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BUtterfield 8: No Call Girl
The year is 1931. The era started after the Great War, with a mass turning away from faith, the relative anonymity of big cities, youth at the wheel of closed cars seemingly just made for “necking,” speakeasies, gossip over telephones, dance bands on the radio—it all made for a combustible jazz age culture. Boomers like me tend to think of “the sexual revolution” as something that happened around 1966, not without some reason, but it’s becoming clear that the real revolution happened in the Twenties. Unchaperoned young women in short skirts climbing into cars with men to go to roadhouses, getting utterly plastered; night-long “petting parties” ending in the purple dawn; there’s a pattern there that you’d see, with variations, for generations to come, by writers as diverse as Mickey Spillane and Jack Kerouac. But it all started back then.
John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8 is a 1935 best-selling novel about a dissolute New York party girl and her social circle. For decades, O’Hara was famous, right up there with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By the time I was in college, half a century ago, his star had dimmed. Chances are if you’ve ever heard of BUtterfield 8 it’s only because Hollywood made it into a 1960 Elizabeth Taylor movie. That’s a shame. Although most of the characters have middling to poor moral standards, it’s not explicit at all. There are serious truths here about men and women, rich and poor, snobs and commoners, and the inescapable wages of sin.
Gloria Wandrous is the main character of the story. Her family is well-to-do. She and her friends float along in a sea of bottle clubs, restaurants, and taxi rides, on a treadmill from hangover to hangover. She’s a prototype of a female character we’d see more and more of; think of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: equal parts lost soul, kooky wit, and tipsy flirt. But O’Hara doesn’t make Gloria’s situation charming, not in the slightest bit.
To readers in 1935 and ever since, the enigma of Gloria Wandrous is her indifferent, joyless drift into promiscuity. MGM’s 1960 screenwriters turned her into a kept woman and a prostitute. It won an Oscar for Elizabeth Taylor, but it was sensationalistic, stupid and wrong. It misses the whole point about what’s most disturbing here. She doesn’t do what she does for money. A shock reveal is that she’s only 22. What happened to this girl? Gradually we find out.
If you want to cut to the chase, much of O’Hara’s point can be found in the title of a 1952 country western song: It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-tonk Angels. Every “bad girl” has a bad man in her past, often a string of them. In BUtterfield 8, the women aren’t seduced and corrupted by fast-talking, hard-loving goodtime boys, but by trust fund boys from Yale and tomcatting Wall Streeters hiding their wedding rings.
By the standards of my own blue-collar family in 1930s New York City, nearly everyone in BUtterfield 8 is rich, but they aren’t super-rich masters of the universe, like Fitzgerald’s characters. There are no Astors or Rockefellers here. Instead, we are presented with the personal lives of what might be called “the working near-rich”—well-to-do stockbrokers, bankers, property developers, some lawyers and doctors—and a wider class of privileged people who live off them. Women of this social class did not work, unless they were college teachers or (much more rarely) social workers. Their children are raised by “the help” or by boarding school. If they don’t want children, there are, for the first time, widely available contraceptives. When those don’t work, there are discreet and understanding Park Avenue doctors, no questions asked.
Some of the ways O’Hara is different: Unlike his fellow Irish American, Fitzgerald, he doesn’t idolize or romanticize the rich. But unlike Hemingway, or most other novelists of his time, he’s not a man of the left either. He doesn’t believe in Marx or Freud. In 1935, this approached secular heresy. Like the other two literary giants, he was something of a snob. Blacks barely register as real people; Jews are financiers with funny accents. Catholics are split between hoodlums, bartenders, cops and upwardly mobile grinds.
To a 1930s readership, even the novel’s title conveyed fashionability that’s largely invisible to us now. Before about 60 years ago, phone numbers had a dialing prefix. There was social status, or lack of it, coded in those names. AMsterdam 5 was Harlem; PLaza 7, on the other hand, was the neighborhood around the Plaza Hotel. BUtterfield 8 meant that infidelity and scandal were part of one of the classiest districts in the city.
