Here’s a selection of famous flappers for you. They are not detailed biographies, not any means. Nevertheless you could usefully use them to show three things:
Their achievements as women
The ways in which they challenged the accepted order of things
Why they might be seen as “dangerous”
Josephine Baker’s story is quite remarkable. She was recruited to her first vaudeville show at just fifteen years’ old, having been seen dancing on a street-corner, and worked in New York in the Harlem Renaissance at the famous Platation Club as well as later in hugely successful Broadway Reviews such as The Chocolate Dandies, as a dancer, singer and comedienne. She then moved to Paris in 1925 where she became an international star (and received more than one thousand marriage proposals (a few more than me). She performed at the Folies Bergère music hall in ‘La Folie du Jour’ in which she danced wearing little more than a skirt made of 16 bananas. She was exotic and sexy, known as the “Black Pearl” or the “Bronze Venus”, and she was very talented. She was also a political activist, active in the Civil Rights movement in America and in the French Resistance during WW2 for which she earned the Croix de Guerre. She became a French citizen in 1937.
Theda Bara was a silent movie star, one of Hollywood’s first and most notorious vamps (temptresses), playing Salome, Clepatra and Madame DuBarry. She typified women’s freedom, sexual freedom and the whole flapper image.
Clara Bow gets a brief mention in my e-book on American Society in the 1920s because she was “the It girl” (“It” meaning sex). She can be seen, then, as the movie’s first sex symbol. In January, 1929 she received some 45,000 fan letters. No wonder her name was said to have guaranteed investors in a movie a “safe return”. She lived life in the fast lane, personifying the life of the flapper. Crossing over from silent movies into “talkies”, she made 55 films between 1922 and 1933 with almost as many scandals. But then she retired from the movies aged 30, leaving behind a tangle of scandals surrounding affairs and money as well as an addiction to alcohol. But she married, and lived a quiet life until her death in 1965.
Louise Brooks was a silent movie legend and an independent spirit. She starred on Broadway and then went on to the Ziegfeld Follies before making it as a movie star in Hollywood where she starred in 17 silent movies and in eight “talkies”. Hollywood blacklisted her for her defiance and in a final act of independence she decided to end her own acting career in 1938.
Coco Chanel had a brief career on stage in the early 20th century but will always be known as the French fashion designer who also created her own line in perfumes, founding her own Chanel brand. She was credited with liberating women from the constraints of the “corseted silhouette” during the Jazz Age for by 1920, she had introduced her “chemise” or her “little black dress”, the simple, short, and loose dress that allowed flappers the freedom of movement to dance the night away.
Joan Crawford was one of the most famous movie stars and flappers of the Roaring Twentie’s. To gain publicity early in her career, she would enter and win dance competitions with her performances of the famous dances loved by flappers – Charleston and the Black Bottom. She made a successful transition to “talkies” in the late 1920s and her career survived right into the 1960’s.
Zelda Fitzgerald, an author herself, was the flamboyant wife of the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the Great Gatsby. They were the golden couple of the Jazz Age. Zelda Fitzgerald was the embodiment of all things modern, unconventional and new. Her husband called her “the first American Flapper.” Zelda Fitzgerald lived a life of wild abandon and she and her husband were famous party animals, and their drunken antics were forever hitting the headlines in the 1920s. From 1930 onwards, Zelda was in and out of mental hospitals until she died.
Gilda Gray was originally a singer in bars but went to New York to perform in vaudeville and joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1922. By then Gray was already known as “the Shimmy Queen”, a dance she made popular nationwide in the 1920s. She also made several Hollywood movies between 1919 and 1936.
Anita Loos was an author, screenwriter, and playwright, best known for writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was first serialised in a magazine, then it was published in 1925 as a book, and in 1928 a film was made (and a Broadway musical in 1949 before a film musical starring Marilyn Monroe in 1953). The story was inspired by Loos’ observations of Jazz Age love and temptation, and featured a flapper as the main character.
Colleen Moore made the ‘Dutch-boy’ bobbed haircut famous which was copied by many flappers. She was probably the earliest film actress to be typecast as a flapper. She made thirty movies between 1917 and 1924. Moore was a valuable silent film actress with comedic moves and expression. For a time she was the top box-office draw in America, drawing a salary of $12,500 a week. Unlike many other movie stars of the era she wisely invested her money (she became a partner in the investment firm Merrill Lynch) and retired to a life of comfort in the early 1930’s.
Helen Morgan was a famous nightclub singer in the speakeasies of Chicago during the 1920s. She also had success on Broadway as well as in films in the 1930s, but alcoholism took its toll and she died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1941 at the age of 41.
Dorothy Parker wrote poetry, short stories, and essays (she wrote for The New Yorker , and was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and celebrities who met for lunch and drinks and whose lifestyles influenced the smart set throughout the 1920s. She then went to Hollywood as a screenwriter. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were brought to an end when her involvement in left-wing politics led to her being blacklisted.
Marie Prevost was an actress in both silent films and talkies. She appeared in 121 films between 1915 and 1936, including a half-dozen or so in which she portrayed a flapper. Her outrageous behavior, clothing and fashion attracted vast amounts of publicity but after her mother died in an auto accident in 1926, Prevost began drinking heavily and gained weight, and her career suffered. She went into a cycle of crash dieting and bingeing. In 1937, she was found in her apartment, dead from heart failure due to malnutrition and alcoholism.
Edna Purviance was best known as Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady. She appeared in 40 films over a dozen years, 33 of them with Chaplin, including the 1921 classic The Kid. She was romantically involved with him, but then married another man in 1938.
Bessie Smith, the ‘Empress of the Blues’, began singing in minstrel shows and cabarets in 1912. She toured with vaudeville jazz shows for two decades, singing the blues, and more importantly for history, recording music. She made her first record Downhearted Blues in 1923 which became an instant success. She became the highest-paid African-American entertainer of the era. She was a great friend of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (the “Mother of the Blues”) recorded “St. Louis Blues” with Louis Armstrong. She died tragically in a car accident in 1937.
Norma Talmadge was a confident, independent ‘New Woman’ who achieved fame as both a movie star and film producer. She acted in 160 films and produced 25. In 1923 she was named the number one box office star, had a legion of fans and was earning $10,000 a week. Talmadge was also a smart businesswoman. She and her much older husband, Joseph Schenck, formed the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation in 1917, giving them control over her work. It was Norma Talmadge who started a famous Hollywood tradition in 1927 when she accidentally stepped into wet concrete in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.