{"product_id":"flapper-isbn-9781400080540","title":"Flapper","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eFlapper\u003c\/i\u003e is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly   modern decade.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her  hemlines, danced   the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More  important, she earned her own keep,   controlled her own destiny, and  secured liberties that modern women take for granted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFlapper\u003c\/i\u003e is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form; Lois Long, the woman who christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into   Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife; three of America’s first celebrities: Clara   Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks; Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway; Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent   and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era; and more, this is the story of  America’s   first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its  first celebrities, and   its most sparkling advertisement for the right  to pursue happiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhisking us   from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first  caught the eye of F. Scott   Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where  would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk   stockings, to the  Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian    Joshua Zeitz brings the 1920s to exhilarating life.\u003cb\u003eJoshua  Zeitz\u003c\/b\u003e has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University,  Harvard University, and Princeton University. He is the author of  several books on American political and social history and has written  for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times, The Washington Post,\u003c\/i\u003e the \u003ci\u003eNew Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAmerican Heritage.\u003c\/i\u003e He lives with his wife and two daughters in Hoboken, New Jersey.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Most Popular Girl\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For all intents and purposes, and purely by virtue of chance, America’s   Jazz Age began in July 1918 on a warm and sultry evening in Montgomery,   Alabama. There, at the Montgomery Country Club—“a rambling   brown-shingled building,” as one contemporary later remembered it,   “discreetly screened from the public eye by an impenetrable hedge of   mock oranges”—a strikingly beautiful woman named Zelda Sayre sauntered   onto the clubhouse veranda and caught the eye of First Lieutenant   Francis Scott Fitzgerald.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At seventeen, Zelda was “sophisticated for her age,” recalled one of   her friends, but “she still had the charm of an uninhibited,   imaginative child.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As she stood outside the clubhouse amid the dull murmur of the brass   dance music emanating from within, bathed by the Alabama moonlight, her   “summer tan gave her skin the color of a rose petal dripped in cream.   Her hair had the sheen of spun gold. Wide and dark-lashed, her eyes   seemed to change color with her prismatic moods; though in reality they   were deep blue, at times they appeared to be green or even a dark   Confederate gray.” Just one month out of high school, Zelda was   “slender and well-proportioned,” “lithe,” and “extraordinarily   graceful.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Among the younger set, Zelda Sayre was commonly acknowledged as   something of a wild child. She particularly delighted in scandalizing   her father, Judge Anthony Sayre, a staid Victorian who, in his capacity   as an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was one of   Montgomery’s leading citizens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Given her family’s standing in the community, Zelda’s frequent exploits   were sure fodder for gossip. There was the day she climbed to the roof   of her house, kicked away the ladder, and compelled the fire company to   rescue her from certain injury and disgrace. Or the time she borrowed   her friend’s snappy little Stutz Bearcat to drive down to Boodler’s   Bend, a local lover’s lane concealed by a thick orchard of pecan trees,   and shone a spotlight on those of her schoolmates who were necking in   the backseats of parked cars. Or those other occasions when she   repeated the same trick, but at the front entrance to Madam Helen St.   Clair’s notorious city brothel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most disturbing to Judge Sayre was Zelda’s well-earned reputation for   violating the time-honored codes of sexual propriety that seemed   everywhere under attack by the time the opening shots were fired in   World War I. Already a veritable legend among hundreds of well-heeled   fraternity brothers as far and wide as the University of Alabama,   Auburn University, and Georgia Tech, Zelda was “the most popular girl   at every dance,” as a would-be suitor remembered years later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part of Zelda’s renown surely was owed to her habit of sneaking out of   country club dances—and sometimes her bedroom window—to join   Montgomery’s most eligible bachelors for a few hours of necking,   petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues. On more than a few   occasions, the inviting aroma of pear trees, the dim glow of a   half-moon, and the tentative sound of a boyfriend’s car horn were all   the inspiration Zelda needed to walk quietly across her plain   whitewashed room, draw open the curtains, and creep down to the tin   roof that protected the Sayre family’s front porch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After that, she was gone into the night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During her four years at Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda was an   average student, but she was well ahead of the learning curve in most   other matters. She habitually rouged her cheeks and stenciled her eyes   with mascara, giving her friends’ parents great cause for concern.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A regular at the local soda fountain, she alternated between double   banana splits (innocuous) and a “dopes” (not so innocuous), a   combination of Coca-Cola and aromatic spirits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the entire senior class cut school on April 1, it was Zelda who   pooled everyone’s money and flirted with the nice agent at the Empire   Theatre, who happily granted the students admission at a cut rate. And   it was Zelda who triumphantly organized a group photo in front of the   ticket box.