‘ Flappers’ captures women’s raw energy
JudithMackrell’s “Flappers” is a juicy, energetic exploration of six dazzling iconoclasts who all flared to fame in the Roaring ’ 20s. By stringing their individual stories together, Mackrell highlights a postwar throw- caution- to- the- wind zeitgeist and the early stirrings of restlessness that presaged thewomen’s liberation movement by decades.
Mackrell, an English dance critic, has chosen her subjectswell, from the eldest, English aristocrat Lady Diana Cooper, born in 1892, to the youngest, American- born dancer Josephine Baker, born in 1906. Steamship heiressNancy Cunard, PolishRussian artist Tamara de Lempicka, actress Tallulah Bankhead and writer and muse Zelda Fitzgerald round out the group.
All of thesewomen combined some form of art with their striking good looks and taboo- busting behavior to gain fame and a measure of independence. † They broke sartorial, sexual and social boundaries in their determination to live on their own terms.
They paid for the astonishing trajectory of their lives with dangerous abortions, unsettled domestic lives, and physical and mental breakdowns.
Two ofMackrell’s subjects— Lady Diana Cooper andNancy Cunard— were highborn Englishwomen who chafed against controlling mothers, limited options for personal fulfillment and the expectation of socially prominent marriages. Diana’s rebelliousness will ring familiar to viewers of “Downton Abbey,” including her enlistment despite her parents’ objections as a nurse in the Volunteer Aid Department duringWorldWar I.
She further disappointed her mother by marrying untitled, philandering Duff Cooper, whose political career she helped fund with the proceeds from her starring role as theMadonna inMax Reinhardt’s theatrical pageant “The Miracle.”
Nancy Cunard made Diana ( Mackrell calls them by their first names) seem tame by comparison. Versions of her emotionally restless persona cropped up in countless works of art, including three 1920s novels by AldousHuxley after their brief affair.
Cunard poured herself into her poetry, anti- fascist activism and a revolving cast of lovers, including Ezra Pound, Louis Aragon, Michael Arlen and jazz pianistHenry Crowder. Mackrell certainly captures her “apparently determined disregard for her reputation,” yet of all of her subjects, Cunard’s bad- girl allure is more elusive in retrospect, providing little to admire or emulate.
Mackrell’s portrait of the difficult, socially ambitious, bisexual, bipolar artist Tamara de Lempicka is also no hagiography, althoughwe come to understand the forces that drove her. A refugee from the Russian Revolution, Tamara took up portraiture after arriving in Paris because her Polish lawyer husband “remained paralysed by his former sense of entitlement.”
Her hard- driving “battle to hold her professional ground” ultimately destroyed her marriage, and changing tastes led to a long fall from artistic favor. But her cubistinflected art deco paintings became newly fashionable in the 1970s.
Of the three AmericanwomenMackrell profiles, Josephine Baker’s rags- to- riches arc is the most inspiring. Performing onstage ( and in male and female patrons’ beds) was her ticket out of the St. Louis black ghetto— however demeaning and racist her sexual African goddess dances and banana skirts may strike contemporary readers.
Without dodging Baker’s difficult narcissism, Mackrell highlights her “rawinstinct and professional polish,” willingness to continually reinvent herself and her eventual, laudable embrace of her racial identity “as both an essential part of her identity, and a cause.”
“Flappers” reminds us of the enormous, lasting cultural impact of gutsy, vibrant women who managed to shine in unexpectedways. Mackrell not only captures “the restlessness of a generation”— she does so in a fast- paced, no- holds- barred form particularlywell suited to the topic.