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

she said, avoiding his eye, thinking how she had been both right and wrong when he had sat down next to her at Horn & Hardart. She hurried home to the safety of the Barbizon.

Carolyn Scott in a photo shoot for Mademoiselle.

Christmas arrived and Grace went home to Philadelphia while Carolyn stayed behind in New York, attending the Barbizon’s afternoon teas with the other young women too far from home to return for the holidays, or else with reasons not to want to go home. Grace had advantages Carolyn could not even imagine; Grace’s father, a self-made millionaire, paid for her room at the Barbizon as well as her acting classes. Unlike so many other residents, Grace did not have to sit herself down every week with paper and pencil to figure out where to cut corners, particularly after Mrs. Sibley had confiscated one’s hot plate. Residents’ frequent budgetary self-reprimands included promises to cut down on room service, cabs, and phone calls (they were an exorbitant eleven cents each from the rooms). One trick was to wait until 9:00 p.m. to see if you got a dinner date invite, which helped significantly with monthly meal costs. Another penny-pinching tactic was to hold off shopping at Bloomingdale’s, even though it was down the street, and wait for an in-house clothes swap or auction, which was particularly thrilling when it was a model who was clearing out her closet or, better yet, leaving the Barbizon to get married: the models had designer clothes purchased at wholesale prices and were more likely to give them away for minuscule sums.

While Grace Kelly did not have to worry about money, she did have to worry about her parents, who were clearly waiting for her to fail or give up. When she returned from the holidays back to the Barbizon, Grace thus made doubly sure she did not do either. Her voice was a problem, she was told by her acting teachers, too high-pitched, too nasal; but like Carolyn, she knew how to fix a problem. She bought herself a wire recorder and sat in her room next to Carolyn’s, speaking into the machine and playing back her voice until she had corrected her speech and acquired that oddly transatlantic British-like accent mandatory for all actors of the time.

Altogether, there was something genuinely resourceful about these postwar young women. Many residents were putting money aside for further training, such as seventeen-year-old Helen Sinclair, with “a drawl as broad as her native Texas,” who was working for $300 a week as a fashion magazine model so she could save enough to return to college for a fashion art degree. Kathleen Carnes, from Detroit, sang jingles to pay for voice lessons, and San Antonio’s Dorothy White taught music appreciation in New York’s suburbs to pay for her piano studies. Joan de Bey Murchison, from Kewanee, Illinois, started a publicity firm with earnings from a television gig, and Clair McQuillen from Pennsylvania used her modeling fees to study art and head out as a freelance advertising artist. Barbizon manager Hugh J. Connor took all these accomplishments and promotions as shared victories, sending flowers to those who had gotten their break, particularly if he knew how tough the road getting there had been. He smiled widely when sharing good news of Barbizon residents who went from sales clerks to buyers, from receptionists to magazine cover girls, from secretaries to company executives. The Barbizon dollhouse might well have been full of young, beguiling beauties, but there was much more behind their attractive facades. Even if many of these young women would indeed end up as wives and mothers back in the towns from which they had come, their goals while in New York were as ambitious as Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s.

Hugh J. Connor of course knew the intricacies of the hotel residents’ budgets and financial constraints. Carolyn now had one modeling job after another, but that did not immediately translate to money in the bank; Conover was notorious for not paying his models on time (in fact he would lose his New York license in 1959 for just this reason), and after two months of working for him, she had yet to receive her paycheck. And it wasn’t just Carolyn. New York’s working models were getting fed up with not being paid on time, or paid at all, and they were soon whispering among themselves about a new agency run by women. Two women, in fact: top-notch model Natálie Nickerson and her friend Eileen Ford. Natálie, a tall, leggy blonde, had been a successful Powers model. But, like almost everyone else, she became tired of the payment runaround. She began to plot with Ford, a model booker. They had met in 1945, soon after Natálie had walked away from her wartime job as a drill-press operator at an aircraft assembly plant in Phoenix, Arizona. She had left for New York after her supervisor took the credit for an innovation she had invented that would improve the production of an airplane’s altitude meter, and which the company then profitably adopted. She was determined to become a model, but one agency after another took a look at her five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch willowy frame, and said, “No, thank you.” She simply did not have the look that was selling then, or that anyone thought would sell. So Natálie, who, like Carolyn, was no stranger to hard work, got a job in a hotel where she punched an adding machine from midnight until 7:00 a.m. She would rush back to her room, get a few hours of sleep, and then continue to canvass photographers. She finally persuaded one to see her potential, and the shots he took immediately sold; within two months, Natálie was pulling in $25 an hour, making the enormous sum of $25,000 by the end of the year as a top high-fashion model.

Natálie had started out in New York at a church hostel, but as soon as the modeling work stepped up, she