From Tomboy to Glamour Girl

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Cosmopolitan Oct 1939

Jane Hall and Kate as pictured in “Beauties” by Bradshaw Crandell. Cosmopolitan Magazine, October 1939 (Copr. Hearst Publications)

WATCH FOR “NANCY GOES TO RIO” ON TCM . The film is a remake of ”It’s A Date” which Jane worked on in 1939. She kept her story and screen credit.

Here’s a bit of background for the posts and images in the  Salome to Hollywood Blog and Gallery. (Posts began on 11/16/2011.)  Who was Jane Hall and why is her journey of interest today?

“I was a candle on the President’s birthday cake!” On January 30, 1934, Jane Hall was exuberant as she whirled around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at a pageant in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. For nineteen-year-old Jane, this ball and other glamorous evenings like it were not just fun, they were research. Jane’s roots in Arizona and California had not prepared her for this world of eastern glitter. Just four years earlier she had been an orphan who knew what it meant to be heartbroken and hard up. But once she arrived in the nation’s cultural capital to live with her aunt and uncle, her life was transformed.

Like an undercover agent, she brought keen eyes and ears from the wide-open West into what appeared to be (but of course was not) a dream world. In his definitive history of Depression – era culture, Morris Dickstein refers to the “split personality” of the 1930s as Americans confronted disaster and sought to “create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble. . .”* Jane Hall did just that in her stories, essays and screenplays as she came to terms with the tragedies in her life.

Named a “literary prodigy” by at least two papers by the time she was fifteen, Jane’s work frequently appeared in print between 1925 and 1942. Her sharp wit and superb ear for authentic dialogue soon caught the notice of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In October 1937 Metro offered her a contract as a scenarist, and over the next five years she worked on several films. In August 1939,  “These Glamour Girls,” which had already been published as a novel in Cosmopolitan, opened in New York City. It was “the best social comedy of the year” according to the New York Times. And the film gave Lana Turner her first starring role. That same month, Jane’s feature-length article about her visit to the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” received high praise from the editor of Good Housekeeping. It seemed she was on her way.

Jane’s journey from a desert hamlet in Arizona to Manhattan’s Café Society and then to Hollywood is a story of resilience that is often exhilarating and always captivating. Her father, Dick Wick Hall, Arizona’s best-loved humorist in the mid 1920s, was the dominant influence on her until an unexpected illness cut his life short in April 1926. By then, “Little Jane” had already decided she would be a writer; her work first appeared in the Los Angeles Times when she was ten.

As she reached twenty, literary magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, and especially Cosmopolitan began buying her stories on a regular basis. In the middle of the Depression, Jane  wrote fiction with a twist of satire about the romantic predicaments of her socialite contemporaries. As editors soon learned, she was as much fun as the characters in her stories. But she had agonizing choices to make and kept a unique record of her professional and emotional journey. Drawing on her diaries, sketches, photographs, telegrams, and hundreds of letters, we will travel across America with this articulate young woman, who was also my mother, as her small-town values were tested, and she made decisions that would affect her for the rest of her life.

Return Address– A Letter from MGM

A critical turning point for Jane came between 1938 and 1940 when her life “belonged only to Louis B. Mayer.” She worked long hours, often six days a week, in the Thalberg Building at Metro – for much of the time in an office next to F Scott Fitzgerald’s – (see Gallery). But she still managed to dance with the stars at night. Her voice from Culver City is candid, refreshing and, at times, disturbing as she describes her response to Hollywood and the creative process at MGM during its Golden Age. (She also did some contract work for Universal Pictures and RKO. )

In posts (that began on November 16, 2011), you can follow this self-conscious, sturdy tomboy as she matured into a sophisticated, glamorous young woman and in October 1939* became one of Cosmopolitan’s iconic cover girls.  In this image, her complexion is flawless, her features perfect, but the expression in Jane’s green eyes is wistful.  Always unsure of her looks as a young girl, by 1939 her sense of who she should be had been redefined by Hollywood and by cover artist Bradshaw Crandell. The image is symbolic; the world of glamour was seductive but it came at a cost.  Her aunt and uncle — her guardians–had been hard-hit by the Depression and felt enormous relief when, in September 1940, Jane became engaged to Robert Frye Cutler, a handsome businessman and theatrical producer, who could provide some assurance of financial security. Unforeseen complications that followed her marriage kept Jane from being the writer she had hoped to be. But she left a priceless record of the years between 1925 and 1942, when she helped create and assess the vibrant culture of a tumultuous era.

