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

to waving him on through. As for inviting them in, even actress Cybill Shepherd, rather good at “sneaking ’em in, sneaking ’em out,” refused to give it a try at the Barbizon because it “was an institution,” not to be messed with.

The intricate balancing act played out in the 1950s by both women and men was eased by the martini culture of the time. The training started early in one’s college years, if not sooner. In 1958, the future actress from Love Story, Ali MacGraw, also at the Barbizon as a guest editor at Mademoiselle, illustrated a witty account of a typical Ivy League college weekend for the August College Issue of the magazine. Fellow guest editor Colette Hoppman, its author, described her anticipation for a weekend filled with “witticisms, milk punch, Frisbee on the lawn.” One friend, she noted wistfully, had recounted “hopping off a train in Cambridge [Harvard] on a Friday and being told that she was to be in a reading of The Cocktail Party that evening.” Thus Colette headed to Yale for her first Ivy League college weekend full of excitement and hope: a blind date with a boy who came recommended as “tall, clean-cut and well liked.” As was traditional for the college weekend, her blind date would pay for her lodging, food, and entertainment, and she would only need to cover her train fare.

But what she found there was nothing like her friend’s adventure in Cambridge. Colette’s experience was more like an alcohol-soaked frat weekend under the guise of genteel elegance. She arrived in New Haven with a girlfriend who was similarly set up. They were picked up in a convertible, taken to their boarding house, and told to be ready for dinner in an hour. Fence, the fraternity to which her date, Bill, belonged, was hosting the dinner, and they all sat down in “some fat leather chairs,” attempting conversation. Colette asked Bill if he was interested in advertising, as she had heard. He said he would most likely follow his father’s footsteps into it, eventually, but for now, “Drinking’s good enough for me.”

As if on command, “a white-coated waiter plopped a Martini down in front of me,” Colette wrote. Taking one sip, she decided gin was not for her, but for the rest of the weekend it was hard to avoid. Dinner was followed by yet more binge-drinking well into the early morning hours. Saturday was the big football game, the stands filling with Yale students and alumni, “old grads carrying 1919 balloons, tweedy boys in porkpie hats and camel-coated girls and girls and girls.” Public drinking was part of the game itself: liquor right out of the bottle, beer out of the can. One group chugged wine from “old Spanish wineskins, obvious souvenirs of a summer abroad.” The game was followed by another string of parties, these separated by theme, as if to stave off the growing ennui. When the night was finally over, the floor was “littered with cigarette butts, beer cans and an earring sprinkled here and there.” It was a disappointing Ivy League weekend for Colette, but an initiation into college life and after. Equally so, it was a peek into what life as an upper-middle-class young wife might mean, and the rounds of stultifying social rituals that came with it. Because it was the 1950s, and that would almost inevitably be her fate. The “dollhouse” was merely an interlude in a young woman’s journey toward the end goal: to become the mistress of her own home.

By the time Colette was coming to terms with her Ivy League weekend in 1958, Grace Kelly was already living in Monaco as its princess. In 1956, she had married the prince of Monaco in a wedding that dominated world news. In a few short years, she had gone from acting student staying at the Barbizon Hotel for Women to famous actress and Academy Award winner to love interest of Prince Rainier III of Monaco. In marrying him, she officially retired from acting at the age of twenty-six. Thinking back on the 1950s, one of her bridesmaids would say: “Did I think at all about the future? Not at all. Not a bit about ours nor even Grace’s… it was the Fifties. From where we stood, we were pretty sure that as long as we looked the right way, married the right man and did and said the right things life would unfold before us as easily and enjoyably as it always had.” Marriage was still the goal, and the Barbizon, the dollhouse, was its most coveted antechamber.

During the 1950s, one in three women were married by age nineteen, and by 1957, fourteen million girls were engaged by the age of seventeen. Eileen Ford would famously gather her models nearing their expiration date and arrange for meet-and-greets with wealthy Americans and titled European suitors. She was proud of marrying off “her girls” to successful men and excellent providers. While Grace Kelly moved out of the Barbizon to Monaco’s royal palace, her friends, now also getting married, moved out to the chic suburbs of New York. That too was a 1950s thing. Suburbs were growing six times faster than cities. Carolyn Scott would move to Long Island, while Lorraine Davies and Janet Wagner became neighbors in Westport, Connecticut.

The 1950s is a decade sometimes remembered with rose-colored glasses, a time, some say, when America prospered as it never had before nor has since. Yet the 1950s were bursting with contradictions, with the unspoken, with pretense, some of which would lead to tragedy. Grace Kelly, actress and princess, would famously die as her car pitched over the side of the mountainous, winding road in Monaco. Carolyn Scott, the model, would succumb to mental illness and live out the rest of her years in a homeless shelter in Manhattan. Janet Wagner, Mademoiselle guest editor and model, would marry a man who caught a flight to a business meeting one day and never came back: he