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

Avenue bus, giving her fellow passengers an intimate view of its contents, including long woolen underwear and so-called “binoculars,” an apparatus that helped to create a bosomy effect if the shoot demanded it. Celeste resented her Cavanagh hatbox in other ways too: when she carried it, people would shout “Hi, Powers!” at her. That said, when she didn’t, they would shout “Hi, Toots!” Neither was ideal.

But one of the worst aspects of modeling was tolerating the lighting lamps that generated an intense heat. Photo shoots were as much about fighting off perspiration and fainting as they were about posing. Celeste learned to do what other models did: she propped herself up against the slim metal support routinely provided by photographers and furiously chewed Beechies gum (which she always had on hand) to fend off a fainting spell. Celeste averaged three to four hours of work a day, but it was a constant hassle to get those jobs. Modeling jobs were arranged by two average-looking, stressed-out young women who had twenty-three models to take care of and commanded an enormous scheduling chart that hung on the wall behind them and dictated all their lives. Some Powers models were used only for their faces and were never shot below the neckline, but Celeste had a good figure, to which her leather-bound look-book, with her name and Mr. Powers’s printed on the front, could attest. She was a dress size 12 (which today would be about a size 4), hat 22, shoe 7 ½ AAA, hose 10, gloves 7. This translated to 35-inch hips, a 24-inch waist, and a 34-inch bust, with a height of 5 feet 8 ½ inches, weighing in at 115 pounds. She was a living and walking Barbie before Barbie existed.

When a job was called in, the two office assistants scoured the models’ schedules to see who would go. The WP jobs were, in Celeste’s opinion, by far the worst. WP stood for “weather permitting,” and there had been times that she had had to wait for ten afternoons until the weather cleared up, during which time the Powers schedulers could not book her for anything else.

After two years as a $5-for-one-and-a-half-hours model, Celeste had promoted herself to a $5-for-one-hour model. It was up to the models themselves to decide when they wanted to raise their price, when they thought clients were ready to pay up; of Powers’s four hundred girls, only twenty were at the $10-an-hour rate, and Celeste, being a realist, doubted she would get there.

But Celeste was talented, and she could adjust her hair and makeup to look anywhere from eighteen to thirty-five. She had once played the part of a “loving mother giving a cookie to a rather large child,” although she did not enjoy working with juvenile models, who were generally badly behaved; once she swatted one when his mother wasn’t looking. The jobs called “objectionables” paid double, and included posing with depilatories or deodorants and in bathing suits, brassieres, and step-ins. Celeste’s most objectionable “objectionable” was when she had had to bathe in Colman’s mustard, after which the proposed advertising campaign, claiming health benefits for sore muscles, was abandoned. Celeste was undoubtedly a workingwoman, no less than the Gibbs secretaries, however different their jobs might appear at first glance. Both the Gibbs girls and the Powers models were in the business of making a living in the professions that had been allotted to them as “women’s work” during the Great Depression.

It was this shift in the Barbizon’s residents during the 1930s—to eager professionals determined to work, even if within the confines of what was not only considered ladylike but also exclusively female—that solidified the hotel’s reputation as the premier landing spot for young, ambitious, beautiful women. In 1938, Kathryn Scola, a prolific screenwriter, booked herself into the Barbizon for two weeks, billing her expenses to 20th Century Fox. Her instructions were to observe, absorb, and write a movie script about what she saw. She soaked up the atmosphere of what Washington Post columnist Alice Hughes described at the time as “a fine big secular nunnery,” its ornate lobby filled with young men who “all look as though a house detective were about to pitch them into the street on the seat of their best ice-cream pants. And the girls are mighty grand to look at, too, most of them. Models, mannequins, and such-like.” It was the models, of course, who would become Scola’s focus. The film script she wrote was to be called Hotel for Women. The film’s director, Gregory Ratoff, at first hired Elsa Maxwell, the Waldorf Astoria’s famous party planner, as the technical director for the movie’s party sequence, but he soon insisted that she work with Scola on the film’s storyline as well.

Elsa Maxwell was an American phenomenon, an unlikely rags-to-riches tale. She had started to cultivate her party-planning skills at the age of twelve when she was told she was too poor to be invited to a friend’s party. As she grew, so did her parties, and by the time she was an adult “party planner,” an entirely new job category thanks to Elsa, her events were showstopping. Her parties for the rich and famous put Venice’s Lido on the map, after which she was hired by Monaco to do the same, and she created havoc in Paris when she organized a scavenger hunt there. A woman who was not in the least attractive and dressed, as the New York Times noted, in “mannish toggery,” her reputation was still such that when she returned to New York in 1931, in the thick of the Depression, the Waldorf Astoria gave her a suite rent-free to attract clientele to the new hotel and paid her to entertain them. Under her supervision, Kathryn Scola’s film was suddenly retitled Elsa Maxwell’s Hotel for Women.

Elsa Maxwell’s helping hand was a heavy one. The movie’s heroine, Marcia Bromely, arrives at the Sherrington (a fictionalized version of the Barbizon) from Syracuse. She is in New York to