From Publishers Weekly
This light, engaging book spends the years from 1920 to 1930 with Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber. Without directly tying them together by any theme (other than that they were all "blessed with the gift of laughter"), Meade moves easily among the women, bringing to life four very different individuals and the worlds they moved in, although Ferber suffers somewhat from being surrounded by more colorful contemporaries. Parker, appropriately enough, is introduced with the words "[I]t couldn't be worse" (she was being canned by Vanity Fair) while Millay is evoked with the offhand observation, "[S]leeping with the boy from Vanity Fair was probably a bad idea. But Vincent did it anyway." The emphasis is on the personalities and personal lives of the women, but Meade (Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?) fairly seamlessly weaves professional ambitions, successes and frustrations into their stories. (It's also fascinating to be reminded that both Ferber and Millay, who could not have been more different in writing style or personality, both enjoyed a good deal of commercial success.) Serious students of the Roaring '20s or of the writers may not learn anything new here; they may also find the interior monologue of the narrative ("Bunny, poor sweet Bunny, so naïve about the opposite sex") grating. And the story stops, rather than ends, in 1930. But for the curious nonexpert, the gossipy, personal tone makes for an enjoyable and informative read. 2 photo inserts not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The four 1920s women writers Meade focuses on were legends in their own time--and what a time it was. Encapsulating the razzle-dazzle and optimism of the Jazz Age, Meade covers each year of the wild and woolly decade, beginning with Dorothy Parker's firing from Vanity Fair, and embracing Zelda Fitzgerald and her wild drinking and dancing in fountains alongside her husband, F. Scott. Across town on West Nineteenth Street, Edna St. Vincent Millay's fingers flew over the keyboard of a featherweight Corona No. 3 (a gift from her married lover, James Lawyer), turning out "Renascence," the poem that would make her famous. With fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, those three inspired and intrepid women were free-spirited "celebrities" before the term was coined, in an era whose energy and tumult became legendary historically and literarily. Their unusual and indelible lives, and scintillating milieu, are vividly captured by Meade in this fast-paced and informative group biography. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Marion Meade has done something dazzling. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, she has resurrected the literary heroines of the l920s so that they're with us still, kicking and screaming and occasionally even writing. Fast living never felt like this on the page before."
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
Review
"Marion Meade has done something dazzling. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, she has resurrected the literary heroines of the l920s so that they're with us still, kicking and screaming and occasionally even writing. Fast living never felt like this on the page before."
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
Product Description
In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.
Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley) who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. Here are the social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and inevitably the penances each paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness.
These literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Meade recreates the excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation--the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism--and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior.
A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN is a rich evocation of a period that will forever intrigue and captivate us.
Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley) who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. Here are the social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and inevitably the penances each paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness.
These literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Meade recreates the excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation--the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism--and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior.
A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN is a rich evocation of a period that will forever intrigue and captivate us.
From the Back Cover
"Marion Meade has done something dazzling. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, she has resurrected the literary heroines of the l920s so that they're with us still, kicking and screaming and occasionally even writing. Fast living never felt like this on the page before."
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
-Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
About the Author
MARION MEADE is the author of DOROTHY PARKER: What Fresh Hell Is This? She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as two novels about medieval France. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1920
CHAPTER ONE
It couldn't be worse.
Twenty-six, and she was losing her job. Vanity Fair's editor in chief broke the news in the grandeur of the Tea Court at the Plaza Hotel, beneath the Tiffany glass dome, amid the Caen stone and Breche violet marble, the Baccarat crystal and gold-encrusted china, the handwoven Savonnerie rugs. He had to fire her, Frank Crowninshield said, because his former theater critic was planning to return to the magazine and of course he needed his old job back. She said she didn't know that. He hoped she would work at home and do little pieces in her spare time. She said she really couldn't. She had no idea how to change a typewriter ribbon.
