Vanity Fair Magazine – Page 9 – Old Magazine Articles

American Trucks & Armored Cars
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1916)

Recognizing the importance of armored vehicles, a group of American millionaires, among them Henry Clay Frick (1849 – 1919), pooled their money and donated a number of such items to the New York National Guard. VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE pursued this story and produced this article as it developed with a thorough review of each of the donated military vehicles. Although the trucks are photographed, few are named.

Butlers
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

Some witty words on the topic of butlers; what to expect from butlers, the treatment of butlers and how exactly one should be butled

It is not easy to butle, but it is still more difficult to be butled to…

Silent Movie Caricatures
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

When the Five O’Clock Whistle Blows in Hollywood is attached;
it appeared in VANITY FAIR eight years after Hollywood was declared the film capital of the world.

This single page cartoon was created by one of the great American caricaturists of the Twenties: Ralph Barton, and all the kingpins of the young empire are depicted (among others): Douglas Fairbanks, Marry Pickford, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Bebe Daniels, Bill Hart, Wallace Reed, Gloria Swanson, Nazimova, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Fatty Arbuckle and the writer Rupert Hughes.
Lording above them all, and represented simply by jodhpurs and riding boots, stands the founder of the feast – Cecil B. DeMille (and his brother).

Movie Ushers
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

A word on movie ushers and those darn flash lights…

A Predictable Silent Movie I
(Vanity Fair, 192?)

Attached is a Vanity Fair cartoon from the days of silent film illustrating how unsophisticated those movies truly were and how wildly predictable the plots and characters always seemed to be. This cartoon, along with a number similar magazine articles on this site, illustrate that such thinking was not entirely rare.

Another anti-silent film article can be read here…

This critic didn’t like silent movies either – –

Typical American Films…
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

The Conde Nast cartoonist Ann Fish wanted her swank readers to know that she was another Brit who recognized the reoccurring formula that young Hollywood relied on all too often and even though the film business was still in it’s infancy, there was such a thing as a typical American movie.

Predictable Characters from the Silent War Movies
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

Here are seven drawings by Henry Raleigh (1880 – 1944) that depict the sorts of silent film characters that were likely to be seen in the 1920s W.W. I movies. These sketches are accompanied by a few dry remarks by the Vanity Fair editors:

No matter how much we may wish to lose sight of the war, it can’t be done. There will always be reminders of it. You suppose that, just because a little thing like peace has been declared, the playwrights, the theatrical managers, and the moving picture producers are going to let a chance like the war get by? Since we have become accustomed to German spies, Red Cross nurse heroines, and motor corps vampires, we could never go back to the prosaic mildness of innocent little country heroines, villains in fur-lined overcoats and cub reporter heroes. No actor will ever again consent to play a society role in evening clothes with flap pockets and jet buttons, when he can appear in a war play wearing an aviator’s uniform and going around in a property airplane.

This 1918 silent movie was certainly mocked for its predictability…

Fashions from the Last Summer of the War
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

Six very fine fashion drawings illustrate what was generally perceived to be the chic silhouette during the August of 1918.

There may be some women who can get along without satin frocks, but it is exceedingly doubtful..

One of the First Reviews of ‘Sons and Lovers’
(Vanity Fair, 1913)

Later in the century there would be many ink-slingers to gush over the talents of D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930); but in 1913, the writer would simply have to bide his time and suffer the reviews that were printed in the society pages.

It emphatically is not a book for the ‘young person’, and it is certainly a book that will make the older conservative wince a bit…nevertheless it is a study that was worth doing, and D.H. Lawrence has done it well. He has dealt with very real things in a way that leaves a distinctness of impression unequaled by nine books out of ten one picks up nowadays.

Claude Monet at the Age of Eighty
(Vanity Fair, 1920)

The editors of VANITY FAIR saluted the eighty year-old painter Claude Monet, praising him as

the only remaining member of a little group of painters – Degas, Manet, Renoir and several others – known as the Master Impressionists.

‘Cupid to Seal the Balkan Peace”
(Vanity Fair, 1913)

By the time this item appeared in print, the Balkan War (1912-1913), was over however some of the swells of Europe put their crowned heads together and collectively came up with the best Medeival plan they could think of in order to insure the promise of peace. The plan was to have:

• the Czar’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga (1895 – 1918), would wed Serbia’s Crown Prince Alexander

• the Czar’s second daughter, Grand Duchess Tatiana (1897 – 1918), was promised to Rumania’s Crown Prince Charles (1893 – 1959)

• All concerned agreed that Rumania’s Pricess Elizabeth (1894 – 1956) and Crown Prince George of Greece (1890 – 1947) would make a simply splendid couple (they divorced in 1935).

Much Talk of White Waistcoats, Shoes and Shirts
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

When the smoke cleared following the close of that dreadful unpleasantness that spanned the years 1914 to 1918, there remained much work to do; bodies to be buried, cities to be rebuilt. Men and nations prepared to face the new realities that came with the new social structure; many weighty subjects had to be addressed that had been ignored for so long a time. The most pressing of these topics was deciding which was the proper combination of white waistcoat and dinner jacket? In an age of industrial slaughter, which was more suitable: double-breasted or single-breasted? and what of ties, shoes and overcoats?

Theater Intermissions and Prohibition
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

Prohibition has been pretty rough on everybody, but there is no class of people which it has hit so hard as the theater-goers. The Federal Amendment has completely wrecked their evenings. It isn’t so bad while the show is going on; the blow falls between the acts. In happier times the intermissions were the high spots of the evening…

With pin-point accuracy, Vanity Fair was able to identify the new minority-victim class that emerged from America’s unfortunate experiment with Prohibition: Broadway theater enthusiasts (It might be argued that the real victims were American bar tenders, many of whom high-tailed it over to Europe where they established a number of American-style bars).

The attached page from the magazine can be classified as humor and is illustrated with six great sketches by Edith Plummer.

Read other articles from 1919.

A Cartoonist with the U.S. Army in Germany
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

A few cartoons by the illustrator George Wright (1872 – 1951) depicting the American Third Army during it’s 1919 occupation of Germany.

The Rosettis
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

Shortly after the death of William Michael Rossetti
(1829 – 1919), Welsh poet and essayist Arthur Symons
(1865 – 1945) wrote this essay remembering the man, his brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the friendship that the two shared with poets George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Charles Huard: War Artist in the 1914 Trenches
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

Seven sketches from Soissons by the war artist Charles Huard (1875 – 1965) as they first appeared in a fashionable American society magazine.

Click here to read additional article about the World War I artists.

The Well Dressed Man in Winter
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.

Russian Modernism After the Revolution
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

Art alone survives the earthquake shocks of revolution, and Russian art has been doubly secure because of it’s deep-rooted imagination and it’s passionate sincerity.

That was the word from Oliver M. Sayler writing from Moscow as it starved during the Summer of 1919. Sayler, known primarily for his writings on Russian theater from this period, wrote enthusiastically about the Russian Suprematist Casimir Malyevitch, Futurist David Burliuk and The Jack of Diamonds Group; believing deeply in the Russian Revolution, he wrote not a word about how the Soviets mistreated the modern artists of Russia.