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

Sylvia Plath keenly felt the contradictions of the 1950s. She embodied them and she battled them; she was neither able to comply with the demands made on women nor bravely shirk them. Yet two years later another set of guest editors would arrive in New York, with more than one future writer in their midst, and while they too experienced their summer at the Barbizon and Mademoiselle as a time of reckoning, it would bring them to different conclusions from Sylvia Plath’s.

Joan Didion, who would become known as one of the finest writers and chroniclers of America’s political and cultural shifts, checked in to the Barbizon in 1955. She arrived, just like Sylvia had, with a drawer full of prizes and awards and a reputation that suggested great things were to come her way. She had received the enviable telegram from Betsy Talbot Blackwell, but so too had Peggy LaViolette, one of her closest friends at the University of California, Berkeley. It was unusual for the magazine to choose two students from the same university, but Joan and Peggy were delighted to have each other along for the ride. As sophisticated as they felt, they were both California natives after all, and in Peggy’s words, their circle was limited to WASPs, girls dressed in “cashmere sweaters, and skirts, and saddle Oxfords, with shiny hair.” They knew little of the larger world.

Flying to New York, it was Joan Didion’s first time on an airplane. It was 1955, late May, and air travel was a pleasure and not yet an ordeal. Flights had names as if to suggest they were the start of a journey. Their American Airlines flight was called the Golden Gate, and it was taking them from San Francisco to New York. Didion was only twenty years old, very small and fine-boned, with dimples and light brown hair cut to just above her shoulders. It was much the same hairstyle Sylvia Plath had worn two years earlier when she traveled to New York as a guest editor. As for Peggy LaViolette, this was not her first trip in an airplane (she had flown the summer before to Mexico City), and she became the unofficial expert as Joan gripped the seat.

The stewardesses, as they were called then, served the passengers Beltsville roast turkey with dressing and giblet sauce. Apparently it wasn’t only flights that had names back then; turkeys did too. The Beltsville was an invention of the 1930s—a turkey that was finally small enough to fit an apartment-size oven. As Joan and Peggy leaned over their roast turkey, they made sure not to spill. Both had dressed up for the plane ride, as was expected of any airline passenger in those days. Peggy’s mother had insisted that she go to San Francisco’s best store, I. Magnin, for her travel suit. Upon entering, they made a beeline for the “moderate” floor. It wasn’t “couture,” one floor up, where they seldom ventured, but nor did it mean thumbing through the racks. The “moderate” floor came with a “clothing adviser,” who greeted Peggy’s mother by name, led them over to a damask-covered love seat, and asked Peggy to describe the purpose of her outfit. She was going to New York, she explained, for the month of June, staying at the Barbizon and working in the Mademoiselle magazine offices on Madison Avenue. She would need to appear sophisticated while she mingled with editors, advertisers, and the New York literati. Nodding, the clothing adviser disappeared behind a mirrored door and then reappeared with an armful of items that she spread out on the love seat. Peggy, her mother, and the clothing adviser put their heads together, touching the fabrics, remarking on the cut and style, until the outfits were narrowed down to those worth trying. Peggy left I. Magnin with a navy two-piece dress in summer wool: a long tunic top that buttoned up the front and a pleated skirt underneath. There was even a detachable white collar.

With lunch over, the stewardess passed out postcards. One pictured a DC-7, the same airplane that they were on; another some passengers toasting the flight over cocktails in the airplane lounge. This was in-flight entertainment in the 1950s: the opportunity to write to friends and family to let them know you were flying high up in the clouds. But once the postcards were written, the boredom of sitting took over, as did the droning of the metal carcass in flight. The Golden Gate stopped twice along the way, dropping off some passengers and picking up others. In Dallas, Peggy and Joan got off and bought a boxed meal while the plane refueled. Next was Washington, DC, and with it being Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the plane now filled with congressmen. The final leg of the trip to New York was by far the worst, and Peggy sat next to a quivering Joan, reassuring her that the air bumps did not translate to imminent nosedives, even as she was losing faith herself.

Joan Didion was a junior at Berkeley, and had another year of college left, but Peggy was a senior missing her graduation, which her mother had found difficult to process. What her mother did not understand, no matter how much Peggy had tried to explain, was that there wasn’t a girl in America who wouldn’t choose Mademoiselle over her graduation ceremony. New York beckoned as California receded, and Joan and Peggy confided to each other how they were glad to be free of their boyfriends (Joan would take hers back upon returning to Berkeley, even as she felt their relationship was “hopeless,” leaving her “bored” and “apathetic”). Peggy felt little loss in leaving her boyfriend behind, was in fact perfectly content without him, but the pressure to have a “steady” was intense. As a college senior over the past year, Peggy seemed to spend almost every weekend at some friend’s wedding—checking off yet another girl who had dropped