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

place was a “rundown saloon” but Malachy and his partners slapped some cream paint on the walls, put down red carpet on the floor, and put up a sign over the canopy. One final touch was a brightly lit fish tank, and the other was Earl Walker, “trained in the art of food preparation and service at Rikers Island,” as Malachy McCourt liked to say. Malachy’s would become known as the first singles bar in New York. Its location within two blocks of the Barbizon was no accident.

Opening the bar required navigating land mines of regulations and codes that spoke to the era’s emphasis on propriety and all its implications. In every bar in New York, food had to be served (from a kitchen on the premises), with one dining table available for every two feet of bar counter installed. Lighting, it was stipulated, needed to be bright enough by which to read a newspaper. (When Malachy would later be hauled in for this particular violation, the judge asked the officer the name of the paper he had tried to read. “The Daily Mirror,” the cop replied. The judge ruled against him: bad choice of reading material, he said, and if the cop wanted to read so badly, there was always the public library.) There were also unspoken rules, such as the one about women not being allowed to sit up at a bar alone. Malachy got rid of that one.

Soon after opening night, the Barbizon’s young women started to wander in, curious at first, a little hesitant, but once they had discovered it, they let their friends know that Malachy’s was a respite from what was otherwise “a pale, green preserve up and down Third Avenue, with shamrocks, and Irish bars, and green fluorescent lights.” Malachy, who could be counted on to spin a good yarn in his Irish brogue, was a regular on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar, then broadcast live from New York. The jet-setters—charmed by Malachy and “prone to the lemming syndrome,” in his words—started to flock to the bar: the Whitneys, the Reynolds (of tobacco money), the Hitchcocks, and the socialite Berlin kids, whose father was chairman of the Hearst newspaper empire (Brigid Berlin would end up as Andy Warhol’s confidante). The actors that Malachy McCourt ran with—Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney—also joined.

Everywhere else across Manhattan women were still being banned from sitting up at the bar by themselves, just as once they had been banned from checking in to a hotel by themselves after 6:00 p.m. If a girl was up at the bar, the thinking was, nothing good was going to come of it, and in fact there was probably nothing “good” about the girl to begin with. At first, Malachy had thought it must be a citywide regulation of some sort, but after searching for the ordinance, he realized this rule was nothing more than a tradition, and a bad one at that. He invited the Barbizon’s women to come sit up at the bar alone. At Malachy’s, anyone could sit “wherever the hell they wanted.” “The beautiful young women, and handsome guys—they’d talk to each other. And then all of a sudden there were lines outside the bar.” When finally a cop came and pulled out his ticket pad to write out a violation because there were unaccompanied women sitting at the bar, Malachy dared him to name the ordinance. The police officer could not.

What Malachy’s offered to the Barbizon residents, if not the best of decor, was a chance to speak to whomever they wished or else to sit quietly alone if they wanted to. Because that was the one single rule at the bar: in there, “you were under the protection of the house,” and no one was allowed to harass anyone else. Even the Gibbs girls, otherwise under the strict restrictions of dress codes and mandatory lights-out, would come home from their classes, put on their nightdresses, then throw on a raincoat and come over to Malachy’s. His brother Mike called them the “Raincoat Brigade.” He even claimed some of them had forgotten their nightdresses under their raincoats. Sometimes, Malachy noted, his bar offered real sustenance too, and he was not above feeding the Barbizon girls: “Sometimes you could tell if they were counting their pennies.” If the young woman ordered a beer or a soda, and then began to count out her money, placing each coin carefully onto the bar, he would cheerfully offer her a burger on the house, making it seem like the most offhand of gestures.

One night, Malachy himself caught a fancy to one of the Barbizon girls. He was “on the booze then,” and drunkenly he escorted her back to the hotel. With the alcohol giving him confidence, and rugby training a fast run, he made it up to her room while she distracted the front desk receptionist. He vaulted up those stairs “faster than a fiddler’s elbow.” He did not find the hard single bed exactly conducive to lovemaking, but he made do. A few hours later, he crept back down and waited until the “eagle-eyed woman” at the front desk had temporarily stepped away. Then he made a run for the door, figuring that if she saw him, she could not catch him; and even if she caught him, she would still not know which cramped narrow bed he had been in when there were “seven hundred rooms of throbbing virginity” to choose from. Malachy would try it again many times after but always fail, even as he met half a dozen men in his time who claimed that they had vaulted up those stairs too and lived to tell the tale. If they were telling the truth, according to Ford model, Barbizon resident, and fashion icon Carmen Dell’Orefice, it might have been that they were masquerading as John MacGuigan, a good-looking Upper East Side gynecologist who was called in often enough that the staff became used