen who benefited from the phenomenon culturally, financially and personally, changed the life chances of subsequent generations of women.