Newsstand: 1925: French Frolics

Context | View Contents | View Magazine

 

a virtual newsstand from the summer of 1925

Overview

           French Frolics, a short-lived humor and “girlie” magazine, contained high-quality European pin-up drawings, nude photography, short stories, politically-satirical comics, and one-liner jokes.[1] Much of the illustrative content was essentially cut and pasted from European magazines such as La Vie Parisienne, Le Sourire, Le Rire, and Berliner Leben.

 

French Frolics: La Vie Parisienne

 

           French Frolics published six monthly issues starting in January of 1925 and ending in July of 1925. The contents featured in French Frolics were similar to other magazines in it genre like Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Snappy, Red Pepper, and Artist & Models. Sold as a humor magazine, French Frolics: La Vie Parisienne primarily took content from other risqué or humorous magazine to fill its pages, specifically the French magazine La Vie Parisienne. Unlike similar risque magazines of the time, French Frolics cost 10 cents more than the average pulp magazine, presumably due to the quality of its paper and illustrations. The magazine claimed to be the American LaVie Parisienne.

 

Origins of French Frolics: La Vie Parisienne

 

La Vie Parisienne began in 1863 as a weekly newspaper in Paris. The founder and editor, known only as Marcelin, intended the publication to rejuvenate the Parisian way of life through culture and high society. La Vie Parisienne was “intended as a guide to the privileged social and artistic life in the French capital,” highlighting the artistic European culture.[2] At the beginning of WWI, many European periodicals ended publications, while others merely adapted. La Vie Parisienne proliferated until the beginning of WWI when the newspaper restructured itself as a magazine. After the magazine’s restructuring in 1914, it had more tongue and cheek tone in its attempt to capture the fashion and style of the Parisian woman. The majority of the art in La Vie Parisienne came from the distinguished artists living in Paris such as Georges Barbier, Gerda Wegener, Cheri Herouard, and Georges Leonnec.[3]

 

The Risky Business of French Frolics

 

           Since the turn of the twentieth century, the American Society for the Suppression of Vice had been trying to rid the states of erotica, or “men’s interest” publications. In May 1925, Omaha, Chicago and the entire state of Washington banned the mailing of La Vie Parisienne magazine for “salacious” and “indecent” content. Other magazines involved in the ban were Artists and Models, Hot Dog, Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang. These magazines were deemed “pornographic” and seen as “pandering to the suppressed bawdiness of soiled minds.” A Time magazine article from June 1925 notes that La Vie Parisienne “cannot be understood without a modicum of sophistication,” while acknowledging that the “English translations, however, accompany the more salacious jocosities, and these invariably emasculate whatever finesse there may have been in the original.”[4] French Frolics was one of these “English translations,” considering itself as an “American Magazine in the Parisian Style” (French Frolics).

 

French Frolics and the Shifty Masthead

 

           French Frolics’ editor is listed on the title page as a Leinad J. Droflaw, a likely pseudonym for Harry A. Glynn, the editor of Red Pepper: A Peppy Periodical for Peppy People, the publishing address of which matches that of French Frolics.[5] Very little is known about the age and origin of Harry A. Glynn other than he began publishing his first magazine Glynn’s Jamboree out of Yonkers, NY, in 1922. He may possibly have been the same Harry A. Glynn who began Pap-R Products, a paper manufacturing company in Martinsville, Ill. in 1947.[6] Leinad J. Droflaw is simply Daniel J. Walford spelled backwards, who was one of the founding members of the American Temperance Society in New York.[7] The Temperance Society rallied for the prohibition movement that lead to the 18th Amendment, a topic that is made as the butt of a risqué, two-page spread comic within the February issue of French Frolics. The reference to the Temperance Society leader within this magazine shows the political satire and the various social dynamics within the print culture of the 1920s.

           French Frolics’ audience was most likely the middle class, American male. Besides the Parisian style art and pornographic photographs, the magazine featured humorous sketches, jokes, and epigrams. These features of the magazine were shared with many other humor magazines which could be considered as the sub-genre of “humorisque”--a light-hearted juxtaposition between sex and wit. The magazine is also illustrated with the short jokes taken from college magazines in the segment “Int’l Kollege Wit & Kapers,” which illustrates the popular allure of youth culture, much like the allure of the youth culture in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels of the same time period.[8] During the economic boom of the 1920s, many Americans felt a sense of “tragic sensibility,” but allowed themselves to relive their youth via proxy in periodicals. This aspect of the magazine shows that the average French Frolics reader would have at least an understanding of the college experience, if not a comprehensive collegial education.

 

The Art, the Style, the Piracy

 

           The February 1925 issue of French Frolics depicts an eagle with a postal purse carrying issues of La Vie Parisienne as well as Berliner Leben, La Sourire and La Rire, over to the United States where both women and men rejoiced at the eagle’s arrival. Interestingly, many of the artists featured in La Vie Parisienne, like Cherie Herouard, George Barbier, and Gerda Wegener, produced art for many of these same periodicals during the 1920s. Many of the works in French Frolics, though, were pirated and edited to exclude names, and published without artistic attribution.

           The majority of the content within French Frolics was pirated both from the European risqué periodicals and witty college campus magazines such as the Pitt Panther, Punch Bowl, and The Gargoyle (French Frolics). The cut and paste aspect of French Frolics was shared with a few magazines, regurgitating content of other magazines for their own. With copyright laws still in their infancy, the piracy of magazine copy was a relatively common practice. The New York National Guardsman monthly magazine made a habit of reprinting humor as well within their section “Keep Smiling: With the Aid of Scissors, Paste Pot and Brain Storms.”[9] Notably, the August 1925 edition of The National Guardsman features a joke entitled “Tickled Silly,” mentioning that the humor came from French Frolics (NYNGM, p.11).

