Butterfield 8, published in 1935, is a great novel of New York in the Depression, an insightful chronicle of America in the 1930's. Swirling around a myriad of people, flowing through circles of society, it is still quite raw and shocking.
Butterfield 8 became famous when Elizabeth Taylor played Gloria Wandrous in the 1960 film of the book, in which Elizabeth wore only a slip under her borrowed mink coat. The movie created a new story from the barest bones of the book by John O'Hara. The book sold over a million copies that year.
Gloria wakes up in the apartment of her married lover, the usual despair turning to weak defiance. Since he tore her dress off the night before, she feels she is owed his wife's coat, a mink will do. She came to New York a young art student, but spends her time socializing with men who maintain her lifestyle, often a money filled envelope discreetly left behind. Her good friend is Eddie, a struggling artist in Greenwich Village. The two share everything like family, and his girlfriend Norma finds her a dress to wear. Eddie was the doorman at a hotel for whores when Gloria came in as a third with a couple, and they have been inseparable ever since. Her married man is Weston Liggett, a manufacturer and Yale man with a wife and three girls, ready to set her up in an apartment with charge accounts, this 23 year-old young enough to be his daughter. His is a world of highballs at the club, and the world of alleyway speakeasies, where the wine is bottled that same night. Jimmy and Isobel (a Bryn Mawr girl) are a couple on the town frequenting that speakeasy the night Leggitt asks for the mink returned. They wander the streets talking about Walter Winchell, seeing the new Radio City being built, watching a James Cagney film, debating Herbert Hoover and Coolidge. Intermixed are Paul and Nancy ('The Farleys'), friends of friends with the Westover pedigree. Paul is a Princeton man, and theirs is the world of dinner parties and discussing stocks - the men who are buying gold as the market falls, those who are buying up luxury items for pennies from those in need, the men jumping in front of trains in despair. These characters, and more, fall in and out of this realist narrative, always returning to Gloria and Weston; as Weston leaves his wife, just when Gloria decides to remain free.
It is a revelation to read life in the thirties, reminding me of other classic novels of the time - They Shoot Horse's, Don't They? by Horace McCoy; The Day of The Locust by Nathanael West; and the raw truth seldom exposed in novels, reminiscent of Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. For we are exposed to a myriad of experiences such as abortion, gonorrhea, sniffing ether, menopause, menstration, prostitution, sexual abuse, 3-somes and 4-somes, lesbianism, Catholics, Irish, Protestant, self-proclaimed heebs, micks, fairies, jews, colored people, negroes (and worse), crime cases like Leopold-Loeb, gangsters like Legs Diamond, the jazz of the speakeasies, the entertainers and musicians of the day, the flow of homemade alcohol, the sports heroes - the sordid and sensational, all converging on the lives of a man and a woman on the fringe of society and the underworld.
"I was determined to make plain what I had seen." O'Hara based this on a sensational case of the time, the mysterious unsolved death of socialite and flapper Starr Faithfull in 1931. It was a shocker to the literary set. Butterfield 8 is the dialing code used by the telephone company for upper east side New York, not the number of an escort service as in the movie. Elizabeth Taylor called the film Butterball 4, and did it under protest to fulfill a contract, allowing her to film Cleopatra. Even though she won her first Academy Award for the role, she still said "it stinks."
1935 / Paperback / 258 pages
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