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

her Alger Hiss. I shall not do so; the issue is her personal ambition, not her politics.” George warned that Mademoiselle was being “turned over to a leftist clique,” and that it was the talk of New York’s literary world. According to him, an editor of the leftist New York Star had even said: “Isn’t it wonderful what that little Miss Abels is slipping past that stuffy old firm, and that reactionary husband of her boss?” BTB’s husband, James Madison Blackwell, referred to by Mademoiselle’s staff as “the Colonel,” was known to be ultra-conservative, even anti-Semitic and racist. But George was ultimately afraid of women’s power.

George was really only echoing the zeitgeist of the time. In 1945, the Cold War was still barely on the horizon. Three years later, in 1948, Harry Truman won the presidential election by channeling the growing anti-communist mood in America. Red-baiting became fully entrenched in everyday life, and the family—with wife and mother in the home, and not at the office—was understood to be the most effective safeguard against this new ideological threat emanating from Moscow. In 1949, the Soviet Union showed off its atomic muscle, China joined the communist camp, and America’s House Un-American Activities Committee warned Americans about communists, fellow travelers, subversives, and “perverts” (homosexuals) lurking among them.

The “Red Scare” quickly became intertwined with a postwar fear of the feminist. Many wondered if women would be willing to relinquish their wartime “men’s jobs” and return to the kitchen. Those who didn’t became suspect. Schoolteachers, in particular, being traditionally female, were suddenly seen as potentially dangerous and most likely to spread Soviet propaganda. One Columbia University professor theorized that “the girls’ schools and women’s colleges contain some of the most loyal disciples of Russia. Teachers there are often frustrated females. They have gone through bitter struggles to attain their positions. A political dogma based on hatred expresses their personal attitudes.” And what then could one say about women-staffed women’s magazines, these unique enclaves of female employment and empowerment? Let alone women’s hotels?

Unsuspecting Nanette Emery had done everything she could to win a place in the 1945 guest editor program, including participate in Phyllis Lee Schwalbe’s April College Forum. But by 1949, at the same time that George Davis was lobbing accusations at Cyrilly Abels, Nanette was indirectly under suspicion too. In Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts on Communism, Mademoiselle and its publisher, Street & Smith, were put on notice: “Memo to the top people at Street & Smith: You’d better really take a look at your Mademoiselle forum, really find out what goes on there. Ask a few questions: Who picks the speakers? What standards are used in making the choice? Does anyone ever investigate what they really stand for?” Referring to the dime novels that Street & Smith was once famous for publishing, particularly a series called the Frank Merriwell Stories about an athletic undergraduate at Yale University who fights crime and rights wrongs, Counterattack suggested it would “sadden [Merriwell fans] to think the top men of Street & Smith, in their modern offices at 122 E 42nd St., NY, didn’t have enough of the old Merriwell spirit to clean up the Mademoiselle forum and make it gleamingly virtuous.” Another Red-seeing newspaper explained that the fifty-five college girls brought over from forty-two colleges for the 1949 forum were viewed as student leaders but, if misled, would become “MISLEADERS.”

Yet George Davis was, in theory, just as suspect for his sexual preferences. Truman Capote, in his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, did not draw an attractive picture of George Davis, whom he turned into the character of Boaty: “a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. Diaghilev, for example. J. Edgar Hoover. Hadrian. Not to compare him with those pedestal personages, but the fellow I’m thinking of is Turner Boatwright—Boaty, as his courtiers called him. Mr. Boatwright was the fiction editor of a women’s fashion magazine that published ‘quality’ writers. He came to my attention, or rather I came to his, when one day he spoke to our writing class. I was sitting in the front row, and I could tell, by the way his chilly crotch-watching eyes kept gravitating toward me, what was spinning around in his pretty curly-grey head.” In 1951, Davis suddenly married the famous singer Lotte Lenya, the widow of Kurt Weill. George helped revive Weill’s remarkable Threepenny Opera, as well as Lotte Lenya’s career. The notoriously gay editor, a Democrat, beloved by the GEs who saw him only how he wanted to be seen, had become, at the height of McCarthyism, a married man and a borderline Red-baiter. Again he could not hold back and wrote to BTB: he wanted her to know that his life was back on track through “the inspiring support of a remarkable and dear person, my wife,” and he felt ready to confess something. He wanted to have it remain between him and BTB, although he did not mind if she shared it with her husband, “the Colonel.” Five years earlier, he explained, back in 1948, he had been “horrified by the color of such phrases as ‘witch-hunting’ and ‘red-baiting,’ ” and even today, in 1953, he was decidedly “opposed to what is called ‘McCarthyism’…”

“Yet.”

Yet a month earlier he had—he confessed now—made an unsolicited visit to the FBI “to tell them everything I know about the Communist infiltration of publishing. What I know is limited to the activities of one person, whom you know.” He was of course talking about Mademoiselle’s managing editor Cyrilly Abels. His story was listened to “attentively” by the FBI, and when he was asked if there were any doubts as to BTB’s loyalties, he answered no—he assured her—“As positively as you can imagine.” Yet unable to leave Abels alone, he added a postscript: “I do realize that our friend, in accordance with the party line, must now pose as a ‘poor-confused liberal’ who was taken in intellectually during the Spanish Civil War, etc. etc.” BTB was no fool,