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When her English teacher assigned a poetry-writing exercise for   homework, Zelda immediately volunteered to read her original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    composition—scratched out the next morning in homeroom—aloud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I do love my Charlie so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It nearly drives me wild.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’m so glad that he’s my beau\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I’m his baby child!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a big hit with her classmates, but not exactly what the teacher   was looking for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For all of Zelda’s purported daring, Sara Mayfield, her loyal childhood   friend, averred that she was no better or worse than most young women   of her time. “Zelda would have been the last to deny that she danced   cheek to cheek and did the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Black   Bottom,” Mayfield admitted. But “if she gave a demonstration of the   Hula at a midterm dance at the University of Alabama, had not Alice   Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, been similarly criticized for   doing the same thing . . . ?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To be sure, Zelda “rode behind her admirers . . . on their motorcycles   with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her   hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye.” But this sort of   “flirtation was an old Southern custom; ‘going the limit’ was not.   Zelda was a reigning beauty and ‘a knockout’ in the paleolithic slang   of the day, far too popular to have ‘put out’ for her beaux, far too   shrewd in the tactics and strategy of popularity to grant her favors to   one suitor and thereby alienate a regiment of them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Maybe so, maybe not. But Zelda did her best to cultivate a scandalous   reputation. She encouraged reports of skinny-dipping excursions and   multiple romantic entanglements. During the summer, when it got too   hot, she slipped out of her underwear and asked her date to hold it for   the evening in his coat pocket. And at a legendary Christmas bop, when   a chaperone reproached her for dancing too closely and too wantonly   with her date, Zelda retaliated by swiping a band of mistletoe and   pinning it to her backside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Long after the last chords of the Jazz Age had been struck, Zelda   admitted in her own autobiographical novel that “I never let them down   on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Scott Fitzgerald certainly thought so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Just shy of his twenty-first birthday, the young army lieutenant was   stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan, where he spent most of his time   devouring novels and cavorting with the sons and daughters of   Montgomery’s first citizens. Smartly clad in a new dress uniform,   Fitzgerald cut an impressive figure. Shortly after the war, when   Scott’s first book became a best-seller, an interviewer described him   as bearing “the agreeable countenance of a young person who cheerfully   regards himself as the center of everything.” His eyes were “blue and   domineering,” his nose “Grecian and pleasantly snippy; mouth, ‘spoiled   and alluring,’ like one of his own yellow-haired heroines; and he parts   his wavy fair hair in the middle, as Amory Blaine”—the fictional hero   of Fitzgerald’s first novel—“decided that all ‘slickers’ should do.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Fitzgerald was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had spent four   years at Princeton without earning his undergraduate degree. An   indifferent student, he received poor marks from his professors and   made little contribution to classroom discussion. To his credit,   Fitzgerald was an accomplished amateur playwright and a frequent   contributor to the university literary magazine. But on balance, his   academic career fell far short of even his expectations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lazy in all things but reading and writing, vaguely ambitious but   hopelessly lacking direction, Fitzgerald escaped the indignity of a   fifth year at Princeton by enlisting in the army in late 1917. First   stationed at Fort Leavenworth for officer’s training, he made a poor   impression on his platoon captain, a serious young West Point man named   Dwight D. Eisenhower. Scott’s attention simply wasn’t on soldiering,   and it showed. He fully expected that he would be sent to the European   front, and fearing that he might return in a pine box, he accelerated   work on his first novel, The Romantic Egotist. It consumed much of his   time and all of his energy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On short leave from the army in early 1918, Scott enjoyed a brief   hiatus in Princeton, where he managed to finish the novel and send it   off to an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. After reporting back for   duty in March, he was transferred to the Forty-fifth Infantry Regiment   at Camp Alexander in Kentucky. Though he was trained to lead a platoon,   his commanding officers found Scott so deficient as a soldier that they   consigned him to stateside duty—first at Camp Gordon in Georgia and   then, in June 1918, at Camp Sheridan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With his novel under review and combat service safely at bay,   Fitzgerald was free to immerse himself in local revelries. Almost from   the start, he began working his way through a list of Montgomery’s most   eligible debutantes, generously supplied by Lawton Campbell, a local   boy he had known at Princeton. In a more candid moment years later,   Fitzgerald admitted that he had been naturally endowed with neither   “great animal magnetism nor money,” two certain keys to success among   the well-bred collegiate circles in which he moved back in the early   days. Still, he knew that he had “good looks and intelligence,”   qualities that generally helped him get the “top girl” wherever he   went.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lawton Campbell was several years older than Zelda Sayre and had left   Montgomery before she entered high school; consequently, he didn’t   include her on Scott’s roster of southern belles. It was purely by   chance that she and Scott Fitzgerald happened upon each other that   evening in July.