Since time immemorial human beings have clung to the idea that unknown lands must surely contain vast mineral treasures.
July 26, 1930 cover by Helen Hokinson.
Such was the case when Admiral Richard Byrd returned from his Antarctic expedition, during which he conducted a number of geological studies. Ever ready to tweak a senator’s nose, the New Yorker’sJames Thurber imagined an exchange between Byrd and a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was more interested in exploitable commodities than in scientific discoveries:
HMMM, NO OIL HERE…Richard Byrd’s expedition building their “Little America” encampment at the South Pole in 1928. (osu.edu)
One passage of particular interest in this imaged exchange dealt with the speed of climate change in relation to potential mineral extraction…
BIRDS MEET BYRD…Admiral Richard Byrd onboard the USS Bear during his second expedition to the South Pole. (Wikipedia)
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Before CNN
Newsreels came into their own with the advent of sound, offering moviegoers a selection of news stories from the around the world. In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White observed that newsreels depicted foreigners as people who just liked to hang out (note the racial slur directed at Latin Americans). White’s characterization of Germans as an indolent lot is also noteworthy, given the country was just two and half years away from Nazi takeover.
TANZEN UND TRINKEN…Kroll’s Biergarten in Berlin in September 1928; English visitors raise a glass at a beer hall in Hesse, 1929. (YouTube)
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Speaking of Slurs
Here is what passed for a humorous anecdote in the July 26, 1930 “Talk of the Town”…
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Star Power
William Powell and Kay Francis were frequent co-stars, and would team up for the 1930 courtroom drama For the Defense. Powell and Francis would be two of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1930s.
LET’S MAKE A PICTURE…Frequent co-stars William Powell and Kay Francis in a publicity photo for 1930’s For the Defense. Francis was a longtime friend of the New Yorker’sLois Long. (IMDB)
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From Our Advertisers
What Depression? As bread lines lengthened so did the “super-chassis” of this monster Cadillac…
…in contrast, this ad in the Aug. 2 issue questioned the necessity of a 4,000-pound car (or in the case of the 16-cylinder Cadillac, 6,500 pounds), and touted this “common sense” British import…imagine the America of today if this idea would have taken hold in the 1930s…
…we return to the June 26 issue to find an ad that would likely not appear in today’s New Yorker…
…another unlikely ad is this spot from the makers of Farina cologne featuring a skinflint applying the stuff to his armpit…yeah, I’ll take a bottle…
…and Rea Irvin continued his series of illustrations for Murad cigarettes…
…in cartoons, Irvin gave us this interpretation of country life in a full-page panel originally featured sideways…these “Country Life in America,” scenes depicted common folks enjoying the outdoors at the expense of country squires…
…and then we have the bohemian artist and set designer Cleon Throckmorton (1897-1965), with his one and only contribution to the New Yorker…
…in a previous issue (May 31, 1930) Throckmorton had placed this tiny, curious ad in a corner on page 46…
…and in the June 7, 1930 issue, he placed another ad in the bottom corner of page 94…
Cleon Throckmorton, well-known for his bohemian lifestyle, operated a backyard speakeasy called the Krazy Kat Club in Washington DC. He is pictured here (center) with a couple of “Klub” members in 1921. He was no slouch, however, designing 149 New York theatrical productions between 1920 and 1934. (messynessychic.com)
…back to our cartoons, we have Otto Soglow, who was going through a wavy period in his illustrations…
…Soglow would soon become famous for his Little King strip, but for now we’ll leave the king jokes to Peter Arno…
…Gardner Rea contributed this series cartoon that slid around page 20…
…Leonard Dove looked in on a domestic scene…
…and John Reehill contributed this weird little cartoon that reminded me a bit of the humor of Gahan Wilson…
In his 2006 book, Flapper, Joshua Zeitz refers to the New Yorker’sLois Long as the epitome of the 1920s flapper, an “absolutely a wild woman” who wrote about Jazz Age nightlife “with a wicked sort of sexual sense of humor.”
Feb. 8, 1930 cover by Theodore Haupt (the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show was in town…)
This Vassar-educated daughter of a Congregational minister began her New Yorker career in the summer of 1925, at age 23. She took over Charles Baskerville’s rather dry column, “When Nights are Bold,” renamed it “Tables for Two,” and using the pen name “Lipstick” plunged into the nightlife scene with considerable brio.
