Wild lives of Gatsby-era flappers

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

• Flappers: Six Women Of A Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell Focuses on 1920s celebrity women involved in arts, many living in Paris
• American creatives Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead British flappers including Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard
• Wild Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka
• Reveals Zelda was tragic alcoholic who drank heavily and took morphine
• Tamara took cocaine to stay awake having sex or painting
• Actress Tallulah had lesbian affairs and used cocaine

Money flowed, jazz music rang, and fashionable young women in 1920s London, Paris and New York set aside behaviour previously deemed 'appropriate' in favour of high spirits, short skirts, hedonism and social liberation.

These giddy, creative, enthusiastic women of the Roaring Twenties' were named 'flappers' because of their effervescent personalities. They were writers, actresses, painters, society heiresses, and were a new breed of women typified by newly bobbed hair, thick make-up and predilections for smoking, drinking, dancing the Charleston... and then some.

As Baz Luhrmann's new cinematic remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby prepares for release, global interest in the era is piquing.
A new book lifts the lid on the most infamous of the flapper women - from Fitzgerald's American wife Zelda and US actress Tallulah Bankhead, to Britain's high society heiresses Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard - revealing them to be bawdy souls with penchants for cocaine, lesbian affairs and all-night sex sessions.

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'My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine': Tallulah Bankhead in 'Her Cardboard Lover', (1903-68)

Tamara de Lempicka, in a dress by Marcel Rochas. Paris. Photography by d'Ora, around 1931 and the cover of the movie tie-in edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

1920s decadence in The Great Gatsby

Flappers: Six Women Of A Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell follows the lives of a handful of international women who exemplified the daring nature and extreme depths of their generation's spirit.  
Zelda, the colourful American wife of Gatsby author Scott Fitzgerald; American dancer Josephine Baker; Paris-based Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka; American actress Tallulah Bankhead and English aristocrats Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard feature in chapters dedicated to their lives.

The book divulges intimate details of Tallulah's lesbian experiments and affairs with young female admirers and mature women alike, and describes the challenge to have felt badly for using cocaine to lift the spirit when the substance was so easily  acquired.

Carey Mulligan as society girl Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's new film remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby

The jazz-age actress, who starved determinedly to achieve her waifish look, frequently quipped a phrase by which she and so many of her peers lived by: 'My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.'

Mackrell writes of Nancy Cunard's penchant for French affairs, and Zelda Fitzgerald's heavy alcohol consumption and taste for morphine
 

Author Judith Mackrell, an acclaimed dance critic, reveals Tamara de Lempicka to be a lesbian, free to discover the possibilities of her motivations in the liberal age of the twenties, and especially in Paris. The glamorous artist of Polish origin would snort cocaine from a silver teaspoon to stay up all night having sex or painting.
In a heady mix of epicureanism and dismay, Mackrell writes of Nancy Cunard's penchant for French affairs  that acted as remedy for despair at life's tragedies, and of Zelda Fitzgerald's heavy alcohol consumption and taste for morphine.

1920s Poster for The Original Charleston, Starring Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker strikes a pose during her Ziegfeld Follies performance of  The Conga in 1936

In an era of soaring stock markets, consumer expansion, urbanization and fast travel, women were reimagining both the small detail and the large ambitions of their lives.

Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, fascinating and tragic ways

For them, the pursuit of experience was not just about dancing and wearing fashionable clothes. They made themselves prominent among the artists, icons and heroines of their age, pursuing experience in ways that others could not  have imagined, seeking to define what it was to be young and a woman in an age where the smashing of old certainties had thrown the world wide open.

Talented, reckless and willful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, fascinating and tragic ways.

Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann's new film

Zelda Fitzgerald and husband Scott, who had a fiery, passionate marriage, pictured in the 1930s

Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald pictured in an undated photo from the archives

The colourful life of actress Diana Cooper, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her time, is detailed in the book

Diana Cooper on set with a fellow actress, thought to be Wanda Holden, in an undated photograph believed to date from the 1920s

Flappers: Six Women Of A Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell is published by Macmillan in hardback on 23 May 23 at £