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The moment his eyes locked on her, Scott was taken by Zelda’s beauty.   Had he asked around, he would have learned of her dangerous reputation.   As one contemporary remembered, “There were two kinds of girls, those   who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls   who wouldn’t. But Zelda didn’t seem to give a damn.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At the first opportunity, Scott elbowed his way to her side and,   finding that her dance card was full for the evening, asked if he might   take her out after the country club festivities wound down. The faux   East Coast drawl that he studiously cultivated at Princeton just barely   concealed his flat Minnesota burr.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I never make late dates with fast workers,” she replied sharply in the   most properly southern of southern accents.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nevertheless, she gave Scott her telephone number and subtly encouraged   him to ply his charms another time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Scott called Zelda at home the next day—and the next day after that,   and again every day for the better part of two weeks until she   relented. Not that it took a great deal of convincing. Scott was “a   blond Adonis in a Brooks Brothers uniform,” one of their contemporaries   remarked. He was, by Lawton Campbell’s estimation, “the handsomest boy   I’d ever seen. He had yellow hair and lavender eyes” and a confident   swagger that won over even his deepest skeptics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In her autobiographical novel, Zelda evoked the sensation of dancing   with Scott on one of their first dates. “[H]e smelled like new goods,”   she wrote all those years later. “Being close to him, [my] face in the   space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being   initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding   the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.” Zelda   was jealous of Scott’s “pale aloofness,” and when she watched him   stroll arm in arm off the dance floor with other women, she felt a dull   pang of resentment that he was “leading others than [me] into those   cooler regions which he inhabited alone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To be fair, Zelda saw to it that Scott did most of the chasing. As one   of Montgomery’s most popular debutantes, she already enjoyed scores of   romantic opportunities from the usual college and business crowds. In   normal times, Scott would have faced stiff competition from the likes   of Dan Cody, the dashing young scion of a prominent Montgomery banking   family, or Lloyd Hooper, an even wealthier son of an even wealthier   Alabama line. Now, with America fully mobilized for war and thousands   of doughboys in starched uniforms flooding Camp Sheridan, Zelda found   herself one of the mostly hotly pursued belles in the state. Army   aviators stationed at Camp Taylor honored her with elaborate aerial   stunts and flyovers above the Sayre household, until an unfortunate   pilot crashed his plane and died in a futile attempt to win Zelda’s   affections. Army regulars staged a ceremonial drill on Pleasant Avenue   in Zelda’s honor. Sara Mayfield claimed that when the war ended and all   of Montgomery celebrated with a grand parade, “the military police had   to break up the stag lines that crowded around her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By her own admission, Zelda’s attention wasn’t on school that year.   There were too many “soldiers in town [and] I passed my time going to   dances—always in love with somebody, dancing all night, and carrying on   my school work just with [the] idea of finishing it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This fierce competition notwithstanding, within weeks of their first   meeting Scott and Zelda fell deeply in love. Each weekend, Scott would   hop the rickety old army bus at Camp Sheridan and ride it into downtown   Montgomery; from there, he would take a short cab ride to 6 Pleasant   Avenue and call on Zelda. They passed their days rocking quietly on the   Sayres’ front porch swing and sipping cool drinks made of crushed ice   and fruit. At night they danced away the hours at the country club,   where Scott carved their initials in the front doorpost. Sometimes they   strolled arm in arm around the pine groves that encircled the town.   Scott joked that by the logic of both Keats and Browning, Zelda was   destined to marry him. Good-naturedly, Zelda replied that Scott was an   “educational feature; an overture to romance which no young lady should   be without.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That long Indian summer of 1918 would loom large in both their   memories. Writing from her confinement in a mental hospital almost   twenty years later, Zelda found that “at this dusty time of the year   the flowers and trees take on the aspect of flowers and trees drifted   from other summers.” The peculiar scent of pine needles evoked memories   of “roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago.” She fondly   bade Scott to recall the “night you gave me a birthday party and you   were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom . . . it was a   radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it   was all going to be for the best. . . . That’s the first time I ever   said that in my life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Zelda’s eighteenth birthday fell on July 24, 1918, less than a month   after they first met. If she and Scott didn’t consummate their   relationship then, it’s almost certain they did so before the summer’s   close. From an early age, Fitzgerald kept detailed scrapbooks that   chronicled his life and his works in progress. An entry from 1935,   containing notes for a short-story collection, reads: “After yielding   she holds Philippe at bay like Zelda + me in summer 1917.” It was a   slip of memory; he meant 1918. But this lone fragment, and Zelda’s   later reminiscences, suggest that they slept together sometime before   that November, when Scott left for Camp Mills, in New York, to await   embarkation for Europe.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304461684965,"sku":"NP9781400080540","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400080540.jpg?v=1767727431","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/flapper-isbn-9781400080540","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}