John Held, Jr. Creator of an Era

the satirist laureate of the twenties, he virtually invented the flapper, and soon the sheiks and shebas were actually patterning themselves on his drawings

It Won't Be Long Now

They Were Dubbed the Roaring Twenties--a decade unmatched by any other in the annals of modern Americana as a cache of romantic folklore and unabashed, wacky nostalgia. Prohibition was the law of the land, and booze -- bootleg or bathtub-brewed -- had never been more popular or plentiful. The stock market spawned millionaires by the minute, and anyone who didn't buy on margin was a "sucker." Florida was having a real-estate boom; John Scopes and man's simian ancestors were on trial in Tennessee; Chaplin had reached the apogee of silent-film stardom in The Gold Rush and Jolson brought sound to the screen in The Jazz Singer; Gershwin put the finishing touches to his Rhapsody in Blue; Red Grange set the standard for future Saturdays' heroes by turning pro; Lucky Lindbergh linked the hemispheres and The Great Gatsby established F. Scott Fitzgerald's position among the literati as America's chief chronicler of the Jazz Age. But by far the most memorable symbol of that lost generation was a tassled, baby-faced, swivel-hipped, rouge-kneed, shingle-haired, flat-chested female confection called the flapper. She and her bell-bottomed boyfriend, with his ukulele, coonskin coat, slicked-down hair and pocket flask full of homemade hooch, were what really made the Jazz Age jump. And these sheiks and shebas, the prototypes of thousands of Joe Colleges and Betty Coeds to follow, were conceived -- and immortalized -- by the artistic imagination of one man: John Held, Jr.

Held captured the champagne-bubble spirit of a zany generation of pleasure-bent young men and women in an era of unparalleled post-War prosperity, troubled by nothing more serious than yesterday's hangover and tonight's heavy date. Out of his India inkwell tumbled an endless stream of flirtatious flappers and their saxophone-playing, megaphone-crooning sweethearts, all of them bent on but a single purpose: making whoopee! And although Held's flappers tended to make wilder whoopee than most of the real cuties of the day, no one could deny that his satiric sketches had catalyzed an era of profound change in the traditional mores of American women. With refreshing candor, he pictured a new society of high-living females as they strutted their stuff at football games, fraternity hops, speakeasies and spiked-tea parties, snapped their fingers and flaunted their bloomers with provocative unconcern to the beat of a black bottom or a charleston, or pursued their favorite pastime of necking in the rumble seat of some sheik's Stutz Bearcat. They became known throughout the publishing profession as Held's angels, and furnished the original working model after which an entire garter-snapping generation of happy-go-lucky coeds patterned themselves.

As irony would have it, the creator of all this wry and wonderful humor was its personal antithesis. Some 15 years older than the community of collegiate cutups he depicted, Held, who never went to college, was a quiet and elusive man who disliked crowds, noise and, above all, cocktail parties. A prodigious worker, even at the height of his success, he often spent 18 hours a day at his drawing board chronicling the capers of a student population whose (text concluded on page 247) John Held, Jr. (continued from page 95) official motto was "College bred--a four-year loaf!"

Held was born in Salt Lake City in 1889. the son of artistically gifted Mormon parents. His father, a capable penman and engraver, abandoned a promising career as an art teacher at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah) to open up his own engraving and stationery shop, where he produced an illustrated edition of the Book of Mormon, designed greeting cards and manufactured fountain pens. His mother was an accomplished actress, and John Jr.'s earliest sketches were of the Salt Lake City Theater, where she often performed.

Held's childhood was spent mostly in the small studio above his father's shop: it was here that he began to develop the artistic style that would someday mark him as one of the most renowned craftsmen in his profession. At the age of nine, he made his first sale: a wood engraving that went for a modest nine dollars. In high school, he drew cartoons for the Salt Lake City Tribune and helped publish the student newspaper along with schoolmate Harold Ross, who went on to found The New Yorker, for which he commissioned Held to create a historic series of satirical linoleum-block illustrations in its early issues.

