Ernest Hemingway & Elizabeth Hadley Richardson Wedding (1921)

Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Hadley Richardson married after a courtship of less than a year, on September 3th 1921, in Horton Bay, Michigan. Hedley was 8 years older than Ernest, and the first of his four wives. Bernice Kert, author of The Hemingway Women, claims Hadley was “evocative” of the woman whom Hemingway met and fell in love with during his recuperation from injuries during World War I, Agnes von Kurowsky, but in Hadley, Hemingway saw a childishness Agnes lacked.

The couple spent their honeymoon at the Hemingway family summer cottage on Walloon Lake. The weather was miserable, and both Hadley and Hemingway came down with fever, sore throat, and cough. The couple returned to Chicago after their honeymoon, but within months they moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s “Lost Generation” expatriate community.

Of Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers claims: “With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes:

“the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe.”

Their marriage disintegrated as Hemingway was writing and revising The Sun Also Rises.  In 1925 Hadley became aware of Hemingway´s affair with American journalist Pauline Pfeiffer. The couple divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May the same year. In 1933 Hadley married a second time, to journalist Paul Mowrer, whom she met in Paris.

Hadley on her wedding day in 1921 via

Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, on their wedding day in 1921 via

Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, on their wedding day in 1921 via

Edward Steichen, Foxgloves, France (1926)

Edward Steichen, Foxgloves, France, 1926 via

The Glamorous Wedding Of Cornelia Vanderbilt & John Cecil (1924)

Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt (1900-1976) was born at the famous Biltmore Estate, a large (8,000 acre) private estate  in Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore House, the main house on the estate, is a Châteauesque-styled mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately owned house in the United States, at 178,926 square feet (16,622.8 m²)  of floor space (135,280 square feet (12,568 m²) of living area).

Cornelia was the only child of George Washington Vanderbilt and Edith Dresser Vanderbilt. Cornelia inherited the Biltmore Estate from her father.

Cornelia was married first to Hon John Francis Amherst Cecil in 1924. About 1932, Cornelia found life at Biltmore too dull to endure and moved to New York briefly to study art. After a few months she moved to Paris, divorced Cecil in 1934, changed her name to Nilcha and dyed her hair bright pink. That phase passed, and while living quietly and modestly in London, she met and married Vivian Francis Bulkely-Johnson about 1950.

At some point she adopted the name Mary. Her last marriage was in 1972 to William Goodsir, 26 years her junior. They lived very quietly; Cornelia never spoke of her past.
Her sons with Cecil, George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil (b. 1925) and William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil (b. 1928), eventually inherited the Biltmore Estate and land (source).

Cornelia Vanderbilt in her official wedding portrait, 1924 via

Cornelia Vanderbilt, 1924 via

Cornelia Vanderbilt, 1924 via

Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt and John Francis Amherst Cecil, 1924 via

Cornelia Vanderbilt and John Francis Amherst Cecil, 1924 via

Cornelia Vanderbilt and John Francis Amherst Cecil, 1924 via

 

Famous Flappers of the Roaring Twenties

Flappers were a “new breed” of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.

Zelda Fitzgerald was an American socialite and novelist, and the wife of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who dubbed her “the first American Flapper”. She and Scott became the emblem of the Jazz Age, for which they are still celebrated via

Clara Bow epitomized the Roaring Twenties’ flapper. At only 25, she retired exhausted by repeated scandals about her presumed sexual life. Photo: Bow in a shiny strapless dress by Eugene Robert Richee, 1926 via

 Coleen Moore was Bow´s “chief rival”. After Bow took the stage Moore gradually lost her momentum. In spring 1924 she made a good, but unsuccessful effort to top Bow in The Perfect Flapper, and soon after she dismissed the whole flapper vogue. Photo: Coleen Moore in “Why Be Good?”, 1929 via

Louise Brooks 1920. She was an American dancer and actress noted as an iconic symbol of the flapper, and for popularizing the bobbed haircut via

Gilda Gray, 1924. She was an American actress and dancer who popularized a dance called the “shimmy” which became fashionable in 1920s films and theater productions via

Tallulah Brockman, 1922. Bankhead was an American actress of the stage and screen, and a reputed libertine britannica.com

Anita Loos was an American screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for her blockbuster comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes first published in 1925. It was one of several famous novels published that year that chronicled the so-called Jazz Age – including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Photo: Loos, on page 12 of the April 1922 Photoplay via

Photos of Iconic Entertainer Fanny Brice (1891 – 1951)

Fanny Brice (1891 – 1951) was a popular and influential American illustrated song model, comedian, singer, and theater and film actress who made many stage, radio and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl and its 1968 film adaptation, for which Streisand won an Oscar.

Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks via

Fanny Brice via

Fanny Brice, 1910s via

Fanny Brice via

Vintage Circus Clown

Circus Clown via

Actress Lina Basquette Practicing Her Steps 28 Floors Up (1920s)

Lina Basquette ( 1907 – 1994) was an American actress noted for her 75-year career in entertainment, which began during the silent film era.

Talented as a dancer, she was paid as a girl for performing and gained her first film contract at age nine. In her acting career, Basquette may have been best known for her role as Judith in The Godless Girl (1929) The film was based on the life of Queen Silver, known as a 20th-century child prodigy, and feminist and Socialist activist.

 Lina Basquette, practicing her steps 28 floors up on the roof of the Hotel Commodore (ca. 1920s) via

 Lina Basquette, practicing her steps 28 floors up on the roof of the Hotel Commodore (ca. 1920s) via

Glamorous Photos by Trude Fleischmann (1895–1990)

Trude Fleischmann (1895–1990) was an Austrian-born American photographer, who  became a notable society photographer in Vienna in the 1920s.

With the Anschluss in 1938, Fleischmann was forced to leave the country. She moved first to Paris, then to London and finally, together with her former studient and companion Helen Post, in April 1939 to New York. In 1940, she opened a studio on West 56th Street next to Carnegie Hall which she ran with Frank Elmer who had also emigrated from Vienna.

In addition to scenes of New York City, she photographed celebrities and notable immigrants including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oskar Kokoschka, Lotte Lehmann, Otto von Habsburg, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Arturo Toscanini. 

She also worked as a fashion photographer, contributing to magazines such as Vogue. She established a close friendship with the photographer Lisette Model.

Trude Fleischmann
Hedy Pfundmayr mit Fledermauskopfputz, um 1925
signiert: „Es gibt nichts Besseres als Pessl’s Schönheitscreme“
Silbergelatineabzug, 22,6 x 14,5 cm
© Photoinstitut Bonartes via

The dancer Tilly Losch by Trude Fleischmann via

 Ernst Mafray (dancer, choreographer, actor and director, seated)
Kata Sterna (actress and dancer) by Trude Fleischmann via

Trude Fleischmann, Study with glass sphere, Vienna 1923 via

Karin van Leyden by Man Ray (1929)

Artist Karin van Leyden (Karin Elisabeth Kluth b. 1906-1971) by Man Ray.

Paris, circa 1929 via