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

marry her boyfriend, Jeff, an architect. But at dinner that night, Jeff tells her he needs to advance his career, and that means no ties, and no marriage. Back at the women-only hotel, as Marcia prepares to return home, she meets two of her hallmates, both older models. With no train to Syracuse until the next day, she agrees to accompany one of them on a double date with two South American millionaires. At the Pelican Club (a stand-in for the famous Stork Club), she is predictably sighted by her now ex-boyfriend (who, just as predictably, is on a date with his boss’s daughter); yet more predictably, he seethes with jealousy upon seeing Marcia with the millionaires. Marcia soon becomes a model herself, and even wins out against a fellow Sherrington model/resident to become the next Cambridge Cigarette girl. Now Marcia begins to date Jeff’s boss, whom she meets at a cocktail party at the Blue Room hosted by none other than society hostess Elsa Maxwell (set up to be Elsa’s starring moment, a reviewer simply noted that she said her words far too quickly).

Elsa Maxwell’s Hotel for Women came out in movie theaters as the air had begun to shift and the Depression was finally starting to recede. The Barbizon reawakened as steadily as the economy, and once again getting a room at the premier women’s hotel was a process intended to underscore the hotel’s prestige. Serious references were required. So it was that Phyllis McCarthy of Worcester, Massachusetts, submitted an application for a room at the Barbizon and asked a well-connected friend, St. Clair McKelway, the managing editor of the New Yorker, to be her reference. The Barbizon’s manager at the time, Bruno R. Wiedermann, checking on her credentials, wrote to St. Clair to ask for his “opinion as to the desirability of Miss McCarthy.”

Wiedermann’s wording was impossible for St. Clair to pass up, and he had a field day, sending the Barbizon’s manager a typed four-page letter: “It certainly is a coincidence that you should write me just at this time, when the desirability of Miss McCarthy is practically the only thing on my mind.… I never thought I would be confiding in a hotel manager about her but you asked for it, Bruno, so here goes: Miss McCarthy is just about as desirable as a girl can be. She is tall, just about the right height for a six-foot man, blond, with longish hair that has a way of falling all around her face in spite of the efforts of hairdressers and herself to keep it orderly. It is nicer when not orderly.” To keep fit, St. Clair continued, “she rides on occasion, handles the jibs and sometimes the helm of a sloop, dances until four and fights her way in and out of the Stork Club, using her escort as a club.… She dresses beautifully and is inclined to buy a grey suit for $150 or so when she hasn’t got $150, much less a so; she is apt, also, to choose a grey suit because she happens to like that particular grey suit and entirely disregard the fact, in doing so, that she has neither grey shoes, grey hat or grey gloves and consequently will be forced to buy these, too, with what she has left out of the $150 or so she didn’t have in the first place.”

That this was indeed Phyllis McCarthy’s approach to life was quite accidentally confirmed in a newspaper piece written by a George Bushfield about an afternoon he had spent in New York visiting his friend Hank Harleton, an advertising man. Hank lived in a bachelor pad on Lexington Avenue, with a back terrace that looked directly onto the Barbizon. Bushfield kidded his friend about the priceless location of his apartment, and Hank admitted that sometimes things did happen; just that day a crumpled piece of a paper had been carelessly tossed out a window of the hotel and landed on his terrace many floors down. The four-by-five-inch paper was a telephone message from the Barbizon’s front desk for a McCarthy in Room 1515. The Carlisle bookstore had called to say that her copy of How Green Was My Valley had arrived. On the back, before discarding the telephone message, McCarthy had written up her weekly expenses: $18.50 Rent; 2.00 Mom; .13 Postage; .23 Books; .10 Fares; .70 Mon. Dinner; .20 Mon. Breakfast; .25 Mon. Lunch; .50 Five & Ten; .25 Breakfast Tues.; .30 Cigs; .25 Breakfast Wed.; .15 Candy & Coke. From this, George and Hank deduced, or thought they had, that McCarthy was a small-town girl (why else so much postage to write letters home?), not independently wealthy ($2.00 for Mom?), slender (she could indulge in candy and Coke!), independent (not easy to pay $18.50 for a weekly rent), wined and dined by the opposite sex (no need to pay for Tuesday nor Wednesday dinners), and nervous (30 cents got you two packs of cigarettes). It turned out that the stunning Phyllis McCarthy, who had the look of a movie star taking a short break on Cape Cod, and whose desirability was very much on the mind of New Yorker editor St. Clair McKelway, was of course a Barbizon-residing Powers model.

While the Barbizon was populated with Gibbs girls and Powers models throughout the 1930s, the hotel continued to serve as a sanctuary for many others too. Robin Chandler Duke, later a Wall Street pioneer and President Bill Clinton’s Norwegian ambassador, lived in a room there with her mother and sister after their father abruptly abandoned both the family law firm and the family. Her mother, a privileged Southern belle, took work as a cashier in a New York tearoom, Robin’s sister got work as a high-fashion model, and Robin herself found work as a house model at the Lord & Taylor department store after lying that she was eighteen when she was in fact two years younger. Her job was to swan around the store in