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

and she knew she had to launch a preemptive strike. McCarthyism was not generous to career women. She contacted Street & Smith’s legal team, and two weeks later they wrote to her in Paris to let her know that they had decided it would be best to go see the FBI themselves, “voluntarily.”

George Davis’s swift slide into McCarthyism, even as he swore he was against the Red-baiting, clearly conflated communism with a distaste for ambitious women. In this, George, albeit a bohemian, a homosexual, and a New Yorker, was not so very different from many other Americans. As BTB sat in her green office, a glass of Scotch in her hand, and then another, reading George Davis’s written missives that stretched over five years, perhaps she understood the real target of George’s rage and suspicion. She was no stranger to the assault on women like herself. She would be accused of many things, and hiding “her iron hand under a charming and extremely feminine satin finish” was the least of it. Street & Smith had made a killing with Mademoiselle, discarding its pulp fiction operation and turning exclusively to magazine publishing. Yet BTB fought to get rightfully compensated. Gerald Smith, the president of Smith & Street, was a friend and confidant, and one day in 1952, she had again had lunch with him on a Friday to discuss her resentment. Clearly she had not gotten through to him. On the Monday, once the workday was done and the office had emptied, she sat down to write to him, reiterating the argument she had been making for years. The inequality was getting under her skin. What bothered her most, she wrote, was the lack of “recognition” she received, which she broke down into two categories—“professional (title) and money.” “There seems to me little doubt,” she said, “of my having been made an officer of the company had I not been a woman.” Yes, sure, she’d been thrown a bone, she had been made the only woman on the board—where, on her first day, bewildered by the presence of a woman and fumbling for a friendly gesture, the men had passed her a box of cigars. But the board appointment proved to be more show than substance: she had no real say, no title. And as for salary, she had sacrificed pay raises for the good of the company—the same could never be said of the men at her level, or even below, who felt perfectly entitled to take raise after raise. “I believe I have been the victim of discrimination. If not that, then what?”

By 1950, Dior’s postwar New Look silhouette had been modified with layers of added crinoline and petticoats to weigh down movement, much like the nineteenth-century bustle. But there were those who refused to be weighed down. Nanette Emery had left the Barbizon with her suitcase packed with New York memorabilia and returned to Bryn Mawr, graduating in 1947. She would lead an unconventional life, working all around the world, marrying late, at the age of forty, to a man in the State Department. There is a photograph of her wedding in 1966, in Paris, France, where she wears a stunning Jackie O.–style white knee-length coatdress and pillbox hat. She would adopt a daughter, Maria, while living in Paraguay. Elizabeth Moulton, her fellow guest editor, who could not afford to stay at the Barbizon the second time around, became a writer and artist, the author of several novels. Editors Cyrilly Abels and Rita Smith would continue to find and publish the best of new and cutting-edge fiction, for which Mademoiselle would become ever more famous. Blackwell would continue to reign over the magazine until 1970. There is no doubt that the typical image of American women in the 1950s pushed back into the home, behind the white picket fence of a new postwar suburbia, was in part true. But there were also enormous variations, including career women who defied the trend, and whom McCarthyism wanted to punish for daring to do so. Some of them sought shelter and found it in the hallways of the Barbizon and the corridors of Mademoiselle.

CHAPTER FOUR

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Grace Kelly and the Beauty Queens

Photographs of the beautiful Grace Kelly wearing glasses are less common, but that is exactly how Grace looked when the model Carolyn Scott first encountered her in the room next to hers.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, requests for rooms at the Barbizon grew exponentially, coming in all the way from New Delhi in India to Bournemouth in England. Meche Azcarate from Mexico, for example, was forbidden by her mother to stay anywhere other than the Barbizon. But even if left to her own devices, she would never have wanted to stay anywhere else; she loved “the atmosphere of a sorority house,” where “you can never run out of bobby pins.” The hotel manager Hugh J. Connor, with the help of assistant manager Mrs. Mae Sibley, was now finding it a challenge to coordinate all the various reservations and check-in/check-out dates. Together they calculated that close to “100 famous fashion models, radio and television actresses” along with many more “stage and screen hopefuls, girls studying art, music, ballet and designing” were residing at the Barbizon at any given time.

Phyllis Kirk, lead actress in The Thin Man television series, stayed at the Barbizon at her mother’s insistence. Shirley Jones, later to star as David Cassidy’s on-screen mother in The Partridge Family (as well as become his real-life stepmother), was dropped off at the Barbizon by her parents with $200 in her pocket. She had spent a year as “Miss Pittsburgh,” followed by a year acting at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The next step was of course New York and the Barbizon. Sure enough, she walked into the weekly open auditions for all the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway shows, and the casting director, upon