IT WAS A WONDERFUL LIFE
There’s a photograph taken in Palm Beach in 1955 that seems to encapsulate the breezy allure of post-war America. The Vogue model and socialite Patsy Pulitzer, unscrubbed but poised in pleated shorts and a print blouse, poses nonchalantly on a seaplane. She looks equal parts high society (the granddaughter of Joseph Pulitzer, who instigated the eponymous prizes, she would go on to marry Lewis Thompson Preston, the president of the World Bank) and vigorous outdoorswoman (three years earlier she’d caught a marlin weighing 1,230lbs, then a world record for a woman, off the coast of Cabo Blanco, Peru, leaving the likes of Ernest Hemingway trailing in her wake).
Pulitzer and her peers represented a new ideal of American beauty that coupled an urbane self-possession with the drive and rangy energy of the U.S. itself, a country that, in the 1950s, was “swollen with production and pleasure”, as the critic Robert Hughes put it in his book , in contrast to “the pinched and traumatised life of a Europe flattened by bombs”. Along with a burgeoning cultural cachet, from the allure of Hollywood to the birth of the cool strains of jazz and bebop and the zipping and dripping of abstract expressionism, American society now spawned a new class — the stylish rich, as opposed to the hidebound blue bloods or the vulgar nouveaux — who, as the author Truman Capote put it, were “heaven’s anointed, the only truly liberated people on Earth”. He went on: “The freedom to pursue an aesthetic quality