A second critical bit of insider info in these numbers was topicality or timeliness. Even in America’s biggest city, phone numbers were only six digits until December 1930. By calling the book BUtterfield 8, in the new Bell System style, O’Hara was tipping off 1935 readers that this was a contemporary story, set in the post-stock market crash, Depression-era city of “today’s” headlines. It would be like a mid-Nineties hipster calling his novel “Brooklyncoffee.com”.
In the same way that in my time, the cynical wised-up Seventies followed the idealistic, naïve and oversexed Sixties, nearly a century ago the Thirties began as a figurative and very literal hangover to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties. By almost any standards the culture of Manhattan’s so-called café society was extremely alcoholic, given to binge drinking and blackouts. As a novelist, John O’Hara is at his best with dialog, and he knew the sounds of a barroom conversation.
The exponential growth in alcoholism during prohibition is one of those “in spite of/because of” semi-paradoxes with many competing explanations, but there’s no doubt that spoken or unspoken, assumed or spelled out, much of America’s leadership class appears to have been tipsy a fair amount of time. Even by the Fifties, a generation later, things hadn’t changed: realist writers described late afternoons in the executive suites of Midtown Manhattan when it seemed like a daily fog of alcohol rolled in, obscuring recollections of whatever-the-hell-it-was that they were all talking about before lunch. Hollywood, too. Maybe your own town and your own industry as well.
Most of the people in O’Hara’s stories are not so much strivers as wannabes, not unlike John O’Hara himself, too anxious to be accepted in “society.”
O’Hara’s not a total cynic. He doesn’t say that everyone is corrupt or lecherous or larcenous, just that the people he finds interesting enough to put in his stories have regrettable tendencies in those directions that emerge if temptation is strong enough. At a time when novelists were beginning to blame society, not the actual perpetrators of shocking offenses, he recognizes that although none of us entirely controls our own destiny, we all have a responsibility to do what we can to avoid going down morality’s drain, pulling others along with us.
Published in General
Ripped from the pages of the PIT.
Caught! And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!
So, should I do my joke again, then?
Absolutely!
However, KLondike 5 was everywhere.
Pretty good, huh? Totally worth waiting for. And the buildup didn’t hurt it at all.
Here I should acknowledge that @hankrhody inspired me with his Reading List ongoing post. If I can paraphrase only one of the precepts, once in a while we Ricochet writers should try to get a little out of our usual jurisdiction, our usual comfort zone.
Around here, Hank is known for his quietly authoritative knowledge of material structures from inside subatomic particles to the outer dimensions of intergalactic space. But the Reading List expands the compiled base of Rhodyville into all this human stuff, so in an attempt to keep up I decided that instead of doing my usual, explaining why the blindest of old projectionists got the highest paying jobs with the most critical screens, I’d abandon media technology and history for the subject of men and women in 1931.
Really, what else could the RightWebs be calling out for?
Thank you again for a wonderful post on a topic that lies outside my sheltered worldview!
Thanks. Well done. Perhaps a proper response later.
By the time I read Appointment in Samarra I had already seen BUtterfield 8 (and boy, did Liz ever move on from National Velvet or what). So now I gotta go read it too.
Thanks loads, McVey.
Good article, Gary. Do you have any theory on why widespread day-drinking among the upper classes went out of fashion, after a couple of decades?
In my younger days the dialing prefix was how we separated the natives from the new arrivals into NE Ohio. There was a business in Cleveland called The Home Corporation that did siding and windows and their commercials, which seemed to be everywhere, ended with their phone number sung as a jingle: GArfield 1-2323. If you knew the number and could sing it, you were a native.
It was so ubiquitous that they changed the name of the business. It’s now called Garfield12323.com, although most people probably expect a fat, lasagna-eating cat to be associated with it instead of a phone exchange.
As for O’Hara he did achieve some form of literary immortality with a series of short stories about a second-rate nightclub singer that Rodgers and Hart put words and music to: Pal Joey.
Holy cats that’s a good essay.
Thanks much!
Overtones of Gatsby?
