The Roaring 20s and the rise of celebrity

It was during the The Roaring 20s that the first real celebrities began to appear, with the ever increasing popularity of cinema having a huge role to play.

Here’s a few of the most famous faces…

Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson was one of the most prominent stars during the silent film era and was one of the most sought after actresses in Hollywood.  She was also one of the first fashion icons, and audiences would not only flock to see her films but also to see what she was wearing and try to copy her style. Her fashion, hair styles, and jewels were copied around the world – ornamented with beads, jewels, peacock and ostrich feathers, and other extravagant pieces haute couture of the day. She was one of the most photographed women in the world, with a commanding presence, despite being only a petit 5ft tall.

Swanson’s popularity waned during the 1930s and the introduction of the talkies. She made a comeback in the 1950s, starring in Sunset Boulevard, where, in a case of art imitating life, Swanson played Norma Desmond, a faded silent movie star, who falls in love with a young screenwriter and dreams of making a comeback.  Swanson received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role.

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Still considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of cinema, English comic actor and filmmaker Charles Spencer Chaplin rose to fame during the 1920s.

Chaplin founded his own film distribution company in 1919 so that he would have complete control over the films he made and they would fit into his vision. His first feature-length picture was The Kid (1921), followed by A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), all featuring his on screen ‘tramp’ persona. He continued to make silent films in the 1930s, refusing to move into sound.

Not only did Chaplin star in his films, he wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored most of them as well.  The combination of slapstick and pathos, with a political and often autobiographical edge, struck a chord with audiences and he was a much-loved public figure.

In 1972 Chaplin received an Honorary Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century” and he continues to be held in high regard to this day.

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker

Once described as “the most famous woman in the world”, Josephine Baker was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress.  Born in St. Louis, Missouri, but later becoming a citizen of France.

Baker’s childhood in St Louis was poor, but her talent and confidenence attracted the attention of the St Louis Chorus Vaudeville Show, and she joined aged 15.  After a stint on Broadway, she headed to Paris in 1925, where she rose to fame as a performer and where she made her home.

Baker was the first African-American female to star in a major motion picture, to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world famous entertainer.  She refused to perform for segregated audiences in America, and is noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. She was also known for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and received the French military honour, the Croix de guerre.

Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth

George Herman “Babe” Ruth, Jr., nicknamed “the Bambino” and “the Sultan of Swat”, was an American professional baseball player and one of the first celebrity sportsmen.

He was known for his hitting brilliance, setting many records and was the first player to hit 60 home runs in one season, a mark not surpassed until 1961.

Ruth is credited with changing baseball itself. The popularity of the game exploded in the 1920s, largely due to his influence. He has since become regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture. Ruth’s legendary power and charismatic personality made him a larger than life figure in the “Roaring Twenties”, and according to ESPN, he was the first true American sports celebrity superstar whose fame transcended baseball. Off the field, he was famous for his charity contributions which included helping children to learn and play baseball, but also was noted for his often reckless lifestyle.

Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel

Founder of the Chanel Brand, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was the only fashion designer to appear on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Chanel is credited with liberating women from rigid corsets and petticoats and popularising the sportswear and casual chic that defined the look on the 1920s.

As early as 1915, Harper’s Bazaar raved over Chanel’s designs: “The woman who hasn’t at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of fashion … This season the name Chanel is on the lips of every buyer.”

She trademarked a look of youthful ease, confidence, liberated physicality and understated elegance in the post war era and is credited with the creation of iconic fashion items such as the “little black dress”, the Chanel Suit, naticual chic, and the Chanel Bag with its famous chain strap.

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Great Inventions of the 1920s

Alongside the revelry, the fashions and the music of the Roaring 20s, great strides were being made in the world of science and invention.

