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

went up. Eventually they turned to look at Neva, the youngest in the room, a college sophomore, but she only turned a deep red. Grace looked at her with shock, but, then again, perhaps it was feigned shock, the kind that young women in the 1950s practiced regularly. In Neva’s experience, by the age of eighteen—regardless of what anyone actually said or admitted—most young women had been “seduced.” In fact, when Neva arrived at Stanford, she had been surprised to find she was one of the few remaining virgins and much in demand for the traditional Stanford “jolly-up” dance, which called for a virgin date.

On Monday morning the GEs breakfasted together at the coffee shop downstairs, just off the Barbizon lobby, and Sylvia was pleased to find she could buy a coffee, juice, an egg, and two pieces of toast for fifty cents. She had dressed in a light suit to make a good first impression, but at the last minute a voluminous nosebleed ruined it, and she quickly had to go change. Janet Wagner thought she looked sharp for the first day of work dressed in a blue-and-white gingham dress, belted, a small white hat, and matching white shoes (despite Mademoiselle’s yearly implorings to its guest editors not to show up in white shoes). Janet’s hat, the size of an extra-large tea saucer, appeared to be weighed down by a farmer’s market share of artificial fruit. When Sylvia saw it, she sniggered. The day before, Sylvia had been itching to size up the competition, especially Janet Wagner, the winner of Mademoiselle’s nonfiction prize. Janet looked like a threat—tall, naturally blond, and with a big smile—but as soon as she opened her mouth, there was an unmistakable (and unsophisticated) twang. Janet watched disappointment flood Sylvia’s face. Nor did Sylvia try to conceal her disdain; she would throughout the month refer to Janet as “hayseed,” and confuse her Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, with Knoxville College in Tennessee. It did not matter how many times Janet corrected her. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia would remake Janet Wagner into Betsy, the “Pollyanna Cowgirl.” But one’s place in the quickly established hierarchy among the 1953 guest editors was always precarious and relational: Sylvia’s “white straw beret,” which she wore unfailingly and proudly throughout the month in New York, resembled an old abandoned Frisbee and easily gave Janet’s fruit saucer of a hat a run for its money.

Another guest editor, the dark-haired, bright-lipsticked Laurie Glazer, a budding singer from a small town in Iowa, was also on the low rung of regional hierarchies. But Sylvia seemed more fascinated by rural Iowa than Galesburg, Illinois, and only expressed regret that Laurie’s parents had not chosen to settle on a farm, because in her view that was far more romantic. Laurie had dreamed of being a guest editor all through her junior year at college, but not until she was a senior had she finally mastered the contest essay form. Now in New York, she was overcome with the excitement of it all. As she would remember it, on that first morning, all the GEs, these “Eisenhower-era innocents,” marched abreast, arms linked, from the “glamorous” Barbizon all the way down to the “glamorous” offices of Mademoiselle on “glamorous” Madison Avenue (Mad Ave). Of course there was no way that seventeen girls could actually walk arm in arm down the streets of New York from their rooms at the Barbizon to Mad Ave. But Sylvia was not the only one who wanted to convince herself of fairy tales in June 1953.

When the “guest eds,” as Sylvia called herself and the others, arrived at Street & Smith Publishers at 575 Madison Avenue, they took the elevator to the Mademoiselle floor and gathered in BTB’s office, “hugging ourselves as if to contain the private ecstasy of winning.” Betsy Talbot Blackwell was in a black-and-white flowered dress with a low boat neckline, looking buxom, perhaps a little dumpy, but nicely groomed. Following BTB’s traditional exhortations to remain healthy, in between long inhales of one cigarette after another, which she lit with her own personalized matchbooks (startling silver with “BTB” printed in black), they were introduced to the other editors and given more forms to fill out in the mirrored conference room.

For lunch, the guest editors were split into groups and sent off with various editors, and Sylvia must surely have realized then, if not earlier, that she was among the very chosen; she was marched off to the famous Drake Hotel with editor-in-chief BTB and managing editor Cyrilly Abels, where they sipped sherry, ordered chef salads, and discussed writers and magazine life. Certainly others realized: it was clear to Dinny Lain because of the way the editors fawned over Sylvia. All of which made the first working day’s faux pas all the more excruciating.

Sylvia and Neva were waiting for the elevator down in the building lobby, where they had gone to grab a coffee during a break. They were chatting about the morning so far, surprised that the Mademoiselle editors were perhaps not as glamorous as they’d expected: instead they were real workingwomen, put together well but clearly less interested in the matters with which the beauty and fashion departments, considered rungs below editorial, occupied their time. Sylvia noted they were “a motley crew,” and Neva picked up with the observation that BTB looked like a hardworking Irish washerwoman. For Neva, it was intended as a compliment; for BTB, who soon heard about it, it was not a compliment (in years to follow, instruction sheets for guest editors included a stern warning to never talk about company matters in the lobby or the elevator). Neva and Sylvia were immediately called into her “boudoir,” as her shoe-themed office was called, and read the riot act. BTB railed against the two of them, calling Neva a charity case and Sylvia talentless, here only due to her mother’s relationship with Cyrilly Abels, for whom she was a reliable supplier of well-trained secretaries. Sylvia