These posts are just an introduction to Jane’s story. A forthcoming book will tell the full story – much of it in Jane’s own voice. For photos check out the  Salome to Hollywood gallery and the individual posts.

PLEASE USE THE CONTACT TAB AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE FOR ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS.

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“The Proper Progress”

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Once school started again in October 1934, Jane Hall’s Upper East Side and Lower East Side worlds competed for her attention. Now in her third-year at Cooper Union, she focused on two advanced courses. Pictorial Design with Austin Purves, Jr., still proved difficult, but Life Drawing and Painting with John Steuart Curry was much more promising. Besides, Thomas Craven, an “unsurpassed modern critic,” whose work Jane admired, held John Steuart Curry’s work in high regard. She knew she should not waste this “golden opportunity” to study with a master. By the beginning of November, despite encouragement from Mr. Curry, Jane recognized she was “not making the proper progress” in art school. How different her experience could have been if she’d had the funds to go away to college and immerse in the arts and humanities without the distractions of a hectic Manhattan social life. U.C.L.A. had been Jane’s dream when she’d been a high school sophomore in Manhattan Beach.

Jane Hall with a beau in Manhattan circa 1935. Her dates would become research material for her stories and screenplays.

Jane Hall with a beau in Manhattan circa 1935. Her dates would become research material for her stories and screenplays.

That fall and winter, Jane saw several of her old friends and met new ones. She told her diary how guilty she felt for staying out too late too often. She was “not producing anything worth a loud damn in the art line! Where is this fun going to get you? And when?” Jane asked herself. “Dear God, give me a sense of values before it is too late.”  Finances were tight; Jane knew her aunt and uncle hoped she would marry well and soon. On December 14, when she stayed out until 1:30 a.m. with her favorite admirer, Dick Clarke, after seeing “Anything Goes,” Rose Hicks was furious. Had Jane fallen for a man who was not well-established enough? Another older suitor, Paul Emiliano, seemed promising as a possible prospect for her niece until Rose learned that he was the divorced father of two young children. But Paul would remain a good friend of the family for several years.

Jane had told her high school pal and fellow debutante, Muggy Gregory, that she would never fall in love – losing anyone else after the death of both her parents would be too painful. So she kept her beaux as pals while they all had a lot of “mad fun” as participants in Manhattan’s café society. Her art school director, Austin Purves, accused Jane of choosing “the course of least resistance?” Early in 1935, Jane would make one more push to succeed at Cooper Union. Should she be a writer or an artist? And how would she find a job?

Jane’s literary agent, Elsie McKeogh, recognized that her new client’s experiences as a “party girl” and her disdain for the shallow behavior of some of her contemporaries – even as she joined them out on the town – would shape the stories and the screenplays that would one day bring her success.

 

A New Mentor

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Painting was not the only focus of Jane Hall’s creative mind in the summer of 1934. She wrote as much as she could, as long as the clacks of her typewriter keys did not disturb her aunt Rose at night. Early in July, she mailed a story to a New York literary agency run by Charlotte Barbour and Elsie McKeogh. It was a smart move. On July 12, she heard from Mrs. McKeogh that she had done quite a good job; she would see what she could do with it, if Jane would just change the title of her story. “I pray I should be able to sell it, but I’m not banking on it at all,” Jane wrote. Still, encouragement from a woman who would be instrumental in shaping her future helped Jane stop “longing for the same sort of summer” her friends were having in New York City and Long Island. Over the next week, she finished two more stories that she mailed to New York.

Thirty-six-year-old Elsie McKeogh was smart, savvy and very plugged in to the magazine world. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College (her mother, Jessica Cosgrave had been the founder and former president of Finch College), she had been on the staff of Harper’s Bazaar and McClure’s. She was married to author, editor, and World War I hero Arthur McKeogh who must have been familiar with Dick Wick Hall’s work. In the twenties he had held editorial positions at The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, McClure’s and Redbook. Since 1929, he had been managing editor of Good Housekeeping where he would remain until his early death at age 47 in 1937. When it was founded in 1930, Barbour & McKeogh was part of a new trend of women starting their own literary agencies, a development that had not escaped notice by the Saturday Review of Literature that October: “Eventually we predict all literary agencies will be entirely in the control of the women. Their sex has all the advantage in beguiling publishers and authors. And our experience has been that a woman can ‘talk turkey’ more remorselessly and more relentlessly than any mere man. It’s a terrible combination!”