The Jazz Age saw in the creation of some of the everyday items we couldn’t imagine living without today…

An early Band Aid box

Band Aid

Earle Dickson was working as cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson when he came up with the idea for the self adhesive sticking plaster in 1920.Earle’s wife Josephine was always cutting and burning her fingers while preparing food, and he noticed that the bandages she was using to dress the wounds (consisting of separate gauze and adhesive tape) would soon fall off her fingers as she continued to work. Dickson took a piece of gauze and attached it to the centre of a piece of tape, and then covered the product with crinoline to keep it sterile. His boss, James Johnson, saw Dickson’s invention and decided to manufacture band-aids to the public.

Sales were slow at first, until Johnson & Johnson decided to give Boy Scout troops free Band-Aids as a publicity stunt.  By 1924 Johnson & Johnson introduced a machine that produced sterilized Band-Aids. In World War II, millions were shipped overseas, helping popularise the product and Earle Dickson was made vice-president of the company.

Rossum’s Universal Robots

Loudspeaker

In 1924, two General Electric researchers, Chester W. Rice and Edward Washburn Kellogg patented the modern, moving coil, direct radiator, loudspeaker, which become the prominent design for all loudspeakers. The Rice and Kellogg loudspeakers were sold to consumers under the name of “Radiola” loudspeakers in 1926, and were superior to anything previously invented by lowering sound distortion and raising audio quality for the consumer.

Kellogg also patented an electrostatic loudspeaker in 1934.

Robot

Although the idea of automata originates in the mythologies of many cultures around the world, and designs for a mechanical knight were drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495, the first use of the word ‘Robot’ was published in 1920.

The acclaimed Czech playwright, Karel Čapek, made famous the word robot, taken from robota, which means “serf labor”. Čapek introduced the word in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which was first performed in Prague in January 1921. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. The issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of the way they are treated.

The first humanoid robot, based on a suit of armor with electrical actuator, was exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Model Engineers Society in London in 1928.

The Schick Dry Shaver

Electric Razor

The first electric razor was patented in 1928 by the American manufacturer Col. Jacob Schick.

Schick left the army in 1919 and devoted himself to his dream project of perfecting a dry shaver. Inspired by weaponry he saw in the service, and wondering why people would risk cutting themselves on new blades, Schick developed the Magazine Repeating Razor, and in 1925 he started a company of the same name. It was the forerunner of the injector razor. The blades were sold in clips which were easily loaded into the razor without touching the blade.

The Magazine Repeating Razor was placed on the market in 1926. Although this product was doing well in the marketplace, Schick was devoted to developing his product. In 1927, his electric razor was perfected to the point of being a marketable product. In 1929, the electric dry shaver went on the market, and in 1930 the firm was incorporated as Schick Dry Shaver, Inc.

Clarence Birdseye

Frozen food

Although many ancient civilisations were preserving their food by freezing many centuries ago, it was Clarence Birdseye who invented, developed, and commercialised a method for quick-freezing food in 1923. Brooklyn born Birdseye was a taxidermist by trade, but had aspirations to become a chef and wished his family could have fresh food all year.  He observed the people of the Arctic preserving fresh fish in barrels of sea water and concluded that rapid freezing in extremely low temperatures could retain the freshness of food when it thawed and cooked months later.

In 1923, Birdseye invested a total of $7 on an electric fan, buckets of brine and chunks of ice, and perfected a system of packing food into waxed cardboard boxes and flash freezing. The Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation and the Postum Company (later the General Foods Corporation) bought Clarence Birdseye’s patents and trademarks in 1929 for $22 million.

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Literature of the 1920s

The social and economic changes of the 1920s not only manifested themselves in the music that was written during the decade, but into literature also.

Like the music of the Roaring 20s, some of the themes and writing styles were considered controversial at the time, but have survived to become much-loved works.

Here’s a few of our favourites…

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby –  by F. Scott Fitzgerald (U.S.) 1925

The novel that defined the era.
Inspired by the parties he attended on Long Island’s north shore, Fitzgerald began writing The Great Gatsby in 1922, with the aim of producing “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”

The novel revolves around the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his passion for the beautiful Daisy Buchannan. It paints a critical portrait of the Jazz age, an era known not only for unprecedented economic prosperity, jazz music and flapper culture, but also for bootlegging and organised crime.