Vanity Fair had no cause to fire her, thought Dorothy Parker. And so what if every producer on Broadway hated her. It was Sunday afternoon on Central Park South, the carriage horses dozed standing up at the curbs, the leafless trees across the street were dark against the dusky sky. When Dottie emerged from the hotel, she went straight home, round Columbus Circle, up Broadway, back to the Upper West Side, where she grew up. From an early age she knew a thing or two about misfortune: a dead mother (E. coli), a dead stepmother (stroke), and a brother who vanished without a trace (amnesia, homicide, possibly pique). And not only them but her uncle Martin Rothschild, a first-class passenger on the unsinkable Titanic--Martin the family martyr. Sometimes it seemed as if her whole life had been spent waiting for something terrible to happen. Even so, to be canned over tea and scones, with the accompaniment of harp and violin, was the absolutely worst. She had spent four years with the Conde Nast publishing company, her first and only real job.
Her husband was waiting when she walked into the apartment. Edwin Pond Parker II, scion of Congregational clergymen and once a Wall Street broker, had served during the war in the muddy trenches of France as an ambulance driver. His van hurtled into a bomb crater, and Eddie spent two days buried with the dead and the wounded before being rescued. Handsome, blond, a Connecticut thoroughbred, he had appeared to be an ideal husband before the war. Since the armistice, he'd been devoting himself, almost full-time, to alcohol and morphine.
Not surprisingly, Eddie had little practical advice to offer, and so for counsel and comfort she turned to her best friend. Robert Benchley was the managing editor of Vanity Fair, and while everybody called him Bob or Rob, she never did. With her impeccable manners, she addressed him, ladylike, as "Mr. Benchley" (or "Fred," or in times of very bad trouble "Dear Fred"), and he in return called her "Mrs. Parker." The day he walked into the office for the first time, Dottie knew that she and Bob Benchley were kindred spirits sharing a similar sense of humor. For example, he subscribed to The Casket, an undertakers' magazine that published everything you always wanted to know about subjects such as embalming ("sometimes in the fresh body of a robust suicide the descending colon may be contracted to the thickness of the thumb"). Dottie had never known anyone who thought it necessary to be well informed about embalming. Immediately she ordered her own subscription. Each month she leafed through the Casket ads for hearses and giggled over the humor column (From Grave to Gay). Then she clipped the most interesting anatomic plates to hang above her desk. Over the months her office friendship with Mr. Benchley had deepened steadily (and platonically, despite gossip to the contrary), until now they were practically inseparable.
In the early evening of January 11, Bob left his home in Scarsdale and hurried into town on the seven o'clock train. It was easy to see that Crownie shared none of the responsibility for dismissing Dottie, since he was little more than a hired hand in the Conde Nast empire (Vanity Fair, Vogue, House and Garden). The man behind her firing was Nast himself. Recently he had denied her a raise and squawked about several pieces, but she'd never given it a second thought. By every reasonable standard, she had done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, the publisher had never figured out that the duty of a critic was to determine what is of high artistic quality--and what isn't. After several hours spent loudly damning Nast for stupidity--the man ought to be horsewhipped, at the least--both of them fell back on personal principles. She knew everything bad happened to her. He always believed the greatest sin was disloyalty. And so the next morning he went to the office and quit.
With evident glee, the New York papers reported the upheavals in Nast's staff--a third editor, Robert Sherwood, also quit--and took the side of the editors. F.P.A. (ne Franklin Pierce Adams), the city's most widely read columnist, wrote in the New York Tribune, "R. Benchley tells me he hath resigned his position with 'Vanity Fair' because they had discharged Mistress Dorothy Parker; which I am sorry for." The New York Times also ran a sympathetic account under the byline of its theater critic, Alexander Woollcott. (Woollcott held court at the Algonquin Round Table, a group of friends--a dozen or so humorists, journalists, and playwrights, including Dottie and Bob--who regularly lunched together at the Algonquin Hotel--the "Gonk"--on West Forty-fourth.) That week the walkout remained Topic A over publishing luncheon tables.
At Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield continued to shake his head. When Bob submitted his resignation, Crownie concluded that he had lost his mind. Bob's wife, Gertrude, stuck in Scarsdale with their two boys, thought so, too. But to Dottie his willingness to walk away from his job would forever be treasured as "the greatest act of friendship" she could imagine.
Dottie sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, before the war, when learning the tango and the turkey trot was the biggest thing on some people's minds. Her verse had appeared earlier in F.P.A.'s Conning Tower column, but this was her first publication for money (the sum of twelve dollars). She felt so tremendously confident that she presented herself at the offices of the new Conde Nast magazine, on West Forty-fourth Street, to apply for a writing job. At that time she was playing piano at a dance school and thinking about a new line of work, but, to be on the safe side, she told Frank Crowninshield that she was an orphan, an exaggeration.
The tall, silver-haired editor would always remember his first glimpse of Dorothy Rothschild: dainty manners, well turned out in a smart suit and bowed black patent pumps, drenched in perfume, brandishing a verbal switchblade. No openings were available, but Crownie, with his gift for spotting talent, directed her to Vogue, where for ten dollars a week she was indentured, writing captions for drawings of underwear ("Brevity is the soul of lingerie"). Vogue was a fossilized place, manned by lizardy-skinned Victorians wearing lorgnettes. But the job was a good deal better than slaving at the dance studio and living with her sister's family. In a fit of mischief, she once tried to sneak past the proofreaders a caption suggesting that a peekaboo mousseline de soie nightdress would be perfect for a night of debauchery. She was bored, barely managing to stay out of trouble, when Crownie rescued her from peonage in the undies department. In the autumn of 1917 he engineered her transfer to Vanity Fair, where she was assigned to write features and comic verse. It took only a few months before she replaced the English humorist P. G. Wodehouse as theater critic.
To Dottie, who had always loved the stage, the chance to become New York's only woman drama critic was incredible good luck, the first she'd ever known. But she soon discovered a tiny worm in the apple: Vanity Fair prided itself on being a magazine of no opinion, and she had nothing but opinions. Nevertheless, she tried her best to please by adopting the attitude that her job was to be a sort of weather forecaster. Faced with mediocre shows, she dutifully proceeded to issue regular gale warnings along with solid information theatergoers needed to know: bring knitting, sneak out for "a brisk walk around the Reservoir," go home, or, a favorite of hers, no need to show up at all. Unlike other critics, who confined their reviews to plot and performance, Dottie complained about the locations of her seats, smacked producers for low taste, and pilloried chorus lines for looking motherly. She one time reviewed the performance of a woman seated next to her who'd been searching for a lost glove. Not surprisingly, her columns pleased quite a lot of readers as much as they enraged an awful lot of producers.
In the January issue Dottie was critical of a comedy by Somerset Maugham. She thought that the leading lady, Billie Burke, had overacted badly and compared her performance to that of a well-known vaudeville dancer famous for wild gyrations. After objections from Crowninshield, Dottie toned down the review of Caesar's Wife and mildly observed that Burke, at thirty-five, was too old to play an ingenue--and her impersonation of Eva Tanguay ("The I Don't Care Girl") also seemed ill-advised.
Billie Burke happened to be the wife of Florenz Ziegfeld, not only a powerful Broadway producer but also an important Vanity Fair advertiser. Affronted, Ziegfeld made a fuss about Mrs. Parker, and within days Conde Nast fired his wiseacre critic.
During their remaining weeks at the magazine, Dottie and Bob made a point of expressing their disdain for Nast. They pinned on red discharge chevrons and marched around the office in a conspicuous display of scorn, even hung a sign in the lobby of the building requesting Contributions for Miss Billie Burke. As soon as Dottie left, the same week that Prohibition began, the company hastened to cancel her...
CHAPTER ONE
It couldn't be worse.
Twenty-six, and she was losing her job. Vanity Fair's editor in chief broke the news in the grandeur of the Tea Court at the Plaza Hotel, beneath the Tiffany glass dome, amid the Caen stone and Breche violet marble, the Baccarat crystal and gold-encrusted china, the handwoven Savonnerie rugs. He had to fire her, Frank Crowninshield said, because his former theater critic was planning to return to the magazine and of course he needed his old job back. She said she didn't know that. He hoped she would work at home and do little pieces in her spare time. She said she really couldn't. She had no idea how to change a typewriter ribbon.
