The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

The Barbizon’s residents read like a who’s who: Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, LizaMinnelli, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Phylicia Rashad, Jaclyn Smith, and CybillShepherd; writers Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Diane Johnson, Gael Greene, AnnBeattie, Mona Simpson, and Meg Wolitzer; designer Betsey Johnson; journalists PeggyNoonan and Lynn Sherr; and many more. But before they were household names, theywere among the young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase, referenceletters, and hope. Some of them had their dreams come true, while many did not. Somereturned to their hometowns, while others holed up in their Barbizon rooms andwondered what had gone wrong. Each of them expected her stay to be temporary, a softlanding until she had established herself, given voice to her ambition, heraspirations. But many found themselves still there, year after year.These holdouts would become known to the younger residents as “theWomen,” harbingers of what was to come if they did not move on and moveout.

In the 1970s, as Manhattan temporarily turned from glitzy to derelict,the Women gathered nightly in the lobby to comment on the younger set, offering themunsolicited advice on the length of their skirts and the wildness of their hair.They had even more to say when, in the 1980s, no longer able to support the originalvision of a women-only sanctuary, management opened the hotel to men. But despitetheir threats to leave, the Women remained. When Manhattan remade itself into a hotproperty market, and the Barbizon underwent its own last reimagining from hotel toluxury condominium building, the Women got their own refurbished floor, where theremaining few still live, in what is now called Barbizon/63. They have theirmailboxes alongside another current resident, British actor and comedian RickyGervais.

The Barbizon Hotel for Women, when it opened its doors in 1928, neverneeded to say it was intended for white, middle- and upper-class young women: theaddress on the Upper East Side said it, the advertisements depicting a typicalresident said it, the required reference letters of a certain kind said it. But in1956, a student at Temple University, a talented artist and dancer by the name ofBarbara Chase, appeared at the Barbizon. She was most likely the first AfricanAmerican to ever stay at the hotel. Her time there was without incident, althoughshe was shielded not only by her good looks and accomplished résumé butalso by Mademoiselle magazine. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, BetsyTalbot Blackwell, a force in New York’s publishing world, had brought her toNew York for the month of June as one of the winners of the magazine’sprestigious guest editor program. No one was sure if the Barbizon management wouldlet Barbara Chase in. But they did, even if they failed to mention the swimming poolin the basement. Back in the Mademoiselle offices on MadisonAvenue, Betsy Talbot Blackwell would usher Barbara out of the room when Southernclients showed up to meet with that year’s young guest editors.

The Barbizon and Mademoiselle magazine were in many wayssymbiotic, catering to the same kind of women, being at the forefront of change,often radically so, only to find themselves eventually overtaken by shiftinginterests and priorities among the very women to whom they catered. It is thereforeimpossible to tell the story of the Barbizon without also stepping along thecorridors of the Mademoiselle offices. In 1944, Betsy Talbot Blackwell hadmade the decision that the winners of the guest editor program—brought toManhattan for June to shadow the magazine’s editors by day and to indulge infancy dinners, sparkling galas, and sophisticated cocktail parties bynight—must stay at the Barbizon. The contest attracted the crème de lacrème of young college women, and opened the Barbizon doors to the likes ofJoan Didion, Meg Wolitzer, and Betsey Johnson. But it was Sylvia Plath, Mademoiselle’s most famous guest editor, who would also bring thegreatest notoriety to the hotel. Ten years after her stay there, and shortly beforeher final, successful suicide attempt, she would disguise the Barbizon as “theAmazon,” spilling out its secrets in her famous novel, The BellJar.

The brainy guest editors, Mademoiselle’s contest winners,shared the hotel with students from the iconic Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School,who resided across three floors of the hotel, with their own “housemothers” and curfews and teas. These young women in their white gloves andperfectly perched hats, regulation attire for a Gibbs girl, were synonymous with thenew opportunities for the small-town girl who could not act, sing, or dance her wayto New York but who sure could type her way out of her hometown and into the glitzand glamour of Madison Avenue. But it was the presence of models, first working forthe Powers Agency and then many escaping to the new Fordagency, run by two daring women out of a shoddy brownstone, that solidified theBarbizon’s reputation as a “dollhouse.” Yet behind the walls inwhich these serial-dating, kitten-heeled glamour women resided, there was alsodisappointment. Writer Gael Greene returned to the Barbizon two years after herinitial stay there as a guest editor alongside Joan Didion, this time to documenteveryone who wasn’t considered a “doll”: she called the overlookedresidents the “Lone Women.” Some were lonely enough to commit suicide:often on Sunday mornings, because as one of the Women noted, Saturday night was datenight… or not. And Sunday was sorrow. The Barbizon management, Mrs. Sibley andmanager Hugh J. Connor, made sure the suicides were hushed, seldom appearing in thepapers. They knew that appearances mattered above all else and it was better toadvertise the Barbizon’s most glamorous resident, Grace Kelly, than it was toadvertise the forlorn.

By the time the Barbizon opened its doors to men, the very premiseupon which it had been built—that women’s ambitions, however large orsmall, could best be supported in single-sex residences with daily maid service andno chance of being pushed back into the kitchen because there wasn’tone—seemed outdated. So why do I wish a place like this had existed when Icame to New York after graduating from college? And why do women-only spaces,supportive of women’s ambition, keep springing up? Women did not come to theBarbizon to network, but that’s what they did anyway. They helped each otherfind