Although she was not impressed by Jane Hall’s second and third stories, Elsie McKeogh would stick by her new client for as long as it took to start getting her stories and articles in print. And it was Mrs. McKeogh who introduced Jane’s stories to a top Hollywood literary agent, H. N. Swanson, in March 1937. “Swanie” also liked her work. But in July 1934 Jane could not have known that she would have to keep working hard for two more years before her first big break.

That August, Jane struggled to finish the Casanova Hunt mural despite a terrible bout of hay fever that lasted for weeks and reappeared whenever she was in Virginia in the early fall. (Allergies had not plagued her when she was growing up in Arizona and California.) “What could make one more futilely miserable?” she asked her diary. “I wonder if the savage races have it, and what they use for hankies?” During her last weeks at Poplar Springs, Jane painted, wrote, swam at Daniel’s Mill, went to carnivals, to the annual Warrenton Labor Day Horse Show, and even to visit Monticello. Of course, all summer there had been movies in Warrenton as well as Washington, D.C. She saw “The Thin Man” with her devoted “cousin,” Randy Carter, and “didn’t think much of the plot but loved the acting.” One big item of national news made it into her diary on September 22: “They found the Lindbergh kidnapper – a German named Hauptman [sic].” It was a case she’d followed with interest—Charles Lindbergh was a Redondo Union High School alumnus — the 1928 yearbook had been dedicated to him. But Jane had found it an exasperating summer because none of her stories had sold. When Cooper Union’s classes began again in October, fall held the promise of the beginning of a new year.

Greetings from Los Angeles where I have just uncovered lots of material about Jane’s Hollywood days including the correspondence between Elsie McKeogh and H. N. Swanson- all  of it at the Margaret Herrick Library. What a great place!. Stay tuned for more on this adventure.

 

“Someday You’ll Get Somewhere”

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January 17, 1934  – “19! And more dependent than ever. I’m getting hip on this biz of earning my own living but what will I do if I’m not able to?” Jane Hall asked her diary. Throughout 1934 she would juggle her dreams of becoming an artist or writer or both with a whirlwind social life during which she met several young men who interested her as pals, though they had other ideas in mind. Her standing at Cooper Union’s Art School became a bit shaky as Jane began the second semester of her second year. Her classes included Advanced Composition, Perspective, Ornamental Modeling, Life Drawing and Painting and Advanced Design. She did not do well in Design and got called into director Austin Purves’s office. The bright spot in Jane’s days on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was the work she did for John Steuart Curry in Life Drawing. Eager for any validation of her progress, she was relieved when a landscape inspired Curry to tell her “someday you’ll get somewhere.” In March, she wrote, “we have a crazy model this week – I put clothes on him and put the bars of a prison behind him and a tear in one eye.” Mr. Curry liked that oil enough to put it on exhibition at the beginning of April.

Once Jane got to Poplar Springs in June, she fell in love once again with the lush green Virginia countryside, the “ethereal” nights and the brilliant moon that somehow did not seem quite as spectacular when it appeared among the brightly lit skyscrapers in New York City. Now that her niece had become proficient with her oil paints, Rose Hicks decided, she could paint a mural to cover the expanse of bare rocks over the fireplace in the three-story high big hall. So Rose and Randolph encouraged Jane to make a studio out of the small original Hicks family farm house behind their fieldstone garage. The studio had five windows, a fine view, a table, chair, and easel plus a roll of 10′ x 9′ canvas in the corner. Jane put samples of her past efforts on the wall as a constant reminder of how much better she had to be in art. She loved to paint horses and decided her subject would be the Casanova Hunt, but it was a daunting task. She was “scared to death” of the project and waited to start until her brother came home from Charlottesville in mid-July after graduating from the University of Virginia with honors. It took Dickie Hall and two other men to put the canvas up on the wall.

Jane's preliminary watercolor sketch and grid of the mural she painted in oil in the late summer of 1934.

Jane’s preliminary watercolor sketch and grid of the mural she painted in oil in the late summer of 1934.

