Life, 1929-08-09 · page 29 of 44
Life — August 9, 1929 — page 29: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page features a society diary column by Baird Leonard documenting upper-class leisure activities in 1920s New York. The two illustrations satirize social pretensions: **Top cartoon**: Shows a crowded, chaotic automobile interior with fashionably dressed passengers crammed awkwardly together. The caption—"Miss Blondel, I'd like you to meet Mr. Rushem—you people ought to get together some time"—mocks forced social introductions at country clubs. **Bottom cartoon**: Illustrates the accompanying text's ironic observation that wealthy women promote "the simple life" while wearing expensive jewelry and furs—exposing the hypocrisy of aristocratic slumming. The diary entries themselves humorously chronicle trivial concerns: card games, pedestrian measurements, social anxieties about college years, and gossip. The satire targets the vanity and superficiality of the leisure class during the Jazz Age, poking fun at their self-absorption and social climbing.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
New York Life Hee Lepr Diary Cooperstown, N, Y. Jury by 17.—Breakfast before a Baird roaring fire in my room, Leonard with Sam, resplendent in new brown flannels, wheedling fish-cakes from my tray as though he were not to descend in a moment and make the morning meal of a longshoreman, and then to set the pedometer which he did fetch me from the city, measuring my stride by the piece of Alengon lace for my new slip and which I reckoned to be exactly forty-five inches. To Cherry Valley for luncheon with Mistress Greene in a house set on land granted to her fam ily in colonial times, and in the stair case was a great gouge made by a tomahawk which an Indian had hurled at one of her progenitors. A great company of women at table, and the dessert caused a treble pandemonium of astonishment and delight, being six griddle cakes the size of service plates welded together with butter and maple sugar, and cut and served by our hos tess like a layer cake, but not, alas, to me. Fell to cards afterwards, losing but four dollars, which pleased me mighty much, for Lord! my fortune at contract has been so consistently bad of late that I do regard a loss of any- thing under ten dollars as a moral vic- tory. Home by motor, in the late af- ternoon, Very smug over many compli- ments upon what had been pleasantly termed my rejuvenation, but we did unfortunately stop at the country club, where | was introduced to a young “Miss Blondel, I'd like you to meet Mr. Rushem—you people ought to get together some time.” woman who, with no apparent motive beyond making agrecable conversation, did wonder if I had been at Smith College in her mother’s day, thereby knocking several pegs from my com- placence. Nor will Granger Gaither forgive me for not vouchsating that my class was '27, which he thinks would have been the ideal retort discourteous and guaranteed to close the conversa- The fellow who maintained that two can live as cheaply as one takes his fiancee to the theatre. Jury 18—Lay late, pondering this and that, in especial how frequently propaganda for the simple life is ad vanced by women with square emer alds on their fingers and Christmas. tree ropes of diamonds around their necks. My husband, poor wretch, does now think of taking up golf again, and I do encourage him, forasmuch as it is the only game in the world at which a man can be a dub and yet tatuously enjoy himself, but 1 do caution him with the late Arnold Daly's pronounce- ment that golf is like a love affair: if you do not take it seriously, it’s no fun: if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart. He countered with coun sel that when I am in a small com munity [| must be careful even with my “Yea, yea” and “Nay, nay,” lest 1 subsequently find myself heralded as the originator of remarks to which | have but assented casually for the sake of lightening social discourse, which would not: be so precarious were it not that the repeated statements are un failingly of a supercritical or deroga tory nature. Nor would he tell me what had inspired his solicitude, so | do suspect that my comment on Lucy Dem. ing’s sunbath has received a wider cir- culation than methought the discretion of its auditors would justify. comicbooks.com