The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

did was sleep for almost an entire day before they finally ventured out, walking past the men who “hung around the Barbizon Hotel entrance like vultures, 24 hours a day.” The first stop had to be Times Square, of course, and the two young women made their way down to Broadway and Forty-Second Street. Once there, Evelyn turned to her friend, clasped her arms around her, and declared that she was never leaving New York.

If she wasn’t going to leave, however, she needed a job. She wasn’t a Powers model or a Gibbs girl, and so the Barbizon desk clerk, not exactly unfamiliar with the girl-who-came-to-New-York-and-wouldn’t-leave type, pulled out the want ads section in the Sunday edition of the New York Times and pushed it toward Evelyn. It was still the Depression, but Evelyn fortunately was a trained nurse, and she quickly landed a job in a private maternity hospital six blocks down from the Barbizon. The hospital was owned by an Italian doctor who called every expectant mother “Rosie.” Each day, as Evelyn did her rounds, she would hear the persistent chant, a broken record that would not stop, ring through the maternity ward: “Push, Rosie, push!” During her days off, Evelyn, whose best friend had long ago returned home without her, hung out with the hotel’s models. They had colorful names that hid their own small-town roots—Dulcet Tone, Choo Choo Johnson, Dorian Lee, and Honey Child Wilder. They took Evelyn for a mandatory makeover to their stylists, who tamed her blond hair and applied makeup to her birdlike eyes, and escorted her on a shopping trip to Seventh Avenue in the garment district, where women could buy designer dresses at wholesale prices. One day, on the way to the movies, her friends stopped by the Powers Agency to pick up their assignments. While Evelyn was waiting for them, a man walked by and did a double take. “You’re the most typical Midwesterner I’ve seen in a long time!” Mr. Powers exclaimed, and declared Evelyn would be “ideal” for the Montgomery Ward catalog.

While Evelyn’s time as a Powers model would be short-lived, Celeste Gheen, who also resided at the Barbizon, was serious about her career. Not for nothing had she won the title of Most Versatile Model, and the list of products to which she had already given her face, her body, and even a limb here and there was long and impressive: Camels, Old Golds, Chesterfields (she smoked only the latter); Krippendorf Foot Rest Shoes, United States Rubber Company, Buick, Hellman’s, La Cellophane, Log Cabin syrup, Texaco, Packard, Bayer aspirin, Beech-Nut, Simmons Beautyrest mattresses, Bon Ami, Spam, and the laxative Castoria (which she didn’t touch). Mr. Powers had baptized her with his highest compliment: “She is the typical-American-girl-type!” What that meant, the New Yorker explained, was that she “hasn’t the sort of breath-taking beauty that compels small boys to whistle involuntarily when exposed to it, but she is a decidedly attractive girl, with delicate, neatly arranged features and a lot of poise.”

Celeste was just fine with that. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she had attended an eight-month secretarial course and then found work as a secretary for the Sherwin-Williams paint company. One day in 1934 she went to a photographer’s studio to get her picture taken for her mother, and the photographer said he could try to get her a spot in a General Electric advertisement, which he had been commissioned to illustrate. He followed through, and Celeste was paid five dollars to hold a sixty-watt Mazda bulb—the photograph appearing with the caption “Talk about your bargains!” To her mind, that was it with modeling, but advertising agencies in New York saw the picture of Celeste holding the Mazda bulb and told Mr. Powers they wanted her. Powers took on the challenge and finally tracked her down in Cleveland; for a full year he sent her pleading notes, which she initially ignored because she had never heard of him and was suspicious that he was trafficking in young white women. Which, in a sense, he was.

But after a year of Mr. Powers’s unrelenting pleas, she finally agreed to come to New York in the fall of 1935 and meet with him. Celeste, very much the working girl, had by then extracted a promise from him: if she did not hold up to his modeling expectations, he would still have to give her a job as a secretary at the Powers Agency. She came to New York, passed his test, settled into the Barbizon, yet still remained suspicious. When her first photo studio appointment came up, she arranged for one of her Barbizon friends to call the police if she was not back by a certain time. She then went one step further and told the photographer that her friend back at the Barbizon was waiting to report him, which turned him into a nervous wreck, barely able to hold the camera still. But Celeste soon learned that everyone in the 1930s was after the same thing: making a living. Herself included. With this wobbly start she was soon earning about $25 a week, and her room at the Barbizon was $11, which left her with more than enough to live comfortably and even save up a nest egg.

Like every model in New York, Celeste carried a black hatbox with her, which held her makeup, accessories, and anything else a model might need for a shoot, since it was up to the models to do their own makeup and hair. If the hatbox came from the men’s hatter John Cavanagh, whose store was in the same building as the Powers Agency, then everyone knew she was a Powers girl. When a rival hatter became tired of all the free publicity for his competitor, he created special hatboxes with each Powers model’s name stamped on the front, but few were willing to switch. Although Celeste had come close to ditching her Cavanagh hatbox after the bottom fell out on the Madison