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

if it remained open, she might be tempted to jump (clearly this was a case of Rita’s “vapors,” about which George Davis originally complained). She asked Joan to go to the Mademoiselle offices immediately, close the window, and then report back that she had done so. “But I’m not going alone,” Joan declared as she dragged Peggy out of bed. Peggy, always the faithful friend, accompanied her from the Barbizon down to Fifty-Seventh and Madison. A night watchman was at the Street & Smith building, and Joan lied that she had left something in the office. Under this pretext, and with the guard watching over her, she dashed upstairs and quickly scanned Rita’s office: the window was closed shut. It had all been her imagination. That was the moment Peggy decided they were all crazy at Mademoiselle.

Like Peggy, Janet Burroway was finding her way. At first she was always writing home for money to be sent, but after a while she learned how to skip cab rides whenever possible, even though she’d damaged her heel (an unexpected medical cost—she noted crossly). As the guest editor in the merchandising department, a position she felt was entirely mismatched with her real interests, Janet was going from one fashion show to another and wrote gleefully at first: “Loot from shows is mounting up.” Lunches too. After a tour of the Bates plant, they were given a “lush lunch,” although Janet would have preferred fabric samples since she designed many of her own dresses—those that Peggy frowned upon. For the Brother sewing machine unveiling, it was lunch on the roof of the Hotel Pierre. But even the swag couldn’t make up for the tedium of the shows after a while: “I’ll take New York, but you can have the fashion industry, from the eyebrow pencil on NY’s highest-paid models to the suspiciously sweet smile on [editor] Ida McNeil.” Like all the GEs, Janet had come expecting to do serious literary work. None of them wanted to be in promotions, or advertising, or publicity.

But gradually, Janet began to embrace the glamour of her Mademoiselle summer. As the days went by, her Barbizon room no longer seemed so small, she decided, and she liked having a phone and a basin inside the room where she could wash the New York grime off of her white gloves. The front desk had given her $10 of credit toward her meals until her first paycheck arrived, and she loved that the maids left her room looking spotless however badly she’d left it for them that morning. She had learned to enjoy being alone. She had also discovered a magical place in Greenwich Village called the Champagne Gallery—“a favorite haunt of the young strugglings.” It was decorated like a very large living room with sofas, carpets, paintings, floor lamps, and a grand piano which anyone could play, and where “Chopsticks” would have elicited no complaints, even as there was a steady stream of classical music, and two boys argued over the score of a piece they were working on. Others sketched but not in a “pseudo-bohemian or arty” way, while a black man, a ventriloquist, wandered around with his dummy, everyone engaging it in conversation and argument about politics and aesthetics. The two waitresses occasionally got up to sing. It certainly rated better than her trip to the Stork Club, which she found to be “very very” and where the “lousy lemonade” left her wondering why some places got to be so famous. Janet’s false world-weariness was at least becoming more discriminatory.

Midway through the month, Sylvia Plath showed up. She already had a well-recognized name, certainly among young college coeds, in part because of her nationally publicized suicide attempt. The East Coast guest editors especially “were gaga over her.” The hushed talk of her nervous breakdown, of disappearing under her mother’s porch with a bottle of pills, the manhunt that followed, merely added to her mystique in an era, Peggy later realized, “when neuroticism among women authors was almost a necessary badge of membership in the women’s creative community.” The day Plath came to the Mademoiselle offices, guest editor-in-chief Jane Truslow, of upper-crust Adams lineage, insisted that Peggy come meet the almost famous young poet. Peggy, an unimpressed Californian, had a pleasant enough conversation with Sylvia, finding her to be a typical American college girl, dressed nicely, with a quiet demeanor. But she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Janet, who did not get to meet her that day, understood what all the fuss was about and harbored a serious case of envy; she would joke, somewhat defensively, that Sylvia’s last name was really “Plass,” but that Sylvia had a lisp.

Multiple generations of GEs would go on to debate the eternal question of whether they did have to work, really work, while at Mademoiselle. Was the work already done for them so that they were only required to cross the t’s and dot the i’s? In this sense, Sylvia Plath was an anomaly. She had worked to the point of a nervous breakdown, with an unrelenting stack of assignments always on her desk. But the other GEs would ask themselves: Was their real job to pose for photographers and detail their tastes and desires to a bevy of merchandisers and advertisers keen to know what America’s college girls wanted? Much of the contention centered on whether “parading all over the garment district so that manufacturers could analyze our consumer inclinations” was work. Gael Greene thought it was.

Of course Gael might have looked more kindly upon the exploitation had she been the one chosen to walk the runway in the latest fashions at the magazine’s College Clinic at the Hotel Astor. But while a guest editor from Utah led the runway show with a twirling baton, Gael Greene was asked to sit it out, watching from the sidelines up in the balcony area. Guest editor-in-chief Jane Truslow wrote in the August issue: at the Astor, “where fashion