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

Balenciaga clothes to pique the customers’ interest. In the evenings she returned to their Barbizon room, where the three women in her once well-off family now lived together like “three little bears.” It was indicative of the times that these were the sorts of jobs open to these three women, and that they were in fact grateful to have them, and that the Barbizon, as glamorously as it was portrayed by screenwriter Kathryn Scola, was also willing to look the other way when all three made a home in their tiny shared room.

But the economic climate was starting to improve, and in 1940, the Barbizon declared itself “free and clear of mortgage.” The hotel was running a profit of $103,476 for the year, significantly up from $63,676 two years before. What had in part made those numbers surge forward between 1938 and 1940 was the millions of visitors to the World’s Fair out in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Built on an ash dump, the fair’s theme was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” suggesting the new sense of hope as the economy improved. On the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration in New York, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the opening speech. Two hundred television sets were scattered throughout the fair so the first day’s visitors could experience that next revolutionary medium. The fair was open spring and fall, in both 1939 and 1940; a gravy train for New York and its hotels as 44 million visitors searched for a place to lay their heads.

Powers models posing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The Barbizon Hotel Corporation, feeling flush, purchased, with cash, the building adjoining it, thereby securing the hotel’s light in the future: no one would be able to build there and obstruct the sun. As if to mark this moment of becoming unshackled from its Depression-era debt, the Barbizon also put up a marquee at the main entrance of the hotel, on Sixty-Third Street. Designed by architects Schwartz & Gross, it was made to match the style of the hotel’s architecture. The marquee was thirty feet in length, art deco: the fascia built of bronze, with panels of aluminite. The name “The Barbizon” was cut out in the bronze fascia so that the light shone through.

While the Barbizon could assert its future with the guarantee of natural light going forward and an enormous bronze marquee to mark its continued presence, most young women emerged from the Great Depression with a string of broken promises. The better-off among them had imagined, and until that fateful week in October 1929 had been brought up to expect, a leisurely life of ice-skating, horseback riding, outings, cars, dates, and friends. What they got instead was one pair of shoes, perhaps a second as a spare. When the financial dark clouds finally cleared, they wanted to make up for the fun they had missed out on as an entire generation. The war that had just started in Europe, far across the Atlantic—at the same time as Phyllis McCarthy was worrying about getting a room at the Barbizon—at first hardly registered. But that too would come to an end.

Evelyn Echols, whom Mr. Powers had declared to be the most typical Midwesterner, was now married and had just finished lunch on Sunday, December 7, 1941. It was a bright sunny day in New York, and she and her husband were reading the doorstopper-size Sunday edition of the New York Times and listening to the New York Giants’ game on the radio at home. The broadcast was suddenly interrupted with the announcement that all servicemen and women were to return to their stations immediately. There was nothing more after that, no explanation. Evelyn and her husband sat and waited until finally the next announcement came: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was now at war. A third announcement followed: Cover all windows and do not allow any light to escape. Do not use the telephone, because all telephone lines at this time must be reserved for the government. Evelyn got up and switched off all the lights, and as she looked out her window in the direction of Times Square—the very place where she had stood as a twenty-one-year-old and sworn she would never leave New York—she could not believe her eyes: there was “not one speck of light showing in the entire city.”

Men left for war, and women were now expected to take over their jobs—even as before they had been reprimanded for it. When General “Wild Bill” Donovan put out a call for women to come work for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, he explained the ideal employee would be “a cross between a Smith College graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” He might as well have come right over to Mrs. Mae Sibley at the front desk and asked for a Barbizon resident.

CHAPTER THREE

M

C

C

ARTHYISM AND

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TS

F

EMALE

P

REY

Betsy Talbot Blackwell and Her Career Women

The remarkable Betsy Talbot Blackwell (far left), editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle magazine, who was never seen without a hat, posing alongside two similarly hatted models. In 1944, she decided the winners of the prestigious guest editor contest would stay at the Barbizon, thereby opening its doors to Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Betsey Johnson, and many others.

There were two types of office-bound women. There were the secretaries who flooded New York’s shiny new skyscrapers in the 1920s and then hung on as best they could through the Great Depression. And then there were the women who had not just jobs but careers. Betsy Talbot Blackwell, or BTB, as she signed herself, was one of them. She wore a hat at all times, without fail, so much so that one newspaper claimed she even wore it in the bathtub. She would pull out the Scotch at 5:00 p.m., “when the sun is over the yardarm,”