Not up there with Gatsby. In today’s terms, O’Hara’s usual subject would be millionaires, not billionaires. Most of us would say, “What’s the difference?” but there really is a difference.
I’ve seen a fading echo of it, generations later. Forty years ago, my boss (about 18 years older than me) got me into his British-inspired habit of wine at lunch. Basically, in the Eighties everyone over the age of 40 was still doing it. (“everyone” doesn’t include Utah).
It might just have been practicality. Whether it’s auto assembly or typing up contracts, even moderate day drinking is a drag on productivity. Driving is another issue.
When I was a kid, I thought that if I had a dollar bill (I called it “folding money”) then I was rich. I just checked; I have $320 in my money clip (actually it is a black binder clip) and think I don’t have enough.
You still see really old photos with phone numbers like “For Coal, ring 4551”.
The addition of the seventh digit gave New York room for 10 million phones (theoretically 9,999,999; in reality fewer, since numbers didn’t lead off with a “0” or “1”).
Boston had REvere 5 and COncord 3. In NYC, the correct time was MEridian 6, weather was WEather 6. My girlfriend’s grandma lived in Yorkville, the city’s German section, so her number began with RHinelander 4.
The 80s. The last time for me was my last St. Patrick’s Day in Los Angeles. We were celebrating a product delivery as well. Wrecked the entire department.
Thanks, iWe! In truth, it’s outside of mine as well.
There are books that are a glass-bottom boat ride through a sewer. I avoid them. BUtterfield 8 isn’t one of them. John O’Hara takes no joy in depravity.
Mickey Kaus once referred to a political dispute within the Democratic Party as “the eternal war between the E-Class and the S-Class”, using Mercedes’ two top names as a proxy for subtle distinctions between the wealthy.
Critic Loren Stein compared reading this novel to watching Mad Men; they flatter their readers/viewers by assuming that you are smart enough to recognize the significance of brand names, feel nostalgia for the songs playing on the phonograph, and notice subtle distinctions of makers of clothes, of fast cars, and preferred vacation spots.
FWIW, I don’t think either of your worldviews is “sheltered”. I think of your worldviews as realistic. It’s just that you’ve both managed to avoid indulging in the nastier aspects of the realistic.
What’s the difference?
I’m closer to being a millionaire than Elon Musk.
Knew nothing about this guy and loved the story.
I can still remember how Mom would say Dad’s OKC work phone number when I was a kid: JA4-8413.
Thanks for this, Gary.
I saw the film for the first time a couple of months ago, and no, it’s not very good.
Legend has it that Taylor won the Oscar for BUtterfield with a sympathy vote, after a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed her.
For the benefit of Ricochet newcomers, the PIT is an ongoing conversation thread. It’s now up to its 24th incarnation. We pretend that it’s an ornery, unforgiving place, full of one-eyed, peg-legged pirates. It is actually something like an all-night group radio show. Oddly, we try to avoid substantive arguments in the PIT; that’s what the Member Feed is for. Anyone who wants to find it, just search PIT 24.
Of course, if you’re reading this comment months from now, we might be up to PIT 25 by then. We try to change ’em over every six months or before 100,000 comments.
Ladies and gentlemen, the PIT Anthem:
Thank you, ECS! Taylor herself thought she got the Oscar for not dying. She didn’t want to do the movie, but she owed MGM one more picture @$125,000. During the scandal over Cleopatra, a 20th Century Fox film, two years later, MGM hurriedly re-released BUtterfield 8 with the slogan, “LIZ Sizzles! See the Academy-Award winning role that gave LIZ her reputation!”
Needless to say, Taylor was not happy about that. (Also, BTW, she hated being called “Liz”)
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Ayn Rand was prone to ranting, but she had a wicked eye for character names. Liberal agitator “Wesley Mouch” is part loudmouth, part moocher.
In BUtterfield 8, Gloria Wandrous is a wanderer. If you were sitting at the other end of the bar in 1931, you might call her a tramp. But if you unpack it a little, what are some of the qualities of women? What do they start out with? Glory. Wondrousness. That’s her tragedy.