Glitter and be Gay

Kay's first two novels began life as serials in College Humor magazine. Glitter was published in book form in 1926, and Little Sins followed a year later. 

There’s really little point in giving detailed synopses of the plots. Suffice it to say that the books are full of glamorous young people doing the things that glamorous young people did back then. They go to dances and drive fast sexy cars. They drink too much and smoke endless cigarettes. They stay out until the wee hours and never rise before noon. They fall in and out of love, often with each others’ spouses, and sometimes with disastrous results. They…well, you get the idea.

Of course the books are dated, frequently in funny ways that the author certainly never intended. They do not, it must be readily admitted, have the timelessness of that greatest of their comtemporaries, The Great Gatsby. But they are a lot of fun. And to be fair, 85-year-old popular novels should really be judged not by how true to life they seem to us but by how true to life they were in their own day. They measure up pretty well in that regard.

Both novels are rare 
in their dust jackets

The only review in print of Glitter that I have been able to find appeared in the April 1926 issue of the campus publication The Ohio State Engineer. 
The Engineer’s reviewer found that the novel’s characters “in every way seem to be the people that we meet every day,” and went on to predict that “this book will soon be the best seller in college circles.” I cannot confirm whether or not that prediction ever came true, but according to Kay's "autobiography" This is on Me,  the book sold about 8,000 copies, apparently quite respectable for a first novel of the time.

Little Sins seems to have attracted a little more attention. In what is the earliest review of a Brush work by a major publication that I have seen, Time magazine had this to say:

The Significance. Nowadays it takes a mental eye of high velocity detail, the myriad activities of knowing young Manhattanites. There are so many things to do and everything is done so quickly. To cover the assignment with the thoroughness and mimetic accuracy (but not the rancor) of a Sinclair Lewis, and at the same time to create four central characters of breathless reality, and a Dickensian hurly-burly of minor characters, and to keep them moving through their swift social traffic under their own power and in their right positions, requires a highly developed social instinct and something akin to literary genius. Socially and book-technically, Little Sins is a stunning performance. And to its fundamental perfections are superadded real whimsy, real pathos, an unobtrusive cleverness at small talk.

Did you catch that?  "Mimetic accuracy of a Sinclair Lewis".  "Breathless reality".  "Literary genius".  "Stunning performance".

Though Glitter is cited as source, Kay gets
no credit on this lobby card for The Drop Kick 

Glitter’s story was filmed--twice, apparently--as silents. (A third, talking picture was planned but never came about.) The Drop Kick from 1927 starred Richard Barthelmess, and is mostly known today for an early appearance of a 20-year-old John Wayne.  (Keen-eyed admirers of the Duke can spot him in a crowd scene.) The second, according to This is on Me, was titled Football Coach, though there is no such film listed at imdb.com. As with so many other silent movies, we must assume this one lost. And although Time thought Little Sins “looks like another sure-fire [film] scenario,” that book never did make it to the screen.

Perhaps Time was right when it called the novel “one of those rare books with more electricity in its pages than can ever be added to it in a projection room.”

Pifflingly Unimportant: Kay covered the 1925 Atlantic City Beauty Pageant for the Brush-Moore Newspaper chain of Ohio (her father-in-law was an owner). The experience provided material for Little Sins.

Distinguished Company

It may seem difficult, some 70 or 80 years after its publication, to categorize the fiction of Katharine Brush. I’ve seen her books described as "romance novels," which absolutely makes me cringe: the term is just plain wrong. But, more importantly, it conveys a thoroughly inaccurate impression of the quality of the work.

Faith Baldwin (a contemporary of Brush’s) wrote romance novels. A LOT of them. In her obituary (she died in 1978) The New York Times said Baldwin wrote “with never a pretense at literary significance.” Time magazine accused her of shaky grammar and poor punctuation, and said she “fizzed fiction like an inexhaustible literary pop bottle.”

