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

would be accused of exploding the commercial plane he was on in a desperate act of suicide, taking everyone with him. Lorraine Davies, Tangerine Queen and model, would write a fictionalized account of her friend Janet’s fight to clear her late husband’s name. The prevailing wisdom for women of the 1950s, the notion that marriage meant success or at least security, often proved false. For many 1950s residents of the Barbizon, their small rooms, hard beds, frantic dress-ups before a date, late-night conversations with friends, even chidings by Mrs. Sibley, would become touchstones of nostalgia. They had understood their time at the Barbizon as a short window of opportunity that would usher them toward the ultimate goal of marriage, but in fact, looking back, that window—and the female camaraderie and independence that defined it—turned out to be a high point.

CHAPTER FIVE

S

YLVIA

P

LATH

The Summer of 1953

This iconic photograph of Sylvia Plath holding a rose was taken on her first day as guest editor at Mademoiselle by an impatient Hermann Landshoff, who complained he was more used to models than dilettantes.

Sylvia Plath was also caught up in the push and pull of the 1950s. She would become one of America’s greatest twentieth-century poets, as well as the author of one single but famous novel, The Bell Jar, entirely based on her time at the Barbizon Hotel. In that novel, she documented her ambivalence toward the promises of the decade: “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” But in the spring of 1953, Sylvia was still fixated on the window of time offered to a young woman like herself and not on how short that window might prove to be, even for the most beautiful, ambitious, and talented. Sylvia had not yet finished college and already she had a reputation that preceded her. She was the one they whispered about: that young woman who was going to be a writer, with a bright blond pageboy haircut and a penchant for parties.

Sylvia Plath was in her third year at Smith College in Massachusetts, and since she was already on her way to being the writer she planned to become, it was inevitable she would apply to Mademoiselle for the guest editor contest. In April, the College Board editor came up to visit the Smith College applicants, and Sylvia wrote forlornly to her mother that over tea, she watched her chances slip away as it became clear the other contestants had “tremendous” talents too. But, still, Sylvia could not resist a dig; she was, she wrote, especially sure one of the other girls would win because (unlike her) “none of them have received prizes yet.” Sylvia of course had a drawer full of them, and was not shy about saying so. She had just won Mademoiselle’s College Fiction Prize ($500, which was no small change then) and also sold three poems to Harper’s Magazine for $100.

But she did not let the visit from the Mademoiselle College Board editor get her down: Sylvia was intent on enjoying life, and she approached it with the same determination as she did her poetry. A medical student had just invited her for a whirlwind weekend in New York; another student had invited her to the Yale University spring dance for the weekend after (and, unlike Colette, she would not be disappointed). If anything, it was clothes that were on Sylvia’s mind: “I now have a white bag and white shoes, a red bag and red shoes, and some day am going to get a black patent leather bag. I am so proud of myself now, in my judgment in clothes. I know what I want and just what I need, and feel most positive and good about it all.”

The New York weekend with the medical student proved to be the quintessential Manhattan experience circa 1953. Sylvia arrived at Grand Central Terminal with her friend Carol, who had been fixed up with her own date (“a short, balding but simply wonderfully kind and intelligent first year man,” Sylvia summed up). The four of them immediately headed for dinner at La Petite Maison, where Sylvia was dazzled by the linens, the French waiters, and, most of all, the food (for she loved food, as she loved clothes), tasting her first raw oysters that very night. Then a Checker cab to see a play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, followed by intense conversation at the famed nightclub Delmonico’s—the very place where eight years earlier Nanette Emery had had an 11:45 p.m. double date with a marine and an army officer. A piano played in the background as Sylvia, her friend, and their dates bent their heads low and discussed race relations, communism, and religion. And that was only the first night.

So when the sought-after telegram finally did arrive for her from Betsy Talbot Blackwell of Mademoiselle to say that she was in fact one of the winners of the guest editor program, Sylvia felt she had just tasted a sumptuous bite of what was to come. She wrote to her mother after receiving all the requisite Mademoiselle forms, lists, and instructions, letting her know she would be staying at the Barbizon “at a reduced rate of $15 a week.”

“Never stayed at a hotel before!” she wrote. Sylvia listed the clothes she was advised to bring to New York, including a swimsuit, a formal dress, and “cool, dark clothes ‘which will look as fresh at 5 p.m. as at 9 a.m.’ ” In fact, Mademoiselle had been more specific still: they warned (as if they already knew that the summer of 1953 would be a record-breaking heat wave) that “it can get very hot in New York in June.” For managing the daily combination of office