Jane began by making pencil and charcoal sketches and a grid of the mural. She started at the beginning of August under awkward conditions. The farmhouse wall was only nine feet high and the canvas had to be ten feet tall. At least with oils she could and did paint over and over her mistakes. Wearing a smock with lots of pockets for brushes, she talked to the farm dogs who settled in around her in the stone house to escape the summer heat. The mural would take two months. In the final version, hunters on horseback in full pink-coated regalia gather in front of the stone manor house while a dozen hounds mill around their feet. A woman in black hunting garb stands near one of the riders. Seven other hunters can be seen in the distance galloping across rolling hills toward the meet. As a whimsical touch, Jane would add a fox peeking out of a bush at the oblivious hounds.

For six decades this mural of the Casanova Hunt was the centerpiece of the big hall at Poplar Springs; many local residents thought that they recognized members of the hunt. The mural was taken down in 1995 when the great hall became the setting for the Manor House Restaurant  and part of Poplar Springs Inn. It is now being preserved at Weston, a unique nineteenth- century historic farmstead not far from Poplar Springs in Casanova.

The First Annual Butler’s Ball 1934

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January 1934 was an unforgettable month for Jane Hall for several reasons in addition to the President’s Ball. A unique opportunity arose on the 12th when she and Margaret Gregory crashed the first ever Butlers’ Ball at Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel (now the Grand Hyatt). Time magazine gave the details about this unusual event sponsored by Mrs. Marshall Field: “2,500 butlers, chauffeurs, chefs, valets, cooks, footmen, ladies maids, parlor maids, chambermaids and scullery maids abandoned the houses of their socialite employers to attend.” No liquor was served – only water, and butlers sat in the ballroom’s boxes overseeing the staff they had trained, while footmen and maids danced. Many butlers, footmen and chauffeurs were British, Time reported, “but the rest of the butlers’ underlings were Irish. German and Scandinavian [being] more raw boned and clumsy than a good butler likes.”

But by going to this Butler’s Ball uninvited, Jane and Muggy had clearly flouted protocol, though Jane found it “simply wonderful to see the servants all dressed up in everything from 1925 evening gowns to real imports that their mistresses must’ve given them. Some even wore gardenias. Such gaity [sic]! There were not enough men to go around, so little maids danced with each other.” The hat check girl put on snooty airs and gave the young debutantes a hard time as well she should have. “In a way I felt very much ashamed for going because that was something that really should have belonged to them. ” Jane told her diary. The ball committee certainly would have agreed.

The New York Sun (January 5) noted that “certain employers” were suspected of [a] desire for [a] peep at [the] butlers’ dance,” normally reserved for their staff members. This charity ball for the benefit of Bellevue Hospital Family Welfare Social Service was not the sort in which “the lady of the house dances with the butler.” (We’ve seen one of these on Downton Abbey.) The committee that organized the ball was adamant that no snooping would be allowed. Although one of their members told her friends, “’I’d love to see my butler dance.’” She’d employed him for seven years and never even seen him smile according to The Sun.

As a consolation for those who were curious or helpless without a staff, Mrs. Field arranged a dinner at The River House followed by dancing at the Place Piquale, 10 blocks north of the Commodore on West 52nd Street. According to The New Yorker, Harry Rosenthal’s orchestra was playing at this “gay after-theatre spot” that week. Ozzie Nelson’s orchestra was at the Hotel New Yorker, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians livened up the Waldorf-Astoria’s Starlight Roof. Across Manhattan people danced in the dark–some in more elegant settings than others, but all found music a consolation in the midst of economic turmoil and the dark, cold winter months.

 May music cheer your hearts on Valentine’s Day !

 

 

Happy Birthday FDR!

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“I was a candle on the president’s birthday cake!” Jane Hall exclaimed to her Diary on January 31, 1934. The night before she had participated in the first annual celebration of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday. Across America, 6000 parties of various sizes paid homage to the president and raised funds for his Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in Warm Springs, Georgia. “All kinds of people joined in the celebration – rich and poor, old and young, city men and farmer, Republican and Democrat, conservative and radical, employer and employee, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, white man and Negro, the Indian on his reservation,” according to The New York Times.

At New York’s famed Waldorf -Astoria more than 5000 people thronged into the ballrooms including Roosevelt’s mother, Mrs. James Roosevelt, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. (Franklin and Eleanor joined the festivities in Washington.) After much fanfare, the celebrations across the country united into a “vast radio party” as Roosevelt’s voice boomed from invisible speakers: “It is only in recent years that we have come to realize the true significance of the problem of our crippled children. There are so many more of them than we had any idea of.” He went on to mention the work done at the Warm Springs facility and expressed his heartfelt thanks to all who had contributed to this worthy cause or sent telegrams, postcards and letters of birthday greetings on this “the happiest birthday I have ever known.” And then the real pageant at the Waldorf began.