TIMES CHANGE…At left, in a still image from a 1920s home movie, Lois Long relaxes on a beach; at right, Long with newborn daughter Patricia Arno in 1929. (PBS/Patricia Arno)
Two years later she would marry cartoonist Peter Arno, and in 1929 would give birth to a daughter, Patricia. During this time the almost weekly “Tables” column would appear infrequently as Long turned her attentions to her family and her fashion column, “On and Off the Avenue.” But as I’ve noted before, Long, along with many of her New Yorker colleagues, had grown weary of the Roaring Twenties many months before they were over. She would put an end to the “Tables” column in June 1930; the good times, as Long noted in her Feb. 8 column, had lost their “verve”…
BRITS AND TWITS…Lois Long recalled the nightlife entertainments of the past and present in one of her last “Tables for Two” columns. Photo at left (from left to right), Beatrice Lillie, Nelson Keys, and Gertrude Lawrence in Andre Charlot’s Revue of 1924. At right, the comedy trio Eddie Jackson, Jimmy Durante and Lou Clayton. (Museum of the City of New York/Herbert Mitchell Collection)
…Long found Don Dickerman’s latest themed restaurant, the Daffydil, to be a mildly amusing distraction…
HE WAS AN ARRRTIST…Greenwich Village personality and pirate aficionado Don Dickerman (left) failed to make a living as an artist, but found success with his various themed restaurants including the Pirate’s Cove, the Blue Horse, the Heigh-Ho (where Rudy Vallee started out), the County Fair and the Daffydil (which was financed by Vallee). At right, singing at the Daffydil were the California Collegians, a group that included actor Fred MacMurray (tallest in the photo). (Restaurant-ing through history)
…and she also looked to Harlem for some nighttime diversions, but the ex-flapper just wasn’t up for a rowdy scene…
FOR THE YOUNG AT HEART…Dancing the Lindy Hop at the Savoy in Harlem, circa 1930. (Pinterest)
…ten years later, in the New Yorker’s fifteenth anniversary issue (Feb. 17, 1940), the 38-year-old Long would look back to the Roaring Twenties in the column “That Was New York,” reprising her signature “Lipstick” as she recalled the days when “Harlem was a thrill” and “we smiled when we went dancing in 1925 even though there wasn’t a candid camera within miles. In those days people frequently laughed out loud in public.” She concluded the piece with this observation:
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Rise of the Débutantes
New York’s débutantes and the New Yorker had something of a symbiotic relationship during the magazine’s early days, beginning with a piece written by 22-year-old Ellin Mackay for the Nov. 28, 1925 issue that served as a manifesto of sorts for a new kind of débutante. Mackay’s essay explained why modern women were abandoning the forced social matchmaking of débutante balls in favor of the more egalitarian (and fun) night club scene.
Mackay’s piece provided a huge boost to the New Yorker’s circulation, the magazine barely staying afloat at the time. Nevertheless, its writers couldn’t resist taking occasional shots at the seemingly frivolous existence of debs, including E.B. White, who called out a one Katrinka Suydam in his “Notes and Comment” column for Jan. 4, 1930:
Perhaps White came across Suydam’s name in the Sept. 7, 1929 New York Times:
What he probably didn’t expect was a reply from Suydam herself, an act that seemed to impress the magazine’s editors, who printed the proud débutante’s letter in full on page 32:
Suydam would go on to marry Frederick Roelker later that June. Note in this excerpted wedding write-up how the couples’ European and colonial pedigrees were carefully detailed in the first paragraphs, distinguishing their union from couplings enjoyed by the unwashed masses…
Katrinka Suydam’s wedding as reported in the June 12, 1930 issue of the New York Times.
