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

from atop a garbage truck. Wonderful to see five million persons cheering for the same team…,” they reported for Mademoiselle. On less exciting days, Nanette ate at the Barbizon, often choosing the coffee shop or else the veranda room (“a balcony with lacy iron work and flower gardens painted against azure sky”), adjacent to the main dining room, where the guest editors could get breakfast for 25 to 65 cents, and lunch 35 to 65 cents. If she preferred to go out, Nanette chose Longchamps, an upscale chain in New York, or else Stouffer’s on Second Avenue—when it was still a popular restaurant and not a frozen TV-dinner brand.

Nanette’s workload was not demanding because, as the editors explained to the GEs, much of the copy for the August College Issue had to be done long before they arrived. Even so, Nanette managed to squeeze in a byline here and there, reporting on such pressing issues as dieting off those extra freshman pounds by possibly joining or, better yet, starting a diet table at one’s college dining hall. Consulting with an expert in the field, who, as she wrote, had “de-fatted something like a quarter million American females,” Nanette passed on the advice that chubby college girls should band together and demand from their parents bushels of unrationed fruit and vegetables, which they should divvy up and eat extravagantly before each meal. Clearly the war had done nothing to disrupt the demand—articulated by the corseted Gibson girl and then by the skinny, boyish-looking flapper—that women be slim to be desirable.

On the last Thursday of the month, a day before they were finished with their monthlong program, the guest editors lunched with Blackwell at the Viennese Roof of the St. Regis hotel, where everything—the napkins, the tablecloths, the room—was arranged to be as pink as Mademoiselle’s trademark stationery. Nanette returned home to Detroit with her itineraries, her front-desk messages, Barbizon postcards and letterheads and matchbooks, an assortment of ticket stubs, entry tickets, everything really, which she would soon compile into one enormous scrapbook, leather-bound. June 1945 in New York had been everything she could have dreamed it to be. Manhattan of the 1940s, as the writer John Cheever famously declared, was “filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” But behind Nanette’s breathless descent onto postwar New York, a thrill ride accompanied by the cheerful sounds of the “King of Swing,” there loomed the coming Cold War. Career women like BTB, and those in training, like Nanette Emery, would prove to be in the crosshairs of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, the series of congressional hearings intent on picking out the traitors in America’s midst.

Elizabeth Moulton, then going under the name Betsy Day, was another of the fourteen guest editors in the summer of 1945 who spent her days at Mademoiselle and her nights at the Barbizon. Like Nanette, she too had received the same telegram from BTB the day after the war ended in Europe, and with just as much fanfare and excitement, she had packed her bags for New York. When the summer at Mademoiselle was over, Elizabeth returned to Radcliffe College and Nanette to Bryn Mawr, but Elizabeth had only one semester left to graduate, and she could not believe her luck when a job as assistant to George Davis, the magazine’s associate editor as well as fiction editor, opened up. In the editorial hallways of Mademoiselle, he was the only man amid a sea of powerful career women. The GEs found him to be warm and open in a way that the indomitable BTB was not. George Davis urged them to address him by his first name, and each June he “dusted the parochialism off brand-new New Yorkers from Roanoke, Chicago, Key West, Texas, Georgia, Minnesota,” helping them achieve style not just in their writing but in their appearance too, sending them home as newly hatched fashionistas who had a way with the written word.

George Davis’s reputation preceded him, and all the GEs knew who he was even before they arrived. He had famously dropped out of high school in Ludington, Michigan, and as a sophomore, moved to Paris. There he wrote his first, and what would turn out to be his only, novel at the age of twenty-one (it became a rite of passage that his assistants scoured New York’s secondhand bookstores until they found a copy for themselves—and Elizabeth would do that too). George befriended Jacques Prévert, Cocteau, and pretty much everyone else in Paris, returning to New York a decade later to work as fiction editor for Harper’s Bazaar before moving over to Mademoiselle.

Phyllis Lee Schwalbe, when she arrived in the Mademoiselle offices in 1942 to work on the College Board, first mistook him for the office porter because he was always gossiping with the telephone operator, leaning in at her desk to keep others from hearing what they said. It was not until the famous writer Carson McCullers arrived one day looking for George that Phyllis was shocked to learn who he was—the very man who had discovered the great writer Truman Capote. George’s three-story brownstone at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn, bought with a $125 deposit borrowed from the infamous Gypsy Rose Lee, was a thing of legend too: it was a Bohemian-type commune, a famous literary salon, a writers’ retreat to rival the famous upstate New York Yaddo, and a funhouse boarding house. George Davis rented rooms not only to Carson McCullers but to other writers such as W. H. Auden, as well as carnival performers, including a monkey trainer.

In 1945, when Nanette Emery and Elizabeth Moulton arrived at Mademoiselle, George was a forty-year-old editor who no longer resembled the boyish man from early photographs. He was short, sloping, with a head much bigger than it should have been, with wavy hair on top of it, receding and gray. No looker was he.