ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember
THE DU MAURIER sisters grew up with the century. They were in their teens and early twenties during the 1920s when much of the nation entered a delayed adolescence. It was an era that became known as the Jazz Age, when this new music provided the soundtrack, its syncopated beat the tempo that sped the young from party to party on a febrile flight to nowhere in particular. Dancing became all the rage; dancefloors were rapidly laid in smart restaurants – the du Maurier family’s favourite, the Savoy, being the first to lead the way. The waltz and the foxtrot were replaced by the highly energetic Charleston and Black Bottom, an import from African-American culture and based on an earlier pimp’s dance, all of which brought to its English adherents a sense of their own exotic naughtiness.
All this was a stark reaction to the general mood of the country. Having emerged from the Great War, Britain was stunned by grief, exhausted, broken-hearted and spiritually crushed by the scale and brutality of the slaughter of its young. More than three quarters of a million men, many straight from working the fields or not long out of school, had died. The sense of loss seemed almost insurmountable. Even the inspired idea of honouring all these dead by interring, with the greatest ceremony, the body of an unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in November 1920, could not staunch the mourning for what became known as the Lost Generation. The ramifications were far-reaching: emotional, economic, political and personal. In the 1921 census it was revealed that there were nearly two million more women than men. Few families escaped unscathed.
Society was changed for ever, most notably perhaps the place of women, now that married women over thirty (and those on the Local Government Register) had gained the vote at the end of the war and Nancy Astor took her seat in Parliament in 1919 as the first woman MP. As the nation slowly began to rebuild, the wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George famously declared in a postwar electioneering speech that he wanted a land fit for heroes: some kind of hope for a new future began to bubble through the daily drabness. A group of well-off, aristocratic or otherwise well-connected young people reacted against the general mood of deprivation and worthy social responsibility and decided to throw a non-stop party.
It was largely a privileged and metropolitan phenomenon. Young men and women came together for extravagant fancy dress balls, ‘stunt parties’, elaborate practical jokes and outrageous treasure hunts with flashy cars driven at breakneck speed through the midnight streets of London, their exquisite occupants seeking nonsensical clues and odd objects of desire. Everything was screamingly funny or pointlessly naughty. The heroes of the hour were not Lloyd George’s magnificent young servicemen, who had given their lives for their country’s freedoms, but epicene youths, posing as maharajas or fairies, drawling their witticisms to a beautifully dressed crowd of braying young. Closely shingled girls in diaphanous, jewelled dresses joined in the fun, pursuing policemen’s helmets or some other trophy, before speeding away to breakfast on quails’ eggs and caviar, champagne and cake.
This was a highly visible group that intersected with the du Mauriers’ theatrical milieu, with Angela on the verge of being carefully launched on a world that seemed half-crazy. One of the revellers, and barely a year older than Angela, was Evelyn Waugh. He famously satirised this period of relentless futility and emotional dead-ends in his novel Vile Bodies:
Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …1
The popular press was also hungry for distraction and avidly followed the antics of this gilded youth, reporting in middle-class papers such as the Daily Mail and Evening Standard activities that made Bertie Wooster and the Drones look positively intellectual and patrician. Journalists coined a term for this group of gorgeous wastrels: they were the Bright Young Things, and by breathlessly recording every move in their newspapers, from the scandalous to the banal, they initiated modern celebrity culture. The Bright Young Things were delighted with this newfound fame based on nothing more than being fabulous. They courted the publicity, dashing for the papers each morning and counting how many photographs or news flashes they could find in the accommodating press.
Among this group exaggeratedly camp behaviour became the norm, and male homosexuality, at the time illegal and socially suicidal, was accepted, its mores copied and celebrated. Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Stephen Tennant, Brian Howard and Beverley Nichols were amongst the more flamboyant and it was only their influential connections that protected them from the dangers of prosecution and ostracism by mainstream society. Lesbians too were suddenly fashionable and famous comedy revue acts like Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney were extremely popular and welcomed into the boisterous parties thrown by these giddy young. Norah played the piano and sang in a sweet girlish voice while Gwen, with circular horn-rimmed glasses and a cello between her knees, played the fool with her comedy basso profundo voice. The bisexual American actress/phenomenon Tallulah Bankhead and Radclyffe Hall, known as John, were part of these artistic social sets. Severely cropped hair, masculine attire, male nicknames and a swaggering culture of smoking, drinking and drug-taking became daringly chic.
The blurring of gender and flaunting of an exaggeratedly theatrical style caused great unease as social norms appeared to break down. A popular song of the 1920s sung by, amongst others, Gwen Farrar, was called Masculine Women, Feminine Men:
Hey, Hey women are going mad today
Hey, Hey fellers are just as bad I’ll say,
Masculine Women, Feminine Men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen,
It’s hard to tell ’em apart today? And SAY
Auntie is smoking, rolling her own
Uncle is always buying cologne …
You go and give your girl a kiss in the hall
But instead you find you’re kissing her brother, Paul
And so it continued, with the suggestive frisson of what was still considered by the law, and society at large, to be aberrant behaviour.
The richer or more famous you were the easier it was to express such freedoms. Amongst this social group, largely centred on London, the 1920s became notorious for its subversive energy and flair, for freedom from the social constraints of the previous generations and for a feverish pursuit of pleasure that loosened rigid hierarchies of class and behaviour. The anarchic spirit of Peter Pan presided over the age in the irrepressible energy and rejection of responsibility, unlike the elder brothers who had marched so tragically to war. The newspapers built a picture of celebrity idlers dancing their lives away, when not otherwise engaged in various amoral pursuits.
The gossip of drug-taking and heterosexual promiscuity, however, was much exaggerated. Given that many of these young men were only just out of all-male public schools and universities with drinking clubs like the Oxford Hypocrites Club that lived by the unwritten law that ‘gentlemen may prance but not dance’, and that young women were mindful of their marriage prospects, it was not surprising that both were still sexually shy in each other’s company. Nevertheless, the gossip appalled the mothers of well-brought-up girls – and none more than the du Maurier parents who watched as their two elder daughters entered the dubious social fray.
Before Angela was let loose, but in a very controlled way, she had to ‘finish’ her education in Paris. When she was nearly eighteen she and Betty Hicks, the daughter of the actor Seymour Hicks and his actress wife Ellaline Terriss, were sent to the smartest and most famous finishing school, situated close to the Eiffel Tower