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

work, luncheons, and outings to various manufacturers, they recommended “dark cottons, nylons, shantungs, silks or light-weight suits—cool, dark clothes preferably… and don’t forget hats.”

Sylvia was twenty years old, blond, a tall five foot nine inches, and a trim 137 pounds. She arrived at the Barbizon on Sunday, May 31, where she would stay until Friday, June 26. The Bell Jar, published ten years later, is an almost literal account of her life in New York in June 1953. In it, she renamed the Barbizon “the Amazon,” turned herself into the protagonist Esther Greenwood, and reduced (and conflated) the other nineteen guest editors to twelve.

Sylvia was forever tabulating, and in preparation for her trip to Mademoiselle and the Barbizon, she calculated that she had spent more on clothes during her current junior year in college than she had on everything combined during her first year. But both mother and daughter understood the potential of New York. Sylvia’s father, a professor, had died when she was young, and with no life insurance policy left behind, her mother, with the help of her parents, was keeping the household afloat, even with the lifestyle that someone like Sylvia and her brother, Warren, who had just received news of a scholarship to Harvard, expected to have. But money was a constant source of stress, and Sylvia’s letters home sometimes read like an accountant’s tally. The clothing expenses were justifiable, Sylvia noted as much to herself as to her mother, because the guest editorship was a rare opportunity to skip a few rungs of the professional ladder on her climb to the top. Moreover, as Sylvia explained (combining her ambition with her love for shopping), “I’ve always wanted to try ‘jobs on like dresses and decide which fits best,’ and now I’ll have the chance to see what it’s like living in the Big City.…”

New York in the summer of 1953 held the promise of a fairy tale. Sylvia, excited for her brother, now a Harvard man, and for herself, now a Mademoiselle guest editor, a “Millie,” wrote to him: “Being one of the 20 winners in the U.S. of this month in New York is a dream of an opportunity.… I feel like a collegiate Cinderella whose fairy Godmother suddenly hopped out of the mailbox and said: ‘What is your first woosh?’ and I, Cinderella, said: ‘New York,’ and she winked, waved her pikestaff, and said: ‘Woosh granted.’ ” The fairy tale continued reassuringly into Grand Central Terminal. Sylvia had traveled from her mother’s house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with Laurie Totten, another GE who, serendipitously, lived only two blocks away from Sylvia. But in her letter home, Sylvia was living the fantasy alone. She was helped off the train by “two lovely muscular members of the US soldiery.” She was guided through the “predatory crowd” by the two uniformed men. It was she they accompanied in the cab to the Barbizon, depositing her and her luggage at the front desk.

Sylvia looked about her and decided that the Barbizon was “exquisite—green lobby, light café-au-lait woodwork.” Checked in, Laurie and she took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, where all the GEs except for two would reside for the next four weeks. Sylvia was delighted by her “darlingest single,” with a “wall-to-wall rug, pale beige walls, dark green bedspread with rose-patterned ruffle, matching curtains, a desk, bureau, closet and white enameled bowl growing like a convenient mushroom from the wall,” handy for washing white gloves and undergarments. Like Molly Brown more than two decades earlier, Sylvia was especially thrilled by the “Radio in the wall,” but also the “telephone by the bed—and the view!” She could see gardens, and alleyways, and the elevated Third Avenue El train, and the new United Nations building, and even the slightest bit of the East River. But it wasn’t even the view as much as what it signified, for when Sylvia sat there many following evenings, working overtime, burdened with more work than the other GEs had—a perversely literal interpretation of the “woosh” to be Cinderella, the put-upon sister who did all the work while the rest pranced around town—below at least was the magical New York of lights and car horns.

But on that first night at the Barbizon, the guest editors gathered to look each other over, to start to forge relationships at the accelerated pace that the experience demanded. Sylvia found the others “intriguing,” four of them so stunning they “could be Paris models” (and of course fellow GE Janet Wagner would, however accidentally, become a model by the end of the month), and everyone vivacious and smart, with even a Mormon in the mix. They all sat in Grace MacLeod’s room, number 1506, which would also become the group’s unofficial lounge throughout the month because her room brought in the most light.

Their hotel rooms looked out onto Lexington Avenue, or Sixty-Third Street, or the alleys in the back on the east and south sides of the building. No one knew how the rooms had been divvied up, but the luckiest got the best views, the most light, or both. In the center of the fifteenth floor were the shared bathrooms, an inadequate number: two with a tub and toilet each, and another two larger ones with a shower and two toilet stalls each. Considering Sylvia’s obsession for long, drawn-out baths, she was lucky to have her room near the tubs, whereas those GEs on the other side of the floor found themselves having to make do with the showers more often than not. There were twenty GEs in total; nineteen of them single, but one already married with a young son. The married GE commuted in from the Bronx, while guest fiction editor, Candy Bolster, opted to stay with friends, the Larkins, in Manhattan. Margaret “Peggy” Affleck, a Mormon, also chose not to stay at the Barbizon. The Mormon Church did not allow it, and so instead she would take a bus back and forth from the Mormon mission