—“Society’s Door Tender” by Anonymous, from the April 4, 1925, issue of The Saturday Evening Post
One of the young women, a friend of the debutante, had come half tumbling down the thickly carpeted stairs to the front door. Tumbling with her, arm in arm, was a slick, black-haired, giggling man in a dinner jacket, the rear of which was caught on the neck of a silver flask. They were not leaving, but just going out for a taxi cruise.
I incurred the anger of the young girl and her companion. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I cannot open the doors just now except on the orders of your hostess.”
It was not so long ago that society would have ostracized a young woman who would have dared to leave a function on any pretext without first speaking to her hostess, and it would have been the hostess’ duty to see that she was accompanied by a chaperone.
It is hard for me to believe the girls are as nice today as they were. Twenty years ago, a woman who stalked boldly out of a ballroom in candid search of a place in which to be alone with a man was not to be found outside of a mining camp.
This article is featured in the March/April 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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Comments
Wow! This is quite the dizzying tale of one man’s many years as an enforcer of New York’s high society party scenes and the differences he’s seen between the 1890’s-1920’s which were monumental. To say life had gotten much faster-paced and more complicated would be a gross understatement.
A fascinating read with a few words I was glad to have the phone to check; one an unlikely food item to me, but apparently not to the ultra-wealthy of the ’20s. To some extent I think the writer is letting off some pent up steam after 30 years, and wanted to remain anonymous. Probably not that easy after being in The Saturday Evening Post though, but I’d have no way of knowing that or not.