But they were only two of the clamoring crowd who populated the social scene of those times. The term “socialite” was a code word, invented about 1928 by Briton Haddon, Henry Luce’s Yale classmate and partner in their invention Time magazine. The word meant rich, and maybe a little racy. It meant play not work in what was essentially a Puritanical society. They were ostensibly the “leisure class,” gentlemen of leisure, ladies of leisure. They were the babies of the last of the Victorians where people lived off the “fat of the land,” namely their land of banks and stocks and bonds.
Haddon was a wordsmith and the term was breezy and smart-alecky, reflecting the “who cares” economic euphoria America was swimming in in the late 1920s. The automotive age was in full swing; the country was getting out and about drinking bootleg liquor and bathtub gin. It was Prohibition in name (and law) only because people were boozing everywhere and flaunting it (breaking the law), and even killing themselves with it. In Manhattan, the flappers and the jazz babies, dressed to kill, were out on the town, hitting the speaks, celebrating the new freedom, dancing and drinking up a storm.
The socialites were the coolest (a word not yet in the vernacular) of the pack because they had nothing but time and money. They frequented first the speakeasies, and then after the Repeal of Prohibition, the clubs like the Stork and El Morocco. They dressed to the nines—the women in gowns and jewels and the men in white tie or black tie. They mingled with theatre people and movie stars who aped their style, adding dash and glamour to it. They were the “socialites.”
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