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By Root 1371 0

’s Pals,” girls just like the reader, with one enormous exception. The pals all had “It.” As defined by scenarist and director Elinor Glyn, It—the quintessential flapper trait—was a form of perceptual physics. In the heat of a media frenzy, the celebration of something “new,” all of a culture’s most desirable traits attached themselves to one young icon everyone else then imitated. But It, the sum total of many tiny acts of adorability, was hard to mimic. It just came to you: a shoe positioned at a clever angle. Well-timed winking. Clever tap-dancing moves away from lecherous men. A fashion columnist summarized in Vogue, “One has IT or one does not.”

But most every silent screen star, and many of the women who watched and read about them tried hard to evolve their own unique sense of It.

Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford began their careers playing richgirl flappers, roadhouse dollies, and office workers who expressed their sense of It by suggestively blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of their leading men. Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks introduced the slick black helmet haircut and a speedy double-talking sense of It that was deceptively fun and eccentric. If asked to be fully candid, their characters might have confessed: “I am so cute and charming, you will inevitably fail to understand that I am also crazy, irresponsible, and destructive!” Even D. W. Griffith, master of the epochal silent film, took on a flapper who, in attaining It, seemed to have injected amphetamines. Carole Dempster, a wild-eyed, frizzy-haired actress, swam marathons, rode bikes or horses, played tennis, tossed hatchets, and, whenever possible, did the jitterbug, which had been called “a dance of anxiety and bitterness.” All within the course of one movie.

But the star with the essence of It was Clara Bow, a redhead with a strategically placed beauty mark and a Brooklyn squawk that would ruin her career in the sound era. She played all variety of flapperish working girls—a manicurist in Red Hair (1928), a swimming instructor in Kid Boots (1926), and, among many others, a lingerie shop girl in It (1927), a film that grossed an astonishing one million dollars. The Bow characters were distinguished by their effervescent refusal to accept class distinctions. In many of her films, her characters “land” a better kind of guy by easing in and out of social milieus (the Ritz and Coney Island all in a weekend!) relying only on their high-spirited personalities to erase any awkwardness.

But having It, running around, trying hard to seem fresh and daring, could be interpreted in other ways. To many Americans, the flapper, as depicted on-screen and in the three thousand magazines published monthly circa 1923, was little more than a potential slut.

Sex and danger were big selling points in flapper films, as reflected in their titles: Strictly Unconventional, Speed Crazed, Wickedness Preferred, In Search of Sinners, Dangerous Business. And the flappers, the It girls, were portrayed, at best, as lightly naughty. For example, they shoplifted. They stole boyfriends. Drank. Or, in many cases, they were chorus girls, a job title that encompassed all the above tendencies. The American Film Institute has cataloged 101 flapper films that featured “chorines,” among them, Sally of the Scandals and An Affair of the Follies. The naughty fictional flapper was also sometimes a schoolgirl. In two-reelers typically entitled Honey and Sweetie, student flappers lounged around their rooms smoking and—this was often depicted as an activity—“wearing lingerie.” After a while the coeds put on clothes and attended their classes. For the rest of the film they flirted with handsome professors, who seemed frightened.

Naturally these films were accused of encouraging the worst aspects of It: sexy, louche behavior that could ruin lives. In fact, they seem most to have encouraged female viewers, potential It girls, to become actors. Many 1920s movie stars, all those friendly “pals,” seemed less talented thespians than they did cute, clever girls. How hard could it be? As early as 1920,