The three graces in Dorothy Wilding’s 1923 photograph Frieze were performers in The Midnight Follies, a new cabaret at the London Metropole hotel. Wilding’s picture, full of attitude in all senses, was designed to promote the show; the Follies promised a jazz age mix of comedy and dance and cocktails.
Two of the women in Wilding’s picture were known in the gossip columns. Red-haired Zoe Gordon, on the left, was a star of musical theatre and of the 1919 film The Sins of Youth. On the right of the sculptural trio is Sylvia Hawkes, “London’s Cinderella” (she was the daughter of a footman). Her success in The Midnight Follies led to a series of headline-making marriages – first to the heir to Lord Shaftesbury, with whom she scandalously eloped, and subsequently to Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks senior, from whom she inherited a $2m fortune, and Clark Gable.
