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

locked herself in the bathroom, and her sobs could be heard all the way out in the Mademoiselle lobby. Neva was crying too, and in this sorry state both of them were eventually called on by a very impatient Hermann Landshoff, who complained he was used to photographing professional models and not these whimpering dilettantes. Ready or not, he snapped their official photographs for the August College Issue.

Sylvia, still determined for this to be the fairy tale she imagined rather than the nightmare it was fast becoming, held a limp rose in one hand, and between tears, tried to smile convincingly into the camera. In The Bell Jar, she wrote: “At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up. ‘Hey,’ the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, ‘you look like you’re going to cry.’ ” Landshoff’s photograph of Sylvia as guest editor would become the iconic and most often reproduced image of Sylvia Plath.

More unpleasant surprises were in store. Back in May, Mademoiselle had asked the GEs for a handwritten statement about what they hoped to achieve in New York—“Write us a note in your own handwriting and tell us in not less than fifty words nor more than a hundred what you expect to gain from your month at MLLE and what you think you can give the magazine. Sign it—your full signature.” Tagged as a top priority among the bundle of paperwork the GEs had received ahead of time, these handwritten statements were sent, without consent, to a graphologist. The “gimmick” was that his handwriting analyses would be integrated into each GE’s “bio” in the “Jobiographies” feature, alongside the photograph taken by Hermann Landshoff, in which each GE would pose with something of significance to her bio. Sylvia’s was the downturned rose, and her “jobiography” promised that “Sylvia will succeed in artistic fields. She has a sense of form and beauty and an intense enjoyment of her work.” But the more interesting and much less flattering part of the graphologist’s analysis had been left out: while Sylvia’s sense of form and beauty would be “useful in fields of fashion and interior decoration,” she needed to “overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook.”

Sylvia had read the whole report, and perhaps she was trying to reverse this crushing analysis when soon after, as the GEs gathered for a special luncheon at an upscale restaurant, she brazenly reached for the large bowl of caviar set out for everyone to share. She pulled it close toward her, took the tiny silver caviar spoon propped next to it, and proceeded to eat it out clean, seemingly oblivious to anyone’s stares. But of course she was fully conscious of what she was doing because the scene would appear a decade later in The Bell Jar: “I’d discovered… that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.” Sylvia was wrong about believing that “nobody will think you bad-mannered.” At least one of her fellow GEs, watching Sylvia hoard the bowl of caviar, wrote her off that day. She understood it was not an innocent gesture, the kind that someone like Janet Wagner or Laurie Glazer—“the hicks”—might have accidentally made.

During this first week, even as so much was on the social schedule, all the guest editors’ work assignments were due if they were to make it into the August issue. Sylvia was chosen as the guest managing editor, shadowing Cyrilly Abels. She tried to hide her disappointment at being passed over for guest fiction editor, working alongside the famous Rita Smith. She dutifully moved her typewriter and desk into Abels’s office, where she would listen in on her conversations and stay late working. Neva Nelson, like the others, would pass by and “see her peck, peck, peck away at the typewriter, frustrated, ripping up pages and starting over, as she sat at the small portable typewriter table, her back to Abels’s desk, facing out toward the door that opened directly into the passageway that everyone took between the various editors’ offices.” Sylvia’s talent made the stakes that much higher; she was expected to do great things that summer while a clueless Dinny Lain and a giddy Laurie Glazer were able to direct readers to the season’s top lipstick shade and attend the extensive list of voluntary opportunities to be wined and dined, always with swag handed out at the end by fawning manufacturers and advertisers.

As the days passed, the GEs settled into a routine. Everyone tried to offset the oppressive summer heat with “below-calf cotton skirts,” and Laurie Glazer and Sylvia would pass each other in the hallways, smiling, “our teeth white against the magenta lipstick of 1953.” Neva adopted a pleasant routine of starting her day at the Barbizon coffee shop, right off the lobby, where she would usually find another GE already seated at the counter. Neva would sit down beside her and order a milky coffee in a big white ceramic mug and a Danish, preferably a bear claw. Dinny Lain, who had arrived already engaged, spent her weekends in search of her wedding dress, which she eventually found—a simple, elegant white organdy. They all discussed how Sylvia was missing out when she worked late, not just on the social events but on the details of their everyday lives, part of which was the sociability on the fifteenth floor of the Barbizon, where the girls kept their room doors open as much to let in the air during the stifling heat of June 1953 as to consult with one another on what to wear.

When it was time for the group’s official photograph, a couple of weeks into their stay, the GEs were driven to Central Park and arranged in star formation, dressed in identical tartan skirts, shirts,