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

hearing her sing, sent everyone else home. Judy Garland insisted her daughter, Liza Minnelli, stay at the Barbizon and drove the staff crazy by calling every three hours to check up on her Liza, and if she wasn’t in her room, they were ordered to go find her.

The postwar Barbizon now staked its claim as New York’s “dollhouse,” as the place to spy shapely young females, made all the more alluring by being tantalizingly out of reach in their sequestered, women-only lodgings. The dollhouse was a place many men dreamed of. Even J. D. Salinger, the elusive author of the 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, hung about the Barbizon coffee shop to pick up women. He was often there after his girlfriend, Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill), married Charlie Chaplin without warning. Charlie Chaplin could make her laugh; J. D. Salinger could not. But Salinger had other attributes. One Barbizon resident recalled that “I’d never encountered such intensity in a person,” while another noted his odd sense of humor: she returned to the Barbizon fully convinced she had just been on a date with the goalie of the Montreal Canadiens—which Salinger had pretended to be.

Many men tried to breach the Barbizon’s security cordon. Mae Sibley was used to being called to the reception desk to speak to someone claiming he was a doctor on call to see one of the hotel guests: “No doubt he’ll be twenty years old and will take care that I see part of a stethoscope sticking out of his pocket. It’s the oldest gag in the Barbizon.”

Not permitted to go beyond the lobby, young men lined up by the telephones to call their dates.

Carolyn Schaffner was the kind of young woman that a man might dress up in hospital scrubs to try to see. Carolyn, of Steubenville, Ohio, looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn, with pale skin and black hair that shone as if it had been brilliantined. She wanted one thing: to get out of smog-covered Steubenville, to say goodbye to her stepfather, who considered her an unpaid caretaker to his children with Carolyn’s mother. Carolyn understood that dreams needed to be worked at. She studied fashion magazines, models’ expressions, hand gestures, and when it was time for the town to choose its Queen of Steubenville in celebration of its 150-year anniversary, Carolyn canvassed. She went door-to-door making her case, even as she was known to be the prettiest girl in town. She understood one cannot leave dreams up to chance. As the winning queen, riding in the parade, hoisted high, waving to the people of Steubenville, she was offered the choice of a trip to Hollywood for a screen test or five hundred dollars. Carolyn wanted escape, not stardom, and chose the cash. It was 1947, and she was nineteen years old when she boarded the train to take her to New York; no one in her family came to see her off because her mother had to stay home to make dinner for her stepfather.

Carolyn’s exit strategy was similar to that of so many other late teens at the time. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, local beauty contests were tickets out of small-town America. In 1945, Lorraine Davies won the title of Tangerine Queen of Florida, traveling to New York by train. She passed out tangerines while her picture was taken. She arrived in New York on December 1, and saw her first snow before being escorted to the citrus industry’s official banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel. Fifteen hundred people watched as she floated in while the band played “Tangerine.” The evening finished with the famous bandleader Guy Lombardo buying her a drink and serenading her with “Sweet Lorraine.” Lorraine’s prize, like Carolyn’s, offered the local “pretty girl” an opportunity for a better or at least more exciting future, if she was willing to grasp it. Even as Lorraine was contractually obligated to hand out tangerines wherever she went, part of her prize was to meet with Harry Conover, who had gotten into the modeling business after seeing John Powers succeed. Conover declared Lorraine had what it took and invited her to return to New York after she finished high school. At eighteen, she did just that, making a beeline for the Barbizon.

It took Carolyn Schaffner one full day to travel by train from Ohio to Penn Station in New York. She did not know much about New York, but enough to flag down a yellow cab and ask for the Barbizon Hotel for Women. It’s what all the fashion magazines she studied so earnestly told her: the Barbizon was the only place to stay for a young girl new to the city. There she would be safe. She went in through the revolving doors and looked about her. Walking up to the front desk, she asked to see someone about a room. Mae Sibley appeared and asked for Carolyn’s references, which—being as well organized about her life as she was—she had brought with her. With the Depression long over and the postwar boom in place, Mrs. Sibley, at the Barbizon since 1936, was heavily invested in her vetting system. A former front-desk employee recalled that Sibley’s “first test of getting in, after she knows you can pay, seems to be how pretty you are. Later on, after the September school rush, she’s not so discriminating. And if a lady over 40 wants to come to the Barbizon, she’ll have a tough time unless she’s only staying a few days. The older ones and the plain ones appear to be there on sufferance.” Sibley would say she looked out for the hotel’s exclusivity; others would say she commodified the young women who came through the Barbizon’s doors, knowing full well that their attractiveness added to the notoriety of the hotel.

Mrs. Sibley laid out the rules to Carolyn: no liquor in the rooms, preferably no late nights out, or certainly not enough of them in a