Jane and fifty-one other well-rehearsed debutantes, (one for each year of the president’s life), were “living symbols of a nation’s love and admiration for its president” said The Times: “Clad all alike in long gowns of shimmering white satin, with huge ruffles of white chiffon about their shoulders and with towering satin-covered hats shaped like triple tiered birthday cakes upon their heads, the girls marched to a lilting tune in a double row across the floor of the grand ballroom.” Each carried a long pink candle lit from concealed electric batteries. They then formed a circle in the shape of a cake and chanted “Happy birthday to you…..” Jane admitted to her diary that she had “never had more fun.” She would attend the ball for three more years, and be part of the actual pageant for two years. On January 30, 1935, Americans would celebrate again with the same charitable  cause in mind.

This time, Jane was not a candle bearer for Roosevelt’s enormous “triple layer birthday cake,” she was, The Times reported, part of an elaborate “Pageant of America . . .a symbolic presentation in which more than 300 New York debutantes, young society matrons and leading actresses of the stage and screen participated.” The program paid homage to the nation’s natural resources; participants appeared in lavish, colorful costumes against a background of mountains.

Press Photo of Jane Hall as a Coal Miner for FDR’s Birthday Ball 1935

Some young beauties portrayed the green Atlantic and the blue Pacific oceans, while others represented corn, rye, wheat and cotton. As the spirit of coal, a Georgian princess, Ketto Mikeladze, “wore a novel costume of black ciro embellished with enormous lumps of black cellophane.” Twenty-year-old Jane, one of two pick-carrying coal miners, appeared in a black jumpsuit with a wide gold belt and knee-high gold boots. It was quite a different look from her white satin of the previous year. By this time, she’d been launched into Society and acquired a faithful cadre of suitors who hung around even though Jane treated them all as pals. Between 1934 and 1936, she would continue to collect material for future stories and to grapple with who she was meant to be – an artist, a writer or a glamour girl. The temptations of this last option became more seductive each year.

More “Lowdown on the Upper Crust”

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In December 1933, and throughout the winter of 1934, the festivities for Jane Hall and Muggy Gregory continued. Like other debutantes they delighted in the publicity that accompanied their parties. But there was a downside to all the press – one that played into Jane’s mixed feelings about her participation in all of these high society events. She was not able to keep her Lower East Side art school world and her uptown social whirl separate. A fellow student at Cooper Union’s Day Art School brought a World-Telegram article about her debutante life to school one day. One of her best art school pals, Ruth Gikow, who would ultimately become a distinguished artist, came up to Jane and asked “for the lowdown on the upper crust.” The word was out and it travelled fast. Jane took some ribbing from her classmates – some even accused her of being a “lousy capitalist” who just pretended to be interested in art.

But finally the big day arrived for Jane’s and Muggy’s Manhattan debut. On the afternoon of December 23rd, 385 elegantly dressed men and women strolled into the three-year-old Pierre Hotel for their Tea Dance. Jane thought it quite a success and reported to her diary: “Everyone said the four of us made a lovely picture standing on the stairs, Mugs and I in white and Aunt Rose and Mrs. Gregory in black dresses with big black hats.” Jane gave few details about the actual party which no doubt — given the cost — ended promptly at six o’clock. In any case, after two hours of congenial chatter, dancing and delicacies, hosts Rose and Randolph Hicks escaped to Grand Central Station for the overnight train to Virginia. They would spend Christmas with Randolph’s family at Poplar Springs, leaving Jane to enjoy her holiday with the Gregorys and other friends her own age.

Many more parties followed between Christmas and New Year’s Eve; Jane was relieved that her aunt and uncle stayed in Virginia so she could sleep in the daytime. Inside the back cover of her “Debutante Yearbook,” she made a chart of her social life: the name of the formal party, what she wore, who she went with and where it was. Between December 9 and 31 she had only 4 nights free. All of this mingling took place within a very narrow slice of Manhattan’s east forties through the sixties at the St. Regis, the Plaza, the Ritz-Carleton, the Pierre, the Waldorf, the Park Lane and The River Club. Entertaining anecdotes accompany many of Jane’s descriptions of these galas. By the end of December even Jane’s handwriting confirmed her weariness as she scrawled barely two sentences in the yearbook about a New Year’s Ball. It was a flop. She’d she sat next to a good-looking but horribly rude egomaniac.

