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Americans were becoming more comfortable with, or resigned to, modernity. But not without a struggle.

 

    Americans in the 1920s found creative ways to circumvent Prohibition.

 

    First-wave feminists marching for women’s suffrage in New York City, May 6, 1912.

 

    Illustrator John Held Jr. captured the spirit of the Jazz Age.

P ART T WO

    Coco Chanel, ca. 1926, outfitted the New Woman for the modern age.

13
A M IND F ULL OF F ABULATIONS
    S ITTING IN HER rambling town house on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with its army of uniformed footmen, maids, and chefs, its grand piano, striking geometric furniture, and haute epoque chairs draped in a fine, beige-colored satin, Coco Chanel had considerable cause to celebrate. 1 Queen of Paris couture, supreme architect of the feminine form, artisan of jersey and tweed and rayon, creator of Chanel No. 5 and the “little black dress,” she had overcome the disadvantages of an unfortunate childhood spent deep in the wilderness of rural France. Her admirers naturally wanted to know how she did it—how she had landed on top having started so low down.
    Though she would always prove strangely reticent about her past, journalists pried at least this much from the tight-lipped Mademoiselle Chanel:
    She was born in 1893 to a poor but upstanding family of traveling merchants. Her mother, a frail woman only thirty-two years of age, contracted pneumonia and died when Coco was a child. Her father, an affable but unreliable drifter, couldn’t own up to the responsibility of raising three young daughters and two sons. He did what any good wanderer would do: He abandoned them and sailed for fortune and freedom in America, leaving his family destitute and at the mercy of private charity.
    The boys, Alphonse and Lucien, were packed off to a work farm. Her sisters, Julia and Antoinette, went to live with distant relatives.
    And little Coco, all of six years old, was taken in by two aging spinster aunts in Auvergne.
    Living “at the farthest corner of that backward province,” young Coco—her real name was Gabrielle—was provided for but not loved. 2 Later in life, she told an acquaintance, “My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness.… I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.”
    Coco didn’t have many friends—in fact, she didn’t have any. Her afternoons were spent in melancholy play at a long-forgotten cemetery near her aunts’ farmhouse. There, with a bitter autumn wind whistling in the trees, amid the crackling of dead leaves and overgrown weeds, she positioned her rag dolls over the headstones and tried to communicate with all the departed souls. “I told myself that the dead are not dead as long as people think about them,” she later confided to a friend. 3
    Those bleak country winters would remain etched in her memory. From late fall until early spring, snowdrifts as high as a grown man’s waist blanketed the thick woods in a sea of unending white. Ice crystals clung to the branches of the tall chestnut trees that ringed the town. The house grew cold and dark. Coco stayed mostly indoors. She remembered thinking of herself as a “little prisoner.” 4
    From the small alcove where she slept, young Coco devoured popular romance novels—especially those by the popular writer Pierre Decourcelle—and allowed her imagination free rein. Lying on her plain cot, with one arm behind her head and the other propping up the latest newspaper serial, she learned to block out the sounds of the old women who gathered each afternoon in her aunts’ kitchen to confer in hushed tones about the financial burdens of raising someone else’s child.
    Every year on her birthday, her grandfather sent her five francs. And every year she used a small portion of the money—just one franc—to buy a handful of mint candies at a local market stall. She squirreled the rest away in a piggy bank, until one year her pious aunts forced her to tithe all of her savings