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

Peggy was waiting for the elevators, the Secret Service suddenly appeared, followed by President Truman. “How the hell are you, Harry?!” people started to shout out, and he waved back, “Fine!”

The floor of the main lobby at 575 Madison Avenue was beige marble, its banks of elevators art deco brass and ornate metal frames. In the back of the lobby was a small coffee shop with stools and a few tiny tables; you could order your lunch from there and a waiter with a trolley would bring it up to your office. The Mademoiselle offices had air conditioners in some of the windows, so on hot summer days, one lingered. The offices were very simple, with sparse decorations and venetian blinds. Most of the staff sat in carrels and only the top editors like BTB, Cyrilly Abels, and Rita Smith had real offices with doors. The art department was right there too, next to editorial—which was unusual—with space next to the windows for natural light. The GEs, when not off at photo shoots for the College Issue or at carefully choreographed luncheons with the magazine’s advertisers, were working, or trying. By June 7, Janet Burroway wrote home that she was tired of being asked to write unimaginative magazine copy that then got ripped to shreds by the editors, and that in fact “all the GE’s” were feeling frustrated too. They were drowning in untapped ambition, as unrecognized by the Mademoiselle editors as an unrequited love.

In the evenings, back in their small rooms with blue floral bedspreads and curtains, the GEs resorted to being the college girls they still were despite their yearning to become more. Peggy ate crackers and cheese in bed while she read. Not one to go out much, she was often there when the maid came around at 10:00 p.m. to do the first bed check of the evening: Peggy was ticked off the list as present. But for those who weren’t, the bed checks continued hourly until 5:00 a.m. Joan ventured out for the night more often than Peggy, taking up party offers wherever and whenever she could. If the light was still on in Peggy’s room, she’d come in and regale her with stories of her evening.

One such night Joan came roaring into the room—Peggy had never seen her like that before: “as if she were set on fire.”

“I’ve met someone!” Joan declared. She explained he was a Southerner, a Catholic, and married.

“Perfect,” Peggy drawled.

It turned out that “Mr. Perfect” was Noel Parmentel, writer and enfant terrible, who later helped arrange for the publication of Joan’s first novel, Run, River, which she dedicated to him. One night, later during Joan’s second stint in New York, she promised to take him—bored with the New York scene—to a party with “new faces.” As he entered, he burst out laughing: “Of the fifteen people in the room, […] he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.” In fact, if any man could penetrate the Barbizon fortress that restricted men to the lobby, it was probably Noel Parmentel.

As Joan began to spend more nights out with him, Peggy was left to explore New York on her own. She often ate dinner at the Barbizon coffee shop, or else right across the street, on Sixty-Third, at the street-level steak restaurant with a patio out front. Whenever someone offered to take Peggy to dinner, she suggested they go there. For Peggy, the restaurant epitomized New York as she had imagined it: red-and-white-checkered tablecloths with indifferent waiters serving eager customers testing out their new New York selves. All of New York drank Manhattans and enormous martinis, and an eggplant parmigiana dinner cost only a dollar anywhere on Third Avenue.

Back at Berkeley, where Joan and Peggy had both worked on the Daily Cal, they had never mentioned to each other that they were applying to Mademoiselle’s guest editor contest. Peggy didn’t say anything because she was sure her application was a lost cause. The only reason she was even applying was because she’d promised Tom, a young man who had taken an interest in her the previous summer in Mexico. Peggy had wanted to go with some of her sorority sisters to Europe, but her mother said they had just had a war over there and she couldn’t go, and so Peggy cooked up the idea to do a tour of Mexico, which came with chaperones to guarantee her parents’ consent. The American students on the program all stayed at different pensiones but would gather at a central hotel in the afternoon for drinks. One day she met Tom, whose classmate at the University of Pennsylvania was an heir to the Saturday Evening Post, and after chatting, Tom convinced Peggy she’d be perfect for the GE program. He made her promise that she would apply. He said he would write and check on her. He did. That June, he would also drive up to New York and take Peggy to the steak restaurant across from the Barbizon, or else for lunch to the Penn Club, where he stayed when he was in town, so she could observe the Ivy Leaguers in their natural habitat—as she liked to say.

Peggy assumed all along that Joan Didion would be chosen as a GE. She already had a “truckload” of literary prizes, and while her grades at Berkeley were not top-notch, the professors loved her work. Indeed, just like Sylvia Plath in 1953, Joan Didion in 1955 was treated differently by Mademoiselle’s staff, and in particular by fiction editor Rita Smith, who made a point of introducing her to New York’s literati. Joan, in turn, was fascinated by Rita and ready to do anything she asked. One night, when it was already past ten, Joan came running into Peggy’s room: Rita had just called, very drunk, saying over and over how she had left the window of her office open and she was afraid that