Still, friendly, fun-loving Jane was quite proud of the fact that she had kept what she called her “ice maiden” reputation in tact as she swirled through Gilded Age and Art Deco ballrooms in 1933. She and Muggy had both had a lot of fun and, she reported to her diary, they never even kissed one of the boys in the stag lines good night.

Happy Birthday, Jane, who would be 98 today. The next post (in two weeks) will include Jane’s adventures at President Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday ball in January 1934.

 

Hidden Suffering at Holiday Time

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After this Southern sendoff, Jane Hall and Muggy Gregory were prepared to make the most of the festive weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yet Jane’s tales of these high society antics in her diary and her debutante yearbook omit any mention of the thousands of people in trouble within a mile or two of her aunt’s and uncle’s apartment. John Patrick O’Brien, New York’s mayor in 1933 (he’d be replaced by the charismatic Fiorello La Guardia in January 1934), seemed helpless to take effective action as unemployment skyrocketed, men sold their possessions on the street, and hungry families built shanties in Central Park. So what had happened to the young adolescent Jane we met in Manhattan Beach who’d written an article about an elderly hospital-bound alcoholic, and composed a poem about a lonely urban street sweeper at midnight?

Jane and her friends rarely saw the bread lines of the unemployed in 1930s Manhattan

Speaking from both Los Angeles and New York City on November 12, 1933, two actresses, Marie Dressler and Eleanor Robeson (Mrs. August Belmont) used the omnipresent radio to entreat Americans to do everything they could to stop the “hidden suffering,” all around them, The New York Times reported. “We are interested in the man who plods the streets day by day, desperately looking for work to support his family, who becomes ill from lack of food and proper clothing. We want to help the woman who bravely tries to keep her home together when there is no money coming in, who washes and irons and cares for her children in a frantic effort to make them know the niceties of home life,” Miss Dressler pleaded. For men and women like this, the local relief agencies were their main hope. Eleanor Roosevelt was then chairman of the National Women’s Committee of the 1933 Mobilization for Human Needs. She “devotes her time and energies to the affairs of humanity,” Miss Dressler said. “She is an object lesson to every living woman.”

If Jane’s diaries are any indication of her friends’ priorities, the first lady had not yet become their role model. For in November and December 1933, she and her crowd lived in the moment, and the moment was full of diversions. It was true that private schools like Nightingale-Bamford encouraged their charges to be sensitive to the less fortunate and give back to their communities. And one time tomboy “Salomey Jane” had grown up in a far less sheltered world than most of her debutante peers.

Yet when Jane marveled at her new life as she zipped up her green velvet dress with mink epaulets, and carefully placed the brown tulle hat her aunt Rose had made on her newly - permed hair, she was focused on her relationship with men. “Is it possible—here I am a New York deb and not only that but popular? Jane asked her diary. “I remember when I was about 14, I was very much disliked by practically all the boys in the neighborhood because I was what is now known as a ‘wisey.’ But times have changed.” They surely had. She was now at a threshold with many decisions to make.

Decades later, as we celebrate the holidays at this same time of year, thousands of needy people in New York City  (and across the world) still suffer. One big difference in 2012 is that this suffering is no longer so hidden thanks to new technologies and the ever-present media. Still many people are just as hungry as the men and women in the bread lines of the 1930s; let’s do whatever we can to help.

Happy Holidays to all.  

 

A Festive Weekend with Plenty of Spirits in 1933

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The real fun began on Friday, November 17, 1933, when Jane, Muggy Gregory and one of their former Nightingale classmates, blonde, beautiful, and athletic Betty Pearl, boarded an overnight train to Virginia from New York City. Mrs. Gregory, who shared a compartment with Muggy, and Jane’s uncle Randy were on board to chaperone. The girls stayed up almost all night jumping in and out of each other’s berths and were quite exhausted by the time they reached Calverton the next morning.

As they came in sight of Poplar Springs, Jane found it a “major thrill” to hear her friends react to the size and splendor of the house. Rose had done all she could to make the atmosphere festive; she’d placed a big branch of mistletoe over the arch that went into the big hall. At 2 p.m. that afternoon the “drag” began. This unique form of fox-hunting took place without the wily fox— hounds took off after an object with a scent that was dragged over the ground ahead of the pack. It was a fast-paced hunt but only four riders took a spill.