When Held arrived on the sidewalks of New York in 1910. he had exactly four dollars in his pockets. Working first as a designer of streetcar posters, then hiring on as a layout artist in the advertising department of Wanamaker's department store, he managed to come up with his share of the monthly rent of a three-room apartment in a West 37th Street rooming house which he and six bachelor roommates affectionately referred to as Cockroach Glades. In 1918, he returned, tall, tanned and appropriately tattooed, from a two-year stint in the Navy, spending the subsequent transition years between the Armistice and Coolidge prosperity as a minor member of the art staff on a new magazine called Life. Most of his assignments amounted to little more than filler items, such as the minuscule sketches at the top of Robert Benchley's drama page, but in these tentative drawings he began to refine the distinctive style that would soon make him the most celebrated commercial artist in America.

Held's first angel appeared on the cover of Judge, a weekly humor magazine, in 1922. She was a chubby coquette who had virtually nothing in common with the scores of slim, long-legged vamps who quickly succeeded her, but she still managed to turn the tide of success in her creator's favor. Held became an overnight sensation, and soon his frenetic flappers were the toast of Life, Collier's, Redbook, Smart Set and College Humor. Money poured in from every corner of the publishing world and, at one point, William Randolph Hearst was paying him an unheard-of fee of $2500 a week for a daily flapper feature titled O Margy. "I used to work all day. days and nights." Held remarked in later years, recalling his heyday as a humorist. "I was looking for success and I'd found it."

Refusing to be typecast by prosperity as nothing more than a collegians' cartoonist, Held spent his few free hours in tireless pursuit of greater artistic versatility, designing costumes and scenery for several Broadway shows, creating his own collection of miniature bronze sculptures and preparing a second satirical series of illustrations for The New Yorker based on the Frankie and Johnny songs of the 1890s. Described by New Yorker columnist John McNulty as a man of "quiet elegance," Held nurtured a deep-seated distaste for the city and the frantic pace of the very decade that had fostered his success. More interested in raising pedigreed dogs and thoroughbred horses than in raising Cain with his contemporaries, he used his new-found fortune to buy a 163-acre farm in Westport, Connecticut, which he stocked with everything from a geese-filled pond and an in-residence golf pro to a full-time Chinese cook and a pair of mules he named Abercrombie and Fitch. In fact, were it not for Held's one small idiosyncrasy--a penchant for putting on public tap-dancing displays--one might never have suspected that beneath his calm country-squire façade lurked one of the prime movers of a decade dedicated to getting stinko to the musical strains of do-acka-do-acka-do.

The stock-market crash and the Depression of the Thirties heralded the return of long skirts and the demise of the flapper. Like countless other investors, Held was swindled out of his savings by the "Swedish Match King," Ivar Kreuger, and once again was faced with the unwelcome prospect of working for his supper. For the first three years of his sudden return from the ranks of the idle rich, he busied himself turning out eight books (among them: Grim Youth and The Flesh Is Weak) in a last-ditch literary attempt to perpetuate the raccoon-coated past. Eventually, the groves of academe beckoned and Held signed on as artist-in-residence at Harvard and then at the University of Georgia.

World War Two found him back on the farm, this time in Belmar. New Jersey, and back at his drawing board--working for the Army Signal Corps. In a New York Post interview in 1957, a reporter remarked to Held that any man who could draw, engrave, sculpt, design, write, farm and tap-dance with his expertise was truly blessed with great gifts. "Gifts, my eye!" the aging artist retorted. "It was just a lot of plain damn hard work." The following year, the father of the flapper era died, at the age of 69.

In the final analysis, Held was important to the American scene less as an author, or even as a skilled artist, than as the creative genius behind a whole new breed of female. The flapper represented a complete departure from her embroidering and croquet-playing forebears, and Held's angels were the precursors of this epic revolution in feminine attitudes. To this day, the Joe Colleges and Betty Coeds of the Jazz Age still look back wistfully on that generation as their image of youth's last stand--an image that would never have existed without the roguish and imaginative wit of John Held, Jr.[bunny]