THE BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS.They dressed-up, partied and kept going on a diet of cocktails and cocaine, then the world changed. Sound familiar?



Bright young things in 1924



How can you describe the Bright Young Things? This was a generation of privileded young men and women who seemed to have little or no interest in politics and no understanding of poverty - but what mattered most to them was dressing up , having a ball and being photographed while doing it. The parallels between the Bright Young Things and the hedonism of Celtic Tiger era are striking. Too much money in the hands of the ignorant, rampant sexual and substance abuse, decadence as a lifestyle and the entitled attitude that there is no tomorrow, or, even if there is, the wealthy are exempt.

 

A snapshot from of their OTT costume parties.

The most famous of the Bright Young People, the ones trailed by London tabloid reporters and photographers for most of the decade - Elizabeth Ponsonby, Babe Plunkett-Greene, Brenda Dean-Paul and Stephen Tennant and Brian Howard - were so seriously committed to their pleasures that they never got around to doing much else.Stephen Tennant - once described by Jacob Epstein as the most beautiful person, male or female, he ever saw was the most notorious of them all.Clad in shockingly bright clothes, lipstick and face powder,Stephen was one of the brightest of the bright young things. He is also famous for having spent much of his life in bed.

   Stephen Tennant - looking like Bowie.

Stephen was the youngest son of Lord and Lady Glenconner - an alien figure in wasp-waisted pin-stripe suit, lame tie, vaselined eyelids and Marcell-waved hair (complete with a dusting of gold). The look itself was a gesture of rebellion: for Tennant's generation, the recent war was a hateful memory, dismissed by Ronald Firbank as "that great persecution".

Stephen Tennant as Prince Charming

Indeed, when photographed for his 21st birthday by Cecil Beaton, Stephen wore a leather coat copied from his brother's wartime flying jacket (with the addition of a chinchilla fur collar) - not to mention a dash of eyeliner.Tennant belonged to a circle - combining theatre, fashion and the arts. At parties, the men wore mascara, dabbed their faces with powder-puffs and screamed with joy at the sight of an acquaintance. Gender differences were blurred, copious alcohol was consumed and image was - everything.

Stephen Tennant at 21

Stephen led a hardcore of 1920s fantasists whose increasingly bizarre antics attracted the daily attention of diary columns - written by their own friends and  told in the gossip columns of papers such as The Daily Mail and The Mirror - marking the start of celebrity culture as we know it.Such was the interest in Stephen and his coterie of  freinds that , wherever they went, they were photographed - becoming - in a way the first generation of celebrities who were famous, pretty much, for being famous.



Impersonation Party, 1927: Among the revellers are Cecil Beaton (back left), Tallulah Bankhead (front right), Elizabeth Ponsonby (in black hat), and (front row left) Stephen Tennant as Queen Marie of Romania

It was an age of new media, of tabloids, telephones, telegrams, with a soundtrack by Noel Coward, gowns by Schiaparelli and Chanel, and cocaine . But more than anything else the bright young things were known for their parties.Nowhere was the spirit of the age more apparent than at the famous parties about which so much has been written.

The summer of 1928 saw the peak of this frenetic, infantalist activity. "We hardly ever saw the light of day, except at dawn", wrote Nancy Mitford. "There was a costume ball every night: the White Party, the Circus Party, the Boat Party, etc... ". It was as if no one wanted to stand still long enough to look where they were going.The culmination came with the notorious Swimming Bath Party, thrown by Brian Howard and friends at St George's Public Baths.

Inside, party-goers wore bathing suits "of the most dazzling kinds" and danced madly "to the strains of an orchestra .As the party hotted up, guests began to fling themselves in the water. By the early hours, such was the commotion that the police were called - only to be dragged into the changing rooms "in the hope of general disrobing". It was all getting too much.

                                                                     Elizabeth Ponsonby



No one remembers the name of Elizabeth Ponsonby now, but in the Twenties she played the same role in her world that Paris Hilton does in ours. Beautiful,well connected but endlessly restless, Elizabeth was at the centre of a group of the shimmeringly social Londoners.Wherever there was a decadent party that involved dressing up as a baby, going on a treasure hunt for the Prime Minister's cigars or ingesting a large number of new-fangled cocktails, you could be sure to find Elizabeth at her laughing,glamorous best.

Elizabeth's story did not end happily. Serious and civic-minded, Lord and Lady Ponsonby simply could not understandwhy their daughter and her unsavoury friends were unable to knuckle down to adult life.Elizabeth made a half-hearted attempt at acting, and later took a short-lived job as a dress-shop assistant, but basically drank, gave parties and practically bankrupted her parents, who fretted helplessly.

Instead of studying or working or even just getting married, she appeared to racket round the countryside in sports cars, mocking everything the older generation held most dear. After being all but disinherited, Elizabeth sank lower and lower before dying of alcoholism while still in her 30s.

Brenda Dean Paul

The most scandalous of the set, Brenda Dean Paul, was seldom out of the papers as she lurched from collapse to crisis, high as six kites on heroin or morphine and, when in a bad mood, apt to rub lobster mayonnaise into someone's hair. She was an "it" girl. She was famous merely for being famous. Her life was followed on an almost daily basis by the society newspapers.And so when, for example, Brenda Dean Paul was on one of her drunk escapades, there would be newspaper headlines on every corner simply saying, "Brenda Jailed Again," or, you know, "Brenda In Trouble." 

Although Brenda Dean Paul became a famous drug addict, her background was anything but squalid. Born in 1907, her mother was a Belgian pianist and her father, Sir Aubrey Dean Paul. As a teenager she haunted the theatre to “strain her eyes at the leading stars.”Back in London she joined the infamous 'Bright Young Thing' set and rubbed sequinned shoulders with Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton at “massed drinking orgies,” never going to bed “before four or five in the morning.”

But when she became seriously ill after an abortion or miscarriage, Brenda grew dependent on morphine, using it as “a barrage between herself and reality, mentally and physically.”Soon she was “one of the most discussed young women in London.”In 1952, she finally succumbed to an overdose but by then, the death of a minor aristocrat's daughter barely merited a footnote in the back pages.





Brenda Dean Paul decended into herion addiction



The Bright young things had exsisted in a period of unparalled prosperity but with the 1929 stock market crash in New York, Britain's financial system (then as now) felt the reverberations.By the end of the decade - the mood of the nation had changed and people were no longer interested in reading about the lifestyles of the priviledged elite.

In an atmosphere of belt-tightening and diminished horizons the parties dwindled, and as World War II began, many of the Bright Young People finally grew up: Many joined the war effort and were scattered across the globe as soldiers, intelligence officers and ambulance drivers. Others, seemingly incapable of living beyond the era that had defined their lives, became victims of their own self-indulgence.Stephen Tennant became a recluse in his Wiltshire home, after suffering tuberculosis, mental illness, and a hardening of the heart.

The Bright Young People's decadence, their frivolity, their refusal of moral seriousness for a shared escapist devotion to pleasure is, as it should be - both enticing and repulsive. There was an art and a grandeur to their living that in some ways reminds me of the Celtic tiger years - and of the people who are still, somehow, trapped in that moment.

'I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.'
John D. Rockefeller

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blog research...


*Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant  by Philip Hoare
*Bright Young People, By DJ Taylor* `Noel Coward: A Biography' (University of Chicago Press)

Additional research - Daily Mail and Independent newspaper archives.