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

Peggy’s desire to buck the trend was as intense as the pressure to conform. Her parents had reared her to work: her mother had always had a job, and in the early years, her father, a teacher, thought nothing of spending summers at the local pea cannery to supplement their income. (Even so, one day, as Peggy was helping dry dishes, her mother turned to her: “Peggy, you know you don’t have to stay at Cal all the way through. You ought to be able to find a husband in two years.” The rest was all noise and haze: Peggy began to shout at her mother that she loved Berkeley and why would her mother suggest she prostitute herself?!)

When Peggy graduated from Berkeley High in 1950, most of her friends received a hope chest as their graduation gift. A cedar-lined chest filled with linen guest towels and bedsheets. Peggy didn’t want a hope chest, she wanted a typewriter, preferably an Olivetti portable typewriter with a travel case. Joan Didion turned up at Berkeley with that very typewriter and travel case; moreover, as Peggy enviously learned, Joan had gotten hers without a fight. Now they both carried their typewriters onto the plane with them. A handbag in one hand, and gripping their typewriter in the other.

To try to be who they were, or who they wanted to be, was not easy. The United States was at war again—first Korea, and now slowly Vietnam was beginning. The Cold War fears with which George Davis had grappled, lobbing accusations of female ambition at Cyrilly Abels, were being inflamed all the more. The solution for most women was retreat. The feminist Betty Friedan, in her famous book, The Feminine Mystique, would write that this era was marked by women’s “pent-up hunger for marriage, home, and children,” “a hunger which, in the prosperity of postwar America, everyone could suddenly satisfy.” America’s expanding suburbs were a witness to this, where one-income families and two-car garages were the new normal. The quiet rebellions against these values were inevitably individual, unassuming, and—in the case of Peggy and Joan—cashmere-clad. They carried their typewriters, boyfriend-less, unencumbered, dressed in their cardigan sets, ready to tackle New York. Joan had already been picked as the guest fiction editor, the most prestigious of all the posts, and the one that Sylvia had so desired. Peggy would be guest shopping editor.

Both wore nylon hose and one-and-a-half-inch heeled pumps on the plane, but Joan had dressed more lightly in anticipation of New York’s summer heat; being from Sacramento, she understood hot weather better than Peggy. Nevertheless, when Joan finally got off the DC-7 at the Idlewild Terminal (as JFK International Airport was then called) in Queens, New York, she felt her new dress, chosen for this moment of propitious arrival, and “which had seemed very smart in Sacramento,” was “less smart already.” New York overwhelmed before it even came into full view.

There was, however, nothing “smart” and stylish about the bus ride from the airport to Manhattan. Joan opened the window wide “and watched the skyline,” only to see instead “the wastes of Queens and the big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE.” But upon entering Manhattan, everything changed. Their first sighting of the towering skyscrapers and sidewalks crowded with people injected Joan with the “sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” When they finally arrived at the Barbizon on Lexington and Sixty-Third Street, they looked up at the salmon-colored multi-turreted building that they’d only before seen in photographs. Its architecture was a playful mixture of Moorish, Neo-Renaissance, and Gothic Revival styles but tastefully arranged in art deco lines and angles that had held up over the almost thirty years since it was built. Oscar, the doorman, stood at attention in his regalia.

Joan and Peggy entered the hotel lobby, the most impressive part of the Barbizon (the hotel keenly understood that first impressions mattered), and looked up at the mezzanine, from which groups of young women peered down, keeping an eye out for their dates or, just as likely, everyone else’s. Peggy and Joan went up to their rooms on the fourteenth floor, pleased to discover that theirs were adjacent to each other, at the end of the hall next to the elevators, and right next to the shared showers. As per Mademoiselle tradition, on their beds they each found a single red rose and their itinerary for the month of June. But one thing had changed since Sylvia Plath’s stay at the Barbizon: now there was air-conditioning to ward off New York’s humid summer heat. Joan had caught a cold when she opened the window on the bus into Manhattan, and she would lie in her bed at the Barbizon for the next three days, curled up, fighting a fever, hating the air conditioner that was cooling the room to a wintry 35 degrees, unable to switch it off, too scared to call the front desk because she had no idea how much to tip if they came to help. It was better to freeze and save face. Instead, she called her on-again off-again boyfriend Bob, the son of the owner of Bakersfield’s Lincoln-Mercury dealership, and told him she could see the Brooklyn Bridge from her window. It was in fact the Queensboro Bridge.

That same day, guest editor and also future writer Janet Burroway was traveling in from Arizona. She called herself Jan because she thought this way she’d have editors guessing her gender (a feminist reflex before she even knew the word). She was a self-described “Arizona greenhorn,” but, like a protective shield, she carried with her to New York a preemptive world-weariness. She wrote to her parents—almost as if she were yawning into the page—that her first ever airplane ride was “exciting and beautiful” and yet “surprisingly unamazing.” In fact, it turned out to be