Despite being very much inspired by the mood of the time,  the plot is timeless and relatable,  exploring themes of decadence, idealism and excess and has been described as cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

Ulysses

Ulysses – by James Joyce (Ireland) 1922

Considered to be one of the most important works of Modernist literature, Ulysses was first serialised in parts in an American journal called The Little Review between 1918 and 1920, and was published in its entirely in 1922.

Ulysses chronicles an ordinary day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom and establishes a series of parallels between its characters and those of Homer’s poem Odyssey (Ulysses being the Latinised name of Odyssus).

Ulysses is approximately 265,000 words in length, using a lexicon of 30,030 words.  The experimental prose – full of puns and allusions as well as the stream of consciousness technique, rich characterisations and humour, have made the book highly regarded, however it has also attracted controversy and scrutiny.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh – by A.A. Milne (England)1926

Winnie-the-Pooh, also known as Pooh Bear was created by A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh, which was published in 1926 and was followed up by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was also the basis for the character Christopher Robin.  Christopher’s toys also lent their names to most of the other characters. Christopher had named his toy bear “Winnie” after a Canadian black bear he often saw at London Zoo, and “Pooh”, after a swan they had met while on holiday.

The Pooh stories have been translated into many languages, including Alexander Lenard’s Latin translation, Winnie ille Pu, which was first published in 1958, and, in 1960, became the only Latin book ever to have been featured on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence (England) 1928

The controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published privately in Italy in 1928.  The book became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of words that were considered unprintable at the time.

When the full unexpurgated edition was finally published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and the publishers only escaped conviction by being able to prove the book was a work of literary merit. Until then, the only version available in Britain was heavily censored.

Besides the sexual content of the book, Lady Chatterly’s Lover also paints a picture of the class system and social conflict in Britain in the early 20th century.  The affair of the aristocratic woman with the working class man is said to draw parallels to the situation into which Lawrence was born and that into which he was married.  Lawrence’s father was a coal miner, and the signs of dissatisfaction and resentment of the working-class mining community are also present in the book.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods

Bambi, a Life in the Woods – by Felix Salten (Austria) 1923

Considered to be one of the first environmentally conscious novels ever published, Bambi, a Life in the Woods or Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde was originally published as an adult book in Salten’s native Austria.  The novel traces the life of a male roe deer from his childhood and loss of his mother to finding a mate, whilst all the time learning from his father the dangers posed by humans in the forest.

More than 200 editions of the novel have been released, with almost 100 German and English editions alone, and numerous translations and reprintings in more than 20 other languages. It has also been released in a variety of formats, including printed medium, audio book, Braille, and E-book formats.

With the Second World War looming, the publisher of the first English translation of the book, Max Schuster, helped Salten who was Jewish, to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 and introduced him, and Bambi to the Walt Disney Studios.  MGM films were initially interested in making a live-action adaptation of the work, however this was considered too difficult.  Walt Disney bought the rights in 1937 and started working on the animation immediately, adapting the story for a young audience as it was considered a bit grim and sombre for children.

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Jazz at the Philharmonic

George Gershwin

When, on 24 October, APO Principal Clarinettist Gordon Richards rips into the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue, no one will doubt for a second that George Gershwin was a genius composer.

What’s harder to answer is whether what he composed was classical or jazz. Rhapsody is shot through with blue notes and other jazz inflections, and yet it’s a piano concerto.

Ultimately, the question is moot: Gershwin was a composer of music, and drew his influences from the European tradition as well as the popular tunes he inhaled every time he strolled the streets of his hometown, New York.

