Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
Published in 1942, Skinner and Kimbrough's story of their trip to Europe is still a classic autobiography, full of humor, surprise, and embarrassment. Cornelia Otis Skinner is the narrator and Emily Kimbrough is often the brunt of Cornelia's amicable wit.
Cornelia was nineteen and Emily twenty-one when they left Bryn Mawr on their sea voyage to England and France. It was the early 1920s and the girls were advised to "single out a few nice older women" for friends. Their mothers had provided each of them with "safety-pockets" in which to keep money, passports, or other valuables. These hung under their skirts against their legs and looked and felt peculiar, especially to the girls' dancing partners.
The first ship the girls boarded ran aground the first night and its tilt made dancing difficult. The passengers were finally taken ashore and assigned to other ships in port at Quebec. For the girls, this involved rearranging luggage and having it moved from ship to hotel to another ship. Their modest luggage was made up of "two trunks, two mammoth suitcases, two of those bass-drum hat boxes, and a galaxy of lesser carriers..." Their second ship, Empress of France, sailed at a snail's pace through fog and icebergs at first, but then provided an enjoyable trip all the way to England.
But Cornelia came down with measles just before they were to go ashore and had to cover most all her body, even her face, to avoid being quarantined to the ship. Later in France, she suffered an attack from bedbugs which made her lips swell. This occurred just hours before a double-date the girls were preparing for.
The closest the girls came to anything sexual on the trip was when they stayed at a boarding house which turned out to be a house of ill repute. Emily got some more sexual enlightenment at a museum when she realized what a swan might do to the naked lady in the painting, "Leda and the Swan." She also was surprised to learn why Oscar Wilde had gone to prison.
Otis Skinner, Cornelia's father, was an actor himself, and he and her mother, who were visiting England and France during the same period, often became unexpectedly involved in some of the girls' mishaps.
Later in life, the girls both became writers. Cornelia was especially talented in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay with her descriptive words and figures of speech, such as "well-behaved streams", "pin-dropping silence", and "painstakingly polite."
Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901-1979) and Emily Kimbrough (1899-1989) dedicated their book (completely non-fictitious, Cornelia boasts) to their very concerned mothers.