Starting “at half after three,” Rose and Randolph Hicks welcomed about 200 guests for the tea dance at Poplar Springs. Photographers from Washington took pictures of various partygoers as mellow jazz from Chauncey Brown’s combo wafted down from the balcony over the great hall. (Until his death in 1974, Chauncey Brown would be a popular attraction at Fauquier County parties as he sang familiar songs and played his guitar accompanied by four other musicians.) Jane’s account of the next twenty-four hours drew on a virtual thesaurus of synonyms for the word “drunk.” (And this was three weeks before the official appeal of Prohibition on December 5.) She didn’t indulge, but several merrymakers became “fried”, “pie-eyed”, “smashed”, “plastered” or at least “tight.” Most guests, and certainly the young ladies, remained under control; about 100 stayed until about 8:30 p.m. for a light supper that would mitigate the effects of excessive alcohol. (A veteran hostess, Rose had been prepared.)

After being up most of the night (for the second night in a row), what could be more exciting on a Sunday morning than a cross-country ride? At least that’s what Jane apparently thought as she and Uncle Randy, Muggy, and Betty started off from the barn in good faith. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Muggy “got scared to death and had to come home.” Jane had little patience with amateurs: “These Central Park riders give me a pain,” she told her diary. When she and Betty took off again, Randolph asked to see her jump their new gray hunter “High Tide.” The horse was fine over smaller fences but refused the coop (a cross-country jump shaped like an inverted V). After several tries, as Jane went around it, her 64-year-old uncle flew off the back of his mount, a two-year-old mare they’d named after movie star Nancy Carroll. Randolph “landed right on his head and smashed his glasses and nearly carved an eyebrow off, so we decided to discontinue our ride then and there.” Whew.

That afternoon several of the local bachelors returned to Poplar Springs to join a family gathering. As they all sat around the fire, Jane decided to find out what it was like to get tight. So when her aunt Rose brought in the cocktails, she drank three “pronto,” one after the other. The next day she would tell her diary that she’d learned a lesson. “I never drink, you know, so the effect was instantaneous, everybody thought I was pretending but I was really as tite as a size 14. I felt sad and very talkative and my own voice sounded peculiar to me. I also wanted to lecture on the evils of liquor. I could walk quite straight and all that, but as soon as I got out of sight of the people I started to skip. Never again for Hall. I want to be complete mistress of every situation, and it can’t be done on three cocktails.”

After a light supper, Jane, Betty, Muggy, and her mother plus Uncle Randy headed for the Calverton rail station and the overnight train back to New York City. “It was one of the nicest weekends of my life,” Jane decided; she could only hope that her friends agreed.

These adventures happened 79 years ago this week. See what December 1933 would bring for Jane and other less fortunate New Yorkers in the posts next month. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

 

“Feted at Hunt Tea in the South”

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Jane Hall and her friend, Margaret “Muggy” Gregory, had lots of fun posing for publicity photos for their “coming out” parties in November and December of 1933. The first article appeared on Wednesday, November 1, in the New York Evening Post—in the days when it was a dignified not a sensational paper. “A big black headline” announced “Mr. and Mrs. R. Randolph Hicks to Give Hunt for Niece,” Jane told her diary. Reporter Madeline Riordan found the Virginia tea dance plus fox hunt at Poplar Springs intriguing enough to supply some context:

“To the modern young woman interested in hunting and outdoor life, the purely social phases of a formal introduction into society are amenably accepted as part of an established order without any great amount of enthusiasm. For this reason parents and guardians of debutantes who prefer hunting to dancing have, in the last few years, varied the usual program of luncheons, teas, dinners and dances by including a private hunt or race meet in the round of festivities arranged in honor of their daughters or wards their first year out. Mr. and Mrs. R. Randolph Hicks, who are making their home this winter at the Hotel Berkshire when in town, belong to this coterie, and they have sent out invitations for a private Hunt to be held at their Warrenton, Va., home a week from Saturday, Armistice Day, for their debutante niece, Miss Jane Hall.”

Jane Hall and Margaret Gregory, New York Times, November 16, 1933.