Vanity Fair had no cause to fire her, thought Dorothy Parker. And so what if every producer on Broadway hated her. It was Sunday afternoon on Central Park South, the carriage horses dozed standing up at the curbs, the leafless trees across the street were dark against the dusky sky. When Dottie emerged from the hotel, she went straight home, round Columbus Circle, up Broadway, back to the Upper West Side, where she grew up. From an early age she knew a thing or two about misfortune: a dead mother (E. coli), a dead stepmother (stroke), and a brother who vanished without a trace (amnesia, homicide, possibly pique). And not only them but her uncle Martin Rothschild, a first-class passenger on the unsinkable Titanic--Martin the family martyr. Sometimes it seemed as if her whole life had been spent waiting for something terrible to happen. Even so, to be canned over tea and scones, with the accompaniment of harp and violin, was the absolutely worst. She had spent four years with the Conde Nast publishing company, her first and only real job.
Her husband was waiting when she walked into the apartment. Edwin Pond Parker II, scion of Congregational clergymen and once a Wall Street broker, had served during the war in the muddy trenches of France as an ambulance driver. His van hurtled into a bomb crater, and Eddie spent two days buried with the dead and the wounded before being rescued. Handsome, blond, a Connecticut thoroughbred, he had appeared to be an ideal husband before the war. Since the armistice, he'd been devoting himself, almost full-time, to alcohol and morphine.
Not surprisingly, Eddie had little practical advice to offer, and so for counsel and comfort she turned to her best friend. Robert Benchley was the managing editor of Vanity Fair, and while everybody called him Bob or Rob, she never did. With her impeccable manners, she addressed him, ladylike, as "Mr. Benchley" (or "Fred," or in times of very bad trouble "Dear Fred"), and he in return called her "Mrs. Parker." The day he walked into the office for the first time, Dottie knew that she and Bob Benchley were kindred spirits sharing a similar sense of humor. For example, he subscribed to The Casket, an undertakers' magazine that published everything you always wanted to know about subjects such as embalming ("sometimes in the fresh body of a robust suicide the descending colon may be contracted to the thickness of the thumb"). Dottie had never known anyone who thought it necessary to be well informed about embalming. Immediately she ordered her own subscription. Each month she leafed through the Casket ads for hearses and giggled over the humor column (From Grave to Gay). Then she clipped the most interesting anatomic plates to hang above her desk. Over the months her office friendship with Mr. Benchley had deepened steadily (and platonically, despite gossip to the contrary), until now they were practically inseparable.
In the early evening of January 11, Bob left his home in Scarsdale and hurried into town on the seven o'clock train. It was easy to see that Crownie shared none of the responsibility for dismissing Dottie, since he was little more than a hired hand in the Conde Nast empire (Vanity Fair, Vogue, House and Garden). The man behind her firing was Nast himself. Recently he had denied her a raise and squawked about several pieces, but she'd never given it a second thought. By every reasonable standard, she had done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, the publisher had never figured out that the duty of a critic was to determine what is of high artistic quality--and what isn't. After several hours spent loudly damning Nast for stupidity--the man ought to be horsewhipped, at the least--both of them fell back on personal principles. She knew everything bad happened to her. He always believed the greatest sin was disloyalty. And so the next morning he went to the office and quit.
With evident glee, the New York papers reported the upheavals in Nast's staff--a third editor, Robert Sherwood, also quit--and took the side of the editors. F.P.A. (ne Franklin Pierce Adams), the city's most widely read columnist, wrote in the New York Tribune, "R. Benchley tells me he hath resigned his position with 'Vanity Fair' because they had discharged Mistress Dorothy Parker; which I am sorry for." The New York Times also ran a sympathetic account under the byline of its theater critic, Alexander Woollcott. (Woollcott held court at the Algonquin Round Table, a group of friends--a dozen or so humorists, journalists, and playwrights, including Dottie and Bob--who regularly lunched together at the Algonquin Hotel--the "Gonk"--on West Forty-fourth.) That week the walkout remained Topic A over publishing luncheon tables.
At Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield continued to shake his head. When Bob submitted his resignation, Crownie concluded that he had lost his mind. Bob's wife, Gertrude, stuck in Scarsdale with their two boys, thought so, too. But to Dottie his willingness to walk away from his job would forever be treasured as "the greatest act of friendship" she could imagine.
Dottie sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, before the war, when learning the tango and the turkey trot was the biggest thing on some people's minds. Her verse had appeared earlier in F.P.A.'s Conning Tower column, but this was her first publication for money (the sum of twelve dollars). She felt so tremendously confident that she presented herself at the offices of the new Conde Nast magazine, on West Forty-fourth Street, to apply for a writing job. At that time she was playing piano at a dance school and thinking about a new line of work, but, to be on the safe side, she told Frank Crowninshield that she was an orphan, an exaggeration.
The tall, silver-haired editor would always remember his first glimpse of Dorothy Rothschild: dainty manners, well turned out in a smart suit and bowed black patent pumps, drenched in perfume, brandishing a verbal switchblade. No openings were available, but Crownie, with his gift for spotting talent, directed her to Vogue, where for ten dollars a week she was indentured, writing captions for drawings of underwear ("Brevity is the soul of lingerie"). Vogue was a fossilized place, manned by lizardy-skinned Victorians wearing lorgnettes. But the job was a good deal better than slaving at the dance studio and living with her sister's family. In a fit of mischief, she once tried to sneak past the proofreaders a caption suggesting that a peekaboo mousseline de soie nightdress would be perfect for a night of debauchery. She was bored, barely managing to stay out of trouble, when Crownie rescued her from peonage in the undies department. In the autumn of 1917 he engineered her transfer to Vanity Fair, where she was assigned to write features and comic verse. It took only a few months before she replaced the English humorist P. G. Wodehouse as theater critic.
To Dottie, who had always loved the stage, the chance to become New York's only woman drama critic was incredible good luck, the first she'd ever known. But she soon discovered a tiny worm in the apple: Vanity Fair prided itself on being a magazine of no opinion, and she had nothing but opinions. Nevertheless, she tried her best to please by adopting the attitude that her job was to be a sort of weather forecaster. Faced with mediocre shows, she dutifully proceeded to issue regular gale warnings along with solid information theatergoers needed to know: bring knitting, sneak out for "a brisk walk around the Reservoir," go home, or, a favorite of hers, no need to show up at all. Unlike other critics, who confined their reviews to plot and performance, Dottie complained about the locations of her seats, smacked producers for low taste, and pilloried chorus lines for looking motherly. She one time reviewed the performance of a woman seated next to her who'd been searching for a lost glove. Not surprisingly, her columns pleased quite a lot of readers as much as they enraged an awful lot of producers.
In the January issue Dottie was critical of a comedy by Somerset Maugham. She thought that the leading lady, Billie Burke, had overacted badly and compared her performance to that of a well-known vaudeville dancer famous for wild gyrations. After objections from Crowninshield, Dottie toned down the review of Caesar's Wife and mildly observed that Burke, at thirty-five, was too old to play an ingenue--and her impersonation of Eva Tanguay ("The I Don't Care Girl") also seemed ill-advised.
Billie Burke happened to be the wife of Florenz Ziegfeld, not only a powerful Broadway producer but also an important Vanity Fair advertiser. Affronted, Ziegfeld made a fuss about Mrs. Parker, and within days Conde Nast fired his wiseacre critic.
During their remaining weeks at the magazine, Dottie and Bob made a point of expressing their disdain for Nast. They pinned on red discharge chevrons and marched around the office in a conspicuous display of scorn, even hung a sign in the lobby of the building requesting Contributions for Miss Billie Burke. As soon as Dottie left, the same week that Prohibition began, the company hastened to cancel her...
