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

Jar: “And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working on—drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion—everybody would think I must be having a real whirl.” The photograph, the one that appeared in the magazine and of which Sylvia wanted a copy, also made it look as if she were having “a real whirl.” But she was not.

Sylvia was irked that some GEs had managed to end up with “eligible New Yorkers” when she had not. Neva Nelson was among the lucky ones. Neva wrote to her mother, temporarily back in her life, that, “Everything was free last night, so of course we had champagne cocktails—three before dinner, then shrimp and dancing with a Herold Hawkey from Wyoming, five feet four, then salad, then dancing with John Appleton, five feet seven, a young book publisher, then chicken with barbeque-type sauce.” After finishing off a third pistachio ice-cream dessert, she danced with John Appleton again, and then again as he sipped his ninth Scotch on the rocks. Afterward, that same night, he took her to the Stork Club to prove to her it was not worth its hype, and when she finally agreed it was not, they moved on to the far trendier Salle de Champagne in Greenwich Village. The next day an enormous bouquet of exotic flowers arrived at the Mademoiselle offices, with a note for Neva: “With love, from John.” She was forced to carry that bouquet, almost like a scarlet letter, back to the Barbizon, with Sylvia and Carol in tow, who did not hold back the whispered remarks about how this was code for “thanks for a good time.” Neva could not help but notice that Sylvia’s tone was the more judgmental of the two.

To add insult to injury, as far as Sylvia was concerned, Neva was then invited to John Appleton’s country home on the Hudson, where he greeted her dressed in tennis whites and had dinner served at the ungodly Mediterranean hour of 9:30 p.m., with a meager (and, Neva decided, WASPish) menu of lettuce salad and steak. Yet these were the very sort of men that Sylvia was after, and so when Neva returned, skulking back to the Barbizon on Monday morning, Sylvia was ready. In the bathroom she cornered her, but Neva breezily explained she had spent the weekend in the country. To Neva’s surprise, Sylvia seemed to accept that, or at least pretended to. But Sylvia clearly wrestled with the way Neva flouted the very social codes she herself hated but by which she nevertheless lived. Days later, Sylvia was still “wishing that I knew Men in the city that could take me the places that I couldn’t go alone at night.”

Indeed, in the 1950s, New York without a male companion was a restricted experience. Being a woman alone, without a date, limited where you could go and what you could do. Sylvia’s hankering for a man, both for romance and for practicality, was further emboldened by her Mademoiselle best friend Carol LeVarn’s shenanigans. The day after the St. Regis dance, with almost everyone nursing a hangover, the GEs piled into three Checker cabs for yet another mandatory Mademoiselle outing to one of the magazine’s advertisers. Stuck in traffic, sitting in the first of the three cabs, Neva was hanging out the window, as much for air as for entertainment. Well-known disc jockey Art Ford happened to be standing out on the sidewalk in front of a bar, and he walked up to Neva’s cab, inviting the GEs to get out and join him and his friends for a drink. They shook their heads, laughing, and Neva playfully suggested they might have better luck with the next cab down. It was the one with Sylvia and Carol inside. Neva and the others watched, incredulous, as Sylvia and Carol opened their cab door and marched out, disappearing into the bar across the street, abandoning their Mademoiselle obligations. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia, as Esther, recounted her view from the sidewalk: “The man… handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.”

Of course it was Sylvia who had felt like the bridesmaid and not the bride at the St. Regis dance, and she continued to feel that way, despite her and Carol’s unorthodox, even risqué, decision to follow Art Ford. But in fact, things got only worse. Following an advertising agency’s luncheon for the guest editors, Sylvia, who adored avocados, gorged herself on the crabmeat salad much as she had devoured the caviar. But the avocado-crabmeat-mayonnaise concoction had been sitting out too long in the test kitchen while they waited for the GEs to arrive. In the cab on the way home, Sylvia was already feeling the first waves of nausea that would soon come crashing in. By late evening, almost all the guest editors were taking turns dashing to the shared toilets, knocking desperately, wrenching door handles in agony, lying on the floor, some laughing helplessly as yet another girl, new to that evening’s sport, darted in, the stench of vomit spreading. Sylvia marked her calendar for June 16 and 17 with red capital letters: PTOMAINE POISONING.

Sylvia, who was otherwise a prolific journal keeper, made only one single entry for June 1953. It was about the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Jewish American couple charged with spying for the Russians. In her journal, Sylvia wrote that she felt “sick at the stomach” because even as “headlines blare” news of the execution that night, no one out and about seemed affected by what was going to happen at 11 p.m.: “no