Flappers by Judith Mackrell

Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s difficult to tell one biography let alone six but somehow Judith Mackrell manages to do so, to bring the stories of six different women together and make it into something fabulous. I loved this book. Can I spoil you with that fact already? I loved it. I loved reading about women who I knew and who I did not and seeing them portrayed within a story of female history, of a period that is somewhat (for me) lost between that which came before it and that which came after. I know of flappers, but I did not know of some of their exploits, of how they decided to be stars and did precisely that, of how they partied hard and then harder still, and of how some of them were chased by men who slept in coffins and kept keepsakes from each of their lovers. I mean, there are parts of this book that left me shrieking and fascinated and obsessed over the obscenity of wealth in action.

The women featured here are Diana Cooper, Tamara de Lempicka, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker and Zelda Fitzgerald. I felt that Diana Cooper’s story became a little lost as the book continued but then, I wonder if the sun itself would have become lost against characters like this. I particularly enjoyed the sections on Tamara de Lempicka and Tallulah Bankhead and how the latter had something of a group of cult-like fans who followed her from theatre to theatre and would cut their hair in the show at the same time she cut hers. It’s an eye-opening book full of moments where you kind of have to just marvel at the excess and the energy and the intensity of it all. These were big, big lives and Mackrell does well in capturing them.

So why the fourth star? It is mainly for the ending which was always going to struggle in such circumstances. How on earth does one bring everything together after Zelda? Tamara? Of Tallulah accidentally on purpose having a drink in the hotel frequented by all of the movie stars? It intimidates me now, even thinking of it. But endings have to happen, even The Neverending Story ended (which bothered my pernickety childish self immensely). and Mackrell’s lively, fierce book is no exception. And for the main, the ending does work: Mackrell winds up everything neatly. But the transitions were a little bit sticky, the movement from one life to the next and feeling just a little pat in their delivery. The links are a little too bluntly made, and often more out of necessity (we need to move on…) then it seems from style.

This is small stuff and it’s important to emphasise that the rest of the book is a riot. Often literally so. Dinner is plated on somebody’s naked skin; somebody else keeps a cheetah in their living room, and it’s all raucously wild and fiercely individual and so very, very present. This is a brave book to write and boldly done and the stories in here are just everything and fiercely human, underneath all of that drama. It is all very good indeed.

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