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

Burroway. They eyed each other with a heightened sense of competition. Leading this 1955 crop of GEs was Jane Truslow, guest editor-in-chief and a senior at Smith College, Sylvia Plath’s alma mater. It was Jane’s job to breathlessly describe to the magazine’s readers their first day at work: “ ‘Sesame,’ said the hero in Arabian Nights and a door opened for him upon a treasure that was incredibly dazzling. The magic words for twenty very excited Guest Eds. were less exotic but just as effective: ‘Sixth floor please… the MLLE offices!’ As the elevator door slid open on that most anticipated of days, our first with MLLE, we entered a new and glittering world, ours for four fantastic weeks. Editors Blackwell, Abels and Fechheimer, once only mythical names on a masthead, welcomed us in the conference room. They and the rest of the staff set us at ease, and so the whirl began… Creative energy crackled like summer heat lightning in the atmosphere over 575 Madison Avenue and the Barbizon as each of us attacked our assignment for the August issue.…”

It was not quite like that. Truslow left out the part about how Margaret Fechheimer, the College Board editor, took one look at them and sighed. She wanted to “bomb the Eastman Kodak people,” who were responsible for the “underexposed snapshots” on the basis of which—along with the mandatory submission of writings and drawings—she had picked this group. Upon seeing what she was dealing with, Fechheimer immediately called down beauty editor Bernice Peck, who quickly summoned all the assistants, and together they circled the twenty girls, tweezing, clipping, advising, and hurriedly handing out sample-size placenta creams in the hope that improvement would be sudden. Gael was subjected to a “four-layer face paint job” and unceremoniously informed that she needed to diet, as of this very moment, with a goal weight loss of twenty to thirty pounds.

But much as the guest editors had eyed one another critically, they were hardly less judgmental about the staff. Gael Greene found it ironic that BTB lectured them on health, punctuating “her talk with deep drags from a cigarette and a rasping cough.” Janet Burroway first caught sight of BTB as she “sailed between the mirrors of the editorial room” “in black sheath, with pearl choker, a very long cigarette holder, which she did indeed handle as Audrey Hepburn would have,” and which she lifted into the air while instructing all twenty to “ ‘Believe in Pink’!” Janet’s automatic distaste for BTB was no doubt bound up in her Methodist upbringing: her family prided itself on never socializing with people who drank or smoked. Betsy did both, copiously. Unlike the others, Peggy LaViolette liked BTB; she found her to be quite a character, “in the same way that all those women were who ran those magazines.” And she got a kick out of watching her slowly eat one single boiled egg for lunch.

Following the beautification of the twenty GEs, Mademoiselle’s editorial staff interviewed them, a process that ended with a closed-door meeting where they argued over who would get whom as their guest editor, if not already assigned. The office-held consensus was that, despite the popularity of the program and the financial success of the August College Issue, the GEs were more of a hindrance than a help. During the interviews, Janet Burroway had found everyone, except for Ida McNeil, the merchandising editor, to be very nice, and of course it was McNeil who ended up as her editor—“these new yorkers are very strange people,” Janet concluded. On that first day, Janet was invited to lunch at the Ivy Room of the Drake Hotel with Pat Weaver, careers editor, where she consumed a “French and gold-leaf ritzy filet of sole 3.95, coffee .50, ice cream .70.” Mademoiselle picked up the bill, she assured her mother.

New York, however, even as it was “noisy, muggy,” did not disappoint. On the second night, Janet walked from the Barbizon at Sixty-Third and Lexington down to Forty-Fifth and Broadway and “was so overcome” that she cataloged her walk that night as a breathless list of landmarks: “saw saks, bonwit teller, tiffany, i miller, grand central, times square, u.n., rko, rca… broadway, broadway, and more broadway.” A few days later she spied Harry Belafonte crossing Broadway: “just beautiful!” She had even more to say about her first Sunday service at the famous and affluent St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue: she described an ornate ceremony with an audience of “15,000 women in fur coats; massive unbeautiful pillars; 3% emotion, 91% PRODUCTION, 5% capitalism, and probably, surely somewhere 1% religion. If Jesus had seen it he would have puked.…” Under Janet’s scrutinizing gaze, the Museum of Modern Art did not fare much better. Until money arrived from home, she was on an “Eat for $2 a Day” diet, which she found to be manageable, if she was careful; she therefore did not appreciate the $1.50 MoMA admission fee that cut so deeply into her food funds.

Peggy and Joan, next door to each other at the far end of the fourteenth-floor hallway, and with an easy friendship, did not join Janet on these adventures. In fact, they did not feel the need to socialize that much with the other guest editors. Gael Greene found Joan Didion to be somewhere “between shy and scared.” Peggy LaViolette liked to head off early and alone to the Mademoiselle offices, making her way slowly down Fifty-Seventh Street, filled with upscale art dealers, until she reached The Tailored Woman on the corner of Fifth Avenue, a women’s clothing store that had opened right after World War I, and whose owner believed less was more, refusing to stock anything with too many “doodads, furbelows, sequins and beads.” She would stop and window-shop, and by the time she arrived at the offices, even if it was early, models were already sitting in the lobby, holding on to their hatboxes, waiting to be reviewed, hoping to land a photo shoot. One time, while