In recognition of this grand event, at least three other papers printed sizable side-by-side head shots of Muggy and Jane with headlines such as “Feted at Hunt Tea in the South” (New York World –Telegram, 11.20.33) or “To Make Their Debut Together at Tea Dance Saturday” (New York Herald Tribune, n.d.). A New York Times story on November 16 noted that many New Yorkers would attend the novel Hunt Tea Dance in Warrenton. The marketing campaign would work. On New Year’s Eve, Hearst’s New York American (“A Paper for People Who Think”) would feature a large photograph of Jane as one of the season’s most “prominent debutantes.”Jane pasted these stories in her scrapbook, knowing full well that her father, Dick Wick Hall, might have found them much ado about nothing.

The publicity for Jane and Muggy, typical of society news in 1933, appeared in the depths of the Depression; it was just one indication of Americans’ eternal fascination with the lifestyles of the rich or those who seemed to be, a trend that picked up even more when prosperity seemed so out of reach. As society chronicler Cleveland Amory observed, Glamour Girls emerged during the depression years precisely because “as money went downhill, both in fact and in prestige, so did publicity come to the fore.”

In the next post, we’ll see how this highly publicized Virginia hunt and tea dance turned out.

 

Full Circle: A Farewell to Dick Wick Hall’s Mentor, Tom Masson

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It did not take Jane Hall long to plunge right back into juggling school and her social life once she returned to Manhattan at the end of September 1933. At the newly coeducational Day Art School at Cooper Union (no longer called the Woman’s Art School), Jane had signed up for Ornamental Modeling, Advanced Composition, Perspective, Advanced Design and, her favorite class, Life Drawing and Painting. She was feeling good about her second year—”I’m drawing much better, it seems to me, than I did last year. But I have to,” she told her diary. At least there were few distractions from boys at school– they all had jobs and continued to enroll in the Night Art School.

Jane would do her best work over the next two years in Life Drawing, taught by the well-known American regionalist painter, John Steuart Curry. A Kansas farm boy, Curry shared Jane’s love for animals and nature. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as in Paris, Curry had worked as an illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post  between 1921 and 1926 —the years when Tom Masson saw to it that Dick Wick Hall’s stories were featured in the magazine. As her second year at Cooper Union began, Jane knew she should try extra hard in Mr. Curry’s class.

But once again, school would not have her undivided attention. The elaborate process of  being introduced to Society enthralled Jane as she entered a world fueled by publicity and filled with spectacle. Between October 1933 and April 1934, Jane supplemented her diary with “an authentic and unexpurgated record of the haps and mishaps attendant on ‘Coming Out.’” This “Debutante’s Year Book” is the chronicle of a participant observer – a reporter and party girl who yearns to have her own story matter. It’s a tale of seduction by the temptations that are integral to a life of glamour – and of Jane’s reaction to the young men who, once she was “out,” competed mightily with her mission to become an artist or a writer or both. Jane did not write in the year book every day. Instead, she recounted a series of incidents, some of which would one day inspire her stories and screenplays.

One of these memorable experiences occurred at the end of the last weekend of October 1933. She’d been the guest of Douglas Frank and his parents in East Orange, New Jersey. They’d gone to the Rutgers-Lehigh football game (Rutgers won 27 to 0), and a party afterwards. On the way back to the city on Sunday afternoon, Jane stopped to see an ailing Thomas Masson and his wife, Fannie, at their home in Glen Ridge. The 66-year-old humorist and editor, now bedridden, was much smaller than she remembered. (Jane had no way of knowing he had less than eight months to live.) But she was touched that Masson agreed to see her because “I am my father’s daughter.”

The Massons, Jane reported, ”had the Navajo rugs Daddy gave them on their sun porch. Masson and I were discussing Daddy’s temporary fame and his untimely death and he said, ‘so, it all goes back into Limbo. But that doesn’t matter.’ Well I think it does matter. I want to be famous and stay famous and have everybody and everybody’s great-grandchildren know I am and was famous.” Eighteen-year-old Jane knew this line of thought was presumptuous, but she didn’t care. She was still incensed by what had happened to Dick Wick Hall.

Jane’s job over the next few years would be to channel that anger into deciding what she wanted to accomplish. In the fall of 1933, plenty of people would see her pictures in newspapers as a debutante; Jane knew what a laugh her father would have had over that way of getting attention. Still it was great fun at the time.

The fun starts in the next post on October 20  - Questions or comments welcome through the Contact Tab. For more on Dick Wick Hall check out my new book, The Laughing Desert.