Anything Goes

A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

Lucy Moore

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782398684
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Bracketed by the catastrophes of the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, 1920s America was a place of drama, tension and hedonism. It glittered and seduced: jazz, flappers, wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events - the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti; the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue - and it produced a splendid array of writers, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

Contents

	List of Illustrations
	Prologue
1	‘You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea’
2	‘The Rhythm of Life’
3	Femme Fatale
4	‘Five and Ten Cent Lusts and Dreams’
5	‘My God! How the Money Rolls In’
6	‘The Business of America is Business’
7	Fear of the Foreign
8	The Ku Klux Klan Redux
9	In Exile
10	The New Yorker
11	‘Yes, We Have No Bananas Today’
12	The Spirit of St Louis
13	The Big Fight
14	Crash
	Bibliography
	Index
	Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Al Capone and Henry Laubenheimer. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.

Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Bessie Smith. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection.

Langston Hughes. James L. Allen Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Louis Armstrong Hot Five. Roger-Viollet/Topfoto.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Courtesy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Archive, Princeton University Library.

Cover of The Beautiful and the Damned. Courtesy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Archive, Princeton University Library.

Scott, Zelda and Scottie. Courtesy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Archive, Princeton University Library.

Gloria Swanson. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

Theda Bara. Fox Films/The Kobal Collection.

Marion Davies. George Hurrell/The Kobal Collection.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The Kobal Collection.

Charlie Chaplin. United Artists/The Kobal Collection.

Fatty Arbuckle. Everett Collection/Rex Features.

Walter Chrysler. The Art Archive/Culver Pictures.

Henry Ford. Getty Images.

Warren and Florence Harding. Getty Images.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. © Bettmann/Corbis.

Ku Klux Klan. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Photo Company Collection.

Caresse and Harry Crosby and Kitsa Wilkins. Courtesy of the Morris Library, South Illinois University.

Caresse Crosby. Courtesy of the Morris Library, South Illinois University.

Dorothy Parker. The Art Archive/Culver Pictures.

Harold Ross. Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon.

Clarence Darrow and John Scopes. The Art Archive.

The Spirit of St Louis. Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.

Evangeline and Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.

Jack Dempsey. © Bettmann/Corbis.

Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. © Bettmann/Corbis.

The Chrysler Building. Getty Images.

William Van Alen. © Bettmann/Corbis.

Prologue

A HANDSOME YOUNG MAN stands on a sunny beach between his wife and his sister. It’s late summer and the bathers frolicking in the shallows or shading themselves beneath striped parasols in the background are growing scarce. The two women are in pale knee-length dresses, their hair fashionably styled; one wears a cardigan against the sea wind. Harry Crosby stands out in his dark suit, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his face screwed up against the sun. The photograph was taken at Deauville in late September, 1929, but it has an astonishingly contemporary feel.

The three figures probably look more normal to us than they would have done to an onlooker at the time the photograph was taken. So many of the things that would have marked them out as modernists in the eyes of their peers are now taken for granted. When I look at it I have to pinch myself to remember that Harry being bareheaded, at a time when no gentleman went outside without a hat, was a daring declaration of freedom, and that the black silk gardenia he sports in his lapel was a deliberate subversion of the genteel buttonhole and a badge of his alliance with the avant-garde. Knowing the story behind this photograph provides us with clues about the world in which Harry and his family lived, a world of growth and social upheaval on an unprecedented scale – a world which, in its self-conscious modernity and its brash enthusiasms, was startlingly similar to our own.

The Crosbys were American aristocracy, living in Europe on vast wealth accumulated on Wall Street, although Harry affected to despise the conventional milieu from which he sprang and delighted in shocking it when he could. Despite their Establishment roots, Harry Crosby and his companions were prophets of a new age. Today there is nothing unusual in divorce but in 1929 it was still a scandal. On this day at the beach, Harry’s sister announced that she was divorcing her husband. Harry’s wife, Caresse, had left her first husband to marry him, branding them both outlaws from respectable society. Their example heralded a future when divorce would be commonplace.

Harry’s eccentric dress and behaviour also marked them out. Like fellow members of the Lost Generation, Harry had responded to the atrocities he had seen as an ambulance driver in the French trenches during the First World War with reckless hedonism, fuelled by the American age of plenty in which he was living. He was promiscuous, he was profligate, he drank too much, he took drugs, he drove dangerously fast, he died young. Harry Crosby may have felt part of a tiny, forward-thinking elite during his lifetime, but his story is all too familiar today.

