Vanity Fair: A Calvacade of the 1920s and 1930s

Edited by Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee

I read and subscribe to the current Vanity Fair magazine. I once wrote a letter to the editor, Graydon Carter, that I thought would be a certainty to be published. I coined the phrase: "Vanity Fair---Gossip for the Ages."

Because Vanity Fair does gossip very well and doesn't limit itself to the current age for subjects.

Anyway, my letter was not used in Letters to the Editor, but I did receive a response (that is more than I can say for any other letters, snail or email, that I have sent to any magazine). The response said that Mr. Carter appreciated my comments, but would decline to publish them.

So there you go, I was declined to be a published gossip. And here, I thought, that I had all the qualifications.

Vanity Fair was originally published 1914 to 1936, died, and then began again to be published in 1981. The original Vanity Fair, from the articles written by Dorothy Parker, Lord Dunsany, D.H. Lawrence, and so on, are rather like the current New Yorker magazine, whimsical and broad reaching it their subject matter and authors. But Vanity Fair, in the number one run, had photos and those were not included in the New Yorker, until the beginning of the current century.

A list of the nominations for the Hall of Fame: 1928 reads as follows:

1. Pablo Picasso
2. Thomas Mann
3. Jed Harris
4. Max Reinhardt
5. Walter Gropius
6. Serge Diaghileff
7. S. M. Eisenstein
8. Ernest Hemingway
9. Countess De Chambrun
10. Louis Bromfield.

Someone back in 1928 had a good feel for the interests and obsessions of the 21st century. All of the listed but the last two are still known today.

I was briefly puzzled by the inclusion of Louis Bromfield (who reads his books today? Although more might be familiar with the old movies that were made from them). Then I remembered that I had visited Malabar Farms in Ohio (his old home where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had been married), so I should have recognized the name, sooner. And Mr. Bromfield was another one of those troublesome agrarian authors.

As for Countess De Chambrun, I like the name, but no, I never heard of her until I read this book. She was some sort of French Shakespeare scholar. She probably thought that Shakespeare's clowns were geniuses---comic geniuses and that The Merry Wives of Windsor was the epitome of what Shakespeare had to offer.

The articles compiled in this book are hit and miss, regardless of the renown of the author. But the pictures and the subjects are fascinating for any one interested in the era that it covers.

I enjoyed it. It was "Gossip for the Ages", even an Age Ago.