Flappers

Starred review from November 4, 2013
In a cool, glittery style that mirrors the roaring decade she delves into, British dance critic Mackrell (Bloomsbury Ballerina) breathes new life into the stories of a few of the most culturally important women of the 1920s. Coming from disparate circumstances, these women nonetheless all seized the astonishing opportunities that grew, ironically, out of the slaughter of the Great War. Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners), a notorious party girl before the war, signed on, against her parents’ wishes, as a nurse with the Volunteer Aid Detachment shortly after the war broke out. She also married Duff Cooper, to her parents’ dismay, but the marriage allowed her the freedom to pursue an acting career. Steamship heiress Nancy Cunard leapt into a disastrous wartime marriage before cultivating both a literary career and a string of notable lovers. On the continent, Tamara de Lempicka fled the Russian Revolution with her husband and daughter, but their economic reversal propelled her into a profitable painting career. Across the Atlantic blossomed the three women who defined Jazz Age America: childhood friends Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald, and dancer Josephine Baker. Through these marvelous portrayals, Mackrell reminds us why these women continue to fascinate and why their lives had such impact. Illus. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

November 1, 2013
Biography of six women who declared their independence during the Jazz Age. British heiresses Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard, Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka, African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, actress Tallulah Bankhead and aspiring writer Zelda Fitzgerald were daring women who defied expectations about what a woman's life should be. Calling them "flappers," British dance critic Mackrell (Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs. John Maynard Keynes, 2009, etc.) notes how they were sexually promiscuous, reckless and given to "provocative exuberance." As Dorothy Parker put it: "All spotlights focus on her pranks. / All tongues her prowess herald. / For which she may well render thanks / to God and Scott Fitzgerald." It was Fitzgerald, after all, whose short stories publicized boyishly slim young women in short skirts and slinky gowns, drinking gin fizzes and falling giddily into love affairs. He modeled his flappers, he said, on his wife, Zelda, who once remarked, "I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay...than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness." Although Mackrell's subjects took advantage of postwar hedonism, unlike Zelda, the others showed no reluctance to work hard. Cooper became a respected actress; Cunard, a poet, publisher and political activist; Bankhead devoted herself tirelessly to her acting career; Lempicka, who had fled Russia after the revolution, reinvented herself as a painter; Baker hired tutors to shape her as a performer. Zelda was deeply unhappy: Her writing career never took off; her marriage was blighted by anger, infidelity and alcohol; and finally, she succumbed to recurring mental breakdowns. Mackrell ties her subjects together by asserting that they all struggled "with the quintessentially contemporary conundrum: how to combine career and family, self-interest, marriage and love," but readers of this gossipy collective biography are unlikely to identify with their struggle. What these women shared most strongly were the glittering allure and tragic consequences of celebrity.

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Starred review from January 1, 2014
As the 1920s dawned, the Western world anticipated a decade of change, British dance critic and biographer Mackrell observes, and that promise was especially tantalizing for women. Hence the convention-blasting flappers, intent on taking charge of every aspect of their lives, from hairstyles and hemlines to sex and careers. Mackrell portrays, with vivid facts, sexual candor, and incisive analysis, six intrepid, stylish, headline-grabbing women artists who exemplify the flapper revolution. Beautiful and pampered Lady Diana Cooper cast privilege aside and became a daring and revered actor. Intransigent, bookish Nancy Cunard, the daughter of a British lord and a coldhearted, wealthy American, found a spiritual holdfast in African American culture. Exiled from her luxurious St. Petersburg life, Tamara de Lempicka transformed herself into an art deco portrait painter of Paris' glamorous elite. Southern daredevil Tallulah Bankhead took to the stage and ignited a rabid fan base among working-class women. Celebrity flapper Zelda Fitzgerald fueled her husband, F. Scott's, fiction. Bewitching performer Josephine Baker of St. Louis galvanized Paris as an erotic and electrifying embodiment of the Jazz Age. For all their grit, fire, and adoration, however, each of these audacious women found that the flapper life was unsustainable and gender equality but a dream. Avidly researched and deeply inquisitive, Mackrell's prodigious group portrait is spectacularly dramatic and thought-provoking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)