Besides, in Gershwin’s music the classical/jazz distinction often lies in the interpretation. Take ‘Summertime’, from Porgy and Bess, as an example. When the soprano Cynthia Haymon sings it, in a famous recording with Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s classical. When Billie Holiday’s singing with Count Basie, it’s jazz. It’s a tribute to Gershwin’s ability that ‘Summertime’ sounds completely natural in either setting.

Kurt Weill

The European Twist

It’s a similar case for Kurt Weill, whose left-wing critique of capitalist decadence Die Dreigroschenoper found a home on Broadway as The Threepenny Opera, and is mostly famous these days for Bobby Darin’s cheery ditty ‘Mack the Knife’, which began life as a menacing song about a murderer.

Jazz was all the rage in 1920s Weimar Germany, when Weill wrote Die Dreigroschenoper. It was even more popular in France, where a number of African American musicians found an escape from the racism they faced in their segregated homeland. Francis Poulenc claimed not to like jazz, but his ballet Les Biches does a good job of hiding his distaste. The syncopations of the work’s ‘Rondeau’ and ‘Rag-Mazurka’ in particular show a clear debt to jazz. At a time when Paris was awash with the style, how could it be otherwise?

Francis Poulenc

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), despite eventually living in both Paris and New York, was Russian, and came to jazz from the perspective of an outsider. Even so, as the most rhythmically adept composer of his age, Stravinsky was perhaps inevitably attracted to the dancing pulses he heard coming from America. His most famous work in this vein was the Ebony Concerto, described by its composer as “a jazz concerto with a blues slow movement,” and written for the bandleader and clarinettist Woody Herman. By 1945, when he produced the concerto, Stravinsky had moved to America, but he had been writing jazz-influenced works since the late 1910s. The Soldier’s Tale (completed in 1918 – and to be performed by the APO in 2014) contains a ‘Ragtime’ dance and the same year saw a full work, also called Rag-Time, for 11 instruments.

Treemonisha

Giving Back

The influence didn’t go one way. The king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, wrote a ballet and two operas. The second of them, Treemonisha, has been performed with the soprano Kathleen Battle in the title role and recorded by that most establishment of classical music labels, Deutsche Grammophon.

Miles Davis

By the mid-1940s, Duke Ellington and his musical foil Billy Strayhorn were composing large-scale suites for jazz orchestra, including the ‘jazz symphony’ Black, Brown and Beige (1943).

A touch later, Miles Davis embarked on a series of collaborations with arranger Gil Evans. Among them was the album Sketches of Spain, which contains arrangements of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, which classical fans will know as ‘Cancion del fuego fatuo’, from Manuel de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo. Miles and Evans also got together to produce a partly improvised, partly orchestrated jazz version of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Which is more or less where we came in…

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Notorious in 1920

Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,
And he shows them pearly white
Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear
And he keeps it out of sight.
 – Kurt Weill

During the prohibition era the dealing of outlawed liquor was big business, and the gangsters running the operations had control of whole areas of major cities, often with political influence.

Some of the most famous crime lord’s of the era have become house-hold names.

Al Capone

Al Capone

Alphonse Gabriel Capone is probably the most famous organized crime lord in American history. Capone was the leader of The Chicago Outfit, a prohibition-era crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling liquor and other illegal activities including bribery of government figures and prostitution.

Despite his unsavory occupation, Capone was seen by many as a modern-day Robin Hood and was a highly visible public figure, making large donations to charity.  However, his reputation was damaged beyond repair following his involvement in the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven members of a rival gang were ambushed by Capone’s men and executed.

Capone was eventually imprisoned in 1931, convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to incarceration at the then-new Alcatraz prison. He died from a cardiac arrest following a stroke in 1947.

Squizzy Taylor

Squizzy Taylor

Joseph Leslie Theodore “Squizzy” Taylor was a Melbourne-based gangster whose crimes ranged from pick pocketing and assault to bank-robbery and murder.

