LIPSTICK

By Rory Morgan - 2019

During the decade known as the Roaring 20s, no place roared louder than New York City. Prohibition may have been the law of the land, but bootleg liquor flowed throughout the city as crowds of flappers and their dates danced through the nights.

An upstart magazine, The New Yorker, began chronicling the fun in 1925, in a lively and popular column entitled “Tables for Two”. It was written with style and humor; the author, identified only as “Lipstick”, clearly knew her way around the world of jazz bands and whispered passwords at the doors of the speakeasies. The column generally covered Manhattan, from Midtown through Harlem. It described the people in the clubs and cabarets, the fashions that they wore and the music that they enjoyed.

In real life, “Lipstick” was a twenty-something writer named Lois Long, a Connecticut-born minister’s daughter and Vassar College graduate with experience at Vogue and Vanity Fair already on her resume. She was smart, independent, attractive – and willing to stay out all night in search of her material. A skilled observer and writer, she became one of the city’s media stars and added the magazine’s fashion column “On and Off the Avenue” to her portfolio. In 1927, she married a New Yorker colleague and fellow media star, the legendary cartoonist Peter Arno. They had a daughter, Patricia, but the tempestuous marriage did not endure; four years later, a quickie Nevada divorce ended it.

New York’s riotous good times faded away in the 1930s as the flapper generation aged, the Great Depression dragged on, and the repeal of Prohibition brought an end to the thrill of secretive drinking. Long, no longer hidden behind the Lipstick identity, gave up her Tables for Two column and became the Fashion Editor for the magazine, a title that she then held for decades. Rather than focusing only on the latest styles, her columns also discussed the price, quality and availability of the clothing, a departure from other fashion writing. As a single mother, she was always in need of money and expanded her work to writing radio scripts and making radio appearances. She even had a stint as a screenwriter for Hollywood.

A second marriage, in 1938, also ended in divorce. (This marriage, to Donaldson Thoburn, was overlooked in her New York Times obituary; the paper reportedly also erred by publishing a photo of a different Lois Long.) In 1953, she married for the third time; her new husband was Easton stockbroker Harold A. “Huck” Fox, a Lafayette College graduate, and a former officer of the Army’s World War II Psychological Warfare Division. It was the third marriage for him also; like Lois, he had one grown daughter from a previous marriage.

The couple lived on Morgan Hill in Williams Township, at Fox’s “Chelveston Farm”. In a 1960 note to the Vassar Alumnae Association, Lois described her home as “an 1807 Pennsylvania-Dutch farmhouse surrounded by woods and other people’s farm land” and noted, “I like things this way”. She managed to keep in touch with New York’s fashion world well enough to continue writing her column.

The couple eventually gave up the rural life and moved to an apartment in Palmer Township. Harold died in 1971. Lois moved from Easton to Saratoga, NY, where her daughter lived. After almost fifty years with The New Yorker, she gave up her position there. She died in Saratoga on July 29, 1974.

Her cremated remains were brought to Easton and are buried beside Harold's remains in Easton Cemetery’s Section N. Curiously, the inscription on her marker is incomplete; no year of death has ever been carved in the spot clearly intended for it.

Lois "Lipstick" Long

Easton Cemetery

Harold A. "Huck" Fox

Easton Cemetery