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

scored a touchdown,” the “Millies” were “offered… new hope for a slim-hipped future” by being introduced to Warner’s elaborate, long line corset called the “Merry Widow,” named after a Lana Turner movie. Janet Burroway’s single goal for the College Clinic was straightforward: she wanted to finagle a free haircut (worth an exorbitant $10.50) from the famous Enrico Caruso, hairdresser to the stars and top models, and director of hair and makeup for the College Clinic. She managed to get her free haircut, and also a front-and-center view of the runway show, whose production, she wrote her parents, made St. Patrick’s Sunday service look like a provincial sideshow.

That year, 1955, the College Issue carried more advertising than any fashion magazine had ever before. All the merchandise was on display in the Hotel Astor grand ballroom in front of a sea of “buyers, store owners, retailers, wholesalers, promotion managers, window display artists, advertisers, designers,” with “scene changes, gimmicks, staging extravaganzas,” and a crystal chandelier that opened up to release three thousand balloons of various colors. Gold and upholstered clipboards were given away as party favors; canapés, and Scotch and sodas were served; and while everyone got “hilariously tight… the 20 innocent young G.E.’s circulate amongst the crowd murmuring sweet nothings about the sincerity of the Mademoiselle promotion department and trying to keep from getting picked up.” Gael Greene was right in that this part at least was work.

Company lunches and photo-opportunity parties certainly took up as much of the young women’s time as any kind of editorial work. There was the annual June gathering at the home of skin-care mogul Helena Rubinstein, where Peggy was surprised to find “a tiny, chubby Russian Jew in 5-inch heels, a large chignon, and an incredible afternoon dress” (Rubinstein was actually Polish). Her outrageously decorated Midtown apartment had a floor, reached by elevator, that was a hidden gallery of master works behind dark velvet drapes. While Peggy delighted in being so close to art that no one else would ever get to see, Janet looked at the Picassos and Chagalls on private display, wondering how it was possible to amass the worst paintings by the best painters and then cram them all into one room. Betsy Talbot Blackwell also hosted a party for the GEs in her enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue, a gathering Peggy found to be among the better ones (even she had come to realize they weren’t all fun), which the owners of the Gimbels department store—right across from Macy’s and their fierce competitor—always attended as well. By June 27, Janet, on the one hand, would sigh, “Mrs. Blackwell’s disgusting cocktail party this afternoon—I don’t mean to be flip, but you wouldn’t believe so many so famous people could be so dull.” On the other, she was already regretting she had not pushed herself to live more in the moment, that she had failed to fully appreciate the rolled-out red carpets, the fashion shows, the lunches, the airplane ride to West Point for a photo shoot, and everything else that Mademoiselle had given her and which she suspected she would not see again for many years to come.

But in one way, Janet had in fact embraced what New York offered. On June 10, a third of the way into the guest editors’ month, Mademoiselle threw its annual St. Regis ball—the crowning glory of the magazine’s multiple parties. While Gael Greene would be sidelined during the College Clinic, she was very much at the center of things at the St. Regis hotel. She brought along her childhood friend Sidney, who was living in New York and selling scarves for his father; she had offered him up to the College Board editor, who was not only in search of men to attend the party, but in particular “a nice presentable Republican with a good address to put at Mrs. B’s table.” Fortunately, by the time Sidney was relating how he had campaigned for the left-wing Progressive Party’s presidential candidate Henry Wallace, “Mrs. B. was slightly high and off dancing with a blue-eyed Scot in knee socks and formal kilt.” The crème de la crème of Manhattan’s bachelorhood, or some simulacrum of it, drank excessively, and openly discussed “the withers and flanks” of the GEs, speculating who would and wouldn’t, eventually deciding they all would with the right alchemy of wining, dining, and foreplay. The ogling, poorly masquerading as flirtation, was led by Life magazine reporter Higgins Wintergreen Von Lemur, who swore his scar was not the result of a dueling match but of a lover’s quarrel, at age seven, with his Hungarian governess, who bit him. Drunk, he rallied others in boisterous demands for cognac. Margaret Fechheimer, the college editor, intercepted the waiters and switched them to coffee, begging Gael Greene to do something because her table alone had already consumed two weeks of the College Board’s contest budget.

Peggy thought the ball was fantastic; it was a real ball, and the party did not stop until well into the early morning. She had invited Tom, the young man she’d met in Mexico the previous summer, the one who pushed her to apply to Mademoiselle’s contest: “You were the one who started it all,” she told him. In the early morning hours, with the St. Regis party finally winding down, Tom suggested they go for a drive through Harlem in his MG. As dawn was breaking over Manhattan, Peggy climbed in, wearing her fancy dress, and they drove through every street in Harlem and the West Side, everything that Peggy had not seen, closeted as she was in the Barbizon up on the Upper East Side. They drove until six in the morning, when Tom finally dropped her back off at the Barbizon, and she giggled to herself as she climbed out of the MG in last night’s clothes, raising eyebrows in the lobby.

Gael, in the meantime, found herself at the end of the night “crawling up the curb in front of the Barbizon and through