There was also the artist Edward Burra, ballet dancer Fredrick Ashton, Christopher Isherwood, the speed-boat racing heiress Marion “Joe” Carstairs, and Ivor Novello.
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Lady Louis Mountbatten came, as did the actress Beatrice Lillie, Sir Osbert Sitwell, Stephen Tennant, Lord Peter Churchill, Noel Coward, David Plunket-Green and even Archie Leach, who later became the movie star Cary Grant, his New York “roommate” the future Hollywood fashion designer George Kelly, known as “Orry-Kelly”. The female impersonator Douglas Byng was acclaimed when he appeared at the Cotton Club in 1930. Small wonder so many artistic Brits arrived. “Of course, a costume ball can be a very tame thing, but when all the exquisitely gowned women on the floor are men and a number of the smartest men are women, ah then, we have something over which to thrill and grow round-eyed … Never no wells of loneliness in Harlem…” Purring over “gowns of all descriptions, jewels, feathers and beauty beyond words”, Dismond singled out “above and over all, a spirit of abandon, hilarity and camaraderie that fired the imagination and made for a true fiesta”.
And thereby hangs the success of the Hamilton Lodge dances which for 61 years have thrilled and entertained the most blasé of New York.” The third greatest joy is to receive the plaudits of one’s fellows. The second greatest joy is to be able to mingle with one’s kind. “The greatest joy in life,” she wrote, “is to be able to express one’s inner self. On 22 February 1929, the black journalist Geraldyn Dismond wrote for the Interstate Tatler about the “Faggot’s Ball”, a precursor to today’s ball culture at which crowds always gathered to gawk. By this mojo alone, some thought, the spent-force of white humanity might be saved from itself. Rather, among the British who visited a fashionable notion prevailed: that Negros held an unspoiled vitality. Sojourning there, some of the bright young things came to see “another arrondissement of Paris”.įew noticed overcrowding and poverty, or appreciated that the parents or grandparents of its residents had often been slaves. For a while, Harlem seemed at the center of the bohemian world. Through drink, drugs, sex and social provocation, these “ bright young people” set out to have a good time. After the great war, many in the artistic elite were determined to celebrate simple survival.