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

of GE (in 1950, this number would expand to twenty). As Schwalbe explained to Nanette, “when stock-taking arrives late in April… the brainiest fourteen Board members are whisked to New York for the month of June to slide in beside our own Editors, to be Guest Editors and go everywhere and do everything.” Schwalbe was right: the winning GEs first had to prove their worth as writers, artists, critical voices, and college students. But they were also going to be photographed throughout the month of June, and they needed to be pleasant-looking at the very least. An addendum to the application discreetly asked for a snapshot, and the board members’ final assignment for the year included a quick PS: “Dig up a tape measure and have your room-or-hallmate take your exact measurements.” Nanette was five foot seven, 134 pounds, with a (then) 14 dress size and a very narrow 9AAA shoe.

Nanette did not place in the top ten winners for the first two assignments, but the third time was a charm. The assignment was to “plan a college fashion show which will dramatize, in some new and diverting way, clothes to wear on campus and off.” This was no casual, off-the-cuff assignment; the magazine’s editors were fishing for new ideas they could use. Mademoiselle was in the midst of planning one of its key events for June—the so-called College Clinic. It was a terrible name for an otherwise extravagant fashion show held at the Hotel Astor each year, with much of the clothing modeled by the GEs themselves, showcasing merchandise to be featured in the August College Issue. The College Clinic fashion show was intended to be whimsical, even mildly irreverent, to match the style of the print advertisements the magazine was known for, where perky, peppy college-aged young women—sometimes actual college women, other times Midwestern-looking Powers models—posed, leaning against a bridge, or feeding pigeons at the park, or bicycling across campus, with captions such as: “Pausing to window-wish on a street of antique shops, Joan wears a soft-tailored dress of J. P. Stevens’ wool-and-rayon, a McKettrick Classic, $10.93” or “On Sunday the Wall Street canyons look like a ghost town (and some smart money says they are). Near Trinity Church, Joan’s snapped in Petti’s plaid dirndl with a wool-and-rayon top, $14.95.” Nanette, even after she had won the third assignment, did not rest on her laurels but quickly submitted a collection of her poems to Mademoiselle and let Schwalbe know that in March—strategically close to when the editors gathered in late April to decide on the list of that summer’s guest editors—she would be in New York. Might she stop by the offices? she asked.

Her gamble paid off. Mademoiselle did not publish her poems, but Schwalbe did invite Nanette to the magazine’s April College Forum (it did help that Nanette was just a train ride away and wartime fuel rationing meant no one a plane ride away could be invited). The College Forum was Schwalbe’s pet project. Schwalbe, genuinely concerned about America’s direction once the war was over, had approached BTB for permission to put together a conference-type workshop on these very questions. The first College Forum, held in 1944, was shaped by Schwalbe’s travels from one campus to another as the magazine’s College Board editor, where she discovered that even if students appeared to be participating in the everyday life of American college coeds, they “were squirming in their desk chairs,” “wondering if they should be studying while others were fighting.” With the war now practically over, the 1945 College Forum, to which she invited Nanette Emery, included a mix of experts and students in panel discussions on topics such as “labor, race, prejudice, political action, world security, postwar education.” Photographs of the conference show Nanette as an attentive and intelligent, if somewhat self-conscious, pretty young woman dressed in the heavily shoulder-padded jacket of the 1940s, her hair pinned on the sides and curled at the back, pen poised to take notes. But Nanette had ensured she was seen.

Less than a month later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies. The very next day the most anticipated of telegrams arrived for Nanette at Radnor Hall, her Bryn Mawr College dormitory: HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN AS ONE OF MLLE’S APPRENTICE EDITORS DETAILS FOLLOW WIRE ACCEPTANCE VIA WESTERN UNION COLLECT AND DATE OF AVAILABILITY CLOSEST TO JUNE FIRST=BETSY TALBOT BLACKWELL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MADEMOISELLE. It was tantamount to winning the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and GE contest winners needed no convincing to come to New York: Lanie Diamond, a 1947 GE winner, would skip out of UCLA without finishing her finals so she could make it to Mademoiselle and the Barbizon on time.

Nanette Emery now had less than three weeks to prepare for her arrival. She certainly knew about the Barbizon. Two years earlier, the stunning redheaded screen star Rita Hayworth had posed for a series of photographs for Life magazine in the Barbizon’s gym. The photos were impertinent, funny, and a bit risqué. One showed Rita looking bored, rolling her eyes, defiantly sitting down on a chair as the Barbizon’s resident models exercised around her—doing handstands, playing table tennis. Another had five women bent over, derrières in decidedly granny knickers facing the photographer, while Rita Hayworth towered over them, her head cocked to the side, exuding sarcasm while staring silently at the reader.

The Barbizon had been steadily building up its reputation during World War II, and Rita Hayworth’s photo shoot in the basement gymnasium was part of that. The hotel had polished its public relations approach, starting with the habit of feeding snippets of delicious gossip to Photoplay magazine about the young, the ambitious, and the desirable women who were staying at the Barbizon. Nanette would miss out on seeing actresses Elaine Stritch, Cloris Leachman, and Nancy Davis (later Reagan) by exactly one year—they would all reside there in 1946. When Cloris Leachman arrived, recently crowned “Miss Chicago,” she was only twenty