 

The End of French Frolics

 

           Very little is known about the reasons why the magazine ended its publication only six months after publishing its first issue. What is known is that both French Frolics and Red Pepper were placed on a list of periodicals prohibited from import into Canada in 1925.[10] But was a Canadian ban the reason the publication ended? Very possible, and there isn’t enough known about the magazine or its editor to conjecture otherwise. This was a time of violent suppression, especially of such early girlie magazines. Not only was this magazine an illegal publication due to the sexual content, but also because the European pirated content. What is known is that French Frolics filled a consumer need for sex, humor, youth culture and Parisian exoticism during the 1920s. Harry A. Glynn attempted to create a publication that would cater to a wide variety of risqué ideals.

—Contextualization by Rose Norton

 

Notes

 

 

[1] French Frolics: La Vie Parisienne. 1.2: Feb 1925. The French Frolics Publishing Co.: Newark, NJ. Print. The full run of the magazine is in selected holdings at Ohio State University Periodical Archives. French Frolics. Web. WorldCat. 10/10. <http://library.ohio-state.edu >.

[2] Dian Hanson’s The History of Men’s Magazines, Vol. 1. Taschen Publishing. Cologne, Germany. 2004. Print.

[3] Unknown stub. “La Vie Parisienne” Wikipedia.com. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org>. 9/10.

[4] Author unknown, “The Press: Pornographia.” Time Magazine. Monday, Jun. 01, 1925. Web archive. Time.com. 9/10. <http://www.time.com>.

[5] 126 Washington St. Newark, NJ. This address is located on what is now Rutgers University campus. Any affiliation between Rutgers University and French Frolics or Red Pepper has not been confirmed (and is highly dubious). (Red Pepper, Vol. 1, No. 9, March 1925, spicy pulp. Web. PulpTrader.com. 10/10).

[6] The Bulletin of Bibliography and Dramatic Index. Vol. 10. Ed. by Frederick Winthrop Faxon. Pub. by The F.W. Faxon Company: Boston. Web. GoogleBooks. 10/10. <http://books.google.com>.

[7] Author unknown. “Suppression of the Liquor Traffic” The New York Times. April 19,1874. Web. NYTimes archives. 10/10.<http://nytimes.com>.

[8] Prigozy, By Ruth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Web. 02 Nov. 2010.

[9] Official State Publication. The New York National Guardsman: 2.5, August 1925. Web. New York State Military Museum Archives. 10/10. <dmna.state.ny.us>

[10] Ernst, Morris Leopold, and William Seagle. (1969) To the Pure. A Study of Obscenity and the Censor. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., p 300-2. Print.In October of 1934, a warehouse raid occurred that lead to the burning of some 12,000 copies of risque periodicals (Ellis, Douglas. Uncovered: The Hidden Art of Girlie Pulps. Silverspring, MD: Adventure House, 2003. p 7). In 1874, the Comstock Act and its later amendments that created the Comstock Laws made the shipment of illicit and lewd materials through the United States Post Office a Federal offense. (Eskridge, William N., Gaylaw: challenging the apartheid of the closet, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 392). Noted in Dian Hanson’s History of Men’s Magazines, Vol. I, publishers of “men’s interest” periodicals used “lampblack” as a temporary pigment in their magazines. In 1896, the publisher of Broadway Magazine, Lew Rosen, was convicted by the Supreme Court on obscenity charges for his special “Tenderloin Issue” which contained “patches of lampblack which could be rubbed off with a piece of bread to reveal ‘females in different attitudes of indecency.’” Rosen was sentenced to “thirteen months’ hard labor.” (Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. NY: Viking Penguin Inc.1987. pg 175.)

 

Works Cited

 

Author unknown, “The Press:Pornographia.” Time Magazine. Monday, Jun. 01, 1925. Web archive. Time.com. 9/10. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,751377,00.html>.

Author unknown. “Suppression of the Liquor Traffic” The New York Times. April 19,1874. Web. NYTimes archives. 10/10.<http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F10E13FF3A5D1A7493CBA8178FD85F408784F9>.

Ellis, Douglas. Uncovered: The Hidden Art of Girlie Pulps. Silverspring, MD: Adventure House, 2003. p 7.

Ernst, Morris Leopold, and William Seagle. To the Pure. A Study of Obscenity and the Censor. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969. p 300-2.

 Eskridge, William N. Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. p.392.

Faxon, Frederick Winthrop, ed. The Bulletin of Bibliography and Dramatic Index. Vol. 10. Boston: F.W. Faxon Company, .Web. GoogleBooks. 10/10. <http://books.google.com/books?id=nkUPAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>.

 French Frolics: La Vie Parisienne. Ed. By Harry A. Glynn, 1.2: Feb 1925. The French Frolics Publishing Co.: Newark, NJ. Print.

Hanson, Dian. The History of Men’s Magazines, Vol. 1.. Cologne, Germany: Taschen Publishing, 2004.

Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. NY: Viking Penguin Inc, 1987. p 175.

Prigozy, Ruth ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002. Web. 02 Nov. 2010.

Red Pepper, Vol. 1, No. 9, March 1925, Ed. By Harry A. Glynn. Web. PulpTrader.com. 10/10. <http://75.95.141.45:8083/web/pulp_ebay.php?id=6906753481&Bkey=208697&book=+Red+Pepper%2C+Mar+1925%2C+v1%239>).

The New York National Guardsman: 2.5, August 1925. Web. New York State Military Museum Archives. 10/10. <dmna.state.ny.us/historic/research/NY_National.../NYNG1925_08.pdf>

Unknown stub. “La Vie Parisienne” Wikipedia.com. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_Parisienne>. 9/10.

 

click cover for magazine

February 1925