On February 20, 1927, The New York Times ran a brief bulletin about the American expatriate culture in Paris, and included a note, remarking with some amusement that it is “hard for the French to understand… why Americans ban drink in their own country and then come to France to try to drink all there is in sight.”

That same article announced the debut of a Paris-based literary magazine by an American named Erskine Gwynne, a man to whom that previous line could’ve been personally dedicated. Handsome in his mid-20s, always well dressed, with white-blond hair and an irrepressible sense of humor, he was a descendant of the Vanderbilt family—the “Vanderbilt Playboy,” the papers called him—and was the kind of incorrigible public figure for whom whole sections of tabloids get devoted.

Qui

See Full Page