Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [22]
Other white tourists slumming in Harlem were fascinated by the ease with which social and sexual taboos were flouted there. Drugs as well as moonshine were freely available on Harlem’s streets. Certain clubs were frequented by exquisitely beautiful transvestites—“some women wished they could look so good,” remembered Ruby Smith. Beverley Nichols, the visiting English journalist, was taken to a shabby Harlem speakeasy where no one thought it remarkable that four white boys and two black boys, all dressed as girls, all drunk, sat flirting and preening and powdering their noses at one table, while nearby a group of debutantes drank champagne and women dressed as men danced cheek-to-cheek on the smoky dance floor. This louche atmosphere was what his friend Van Vechten had enticingly described to Nichols as “shi-shi with an undercurrent of murder.”
Ironically, although the white writer Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase the Jazz Age, the people and places he described were only dimly related to the mysterious rhythms of Bessie Smith or the poetry of Langston Hughes. This colonization of jazz and the blues by white, collegiate, prosperous America was in some ways a betrayal of its original spirit and the new confidence of black culture, but it also represented jazz’s irresistible allure to American youth of all backgrounds. Modern, liberated, open-minded, sophisticated, urban—jazz was a symbol of the changes sweeping through America during the 1920s. As Mezz Mezzrow put it, “A creative musician is an anarchist with a horn, and you can’t put any shackles on him . . . Freedom and jazz are synonymous.”
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drove through the Deep South in the early 1920s. They had matching knickerbocker suits made for the journey
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FEMME FATALE
JAZZ WAS A MUSICAL REVOLUTION AND THE PEOPLE MOVING to its rhythms were an entirely new breed. The girl who jumped on to a table at a Harlem nightclub and started swinging her arms wildly above her head as the charleston played was a type of woman America had never seen before. The word “flapper” described a chick desperately flapping her wings as she tried to fly, although she had not yet grown adult feathers; it had come to mean a precocious young woman whose modern appearance, attitudes, values and behavior utterly mystified her parents’ generation.
Zelda Fitzgerald, immortalized as the heroine of the Jazz Age in story after story by her husband, epitomized the Flapper—in all her worst, as well as her best, qualities. She was the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the generic woman to whom the novelist Warner Fabian dedicated his 1923 bestseller, Flaming Youth: “restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age.”
Born in 1900, Zelda was the adored youngest child of a respectable and respected judge of Montgomery, Alabama, and his artistic wife. Their golden-haired baby grew up indulged and fearless, “without a thought for anyone else.” The fairies at her christening, said the literary critic Edmund Wilson, had squandered choice gifts on Zelda “with a minimum of stabilizing qualities.”
When the aspiring writer Scott Fitzgerald arrived at an army training camp in Montgomery, eighteen-year-old Zelda was the most sought-after beauty in the state, as alluring and unpredictable as she was unattainable. She smoked and drank and danced too close and dived off the top board of the local swimming pool in a costume made of flesh-colored fabric that made her look naked. “She, she told herself,” wrote Zelda years later of her youthful self, “would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and