I’ve been interested in the 1920s in America for many years, but what made me decide to write about it now was an increasingly powerful sense of recognition. So many aspects of the Jazz Age recall our own: political corruption and complacency; fear of outsiders; life-changing technologies; cults of youth, excess, consumerism and celebrity; profit as a new religion on the one hand and the easy availability of credit on the other; astonishing affluence and yet a huge section of society unable to move out of poverty. Perhaps we too are hurtling towards some sort of catastrophe, the effects of which will evoke those of the crash of 1929. After all, as history so often reminds us, there is nothing new under the sun.

This is a subjective survey of the principal events and characters of the time. The Roaring Twenties was an age of iconic events and people, of talismanic names and episodes that have entered our consciousness more like myths – or morality tales – than historical occurrences. This book is my exploration of those icons. From a distance of eighty years, some still glitter while others have grown tarnished, but their fascination endures.

1

‘You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea’

IN EARLY 1927, WHEN Chicago’s Beer Wars between rival gangs of bootleggers were at their peak, Al Capone invited a group of reporters to his heavily fortified home. Fetchingly attired in a pink apron and bedroom slippers, rather than his usual sharp suit and diamond cuff-links, he dished up a feast of homemade spaghetti and illegally imported Chianti and told his guests that he was getting out of the booze racket. Capone wanted the world – not just the public but the police, the federal authorities and his mob enemies – to believe that he was finished with crime. But despite his public pronouncement, he had no intention of quitting such a profitable business.

At the end of the year, with gangsters still dying in regular shoot-outs on the streets of Chicago, Capone again tried to distance himself from the criminal underworld. Summoning journalists to his suite at the Metropole Hotel, his headquarters in the centre of the city, he announced his retirement for the second time in a year. He had only been trying, Capone declared, to provide people with what they wanted. ‘Public service is my motto,’ he insisted. ‘Ninety per cent of the people in Chicago drink and gamble. I’ve tried to serve them decent liquor and square games. But I’m not appreciated. It’s no use… Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best way they can. I’m sick of the job. It’s a thankless one and full of grief.’

He was no more a criminal than his clients, he argued. ‘I violate the prohibition law, sure. Who doesn’t? The only difference is I take more chances than the man who drinks a cocktail before dinner and a flock of highballs after it. But he’s just as much a violator as I am…’ Falsely, he claimed that he and his men had never been involved in serious crime, vice or robbery: ‘I don’t pose as a plaster saint, but I never killed anyone.’

The worst of it was the suffering that his work – which he implied was practically charity – caused his family. ‘I could bear it all if it weren’t for the hurt it brings to my mother and my family. They hear so much about what a terrible criminal I am. It’s getting too much for them and I’m just sick of it all myself.’ Although several of his brothers worked with him, Capone idealized his mother and his wife and son and kept his family life rigidly separate from his professional activities and the late-night perks that went with them of drinking, drugs and girls. It was as if maintaining his family’s innocence allowed him to hope that he was not entirely the monster he knew himself to be.

After the press conference Capone headed for Florida. ‘I almost feel like sending him and his boys a basket of roses,’ said the Chief of Police when he heard the news. The Chicago papers screamed, ‘“YOU CAN ALL GO THIRSTY” IS AL CAPONE’S ADIEU’.

When Capone made these announcements in 1927 he was at the peak of his power. Just twenty-eight, growing into his role as Chicago’s leading gangster, he was becoming ever more confident about engaging with the legitimate world – albeit on his own terms. While on the one hand he was cautious of his safety after the attack of 1925 that had nearly killed his partner, Johnny Torrio, on the other he was increasingly willing to reveal his personality in an effort to win over the public whose approval he craved – and on whose approval, he believed, his continued success depended. This desire for appreciation and attention was what lifted him out of the everyday ranks of mobsters into a class of his own.

His car, a custom-built, steel-plated Cadillac, which weighed seven tonnes and had bullet-proof window glass and a hidden gun compartment, encapsulated the dichotomy between Capone’s need for protection and his love of display. Although it was undoubtedly secure it was also instantly recognizable, and became a defining element of the Capone mystique.

Another element of Capone’s public image was his distinctive appearance. Even in his twenties Al Capone was a broad man – he stood five foot seven and weighed 255 pounds – but he was capable of grace as well as power. He was softly spoken but immensely charismatic, his air of authority enhanced by an undercurrent of menace. As he was reportedly fond of saying, ‘You get a lot further with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.’

Capone may have been known for his facial scars (while still in his teens he had complimented a girl in a Coney Island dance-hall on her ‘nice ass’ and in the fight that ensued her brother had slashed his cheek and neck three times), but he covered his face with thick powder to try to hide them and hated being called Scarface. Among friends the nickname he preferred was Snorky, slang for ‘elegant’. His hand-made suits came in ice-cream colours, tangerine, violet, apple-green and prim...