Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter 1 - “YOU CANNOT MAKE YOUR SHIMMY SHAKE ON TEA”
Chapter 2 - “THE RHYTHM Of LIFE”
Chapter 3 - FEMME FATALE
Chapter 4 - “FIVE AND TEN CENT LUSTS AND DREAMS”
Chapter 5 - “My God! HOW THE MONEY Rolls IN”
Chapter 6 - “THE BUSINESS Of AMERICA IS BUSINESS”
Chapter 7 - FEAR Of THE FOREIGN
Chapter 8 - THE Ku Klux KLAN REDUX
Chapter 9 - IN EXILE
Chapter 10 - THE NEW YORKER
Chapter 11 - “YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS TODAY”
Chapter 12 - THE SPIRIT Of ST. LOUIS
Chapter 13 - THE BIG FIGHT
Chapter 14 - CRASH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgements
INDEX
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 2010 by Lucy Moore
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN : 978-1-590-20451-1
http://us.penguingroup.com
XXXX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Caresse and Harry Crosby and Kitsa Wilkins. Courtesy of the
Morris Library, South Illinois University.
Al Capone and Henry Laubenheimer. ©Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis.
The Louis Armstrong Hot Five. Roger-Viollet/Topfoto.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Courtesy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald
Archive, Princeton University Library.
Theda Bara. Fox Films/The Kobal Collection.
Warren and Florence Harding. Getty Images.
Henry Ford. Getty Images.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. ©Bettmann/Corbis.
Ku Klux Klan. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, National Photo Company Collection.
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.
Jack Dempsey. ©Bettmann/Corbis.
Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. ©Bettmann/Corbis.
William Van Alen. ©Bettmann/Corbis.
Glamorous exiles Caresse and Harry Crosby
and Harry’s sister Kitsa on the beach at Deauville,
September 1929. Narcisse Noir reclines at their feet.
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 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 avantgarde. 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