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

pay her weekly hotel bill, as well as buy lunches and dinners out or at the coffee shop and all the various things that models needed to stay looking good. Although she had nothing to worry about because her room at the Barbizon was paid for by her parents—always in full, always on time—Grace wanted to know she too could support herself. And it wasn’t just Carolyn; there were lots of other young women at the Barbizon who were benefitting from Madison Avenue’s demand for a pretty face and a slender figure. Advertising was one of the fastest growing industries. Carolyn understood what Grace was yearning for, that she didn’t need financial independence but wanted it, and she encouraged her to give modeling a try. Behind the prim, proper, and rather unimaginative outfits that Grace preferred, and the ever-present thick glasses, Carolyn saw a hidden beauty. So she sent her off to Eileen Ford, where Grace took a seat on the red sofa while she waited for judgment. It was not positive.

Eileen thought there was “too much meat on the bones” and that Grace’s look was too commercially run-of-the-mill, not to the Ford Agency’s high standards. (Eileen would later say this was the biggest mistake of her career.) So Grace took the opposite route of her modeling friends who were making their way from Powers over to Eileen; she headed to Powers instead, who hired her on the spot. As Eileen Ford would later pretend, her girls—she said—should advertise beautiful clothes and not products, and she had turned Grace Kelly down for having done bug spray and cigarette commercials. But in fact these were among Grace’s first modeling jobs with Powers—after Eileen had already rejected her for the extra meat on her bones.

Grace should have merely played to Eileen’s ego just like the famous Dolores Hawkins, who had already had some success when she walked into the Ford agency, which meant Eileen could not lay claim to having discovered her. She didn’t like that, and she rejected Dolores, complaining that at 108 pounds, she was overweight. Dolores shrugged. She understood the business and its personalities. She returned to Eileen a week later, declaring she’d lost the weight (which she had not). Nothing more was said. She had let Eileen save face. In 1957, in between apartments, Dolores stayed at the Barbizon, where she had a brand-new dove-gray convertible Thunderbird delivered right to the front door of the hotel, with a big bow on its hood, as Oscar stood on the sidewalk directing the gawkers to move away.

While Dolores Hawkins used her new Thunderbird to drive up to her parents’ horse farm in upstate New York for weekends, Janet Wagner reveled in the perks that came with New York City modeling. She would often go—although not nearly enough, she later regretted—with her friend Lorraine to the Stork Club, where instead of a bill at the end of the meal, the waiter would bring them a small gift, often perfume, or perhaps a lipstick, and a small note: “Compliments of the house.” Janet also befriended Lily Carlson, another of Eileen Ford’s top models. At five eleven and of Swedish stock (her father was a Lutheran minister in Iowa, who often sermonized in Swedish), Lily Carlson had put the Ford agency on the map when she signed with them shortly after they opened. She had come to modeling in her late twenties when her husband lost his job in the midst of the Depression, but her rise under Eileen’s direction was meteoric. In the famous 1947 fashion photograph The Twelve Beauties, photographer Irving Penn posed Lily in the very center of the ensemble, almost as if she were standing alone, basking in her own reflective light, in a simple white ruched floor-length gown.

Lily introduced Janet Wagner to Gita Hall, another famous New York–based Swedish model and actress. Delighted to be in her company, Janet took up Gita’s rich boyfriend’s offer to join them for a weekend at his mansion in Southampton on Long Island, the summer playground of the fabulously wealthy. What Gita—whom Janet would soon refer to as “one of the biggest prostitutes in town”—had not told her was that her boyfriend’s cousin was already there at the mansion, waiting for Janet and a sex-filled weekend. But Janet was clueless, and when he came into her room that night, she sat up straight, horrified, and nervously explained, fumbling for the right words, that she had never slept with a man, which sent him into fits of laughter. For him, her virginity was not only a point of great mirth but, fortunately, also an automatic deterrent.

Perhaps Janet was too unworldly for a world that pretended to be virtuous, even puritanical, but behind closed doors was far more complex. And perhaps Janet, her experiences thus far spanning no farther than Galesburg, Illinois, really was unusually naive and inexperienced. But because the 1950s were rife with contradictions, especially when it came to women and sexuality, looks could deceive. Those who appeared pristine and proper might be masking another layer, whereas the overtly sexy could be hiding a guileless virginity—like Janet. Indeed, Grace Kelly was the poster girl for that decade’s perfect woman, a persona solidified later by her on-screen role as the luminescent Lisa Fremont, the sophisticated, smart, modern woman patiently waiting for her man in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Yet Grace Kelly, forever identified with sweetness and chastity, was fond of dancing to Hawaiian music down the hallways of the Barbizon, and given to shocking her fellow residents by performing topless. Rumors of her sexual appetite and promiscuity abounded.

Few spoke about these contradictions with which young women at this time battled daily. But Malachy McCourt had a front-row seat to them. On May 12, 1958, the actor, professional storyteller, and relentless bon vivant (and brother of the schoolteacher Frank McCourt, who would later write the famous memoir Angela’s Ashes), opened up Malachy’s bar on Third Avenue between Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth Street. Formerly called O’Rourke’s, the