Despite being only 5’2” in stature, Taylor enjoyed a fearsome reputation in Melbourne.  He is said to have “piercing, black eyes and a treacherous mind”.
Taylor became a household name in Melbourne, with his exploits making many a newspaper headline, and due to his ability to avoid conviction was regarded as something of a criminal mastermind.  He was a vain man and basked in his notoriety, writing letters to the media whilst in hiding from the police and even staring in a film.

The Australian television series Underbelly: Squizzy is based on his life.

Baby Face Nelson

Baby Face Nelson

Lester Joseph Gillis, better known as George Nelson or Baby Face Nelson has the dubious distinction of having killed more FBI agents in the line of duty than any other person.

Nelson was first arrested in 1921 at the age of twelve for shooting a fellow child in the jaw.  Shortly after his release from the state reformatory, he was arrested again for joyriding and incarcerated for a further 18 months.

Nelson became acquainted with many local criminals whilst working at an oil station in the Chicago suburbs, becoming a member of notorious bank robber John Dillinger’s gang. He was killed in a short but furious gun battle with FBI agents in 1934.

Bugs Moran

Bugs Moran

Another Chicago based gangster, George Clarence ‘Bugs’ Moran is best known for his acrimonious relationship with Al Capone, to whom he lost seven members of his North Side Gang to during the Saint Valentines Day Massacre.

The animosity grew out of a turf war between Capone’s Italian gang based in the south of the city and Moran’s mostly Irish crew, both involved in the illegal smuggling of alcohol, a pastime commonly known as bootlegging.

The competition between the two leaders became personal and cost both of them their friends and reputation.  Moran told the press that “Capone is a lowlife”, claiming that he was a better Catholic than Capone for never engaging in prostitution and refusing to run brothels.

He died of lung cancer in 1957 aged 65.  He was estimated to only be worth $100 at the time of his death and received a pauper’s burial in a prison cemetery.

Dutch Schultz

Dutch Schultz

Born Arthur Flegenheimer, Dutch Schultz was a New York based German-Jewish mobster, who made his fortune bootlegging alcohol.

Schultz fell in with gangster Joey Noe and the Noe-Schultz operation began to flourish in the Bronx area, becoming the only non-Italian gang able to rival the Mafia’s Five Families.

Shultz is most famous for his ‘lost treasure’.  Shortly before his death, Schultz commissioned the construction of a special airtight and waterproof safe in to which he placed $7 million in cash and bonds and buried it somewhere in upstate New York.  Glangland lore has it that Schultz’s enemies spent the remainder of their lives searching for the safe, but to this day it has never been recovered. Treasure hunters meet annually to search for the safe. One such congregation was documented in the documentary film Digging for Dutch: The Search for the Lost Treasure of Dutch Schultz.

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Fashions of the Roaring 20s

Fashion became fun in the 1920s

After decades of rigid corsets and petticoats, fashion in the 1920s was much more relaxed.

Women’s clothing fashions changed with women’s changing roles in society.  Women were voting and increasing numbers of women had jobs. They were also seen to be indulging in what had previously only been men’s activities like smoking, drinking alcohol in public and going to clubs and bars.  The 1920s silhouette shifted to a more slender, boyish figure, with a flatter chest and hips.  Hair was cut short, waists were dropped and most importantly the corset was discarded and replaced by a looser fitting chemise and bloomers.

The ‘flapper’ look defined the era – low waisted dresses with fullness at the hemline, which allowed women to literally kick up their heels and dance. The hemlines rested just below the ankle or just below the knee.  In the early part of the decade, women were still expected to change from a morning to an afternoon dress to an evening dress.  Afternoon or ‘tea dresses’ were less formal than evening attire and were often adorned with sashes, bows and flowers.  Evening gowns were made of more luxurious fabrics like velvet or satin, embellished with beads, rhinestones or a fringe.

Examples of ‘flapper’ fashion

Short hairstyles were fashionable for the first time, with many women choosing the bob cut or the Eton crop.  Those who weren’t brave enough to go for the chop chose the finger wave hairstyle.

The bob, the Eton crop and the finger wave

Hair was kept short to fit under the popular sequined caps or cloche hats.

