The Flapper is Here
Existing while female in Hollywood in the teens and twenties
We knew that Charlie [Chaplin] had girls, teenaged girls all the time. Hollywood was full of them as soon as movies became popular.
But none of Charlie's girls ever died.
Wally Reid at Paramount had girlfriends.
But none of Wally's girls ever died.
Maybe three trials couldn't prove that Arbuckle was guilty, but nobody in town ever thought he was all that innocent...
I know that Arbuckle was acquitted, and I know that Al Capone's only crime was tax evasion.Gloria Swanson paints a fairly depressing picture of life for young women in Hollywood at the turn of the teens.
It is true that up until 1920, an average of 50% of Hollywood releases were written by women. It is true that Universal had a veritable army of lady directors and that Lois Weber was popularly considered one of the three “great minds of cinema” along with Cecil B DeMille and DW Griffith. It is true that June Mathis and Mary Pickford and Julia Crawford Ivers were powerful studio executives.
But it’s not true that Hollywood was some feminist utopia.
As Swanson points out, Chaplin’s fondness for girls (and I literally mean girls) was well known. He married Lita Grey after getting her pregnant (the baby was born “prematurely” around seven months after the wedding). She was officially fifteen at the time, but some sources suggest she was as young as thirteen. Either way, Chaplin was twenty-eight.
Lita, my wife, was only 15 years old when I selected her as my leading lady in a picture I was making. She seemed to worship me. Her mother often came to me and said: 'Mr. Chaplin, my daughter adores you; please be nice to her.' Well, I fell in love.
- Chaplin interview in the Los Angeles Examiner, 1927Lita is often portrayed as conniving and manipulative (an old friend of Chaplin’s described how she allegedly screamed: “You’ll marry me! I’ve never gotten a kick out of you, but you’ll marry me!” and reminded him of the sentence for statutory rape on the eve of their wedding). And maybe she was a nightmare — at this remove it’s hard to have any real idea what she was like — but that wouldn’t change the fact she was a child.
(I should just change the name of this series to Women can be awful and you’re still not allowed to rape/murder/otherwise screw us over and be done with it).
I find myself in this unfortunate predicament because I am a victim of a dastardly plot, not only to besmirch my character, but also to deprive me of the fruit of my life's work.
- Chaplin interview in the Los Angeles Examiner, 1927Chaplin was nearing thirty and one of the most famous, wealthy men in the world. The idea he was the helpless victim of an evil teenager is absurd.
Not least as he apparently hadn’t learned his lesson twenty years later. At fifty-two, he got his happy ever after when he married the love of his life, Oona O’Neil. They would have six children, retire to Switzerland (after McCarthy went after him and his supposed Communist leanings), and remain married until his death in 1977.
Oona was eighteen years old when they married.
Eighteen, to his fifty-two.
That bit is always glossed over in Chaplin finally found happiness with his soulmate narratives, isn’t it?
And Gloria Swanson wasn’t the only one to have noticed. In a letter to the New York Herald-Tribune, a Mrs RT Niles points out:
Chaplin has an unfortunate habit of getting himself mixed up with young women whom he subsequently marries – probably to keep out of prison or from being deported. Is this man to be permitted to run riot for the rest of his life amid the foolish little girls of this country?DW Griffith, whose ‘masterpiece’ was so racist it was considered racist in 1915, was famous both for his casting couch, and for verbally abusing actresses.
Kevin Brownlaw’s definitive biography of early Hollywood, The Parade’s Gone By describes how:
Thousands of girls poured into the town, pathetically anxious to work in pictures... Infrequent and overcrowded trolley cars and busses cerved certain routes; at other times girls had to beg lifts. This was always risky, sometimes downright dangerous, for few men would allow a girl to refuse his hospitality once he had her in his car.And as Frederica Sagor tells us, climbing out a second-floor window to escape an orgy with studio execs was a standard night out for a Hollywood party girl.
So then, as now, and as for the entirety of the existence of the human race, it was dangerous to be a woman.
But there’s no denying that it was an exciting time to be a woman.
(If you were white and middle class, at least)
These days, we tend to think of flapper as just a style or a look, the fringed dress, the long beads, doing the Charleston and drinking bootleg cocktails. But, as so often, what seems frivolous has a deeper meaning. According to Anything Goes - a Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore: “between 1913 and 1928 the amount of fabric used to dress a woman fell from 19 ¼ yards to just 7.” Being freed from nearly twenty yards of heavy fabric, not to mention the corset (which contributed to the myth of women’s weakness by squishing their lungs, causing them to faint with alarming regularity) shouldn’t be underestimated as a step along the way to women’s liberation.
Further, going out dancing and drinking with a mixed group of friends might seem frivolous to us, but that’s because we take it for granted: simply by having a few guy buddies she had no intention of marrying, the flapper was a social pioneer. I’d argue that if the suffragette generation forced the world to see women as individual citizens, as opposed to sub-citizens of their fathers or husbands, the flapper introduced the idea that women had interests and opinions and a social life. She misbehaved, she dreamt of adventure - all things that men had taken for granted for generations.
The flapper was seven times more likely than her mother to have not only a job but career aspirations. In 1890, 2.6 million women earned a wage in the US, by 1920 it was 10.8 million. There was a sociological case study conducted in Muncie, Indiana during the twenties known as the “Middletown Studies” - the idea of which was to capture a sort of snapshot of typical American life during the period. One mother was quoted in the study, saying, “I’ve always wanted my girls to do something other than housework. I don’t want them to be house drudges like me.” Given that her daughters would be my grandmother’s mother’s generation, this strikes me as an astonishingly modern attitude.
Very often, it is suggested that the First World War was the breakthrough for women’s lib, that we proved ourselves by keeping countries going while the men were away fighting, and were duly rewarded. However, while the war definitely played a part, the tide was already turning. Beatrice DeMille, a scenario writer, producer and mother of William and Cecil DeMille said in 1912:
This is the woman’s age. I think it has come to stay. Every relation between the sexes has changed. Hereafter, no woman is going to get married without feeling that she is getting as much as she gives. This may sound… crude… but it expresses pretty clearly what I mean…. This theme ‘women’s equality’ lives very close to my heart.Ziegfield follies star turned actress Dorothy MacKaill adds:
Give the modern girl a job and she’ll be all set and all right. Give her nothing to do but smoke cigarettes, loll about the house, play bridge, and think about sex – and no one would dare answer for the results.Which I adore. In just a few years we go from the Victorian idea of ladies fainting dead away at the mere thought of sex, to “society will crumble unless women are distracted from it.”
So it was a period of a staggering amount of change for women in almost every aspect of life.
n a single generation, both washing machines and condoms became commercially available, meaning that even married women were no longer sentenced to 24/7 housework and a lifetime of pregnancy. This in turn meant that, for the first time, women were able to have interests, and that made them consumers. All of a sudden, there were women’s magazines, novels, radio shows - and movies.
Film critic Iris Barry wrote in 1926, “Now one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women.”
… Who wants to break it to her?