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Skirt Stakes
In 1930 hemlines plummeted along with the stock market. E.B. White, in “Notes,” welcomed the return of “mystery” to women’s fashions:
THEY DROPPED WITH THE MARKET…Women’s spring fashions with lowered hemlines on display in the April 1930 issue of Good Housekeeping. (fashion-era.com)
Frederick Lewis Allen, on the other hand, was having difficulty understanding the modern woman, circa 1930, based on what he was seeing in the display windows along Fifth Avenue. Excerpts:
NO NONSENSE WOMEN…Window displays on Fifth Avenue included (left) this “Travel Smartly in Tweed” window display for Franklin Simon (1929-30); and right, a window at Lord & Taylor, 1933. (Harry Ransom Center/Museum of the City of New York)
Allen noted that the “snooty” mannequins on display along Fifth Avenue represented a certain type who wouldn’t be caught dead riding a bus…
Whether or not he liked the Altman girls, the 39-year-old Allen felt like an “old fogey” in the presence of these “no nonsense” women:
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Get A Room
Marion Sturges Jones pondered the life of another kind of modern woman, namely that of Virginia Woolf, who had recently published the extended essay A Room of One’s Own. Jones discovered that finding such a room was easier said than done…
IN HER ROOM…Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House in East Sussex, 1932; dust jacket of the first edition of A Room of One’s Own. (kaykeys.net/Beinecke Library, Yale)
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The Way You Really Look
Franklin P. Adams penned a profile of the legendary songwriter and stage producer Jerome Kern, who created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films and wrote a substantial chunk of the American songbook (more than 700 songs) with such hits as “Ol’ Man River”, “A Fine Romance”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Peter Arno provided this less-than-flattering caricature of the man…
…and this is how Kern actually looked, circa 1930…
(bloggingtonybennett.com)
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At the Talkies
Speaking of showbiz, New Yorker film critic John Mosher offered high praise for William Powell’s latest film, Street of Chance. Although Powell is often linked professionally to actress Myrna Loy thanks to their six Thin Man films (1934 – 1947), from 1930 to 1932 he also appeared with Kay Francis in six films, including Street of Chance. Both Powell and Francis would become major stars of the 1930s, and between 1930 and 1936 Francis would be the number one female star at Warner Brothers and the highest-paid American film actress. Francis was no stranger to wild living — she was a longtime friend of Lois Long’s (see above) and also shared an apartment with her at 381 Park Avenue before Long married Peter Arno. Mosher’s review:
TOUGH ODDS…William Powell and Kay Francis in Street of Chance (1930). Francis was a longtime friend of New Yorker columnist Lois Long. (IMDB)
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From Our Advertisers
We have an advertisement from the aforementioned County Fair, one of the themed restaurants operated by Greenwich village artist and personality Don Dickerman, who illustrated his own ads…
…I’m not sure who drew this Arno-esque illustration below for the Holmes Electric Protective Company, but I can tell you that the name Holmes was synonymous with home security in 1930…in 1857 Edwin Holmes bought a patent for an electric burglar alarm (invented in 1853 by Augustus Pope) and went on to successfully commercialize and popularize the electromagnetic burglar alarm. Holmes is also credited with creating the first large-scale alarm network in the United States…
…but I do know that Abe Birnbaum contributed this drawing (in “Talk of the Town”) of the beloved Colony restaurant owner Eugene Cavallero…
A PLACE TO SEE AND BE SEEN…From the 1920s to the 1960s New York’s smart set dined at the Colony. Rian James, in Dining In New York (1930) wrote “the Colony is the restaurant of the cosmopolite and the connoisseur; the rendezvous of the social register; the retreat of the Four Hundred.” Critic George Jean Nathan said the Colony was one of “civilization’s last strongholds in the department of cuisine.” Photo at left of the dining room around 1940; at right, owner Eugene Cavallero consults with a chef. (lostpastremembered.blogspot.com)
…on to our comics, we have this full-pager from Al Frueh…
…another full-pager from Rea Irvin…
…this terrific party scene courtesy Garrett Price…
The New Yorker’s founder and editor, Harold Ross, did not approve of office romances. He had a magazine to run after all, and didn’t want any distractions from Cupid’s arrow.
August 13, 1927 cover by Julian de Miskey.
But then again, it seemed inevitable that Lois Long and Peter Arno–two of the magazine’s most lively personalities and important early contributors–would end up together. Arno cut a dashing figure as one the New Yorker’s most celebrated cartoonists. He often drew upon the same subject matter as Long, who covered the nightclub and speakeasy scene in her column, “Tables for Two” and in the process defined the lifestyle of the liberated flapper. Long is also credited with inventing the field of fashion writing and criticism with her other New Yorker column, “On and Off the Avenue.”
OFFICE SWEETHEARTS… Arno and Long personified the witty, cosmopolitan image cultivated by the New Yorker. (Wall Street Journal, Wikipedia)
In Vanity Fair, Ben Schwartz (“The Double Life of Peter Arno,” April 5, 2016) wrote that Arno and Long “personified what people thought The New Yorker was, which was very fortunate…(Long was) tall, lanky, a Vassar grad with bobbed hair and a wicked sense of humor, a minister’s daughter to Arno’s judge’s son, and she matched him as a hell-raiser.” It was actually their raucous affair that set Ross on a “permanent scowl” regarding office romances.