Little Girl Pal: Kay sporting
an uncharacteristically slick hairdo

By contrast, one New York Times reviewer opined (in 1944 with what would be all of Brush’s full-length novels behind her) that “the interesting thing about Katharine Brush's work has always been not so much what she says as how she says it.” In 1931, when Time reported on the relatively young publishing house of Farrar & Rinehart, Brush’s name appeared first in a list of F&R authors that included Upton Sinclair and DuBose Heyward, among other luminaries. Seventeen years later, in a list of "post-World War I stars" that had written for The New York Post, Time placed Brush in the company of the greatest of these, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Even more telling is Brush’s inclusion in what is probably the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the work of women writers, Margaret Lawrence’s The School of Femininity, published in Canada in 1936 and reprinted as recently as 1977. 

Dust jacket of the first
American edition, 1936

Grouping Brush with Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, and Daphne du Maurier in a section called "Little Girl Pals," Lawrence describes Brush as "extraordinarily able," her artistry "striking."

“[Brush] ranks high,” Lawrence declares from the start, “not only among the younger women writers, but also among all the women writers. The high ranking is justified by the technical control and the depth of her fidelity to her subjects.”

All the women writers. The table of contents 
of School is a Who’s Who of women writers: 
Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, 
Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Pearl Buck...  

Romance novels, my foot!

Kay and Me

It started with a photograph.  I have in my collection a book, acquired years ago, titled The Decorative Twenties. In this book was--is--a photograph of a living room in a New York City apartment.  It was, in this young Long Island boy's eye and mind at least, the epitome of art deco style and elegance, and I thought, “someday  I will have an apartment in Manhattan with a living room like that.” And that was it; I never, over the course of several decades, paid any attention whatsoever to the who, what, where or when...

Flash forward twenty years, and I am working at an art and architecture non-profit (which shall forever remain nameless in these pages) in Manhattan.  

David Garrard Lowe, whose book Art Deco New York has recently been published, presents an illustrated lecture.  And, don't you know it... there's that photograph of that living room I know and love from my book!  So Mr. Lowe tells us that this is the living room in the Joseph Urban-designed apartment of the writer Katharine Brush.  

I confess that the name Joseph Urban didn't really mean anything to me at the time (more on him later), but I made note of the name Katharine Brush, and thought, “I wonder if her books are any good...they might be worth a look.”

I then discovered that Brush had written the novel upon which the movie Red-Headed Woman had been based.  I of course was familiar with the picture and had seen it.  It is, as I mentioned previously, a classic of pre-code Hollywood; I felt as though I already knew Katharine Brush...

Since I was so familiar with Red-Headed Woman, I figured it best to start with a different Brush novel, something that would be entirely new to me.  I decided on Young Man of Manhattan, from 1929.  Halfway through it I was hooked. 

Young Woman of Manhattan:
Katharine Brush

By the way, I did get the apartment in Manhattan...

but the living room looks nothing like I had planned.

The Blonde Bombshell

Any spark of recognition mention of the name Katharine Brush might generate today certainly owes more to Jean Harlow's fame as an actress than to Katharine Brush's own fame as an author.

But an author she was, and a damn fine one at that.  Her wildly popular novel 
Red-Headed Woman was turned--almost instantaneously--into one of pre-code Hollywood's raciest, and most notorious pictures, one that helped catapult the 21-year-old Harlow to superstardom.


And while Katharine Brush outlived Harlow by fifteen years, the Blonde Bombshell's fame has proven far more durable, lasting far and long beyond the grave; Brush's, by contrast, was short-lived, and essentially died with her in 1952.

Jean Harlow with Chester Morris

Such, of course, is the nature of fame: writers seldom last as long as motion picture stars, and books generally do not attain classic status at the same rate as movies.


Though she later credited Harlow and her performance for making the picture the smash-hit that it was, Katharine Brush was, quite ironically, initially disappointed with MGM's choice of Harlow, who hadn't had that many big roles up to that time.  


And of course Harlow's hair was the wrong color...