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.