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

she’d say. She was a Republican amid a sea of New York liberal literati, who were her staff. While women were still climbing their way into the workforce, grasping one widely spaced rung at a time, there was a handful of women in the 1930s and 1940s that already had seats at the men’s table. Blackwell, editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, was one of them. BTB directed so many other career women—her employees, her protégés, her readers—to the Barbizon that she would tie the reputation of Mademoiselle magazine to the hotel forever, so that the fate of one followed that of the other, and the hallways of both became shelter as well as testing ground for generations of ambitious women.

Betsy Talbot Blackwell was never willing to reveal her true age but her staff guessed she’d been born in 1905, and indeed there is a photograph of her as a small girl, taken around the same year that the Unsinkable Molly Brown survived the Titanic. Betsy is dressed in the dropped-waist Edwardian fashion of the time, hat on, clutching her doll, staring at the camera. Her penchant for hats started early. Fifty years later she would fondly recall that same hat: “I remember it well—a kind of golden brown upholstery velvet, trimmed with mink bandings and heather. The coat matched it… the whole ensemble was quite elegant. You can see I was fashion conscious at the age of six, or whatever it was.…” BTB’s father, Hayden Talbot, was a newspaper correspondent and playwright, while her mother, Benedict Bristow Talbot, an artist, was one of the first known stylists and taught her daughter about “all things beautiful and visual.”

Everyone needs an origin story, and BTB’s included the hat—as well as a pair of golden slippers. She spied them in a shop window and was determined to have them, but being only fifteen, she needed a job to pay for them: for three weeks, during her Easter vacation from New Jersey’s Academy of Saint Elizabeth, BTB worked as a comparison shopper for Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue. She was hooked. When she graduated high school, she got a job as a fashion reporter for a trade magazine, and in 1923—at the height of flapperdom—she joined Charm magazine, eventually becoming the fashion editor there. Two years after joining Charm, she got married, but her husband did not believe a wife should work, and she soon had the marriage dissolved. Remarrying in 1930, she chose a man who was not bothered by a working wife, mostly because, she said, his first wife had not been one and so he was clueless about what that meant.

In 1935, Street & Smith, the pulp publishers who put out Charm, decided to start a magazine called Mademoiselle. The daughter of the vice president of Street & Smith, a student at the prestigious all-girls Emma Willard School in Albany, complained that she and her classmates were fed up with Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. With only haute couture on the one hand, or else sewing patterns on the other, the existing women’s magazines catered either to rich ladies with lavish funds or frumpy middle-class housewives with a sewing machine. The Emma Willard girls wanted a magazine with youthful fashion that cared about the problems of young women like themselves. It was, as BTB would later say, an entirely suicidal proposition: not only was it the Depression, but there was no such thing as a youth market, and young women especially had no status, no leverage, no disposable income, no purchasing power, nothing. If that were not bad enough, the first issue, in February 1935, came out with a front cover featuring a poorly rendered illustration of a girl with enormous eyelashed eyes and a puckered mouth. It was a complete disaster, and the only people to buy it were men who thought it was a saucy girlie mag: soft porn circa 1935. Horrified, Street & Smith employees were sent out into the streets to wrestle the publication back from news vendors.

That’s when Blackwell, now around thirty years old, was called in. On a miserable February morning, she was summoned by her old employer, Street & Smith, to the CBS Building and shown offices that were the size of “2 ¼ rooms.” They asked her to come on board this fast-sinking ship. The salaries on offer were low, even by Depression-era standards, expenses nonexistent (pilfering from the stamp box was the only way to reimburse yourself), and the offices minuscule. It was the mid-1930s, and skirts were long and felt hats large and raffish, pulled down over one eye. Trench coats were in too. BTB agreed to give it a go.

There was no March 1935 issue of Mademoiselle; the magazine only returned to newsstands in April, revamped under BTB’s keen eye and iron hand. She changed around the entire magazine and introduced America to the first-ever magazine makeover (on a Boston nurse named Barbara Phillips). Blackwell directed her staff to avoid “Prize Recipes, Romantic fiction written with a stencil. Articles on how to handle six-year-olds, etc. Stuffed shirts. Sublime acceptance of everything the publicity men tell you, and the apparently general assumption that all young women in America actively interested in fashion are either nieces of J. P. Morgan or slaves to [sewing] patterns.” The magazine was entirely geared toward younger women, from seventeen to twenty-five, from high school to early married. Two years later, in 1937, Blackwell was promoted to editor-in-chief, and became “BTB.”

Despite the hats, BTB was no fashionista. In fact, she seemed to be perpetually “dressed for a ladies’ tea.” She was often referred to as homely; and while she was no beauty queen, photographs do show a well-presented woman with dark hair cut to just above the collar, with greenish Bette Davis–like sunken eyes, and a carefully lipsticked mouth. She looked something like a squishy, middle-aged Judy Garland. Her love of shoes, not just hats, was legendary and a central motif in her office, down to the custom-designed shoe wallpaper