Schwartz quotes Arno’s and Long’s daughter, Patricia (Pat) Arno, about her parents’ wild relationship: “There were lots of calls to (gossip columnist Walter) Winchell or some other columnist about nightclub fights…with my mother calling and saying, ‘Oh, please don’t print that about us,’ trying to keep their names out of the papers.”
Schwartz suggests that Arno drew on personal experience when in 1930 he published Peter Arno’s Hullabaloo, a “collection of cartoons that included a set of racy drawings featuring a dashing couple much like himself and Long. In one, a nude woman, in bed, yells at her sleeping lover: ‘Wake up, you mutt! We’re getting married to-day.'”
Long and Arno were married by her father, the Rev. Dr. William J. Long, at her parents’ home in Stamford, Conn., on August 13, 1927. Their daughter, Patricia, was born September 18, 1929.
According to Schwartz, Arno’s first three books sold well (Whoops Dearie! 1927, Parade 1929, and Hullabaloo 1930) “allowing the young family to move into an East Side penthouse. Their social circle included New Yorker staffers, the magazine’s owner, Raoul Fleischmann, publishers Condé Nast and Henry Luce, Kay Francis (Broadway actress, future Hollywood star and Long’s former roommate), and some of the city’s financial powers. ‘Once my mother was having trouble with her Plymouth,’ says Pat Arno, “and Walter Chrysler took off his evening coat, rolled up his sleeves, and fixed it himself.'”
STAR POWER…Actress Kay Francis, no stranger to wild living, was Lois Long’s longtime friend and also her roommate until Long married Peter Arno in 1927. (flickchick1953)HAPPY INTERLUDE…Arno and Long with their baby daughter, Patricia, in 1929. (Vanity Fair)
Less than two years after the birth of their daughter, Arno and Long would get a divorce in Reno on June 30, 1931. Arno later married debutante Mary Livingston Lansing in August 1935; they divorced in July 1939. After his divorce from Lansing, Arno moved to a farm near Harrison, New York, where he lived in seclusion, drawing for the New Yorker and enjoying music, guns, and sports cars. He died of emphysema on February 22, 1968 at the age of 64.
Arno with second wife, debutante Mary Livingston “Timmie” Lansing, Winsted, Connecticut, 1939. (Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark)
In 1938 Long would marry Donaldson Thorburn, a newspaper and advertising man. After his death in 1952 she would marry Harold Fox, head of an investment brokerage firm. Long’s colleague at the New Yorker, Brendan Gill, described Fox as “a proper Pennsylvanian named Harold A. Fox.” They lived in an 1807 Pennsylvania-Dutch farmhouse, where Long delighted in the woods, farms and wildlife as well as in her two grandchildren—Andrea Long Bush and Katharine Kittredge Bush. In 1960 she wrote to her alma mater, Vassar College, that the “hectic fifteen years or so after graduation, when I thought I had New York City by the tail and was swinging it around my head, seem very far away. Thank God. I like things this way.” Long would continue working as a columnist for the New Yorker until the death of Harold Fox, in 1968. She died in 1974 at age 72.
BEFORE IT ALL BEGAN…Left, Lois Long’s photo in Vassar’s yearbook, The Vassarion. At right, during her senior spring, Lois posed for a photo by Sunset Lake. Long studied English and French, graduating in1922 with an English major. (vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu)
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The big news in the Aug. 13, 1927 edition (the same date as the Long-Arno wedding) was President Calvin Coolidge’s brief, ambiguous announcement that he would not run for president. Almost everyone assumed he would run for a second term, given the booming economy in the age of “Coolidge Prosperity.”
Coolidge was summering in Black Hills when he gave his secretary, Everett Sanders, a piece of paper that read, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” Sanders then scheduled a midday press conference for August 2, 1927. At 11:30 a.m., Coolidge cut out strips of paper with this statement–I do not choose to run—and at the conference handed each reporter one of the strips. Coolidge offered no further information, and only remarked, “There will be nothing more from this office today.” This led to considerable debate among the press as to intentions of the president. The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” mused…
…Howard Brubaker’s “Of All Things” column offered this wry observation…
…while humorist Robert Benchley (writing under the pseudonym “Guy Fawkes”) in his “The Press in Review” column continued the New Yorker’s stinging attack on the media for its continued attempts to sensationalize events or impart personality traits on colorless newsmakers:
HAPPY TRAILS, CAL…No doubt the simple life of the Black Hills influenced Calvin Coolidge’s decision in 1927 to decline a second term as president. (Library of Congress)
A New Yorker State of Mind 