A pair of T-bar shoes were an essential part of a flapper’s wardrobe as the strap ensured you could dance all night without them slipping off!

Men also abandoned highly formal daily attire and began to wear what we might describe as ‘sportswear’ for the first time.  Pinstriped suits as well as short jackets with two or three buttons, replaced jackets with long tailcoats, and casual-wear included knickers and short trousers that came to the knee.  The suits men wear today are still based, for the most part on those worn in the late 1920s.

Hats were an important part of a man’s attire.  Middle class men wore a fedora, bowler or trilby hat.  Top hats were still popular amongst the upper classes as were straw boaters during the summer months.

Examples of men’s fashion in the 1920s

Style was, for the first time, heavily influenced by the newly created crop of movie stars.  Glamour was now an important fashion trend, and face, posture and grooming became just as an important fashion item as the clothing itself.  Both the women and the men of the 1920s looked to emulate the styles of Hollywood stars such as Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable.

Clark Gable and Louise Brooks

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Kurt Weill: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929)

Kurt Weill (right) and Bertolt Brecht

Like The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a satirical opera, with a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht.  The music was finished in the spring of 1929, but the work was not premiered for another year.

Despite being written for operatic voices, Weill said that The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny “pays conscious tribute to the irrationality of the operatic form”.  He thought operas had become too full of ritual and lacked substance, and Mahagonny, in part, sought to deflate the “arrogance” of traditional opera. With this aim, many traditional operatic themes are subverted and made grotesque; love becomes a commodity and the law is run by criminals.

In 1933 performances of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were banned by the Nazis, and no significant productions were performed until the 1960s.  Since then it has played in opera houses around the world. Though never achieving the popularity of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny is still considered a work of stature with a haunting score.

1929…

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

– Al Capone

Vatican City

On 11th February 1929, the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See of the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty to establish the Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Rome.  The Pope was pledged to perpetual neutrality in international relations and to abstention from mediation in a controversy unless specifically requested by all parties. Italy was under a Fascist government at the time; but the succeeding democratic governments have all upheld the treaty. In 1947, the Lateran Pacts were incorporated into the democratic Constitution of Italy.

The “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place on 14^th February 1929. Seven mob associates were murdered as part of a Prohibition-era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran.

Al Capone

Al Capone’s men, dressed as police officers, “raided” the Moran headquarters, lining the seven victims along a wall before shooting with machine guns.  No one was ever brought to trial for the crime; however Capone’s reputation was greatly damaged by the event.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 began in late October and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.  The crash signalled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialised countries and did not end in the United States until the onset of World War II.

The crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt.

Also in 1929…

The first Academy Awards were presented on 16th May 1929 in a fifteen minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, honouring the best movies of the previous two years. Tickets cost five dollars and around 270 people attended the event which included a private dinner. Emil Jannings was the first person to ever receive an Academy Award, winning Best Actor for the films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command and the 1927 film Wings won Best Picture.  This was the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast on television.

1929 saw the first appearances of two famous comic strip heroes – Tintin and Popeye.

Tintin

Tintin was created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé and was introduced in Le Petit Vingtième a weekly children’s supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.  Tintin was most recently brought to life in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin, which was directed by Stephen Spielberg and produced by Sir Peter Jackson.

Popeye

Popeye first appeared in the daily comic strip Thimble Theatre. Although Thimble Theatre was in its tenth year already, the muscled, spinach-loving sailor quickly became the main focus and Popeye became the strip’s title in later years. The popularity of Popeye helped boost spinach sales – a 2010 study revealed that children increased their vegetable consumption after watching Popeye cartoons. The spinach-growing community of Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of the character in recognition of Popeye’s positive effects on the spinach industry.

Born in 1929

Actresses Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, racing driver Graham Hill, athlete Roger Bannister, diarist Anne Frank, First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, British criminal Ronnie Biggs and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were all born in 1929.

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