A couple months ago I watched Ken Burns’ 2011 documentary series, Prohibition. As he does with all his subjects, Burns crafted an engaging and enlightening retrospective – not only an examination of Prohibition itself, but also the political and social climate of the 1920s in general. The cast of characters included preachers and politicians, opportunists and entrepreneurs, reformers and gangsters, and so much more.
One in particular who stuck with me was Lois Long, a fashion writer who joined the staff of The New Yorker in the magazine’s earliest days to write about the nightlife in the Big Apple.
Long was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in December of 1901. She studied English at Vassar College, where she was the yearbook editor and an occasional contributor to the local Poughkeepsie Courrier. Immediately after college, she moved to New York in 1922 and landed jobs at Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Harold Ross, co-founder and editor of the fledgling New Yorker, recognized her talent and hired her in 1925 to write reviews of speakeasies. Writing under the pseudonym of “Lipstick,” Long spent the next five years chronicling New York’s after-hours scene at a time when many establishments – an estimated 5,000 in Manhattan alone – were operating in direct violation of the Volstead Act, passed in 1919 to prohibit the creation or consumption of alcohol.
Her column, “Tables for Two,” pulled back the curtain on the speakeasies themselves, but also leveled criticism at Manhattan District Attorney Emory Buckner and other city officials who conducted raids to shut them down. She put it all on the page – the nightlife, the gossip, the inside story of the Jazz Age in the city that never slept (and still doesn’t a century later).
Raven-haired and willowy, Long had little trouble immersing herself in the late-night scene at a time when women were smoking, drinking, voting, getting busy between the sheets and actually enjoying it (gasp!), and generally rejecting the norms and expectations of Victorian and Edwardian society. She was the observer and reporter, but also part of the story at the same time. Her column included first-hand accounts of the perilous moments that often brought the parties to an abrupt conclusion. One early column describes a police raid thus:
“It wasn’t one of those refined, modern things, where gentlemen in evening dress arise suavely from ringside tables and depart, arm in arm, with head waiters no less correctly clad, towards the waiting patrol wagons. It was one of those movie affairs, where burly cops kick down the doors, and women fall fainting on the tables, and strong men crawl under them, and waiters shriek and start throwing bottles out of the windows.”
(She adds in that same column that she escaped it all by the skin of her teeth when “a particularly big Irish cop regarded me with a sad eye and remarked, ‘Kid, you’re too good for this dump,’ and politely opened a window leading to the fire escape. I made a graceful exit.”)
And sometimes she brought a slice of the chaos back to the office with her before the sun came up, according to Joshua Zeitz, author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.
“She would come into the office at four in the morning,” says Zeitz, “usually inebriated, still in an evening dress, and having forgotten the key to her cubicle, she would normally prop herself up on a chair and try to – you know, in stocking feet – jump over the cubicle, usually in a dress that was too immodest for Harold Ross’ liking. She was in every sense of the word, both in public and private, the embodiment of the 1920s flapper.”
By the end of the decade, Long had married New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. They had a daughter in 1929 before divorcing two years later. “Tables for Two” became more sporadic and finally ended in the issue of June 7, 1930, as the writer focused more of her attention on motherhood and a fashion column called “On and Off the Avenue.” The stock market crash of 1929 had put an end to the decade-long party, and Prohibition was repealed in 1933. The hedonistic era, fueled in large part by the thrill of illicit drinking, was over.
Long remarried twice – first in 1938 to Donaldson Thorburn, a newspaper and advertising man who later served in World War II, and again in 1953 to investment broker Harold Fox. Through it all, she continued to write about fashion for The New Yorker until her retirement in 1970. She died of lung cancer in 1974.
In her later years, Long admitted that she and her colleagues and contemporaries may have lived recklessly in their youth, but they didn’t spend much time worrying about it in the moment – and they had few if any regrets after the fact.
“There was never any of this nonsense about nervous breakdowns,” she said. “We smiled as we danced.”