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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 behavior 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, fueled 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.

LUCY MOORE

—London, July 2007

Cozying up to the law: sharp-suited gangster Al Capone

(left) with Henry Laubenheimer, US Marshall for

Illinois, at the height of Capone’s attempts to present

himself as a legitimate businessman, 1928.

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 center 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 percent 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